In her film Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley seems to mirror her own experiences of her ambiguous(biological) father figure with the strange form the movie assumes. She does so in accordance with a number of aphorisms delineated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a prominent language philosopher, who states that “What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinite way. […] A picture is a fact. […] the fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate way represents that things are related to one another in the same way” (Wittgenstein 2.14-2.15).

By creating a plethora of footage that appears found, and intermixes with the found footage shown throughout the movie, Polley creates an ambiguity for the audience around who is actually her mother. The slight alteration in appearance between the actress who plays her mother and the old footage of her mother herself creates a dissonance for the viewer wherein we don’t know what is actual and what is fictionalised, or what is a re-enactment. This mimics the experience that Polley went through in her relationship to a father figure. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she was surrounded by jokes about the notion that Michael may not be her father, only to realise in fact that they were founded and that Harry was her father. Similarly, the viewer struggles to delineate what her mother looks like. There are subtle suggestions in the disambiguity between what the two Dianes look like, only to be realised in the meta-cinematic revelation in the film, wherein the re-enactments are addressed, and then the credit list runs, and the viewer can tell who played Diane in the ‘old’ footage. This symmetrical function strengthens the form of the film and the force of the story. It also fits with Wittgenstein’s conception of what makes a picture, which can be superimposed to what makes a solid film.

Our discussion today on issues of translation, and the short passage we read from David Homel’s “Tin-Fluting It: On Translating Dany Laferriere” about Laferriere’s childhood language being Creole despite his writing in French got me thinking about the inherent mediation associated with translation, but also about how Homel may be thinking about the formation of ideas in Laferriere’s mind.

He states that “one is the childhood language, the other is acquired secondarily. One, the internal; the other external” (Homel 50). This struck me as strange since it seemed to assert that Laferriere’s French writing is founded upon his Creole thinking. As though Laferriere thinks in Creole and translates immediately when he’s writing in French. I found this untoward as the way I tend to think about things like this is that when we say something, we are translating from a non-linguistic idea. Any piece of writing is revelatory of an idea or experience, but will never fully capture the essence of whichever, just like a translated piece will never fully elucidate the intent or essence of the original. I think the line from this aptly named poem “On Translation” by Monica de la Torre, “The translator knows that nothing the poet has ever said or written / reveals as much about him as the expression on his face when he / was asked to pose for a picture,” captures the sentiment well. Any writing is fallible in representation compared to the physical equivalent. The opening line of the poem also serves to capture the notion of translation, “Not to search for meaning, but to reedify a gesture, an intent.” Any translation, under this view, serves not to mediate the original author’s experience, but to recapture an instance. So in the case of “The World is Moving Around Me”, David Homel would not be mediating or filtering Laferriere’s experiences necessarily, but reframing them in the English language. Similarly, Laferriere isn’t mediating with French between his Creole experience and his work, but capturing the event of the earthquake with words. Reedifying the gesture of the ground shaking and then applying meaning with language.

When talking about Spiegelman’s Maus these past few weeks in class, I kept being drawn back to thoughts about the works of Joe Sacco. Primarily concerned with the Israel-Palestine conflict in his graphic novels Palestine  and Footnotes in Gaza, he has also touched on the Yugoslav wars (Safe Area Gorazde) among other things. His book Safe Area Gorazde is hailed on its amazon page as a ‘Landmark of New Journalism’, which was a movement in the ’60s and ’70s which was characterised by unconventional methods of reportage, wherein fiction would be interwoven with stories about real-life events. This methodology, of course, has similar issues surrounding it as does the subject of representing memory in life narrative (such as Maus). There was much debate over New Journalism for its potentially haphazard representation of truth, they held the position that “Their works challenged the ideology of objectivity and its related practices that had come to govern the profession. The New Journalists argued that objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view.” (Encyclopedia Britannica). A similar argument that raged approaching the ’90s, in the time-period Sacco was operating in, was that surrounding Errol Morris’ 1988 film, The Thin Blue Line. This was the first documentary film to use recreations, and many found them overly laden with persuasive tactics and not nearly objective enough to constitute a documentary. 

