One of the concerns that The Stories We Tell brought up was the the question of a story’s ownership. Who “owns” a story? What causes an event that somebody has been through to become “theirs,” giving them the right to tell it over anyone else that has also been affected? In The Stories We Tell, we saw multiple perspectives of a shared story about a family, their deceased mother Diane and people who have been affected and pulled into her world, told through a collective narrative between Sarah, Diane’s immediate family: her husband, children and, further out, her lovers and friends. But we saw that once the idea of beginning to tell a story emerged, there was conflict between who had the right to tell the story and multiple narratives coming from Harry, Michael and Sarah, all telling their sides of the same story.

Perspective is an interesting thing in The Stories We Tell. Since the main focus of the narrative is about Diane, who has already passed away, the only sides of the story that we witness are from the people that are connected to her in some way. Due to this reason, we miss a large portion of the story that is being told: Diane’s own perspective. In a way, it is ironic that a story about a person’s life lacks their own perspective. Instead, because of Diane’s death, we can only see what other people saw of her. This leads to multiple and sometimes contradicting narratives. For example, when Sarah is interviewing her family as well as Diane’s friends, in one instance, one person states that Diane was a person that wholeheartedly expressed herself on the outside and did not have an inner face to show to others. Immediately afterward, the film shows another person who states contradictorily that Diane was very good at controlling the faces that she showed to others. Since we are only hearing what these interviewees knew of Diane, neither piece of information about Diane is false, because it is their own perspective of her, but it nevertheless leaves us with two conflicting views of Diane.

The question of ownership is one that I felt was hard to entangle. Halfway through the film, when the question arises of who will tell the story, we saw that multiple people wanted to, creating a dispute over who had the right to, whose story it was to tell, and who had the “true” story. Harry stated that the affair that he had with Diane was so intense and profound that it was his own to tell, nobody else. But Michael was also inspired to write his own version once he found out about Diane’s affair. However, this raises the question of what the “truth” of the story is. While both Harry and Michael possess insight into events that the other did not, at the same time neither of them also have the entire story. In fact, even though Sarah brought together everyone in Diane’s life, it appears that the story is still incomplete, because it lacks Diane’s own voice.

I think that the right to tell a story about someone is not a “right” to be possessed, but all perspectives of a life narrative are valuable, because it offers its own unique insight. The Stories We Tell may be an incomplete view of Diane from the lack of her own voice, but at the same time, the story is not just about Diane, but it is the story of every person involved in its telling.

For this week’s blog post, I want to write about how the usage of images in Maus is an additional layer that provides meaning in addition to words. Unlike the other texts we have read so far in class, Maus has been the only one that has broken away from the word-only method of telling a story. Now, instead of only needing to look at what is written, Maus asks us to analyze not only words, but also the details that are drawn in the images. How a character is drawn and what details are included shows us elements that we can use to further our understanding of what we are being told.

The particular scene that I want to focus on is a scene at the beginning of the first chapter in the first book. Here, Artie has come to see his father Vladek in order to ask him to recall his story of surviving through Auschwitz. After a short scene where Spiegelman sets up the strain between Vladek and his wife Mala, along with giving us information about people backgrounds, Vladek goes with Artie to a room where Vladek starts pedaling, because it is “good for [his] heart” (13). After that, Artie begins asking his father about the events of his life in the Holocaust because he wants to draw a book about it (13).  The aspect of the scene that was particularly interesting was how the middle panels were drawn. As Vladek pedals, his whole body is situated in the foreground of the panels, and is much larger than Artie. His body extends outwards onto the panels above it, so that it appears that Vladek’s body is actually located in more than one panel. This gives him the sense of being massive, dominating the space he is in.

