( blogger doesn't seem to be allowing me to classify posts at the moment, but this one falls under the category of work towards the creative piece)
Have spent a lot of the last couple of weeks writing 2500 words on a trip to Queensland I did 20 years ago, and its aftermath, I thought seriously about using that as a basis for my main creative piece. But it's been submitted to the magazine I wrote it for and I don't feel as if it would help to rework it.
Still, the topic of the magazine - Hidden Queensland - and the nature of the piece, which explored the undercurrent of hippy/Queensland influences in my otherwise pretty middle-class Melbourne life - has made up my mind to work on the unremembered-past piece, out of the three I've been considering. It does risk being solipsistic but (in reference to the quality of the writing in the Garner book and in the Didion), I think as long as I keep trying to turn the individual events outwards to more general themes it might be OK.
Someone referred yesterday to the Age A2 piece on 20/4 about the Italian broadcaster who has written a biography despite having no interesting dark secrets - this is the question that arises if you don't have any unusual drama in your life - why write about it? To do so is basically saying that I am "clever" enough (in the Kate Holden sense?) to make what I'm writing worthwhile for itself.
The easier option would be to go for the dramatic moments - the car crash, cancer, moments of great danger - but the thing is that over the course of a life, pretty much everyone has those moments too. It's all about interpretation.
Next step: to dig up that box of letters and read for a bit.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Robert Dessaix on Helen Garner in the Monthly, April 2008...quotes Garner on the process of turning a journal that you keep "because without it you will lose your life" into fiction, by way of following a shape you somehow see in it.
I wonder about the woman who came to stay with Garner, who would be the subject of The Spare Room. If she thought that she might become the subject of a novel - and if that idea would have attracted or repelled her - not to mention the ethics of using a dying person in quite this way.
And of course she (the occupant of the spare room) is not around to disagree with Garner's version of events and interpretation of her desperate need to seek a cure.
Dessaix's review talks a lot about the quality of the prose and of the "penetrating intelligence" and so on that Garner shows. Like Joan Didion, Garner can take a step back - make herself into two people, the subject and the object, as was said in the presentation in class yesterday.
Any writer's autobiograpy is likely to be like this; they spend so much time analysing and dissecting and looking for those shapes that Garner sees; the autobiographies of non-writers are more likely to contain an undifferentiated "I", less self-conscious but not necessarily more true to reality.
I wonder about the woman who came to stay with Garner, who would be the subject of The Spare Room. If she thought that she might become the subject of a novel - and if that idea would have attracted or repelled her - not to mention the ethics of using a dying person in quite this way.
And of course she (the occupant of the spare room) is not around to disagree with Garner's version of events and interpretation of her desperate need to seek a cure.
Dessaix's review talks a lot about the quality of the prose and of the "penetrating intelligence" and so on that Garner shows. Like Joan Didion, Garner can take a step back - make herself into two people, the subject and the object, as was said in the presentation in class yesterday.
Any writer's autobiograpy is likely to be like this; they spend so much time analysing and dissecting and looking for those shapes that Garner sees; the autobiographies of non-writers are more likely to contain an undifferentiated "I", less self-conscious but not necessarily more true to reality.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Presentation/chapter four notes and thoughts
I expected this chapter to be more about how autobiographies could illuminate history, but it turned out to be mostly a history of autobiography, and more particularly how autobiography has constituted the subject over time.
In this chapter there were references to how the subject fit into society, or failed to, but the emphasis remained on the "creation of the self."
The book seemed a bit overwhelmed by the job of surveying the whole history of and therefore the different styles of autobiography, and sent me off to Appendix A to read through 52 different types of autobiography, which is a useful overview, though almost every autobiographical work must fit into more than one of these categories.
The overall impression from the chapter was that autobiography has been a tool of the project of modernisation and Western domination of the world; that when "underdog" types write an autobiography it is inevitably in response to the unfriendly world they have met. They give plenty of examples in the chapter - in fact it makes me realise how many historical figures we know basically because they wrote about themselves - the most notable examples were St Augustine (as an example of a person effectively talking himself into the Christian faith (even though his most famous quote is possibly: “Lord, make me good (or chaste). But not yet.” and Rousseau’s Confessions, but there is also Casanova and Samuel Pepys, and I wonder how much we’d know about these people if they hadn’t thought their lives were worth recording.
some questions and criticisms:
-I’m not sure why they include fictional lives as examples in this chapter, for instance on page 101 where they give Dicken’s David Copperfield and Bronte’s Jane Eyre as examples of the “Bildungsroman” or story of coming of age and character, and on 87 when they introduce the “secular subject” they claim Shakespeare’s sonnets for the form. Do we think that fictional and non-fictional stories can perform the same function if they follow the same form?
- Do we agree that autobiography is essentially a Western or modern form? Smith and Watson basically assert this, but as they “limit their focus to written life narrative as it has developed in the West,” (84), it’s hard to know if they’re right. The book doesn’t mention, for instance, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, written in Japan by a woman around the year 1000.