When artists of any genre or medium take it upon themselves to represent a tragedy, be it the Holocaust, the Israel-Palestine Conflict, or the murder of a police officer, to what extent are they tied to being absolutely objective. A wholly objective account of any occurrence would not only be impossible within the limits of any medium’s representation, but would also most probably be mechanically boring. There ought to be lee-way for any sort of journalism wherein allowances are made for a more evocative explication of a subject. Passing on inherited memory which feels engrained.

Our discussion on Maggie De Vries’ ‘Missing Sarah’ over the past few weeks has touched on many different articles of contention that can be teased out of the text. This ‘memoir of loss’ carries the burden of representation and truth much like any other life narrative which aims at capturing some aspect of human reality. Further than that though, the strong exigence behind the text pertaining to drug addiction, sex work, and race issues pushes the textual representation into a very social sphere wherein whose voice the reader is hearing carries a greater weight. The issue of cultural capital arises, and within this, the notion of selective framing and counterframing.

These were some of the trends which I observed in reading this weeks blogs. In her post Artistic Curators of Truth, Callie Hitchcock refers to the website PostSecret in her analysis of truth in art, at one stage asking “What is the nature of truth? Can a story we tell ever be true in an objective sense?” (n.p.) This is a very appropriate question to be asking in a course about life narratives, wherein some distinction between representative art and referential art can be alluded to. Callie goes on to quote Picasso’s statement that “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,” and argue that people’s art, when ‘true’, doesn’t fall under this rubric. Picasso, though, was a very representational artist, his Cubist ideology seeming to be that truth is impossible so abstractions that cause the viewer to think almost reflexively tend to ‘realize truth’. Contrarily, life narratives like ‘Missing Sarah’ and posts on PostSecret seem to be more referential–attempting to reference, with language, actualities from the real world and in turn becoming more scrutinised for it . 

One way that this strand of art can hold up against ‘fact-checkers’, for lack of better phrasing, is through meta-narrative, as noted by Sierra Weiner in her post Story of the Story of the Story. By reflexively referring to the act of writing the life narrative within the life narrative, authors like Maggie De Vries and Art Spiegelman are able to “heighten the “realism” or “believability” of the text at hand by acknowledging the work of censorship, interpretation, and bias that are always inherent within such a piece” (n.p.). The notion that life narratives ought to refer to some rational degree to the fact that this is a piece of referential work being mediated through all sorts of extra influences. In this way, some sense of reliability can be maintained. 

But as observed by Max Potter in his post How much does ‘truth’ matter to the reader?, perhaps this isn’t what the main stream audience is looking for. Outside of a class on life narratives, who is delving into the depths of reliability, truth and bias etc.? The popularity of life narratives seems to come more down to the content of the story and the relevance it has at the time than the exigence it holds with regards to society.

An alternative approach to truth in life narratives is elucidated by Clarice Chan in her post A Change in Perspective: Asymmetrical Interpretations of Life Narratives wherein she alludes to a suggested method of interpreting ‘true’ life narratives by not searching for similarities between the subject and oneself, but looking for differences. Clarice states that: “If we learn to acknowledge those differences, we are then allowing their truths to simply be, without our own truths superimposed onto theirs. In doing this, we start actually respecting the authors’s stories” (n.p.) Tending away from the notion of objective truth, this becomes more an argument for taking the story as granted and analysing the social and individual disparity between you the reader and the subject. The exigence behind any truth comes from not simply from the text, but from the interrelational experience of the text and the reader/society. 

A more specific area when talking about truth also arose a lot in the blogosphere. The topic of framing and counterframing plays into truth representation and reference very much. Al Shaibani, in his post What’s in a Name?, takes the notion of counterframing as social need and applies it to a more political context, referring to the naming of those who were killed in the Gaza-Israel conflict of this past summer, posing them as something other than merely a statistic. The banner of names that was erected in Lebanon characterises well with its size the depth of any story beyond the frame applied by the media. With further reference to the media’s portrayal of the ebola crisis, Al illustrates how even the notion of framing embodies a class/race struggle. Some human life seems to figure as less valuable, not because the truth has been skewed, but by virtue of the way the truth has been portrayed. This is where counterframing shows its incredible value, and gives a great foundation to Maggie De Vries’ calling in writing ‘Missing Sarah’.