I interpreted this as the size of Vladek in these panels is an indication of how important he is to the story, not just Vladek himself as the person, but also what he represents to the story that Spiegelman is trying to tell, namely, the events of Poland, the war, and Auschwitz. We can see in the panel where Vladek is pedaling that there are a series of numbers that have been tattooed onto his arm: “175113” (13), which are the numbers given to Jewish prisoners at the concentration camps. The inclusion of this details is not something that is trivial, as it must have been deliberately placed there to show Vladek’s connection to the Holocaust; the numbers have been literally burned onto him as a living reminder of the events he has been through. This, in connection to how much space he takes up in the panels and his position in the foreground represents how crucial Vladek is to the telling of the story.

The comic form allows Spiegelman to use two different mediums in order to tell his story. As readers, the use of images offers us a new perspective in looking at the texts we study and how we gain information from what we read. Not only do we need to consider what is written, but we now also need to consider what we identify in this spacial environment of images and how that affects the narrative, knowledge and experience.

(This is a repost of the post I did on January 17, 2014 that I accidentally posted on the class blog but never posted on my own)

Compared to some of my friends, I was never an avid user of popular social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Of course, I possess a Facebook account, but I use it as essentially a fancy chat room that I chat with my friends on, with only the occasional snarky comment serving as a status update. But I have spent a lot of time browsing and posting on internet forums, which gets to the topic that I want to write about: anonymity on the internet and how it affects a person.

Unlike other forms of social media, like ones we looked at in class, Facebook encourages a person to showcase their identity. People are encouraged to post constant updates about themselves, so that a person essentially “creates” their identity on Facebook, based on what the website deems as important. What I’m interested in looking at is the opposite that happens on internet forums where people are guaranteed anonymity.

In Tim Adams’ article “How the internet created an age of rage“, he calls the process that occurs on social media sites that grant anonymity deindividuation. Adams states this:

“Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.”

People that are granted the ability to remain faceless will be willing break rules that they normally would not consider, simply because the consequences cannot be traced back to them.

In class, we looked at two social media websites that allowed anonymity: Six Word Memoirs and Post Secret. What I found interesting in those two websites were the things that people were able to admit because they were anonymous. On Post Secret there are some secrets that I cannot imagine anyone admitting unless they were sure no one knew it was them, such as this, or this. It was interesting to see how these particular sites were able to allow people to talk about things that they would not be able to otherwise. But I also think that this is allowed only because of a “deindividuation” that Adams talks about in his article. We can tell that posting anonymously allows people to forgo consequences, which causes a lot of raging to occur on the internet, but also allows for people to talk about or admit things that they normally would not.

I am a frequent visitor of bookstores, but lately, I find myself studying the structure of bookstores, stemming from our discussion on Missing Sarah and paratext. How is the bookstore structured? How are books arranged, advertised, and sold? Where are all of the books placed? When I went to the Metrotown Chapters in order to gain information on our short paper assignment for the class, I began to notice all sorts of things that I had never tried to look for before, and it was surprising just how much a single glance around the area can tell you about what you’re looking for.

I’ll start with a short description of the Chapters I went to. First, it’s worth noting that the section on life narratives was labelled “Biographies,” and it was as far away from the Fiction section as possible. Surrounding this Biographies section were all sorts of books about real life activities: Sports, Foreign Languages, Pets, Travel, Religion, Local Interest, Political Science, Military History. All the books regarding any sort of made up story were absent from the surrounding area. This, combined with the specific label of “Biographies” tells us that Chapters wants us to believe that the life narratives that it sells are all real. Additionally, it also shows us that it believes that those who peruse life narratives should also be people that like “interesting” things like sports or military history.

So it seemed like how life narratives were sold at Chapters advocated the fact that it was real, this legitimate account of people’s lives. But when I got to a closer glance, it turned out that the realism appears to be a show. I noticed the small things that the bookstore used in order to promote popular books: they were put cover first, and unsurprisingly, I looked at them first. These novels were the ones of famous people that were all over the media: Steve Jobs, Olivia Chow, Mandela. Other more minor biographies tended to be put spine first, and were dwarfed by these more popular books. There were two ways that I saw book covers to be designed. For someone like Steve Jobs, whom everyone appears to know, the cover is simply that of his face, nothing else. The other method was editors put shocking bits of information in. I’ll quote one from one book that I saw, Escape by Carolyn Jessop & Laura Palmer:

I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out (Jessop).