-Do we accept that the writing of an autobiography can change a person’s sense of self, specifically by undershoring their sense of being an individual separate to society and/or asserting themselves against adversity?
- how helpful is it to have a list of “52 varieties” of autobiography? If you are about to write your own story or the story of another person, how would you decide how you wanted it to function? In other words, is the story more affected by the form and emphasis you choose or by the underlying facts and turning points of a particular life?
other thoughts not related to the reading as such: saw an article on the SMH jobs site about "personal branding" and in a way autobiographies and autobiographical statements - pretty much any sentence starting in "I" - are part of that work - defining the self against the random perceptions of outsiders.
I expected this chapter to be more about how autobiographies could illuminate history, but it turned out to be mostly a history of autobiography, and more particularly how autobiography has constituted the subject over time.
In this chapter there were references to how the subject fit into society, or failed to, but the emphasis remained on the "creation of the self."
The book seemed a bit overwhelmed by the job of surveying the whole history of and therefore the different styles of autobiography, and sent me off to Appendix A to read through 52 different types of autobiography, which is a useful overview, though almost every autobiographical work must fit into more than one of these categories.
The overall impression from the chapter was that autobiography has been a tool of the project of modernisation and Western domination of the world; that when "underdog" types write an autobiography it is inevitably in response to the unfriendly world they have met. They give plenty of examples in the chapter - in fact it makes me realise how many historical figures we know basically because they wrote about themselves - the most notable examples were St Augustine (as an example of a person effectively talking himself into the Christian faith (even though his most famous quote is possibly: “Lord, make me good (or chaste). But not yet.” and Rousseau’s Confessions, but there is also Casanova and Samuel Pepys, and I wonder how much we’d know about these people if they hadn’t thought their lives were worth recording.
some questions and criticisms:
-I’m not sure why they include fictional lives as examples in this chapter, for instance on page 101 where they give Dicken’s David Copperfield and Bronte’s Jane Eyre as examples of the “Bildungsroman” or story of coming of age and character, and on 87 when they introduce the “secular subject” they claim Shakespeare’s sonnets for the form. Do we think that fictional and non-fictional stories can perform the same function if they follow the same form?
- Do we agree that autobiography is essentially a Western or modern form? Smith and Watson basically assert this, but as they “limit their focus to written life narrative as it has developed in the West,” (84), it’s hard to know if they’re right. The book doesn’t mention, for instance, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, written in Japan by a woman around the year 1000.
-Do we accept that the writing of an autobiography can change a person’s sense of self, specifically by undershoring their sense of being an individual separate to society and/or asserting themselves against adversity?
- how helpful is it to have a list of “52 varieties” of autobiography? If you are about to write your own story or the story of another person, how would you decide how you wanted it to function? In other words, is the story more affected by the form and emphasis you choose or by the underlying facts and turning points of a particular life?
other thoughts not related to the reading as such: saw an article on the SMH jobs site about "personal branding" and in a way autobiographies and autobiographical statements - pretty much any sentence starting in "I" - are part of that work - defining the self against the random perceptions of outsiders.
project thoughts:
There are three possible pieces for me:
1) another piece on living in Melbourne to go with the Melways piece I did last semester – this is the closest to standard nonfiction writing, just using my personal relationship with place to talk about the city. The difficulty with this might be making it into a proper stand-alone piece without involving what I’ve already done.
2) a fiction piece towards a longer story I want to do about a group of young dropouts living in the country in the early 80s (based on journals and personal memories of people I knew then). Again, could be hard to limit – a series of character sketches would be the proper place to start, but possibly insufficient for assessment, and the longer story would be too long and couldn’t be written in time anyway.
3) a more experimental but in a way standard memoir piece using personal artefacts (couldn’t call my boxes full of paper “archives” with a straight face.) I found a set of letters between me and a person in Ireland, written in the mid-80s – the problem is I don’t remember who he was or how I knew him – it could be interesting to do an essay piece around the things I don’t remember – digging through papers and investigating myself as a different person, in a way.
There are three possible pieces for me:
1) another piece on living in Melbourne to go with the Melways piece I did last semester – this is the closest to standard nonfiction writing, just using my personal relationship with place to talk about the city. The difficulty with this might be making it into a proper stand-alone piece without involving what I’ve already done.
2) a fiction piece towards a longer story I want to do about a group of young dropouts living in the country in the early 80s (based on journals and personal memories of people I knew then). Again, could be hard to limit – a series of character sketches would be the proper place to start, but possibly insufficient for assessment, and the longer story would be too long and couldn’t be written in time anyway.
3) a more experimental but in a way standard memoir piece using personal artefacts (couldn’t call my boxes full of paper “archives” with a straight face.) I found a set of letters between me and a person in Ireland, written in the mid-80s – the problem is I don’t remember who he was or how I knew him – it could be interesting to do an essay piece around the things I don’t remember – digging through papers and investigating myself as a different person, in a way.
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