This week, we were tasked to write a paratextual analysis about a life narrative of our choosing. I chose Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, which is a memoir based on a semi-autobiographical novel Jeanette Winterson had written prior to Why Be Happy.
In writing that analysis, I engaged with Whitlock’s book, Soft Weapons and in it she mentions something that really got my mind working over the week: “Young (1997) is inclined to downplay the usefulness of symmetry—putting oneself in the place of others—in favor of working toward moral respect through asymmetrical relations, which recognize differences of history, social position, and experience that cannot be transcended.”
Before having read this argument, I always tried to understand an autobiography by finding myself in the work. I wanted to understand what place the author was coming from and the only way I knew how to do that was to find similarities between the character and I. Did she go through something I had gone through? Was her social situation one I am currently in? I tried to understand her through the lens of my own experiences. In other words, I relied on symmetrical patterns to identify with the author and her story better.
Young’s argument suggests an entirely different perspective in that it asks the readers not to focus on the similarities but to focus rather on the differences. It talks about accepting that the author and the reader (us) come from different places—historically, socially, and experientially, and allowing that acceptance to be the source of understanding. 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.
This argument sets us up to think more critically about the kinds of readers we could be. Reading is not a passive thing; it is an active engagement with the words written on the page. We as readers have the agency to decide how to understand a life narrative. How will we choose to interpret and understand? What kind of readers are we going to be?
Works Cited: Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Chicago Scholarship Online. Web. 7 Oct 2014.
Hi Clarice,
I definitely agree that we all have a tendency to rely on the “symmetrical patterns,” like you mentioned, to relate to the speaker of the narrative. Sometimes we even tend to picture ourselves as the author in order to dive into the narrative better, which also lets our imagination run free when we picture certain events occurring in the narrative; I think this allows us to step into the shoes of the author a bit better.
To answer your last question, I think that acknowledging both the similarities and differences of the author/speaker not only allows us to appreciate the their unique character, like you mentioned, but it also allows us to get to know the speaker not only as a writer but also as a person/human being – it brings them to life in a way. It’s almost like getting to know a person you just met, in this case that new person is the author: you both share similarities and differences about your lives, whether personality traits or overall background, and in turn it only allows you to connect with them better.
Raffaella Caffo