It is impossible to characterise any reality within language truthfully. The natures of interpretation and vagueness force language, and so any work of factual literature, into a very shaky position. There seem to be ways of pinning down aspects of story telling to legitimise them, like using a metanarrative or counterframing or even simply relying on the reader to take what they will from the text without too critical an eye, but ultimately it seems difficult. The nature of life narratives is one of exigence and social education, but as soon as such motivations are placed behind any work, their legitimacy will, and perhaps ought to be challenged, and it seems as though there will not be a foolproof way of circumventing the issues of reference or representation and providing a concrete and insoluble life narrative with a social function.

Works Cited:

Chan, Clarice. “A Change in Perspectives: Asymmetrical Interpretations of Life Narratives”. Blogging About Life Narratives. 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Hitchcock, Callie. “Artistic Curators of Truth”. Callie Anya. UBC Blogs. 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Potter, Max. “How Much does ‘Truth’ Matter to the Reader?”. A/B English Blog. 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Shaibani, Al. “What’s in a Name?”. Al’s Blog. 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Weiner, Sierra. “Story of the Story of the Story”. Auto/biography as Social Action. 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Facebook has always been a confusing medium for me. Like any of my vices it’s something that I find myself saying I hate, but time and again I while away hours skimming the breadth of the society I’ve accrued over the past six years, glued to the screen while laying in bed or while a cursor silently blinks halfway through the introduction I’m supposed to be writing. “Friends” of mine consistently post either things that make my blood boil with rage to the point where I’ve drafted an angry response I’ll never post or things that make me blow a short gust of amusement out of my nose. These are not things I feel immediately drawn to, yet my finger is so quick to the ‘f’ button on my keyboard as soon as I open my browser.

This confusion often leads me to thinking about the constitution of myself when on facebook. The persona I have created on this standardised rubrick for capturing lives by no means reflects my inner self, or even my outer one for that matter. Then again, when at a party or in a tangible social scenario I do the same thing–holding my tongue to keep from saying something questionable, or ruffling my hair just right. I do these things somewhat subconsciously on the spur, with people directly in front of me, but with the wonder of Facebook I have ample time to pick a cool and quirky profile picture or calculate a funny yet cavalier response (with the added bonus of seeming as though I don’t frequent the site as much as I do.) I struggle with this approach to being a social being despite how naturally it comes to me–Blaise Pascal’s philosophy in his final years seemed centered around self-honesty as opposed to self-love. He claimed that we love ourselves too much and to such a degree that we deny and hide our faults from others. Fooling ourselves and others alike whereas it would be more fruitful for us to accept our faults and to share other people’s faults with them. He thinks we act unjustly by doing otherwise: “Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.” (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm) I do feel like a lier on Facebook especially, crafting a mask for others to see while I sit behind my computer chalking up likes. 

After watching Eli Pariser’s TED talk I wondered whether Google, Facebook and the likes are creating my filter bubble based on my shadow or by who I really am. I at one point, for the briefest of times, even worried that if I angered Facebook they’d expose me as the fraud I am to all of my “friends”, for they surely must know the real me–things would come tumbling down fast, I bet. Then I realised that the things I post to Facebook are so banal and inane that there can’t be many friends of mine whose own internet persona motivates Facebook to present to them my product. Then I thought that this may be the reason for how few ‘likes’ I get. Then I finally returned to thoughts about calculation–it seems as though there is no communion with Lejeune’s “Autobiography Pact” here, everything is recreated glamorously, with a flair, so as to make you stand out. It’s tawdry and painful to see yourself doing this, but with each ‘like’ I certainly feel as though I’m climbing some sort of imaginary ladder somewhere. I remembered reading this (http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/30/like-facebook-and-schadenfreude/) article about Facebook, and while it is not wholly about the craft of Facebook, there are good insights into it. Furthermore it addresses the other facet of Facebook I feel drawn to–Schadenfreude! But that’s for another time.

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