I wrote about this in my paper, but I think it’s worth mentioning here again. Does that quote not sound like something you’d read in a page-turning fiction novel?

It concerns me just how sensationalized and fake most of these books look. The blurbs meant to draw in readers make these books sound like an adventure that you’re going on, not an account of a person’s life. It tells of this wild experience that you, as the reader, will go on if you read this person’s biography. Here’s a quote from the back cover of Olivia Chow’s My Journey:

My Journey reveals a woman deeply committed to addressing injustice in our society. To all the challenges she has faced, Olivia has brought her sensitivity, intelligence, boundless energy and courage. She never gives up! I thought I knew Olivia Chow, having worked with her, but this book is a revelation, and her story is an inspiration. -Margaret McCain (Chow).

The descriptions here turn Chow into this inspirational figure that readers should look up to. What I find noticeable is the sentence that describes this book as a “revelation.” The story is now shown as this “unknown” quantity meant to draw readers in to consume this product. I find the way these books are portrayed to be something that is concerning. Another quote I found worth noting was that the list of people written about in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is named “Characters.” Quaint, isn’t it?

What are other people’s thoughts on this portrayal of life narratives?

Works Cited

Chow, Olivia. My Journey. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2014. Print.

Issacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print.

Jessop, Carolyn, and Laura Palmer. Escape. United States: Broadway Books, 2007. Print.

In class, when we were discussing Diamond Grill, the topics we looked at were something that I felt I could personally relate to, being Chinese-Canadian myself. I was born in America, and spent most of my life in Canada, where I was immersed in a Western culture from a very young age. I went to a public school, made all non-Chinese friends and never spoke Chinese outside of the doors of my house. I was, essentially, as white as you could get. Except I wasn’t.

Like Fred Wah, I lived in between two different cultures. It was split between the outside “White” world and the inside “Chinese” world, which was separated by the wooden frame of my front door. When I was inside, I was Chinese; I ate Chinese food, spoke Chinese, and did Chinese things. This would changed the moment I stepped outside, where I spoke perfect, accent-less English, which quickly overtook Chinese as my language of preference. I played with the non-Chinese kids and felt alien to any other Chinese people aside from my immediate family. Like Wah, I was stuck between the different worlds of the people around me, white, and the people I came from, Chinese.

My mother calls me a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). The fact was that I felt more White than I did Chinese. I had no Chinese friends. I was not interested when my mother told me stories of Sun Wukong, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Despite the fact that Chinese was my first language, I became much better in English and my native language fell into rusty disuse. I speak Chinese to a grand total of two people out of everyone I know: my parents. I use English when speaking to everyone else, even my sister (who also studied English and is as banana-ish as I am). Unlike Wah though, who passes as White, I look completely Chinese, despite a strange sense of foreignness when I am surrounded by Asians.

Where does the identity come from? In Diamond Grill, it is crossed between what a person feels they are, and what is attached to them from their outward appearance and name. But despite how a person acts, they are what their name and appearance is. Despite the fact that Wah is Chinese, he is judged to be non-Chinese by those who see him, because he does not look Chinese (169). But at the same time, despite his appearance, Wah is tied to the inescapable bond of his name, such as when he is in grade four, is blond, and is called a Chink because his name ties him to the identity of Chinese (39). I saw these examples as saying, despite how a person feels, no matter who they are “inside”, the outside (appearance and name) always has a pull on a person’s identity.

I find it hard to say exactly what it is that weighs more on the side of identity. Like myself, I feel completely non-Chinese, but my outward appearance says that I am not anything except Chinese, despite the fact that I feel a strange awkwardness around “people like me,” and comfort in those that are “not like me.” How much should the outward projection of a person, their name and their appearance, weigh in on who a person is? Is a person forever tied to what their name and face say, or is it the words that a person says who they are?

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