The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick

Book by Vivian Gornick

Annotation by Susan Tuttle

Vivian Gornick, in her work The Situation and the Story: the Art of the Personal Narrative, distills the personal narrative to its essence. The title repeats itself over and over, until it is like a mantra: situation, story, situation, story, situation, story.  This is the central question to which writers always return: Is this the situation or the story?

Gornick starts out with her reaction to a eulogy held for a colleague. She wonders why, although it contained essentially the same information as the ones before it, this particular eulogy moved her and hung in her memory. The eulogy was based on a memory. Starting there, Gornick uses a head-bone-connected-to-the-neck-bone logic and links the relationship between the memory, the story, and the impact on her:

The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, a dramatic buildup occurred…. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that had stirred me; caused me to feel… the presence of the one doing the remembering… I became aware at last of all that was not being said… This feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on…. (4-5)

She discovered the why it had moved her by dissembling what was said and how it was expressed. In the course of this examination, she also discovers that “Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This narrator becomes a persona” (6).

And there she has it: the personal narrative becomes interesting and accessible the moment the author moves away from center stage and allows a persona to experience the story behind the situation. This moving away is key because “…without detachment there can be no story” (12). She goes on to clarify: “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). And there can be no insight without detachment.

Don’t misunderstand: this is not a how-to book, but rather a private and analytical examination of what the personal narrative is. She looks closely at her own work and how she “… struggled to isolate the story from the situation…” (20). She actually practices what she preaches throughout, demonstrating through her persona – a writer – the effort, insight and courage it takes to explore the personal narrative as a literary form.

In memoir and personal essay writing, the inherent I-centeredness of the piece can pose a challenge if allowed to slip into a “dear diary” style. Gornick defines the nuance between writing as self and writing with a strong persona:  “I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me…. I had created a persona…. it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae” (23, 24).  The idea of having someone speak for the writer on the page is liberating – a simple idea that could free the author of the psychological constraints of writing about personal experiences in the first person. She goes on to explain: “I have created a persona who can find the story riding the tide that I, in my unmediated state, am otherwise going to drown in.” (25).

In an essay, we learn, while the writer uses persona to make a story of a situation without allowing emotions to take over, the persona can also be used to explore a subject other than the self.   Gornick writes, “Whatever the story has been… there’s been a situation to contain it and a truth speaker to interpret it.” (26)   Thus, memoir can, on the strength of its persona, reveal a truth that cannot be seen by the narrator, but is nonetheless revealed to the reader. While at times this makes for an unreliable narrator, if sustained, it can be extremely revealing:

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom…. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened (91).

Yet, Gornick’s honesty and humility about her own writing experiences persuades us that she will not lie to us (14, 19, 24).

It is this honesty, confidence and inquisitiveness, both as a reader and a writer, that guides The Situation and the Story. Gornick’s advice to the writer is based on her own profound interest and delivered in a supportive and meaningful way. She sums it up best: “…I trained my eyes on the writing…. To read out of one’s own narrow but clarified need, I concluded, was to teach oneself better how to write….” (165).  Thus, by allowing us to come along on her journey, we are enlightened through Gornick’s commentary on and examples of the necessity of a strong persona for the self-as-narrator.

Wildflowers in the Median: A Restorative Journey into Healing, Justice, and Joy by Agnes Furey

Book By Agnes Furey

Annotation by Jennifer McCharen

I’ve never read a book like this. A mix of narrative nonfiction and poetry, Wildflowers in the Median was written by, and tells the story of, two people thrown together by tragedy, who transform that tragedy through their friendship and through writing.

Leonard Scovens murdered Agnes Furey’s daughter and grandson. The grandson was six years old. Leonard plead guilty to first degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Agnes did not press for the death penalty, but instead  took her shattered life and tried to rebuild. Then, she did something radical: she forgave Leonard.

Agnes’s and Leonard’s story unfolds through chapters that alternate between their two voices, and little is revealed in a linear narrative. Instead, we get moments captured in Agnes’s poetry, an essay from Leonard about what it was like to be beaten as a child, then Agnes’s statement to the court in Leonard’s murder trial, and at about the halfway point in the book, letters from Leonard to Agnes.

The letters are what makes the book truly incredible. As pieces of writing, they are perhaps less interesting than other sections of the book. Leonard’s essays and poems thrum with verbal energy and a striking, unique voice. Agnes’s poetry, while simple, reveals something so mundane as to be extraordinary: the poetry of a non-poet, of a regular human being forced to grapple with the darkest struggle any of us ever has to face. But the letters are heart-stopping, not so much for their beauty of prose, but for the beauty of the reason they exist at all, which is that, despite all he had done, Agnes reached out to Leonard in prison, and offered him compassion, understanding, and forgiveness.

