Cause Narratives
When you remember, what is it that you actually remember? |
What to do
Here are the three possible narratives you are to begin writing about, all of which are derived from a commonplace understanding of the emergence of our strengths from some event of failure ("something wrong"):
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In each instance, the structure you are using to locate the "cause" of the strength/quality is:
Keep in mind that it will likely take writing more than one narrative for each strength and time period until you find the “best” one, which your workshop group will help you to judge.
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RationaleIn this course we are attempting to inquire authentically into what it means to be a writer. Authentic inquiry is an inquiry in which you strive to make your own unique inquiry. This means you do not stop at finding the most common and ready answers: you must be willing to tolerate not knowing a right answer and to instead play with possibilities, to experiment, to take risks, to drop what doesn’t work and move on to what might.
One set of possibilities we are “playing with” in this course is that to be a writer means to write in two modes: exposition and scene. Furthermore, there are two correlative qualities of being a writer that go with these practices: integrity and receptivity (these terms come from Scott Consigny's article "Rhetoric and Its Situations"). That is: integrity to our projections and receptivity to scene. Within any given act of writing we are doing both, but we usually perform them at conservative levels. Until we are challenged, we don’t need to exercise these qualities very much and so we rarely develop them beyond inauthentic levels—levels that everybody already does and already expects you to perform. Concisely put: integrity to projection reveals the world to us, while receptivity to scene allows us to notice the surprising, which in turn challenges our integrity, and hence, our identity. Receptivity to SceneWe sought to distinguish the argument of Mamet’s essay: his problem and what method he asserts will correct the problem. Mamet made it quite clear that for a scene to work (to drive the audience to want to know what will happen next), it must trigger exigence: an experience of urgency to fix a problem. When writing in scene, and revealing “what happened,” you allow uncertainty to dominate, such that the audience WANTS to know how it will get resolved: they become driven to find out which purpose will win over the other and how.
There’s an irresistible demand to resolve any uncertainty. We have been calling this the context of a controlling value. The demand for resolution controls, or at least strives to determine how to resolve the uncertainty present in the situation through enacting the “purpose.” Now your job is to bring this deepened distinction about scene into workshopping the narratives you will be writing for the rest of the semester. I recommend re-reading Mamet more than once. You will continue to learn from him each time. There’s gold in them thar words. Integrity to ProjectionAt the same time, we are also, inevitably, moving in the opposite direction: integrity. We cannot help but project. What we can do is experiment with projecting intentionally, which is what we are doing when we articulate strengths and then use them as lenses to invent recent scenes, and even successes that your strengths have brought you, but also the possible “causes” of your strengths.
Consequently, when we focus on integrity, you are employing a “projection,” using it as a tool, an instrument, a lens, to look into the past to “find” the causes of your strengths. Essentially, the projection is: strengths emerge from encountering exceptional moments of exigence that resulted in failure. The strength emerged as an interpretation the character narrator formed during and after the event, which then determined or controlled future approaches to similar situations. Further Notes for the Cause Narratives
Each narrative (pre-adol., adol., etc.) ought to reveal a significant turning point in the character-narrator's life: before the moment of failure, the world occurred for the character-narrator one way, and after the response to the moment, the world occurred another way. It is a significant turning point because you say so. Again, the sense of this significance should arise in the "interpretation" of the addressee by virtue of reading the narrative written in scene. And so, what writing in scene works to reveal in the interpretation of the addressee is the following:
On the way to getting your narratives to this level of scene, you may have a difficulty concerning "remembering" precise details of physical action or presence. That's fine. What you need to do is CREATE details, including names of people and dialogue, that FIT within the scene.
Review the Culler article, paying special attention to the two opposing ways to relate to narrative: where on one hand the events produce meaning, and where on the other discourse creates the event in the past. Creating these details within a narrative is a performative skill crucial to being a creative non-fiction writer, wherein you must "dance" between two equally powerful but opposing rhetorical skills: being receptive to "what-happened," and being creative with your "interpretation" which insistently projects itself onto the past. It's not easy. But don't use this difficulty as an excuse not to attempt it. This isn't math, and you will never be able to "get it right" like you can a math problem, because the drive to "get it right" has nothing to do with what it means to be a writer. It's more about what works, and what fits, and that's something you can only find out through risking actual performances. |
I have adapted and repurposed parts of this assignment from a "distinction" designed by Werner Erhard (see my book co-authored with Bruce Hyde: Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human 2019) the basis of which you can explore in an early article from The Journal of Individual Psychology, entitled "The Mind's Dedication to Survival" (1975), written by Erhard, Guerin and Shaw (you can find the entire article in the recommended readings).