The correspondence in the book is Leonard’s letters to Agnes as he was unable to save her letters to him when he was transferred to another prison in 2005. This is yet another tragedy, but for the book it’s kind of a good thing. Leonard is a somewhat more interesting writer than Agnes. The singleness of voice helps the book stay focused. And more importantly, it is Leonard’s journey of redemption that is the fascinating one. But that might be because Agnes’s journey is, comparatively, still a mystery. In response to Leonard’s letters, we get poems that Agnes wrote at the time, and these insights are so different from his long, complex insights. We see Agnes healing, we share little poignant memories with her, but with Leonard we get to go on the entire roller coaster of the redeemed sinner – a story near and dear to the heart of our culture whether we’re believers or not.

Through their writing, we witness something truly remarkable: the transcendence of unthinkable evil by two people nobody would have expected to be able to understand each other. The murderer and the bereaved mother are almost archetypes in their resonant power. But instead of a story of revenge, we witness a completely radical story of something much messier, two people doing the devastatingly hard work of trying to see where the other is coming from.

What strikes me most about this book as a work of nonfiction is the simple fact of its existence. More than a work of literature composed by a writer, this book is evidence of the potential of the human spirit. As a work of writing, I am struck by its simplicity, and its urgency. These two writers are egoless, unselfconscious, and they know what matters. There are no flourishes of prose, no showing off. They use words deftly and carefully, as a tool for overcoming the darkest hours of their lives. Together.

I can barely stomach the thought of trying to emulate this text, which I strive to do with most texts I admire. It is a work of art born of necessity in peculiar circumstances and it could never be emulated without those circumstances, so how could I ever ask for such an experience to befall me?

Although the situation that led to Wildflowers in the Median is far from my own life, even I feel healed and enlightened by its power. This text speaks to me as a writer, giving clear marching orders. It tells me to seek out stories that matter. And if possible, perhaps help such stories to be born.

“The Fifth Chair” from The Healing Circle: Authors Writing on Recovery by Mary Swander

Essay by Mary Swander.

Annotation by Angela La Voie

In “The Fifth Chair,” essayist Mary Swander employs the metaphor of a chair to describe the ontology of chronic physical ailment or illness. She writes: “While Chair #1 is raw trauma, Chair #3 is the confrontation with that trauma” (119). Swander describes Chair #1 as “bone-chilling helplessness” and states that “the real fright of Chair #1 comes not so much with the fact that you are alone but that in that loneliness you must convince someone else that something is wrong and then rally him or her to action” (115). Swander calls Chair #2 the “loneliness of vulnerability” (117) where the afflicted person must learn to surrender to the discomfort of being helped: “Chair #2 loneliness can at the same time feel invasive and healing” (117). Swander describes Chair #4 as a literal wheelchair (119), adding that in Chair #4, the actor finds her way in the world again, but is operating on the emotional plane of isolation and loss. Conversely, Swander describes Chair #5 as a transmuted state of being in which the author has come to terms with her physical limitations. The achievement of recovery, however, does not result in an ultimate state of wellness but of learning to make something beautiful and meaningful from the emotional and physical wreckage brought by the chronic physical condition.

Chair #5 addresses the most compelling aspect of Swander’s essay. Swander writes:

I’d like to say that when Lady Lazarus got up out of Chair #5, she could walk forever without a brace or a prop or a limp. All I can say is that while Chair #5 is a place of peace and productivity where solitude again reigns, it is also a chair of detachment, an integration of alienation. . . . Chair #5 is a moving forward with hope despite the pain, connected wholly and intimately with both the light and shadowy sides of the self. (128)

Here, one might visualize a balancing scale. On one arm sits the pain and trauma wrought by chronic illness or ailment. On the other arm sits the act of creative production now possible from the transmutation of the suffering produced by one’s chronic physical condition. The act of creation holds both sides of the scale in balance. Significantly, to reach this transmuted state herself, the author embraces the solitude and isolation that had been so troubling for her while occupying the other chairs. The author’s study of early Christian mystics calls forth a “kinder, gentler acceptance of suffering” (124), ultimately leading Swander to what she describes as a Buddhist act of “letting go of desire, the need for support, the need to be understood” (127). Swander’s practice of solitude and study leads the author to a number of conclusions, including the following: “Hildegard [von Bingen] as well as the other mystics knew that the spiritual was not found in the grandiose, but in the small growing things and the ordinary moments that previously you may have overlooked or found mundane” (125). By engaging in a literal act of creation through the planting of seedlings, Swander realizes that “all of the mystics I’d read had found their fulfillment in some kind of creative activity that gave something back to the world” (128). In Chair #5, the state of physical limitation is still present at times or in some capacity, but “[l]ife transforms into art” (128).

In writing about recovery from traumatic injury, I find Swander’s use of different chairs as a rubric for understanding the various aspects of trauma and recovery extremely useful. In a land where each person’s physical and emotional state is as different as the next, it can be difficult to find a framework that brings some sort of unifying lens to look at one’s own experience. For writers analyzing trauma and healing, Swander’s essay provides a means of isolating the different pieces of the writer’s own journey. Using Swander’s essay, I was able to see how my own narrative structure might come together in a new light for the current book I am writing. If Elisabeth Kübler Ross has becoming iconic in naming the five stages of grief, I would argue that Mary Swander has introduced a new classic for writers dealing with trauma and recovery.