This week, in regards to Stories We Tell, I decided to take a close look at a negative review of the film followed by a positive review, to see the questions these different perspectives offer to our class discussion of the film. According to Rick Groen, of The Globe and Mail, Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley is not original, and simply made up of three tropes:
“(1) a tale of confused parentage; (2) a tale of familial secrets and lies; and (3) a tale about the subjective and elusive nature of truth. Being classics, these are stories we have heard, and ones that novelists and playwrights and filmmakers and memoirists have told, countless times before. Yet Polley behaves as if she invented them, and that behaviour turns corrosive, coating the film’s real sensitivity and intelligence in a smug patina of self-congratulation.”
Groen concludes with the critique “truly resonant stories…don’t strain to illustrate truth’s elusiveness”.
I believe Groen’s critiques raise interesting questions, but I think he is being hyperbolic for he offers no examples of moments it seems Polley believes she has “invented” any of these tropes. His statement about stories that have been told before also has to be taken carefully – while I appreciate the need for originality it is also dangerous for a reader to so critically take it upon himself to decide what stories should be told or heard with so little explanation – would this not call for an end to Holocaust stories? Or in the broader spectrum, coming of age tales, tales of loss? Groen dismisses the importance of the individual’s story remarkably quickly considering the premise of Polley’s film that all stories are different.
Another thing I took note of is the fact Groen refers to the film as a “cine-memoir”. Perhaps this was just a common film critique term included for that reason alone, but it got me thinking about genre. Does Groen purposefully not refer to the film as a documentary because he doesn’t believe it offers us any knowledge in terms of truth? Or can a documentary not be about so personal an ordeal without drifting into the “memoir” genre?

In the positive review of Stories We Tell, Leah Anderst of sensesofcinema.com has a more specific definition of the film as a “choral, relational autobiography” that is as much about theory and practice of documentaries as the family’s story itself. By choral, Anderst is referring to the “chorus of voices” Polley uses to tell her mother’s story. Anderst considers how the genres of autobiography and documentary are “collaborative genres” that Polley most effectively utilizes through these many voices and praises her self-referential filming and combination of film re-enactments and real footage.
Not only are Anderst’s terms much more positive, which perhaps appeals to me since I saw value in the film, but they also seem to be more clearly articulated which makes her argument more convincing. Reading about the film in this light, I thought of its value to our course, specifically recalling Maus. These two works are both long-term; deeply researched; deeply personal; auto/biographical; and stemmed from interviews. Both texts are defined a) by the absence of a character (Anja and Diane) and b) by post-memory, for Polley is remembering Diane largely through memories passed down to her. Like Spiegelman uses interviews and photos as documentary proof, Polley uses interviews and old footage; like Spiegelman shows his personal interpretation of Vladek’s story through comics, Polley, with her interest in film, does so with the recreated footage. She also, like Spiegelman, includes herself as an interviewer in the process. In her own words: “I wasn’t comfortable with doing a ‘voice of god’ from my perspective. I actually thought that that was besides the point, but I did want to include myself as the character of the filmmaker, the investigator…”
Though I agree we should be critical of the works we come across, I think Groen’s critique offered little evidence. Perhaps it would be more convincing if he focused more on the fact the story aiming to show as much of the truth as possible, through a multitude of voices, is ultimately mediated through Sarah (a point Anderst also neglects) which we mentioned in class, for I definitely found that to be the most intriguing aspect, and perhaps critique, of the film.

Justin Trudeau’s upcoming ‘memoir’ Common Ground would have been an interesting topic for the paratext assignment we just completed, only it is not being released until October 20th, 2014. On the Indigo website, you can find it under “Books”, “Biography/Memoir”, and then “Political”. I found the term “political memoir” interesting because of how wide the possibilities of this term in particular are. George Egerton points out the common understanding of the term, a retired politician recording “important political engagements of his or her career,” and the possible critique that “writings by politicians justifying their careers are inherently flawed and seldom likely to produce accurate history, convincing political analysis, or literature of enduring merit” (222). This criticism can be applicable to Trudeau’s piece or any other ‘political memoir’ today, but Egerton is slightly outdated because he wrote this before the recent, booming industry of memoirs by candidates in the US, such as Hilary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and, of course, Barack Obama. I think a more specific term may be useful nowadays along the lines of “campaign narrative”, after reading a CBC article referring to “campaign books”, arguing Trudeau has gone through a “political rite of passage” with his memoir, and campaign books are now used “as campaign tools to shape their political narrative”. The fact that politics are a ‘narrative’ and an ‘autobiography’ is a ‘tool’ in this argument seems very backwards after our discussions of life narratives. This article also points out the possible flaw in using life narratives for political means – the fact politicians, or perhaps their campaign managers, “move to control the narrative” and so “they tend to be very vanilla flavoured, not likely to offend anyone”. After our readings for this class (imagine Wah trying to “control the narrative”!) one does wonder the merit such books have when the exigence is likely, “I must write this book to get votes”.
We must be cautious the memoir is primarily based in strategy. A Globe and Mail article points out Trudeau has followed Obama’s strategy previously, and may simply be imitating the release of The Audacity of Hope one year before Obama announced his presidential candidacy; Trudeau’s own piece is being released about a year before Canada’s next federal elections.
The limited paritextual analysis allowed with an unreleased text is primarily the title, meant to “illustrate Mr. Trudeau’s middle-of-the-ground approach as well as his connections to parts of the country” says the same Globe and Mail article, which, to me, seems to illuminate how his personal narrative and his political endeavors seem inevitably entangled. Trudeau makes similar statements regarding strategy in his interview with George Strombolopolous about not trying to “subdivide and map out” voters but “putting together a cohesive vision” of Canada.
Writing books for political campaigning is not necessarily a bad thing, and neither are they inherently unable to be written honesty. We just simply must acknowledge that writing a “memoir” in the midst of a campaign when every word is being carefully chosen, when no mistakes are without consequential bombardment by mass media, will result in a less honest or ‘candid’ portrayal than readers desire. This is particularly true in a political sphere such as ours that demands a very specific frame of a moral, valid Prime Ministerial candidate, which is why most Canadian Prime Ministers (with exceptions) have waited until after they are out of office due to less censorship and more experience (a common criticism was Trudeau is too young to write a memoir, but that a bit trivial, in my opinion).
Is the term “memoir” or “autobiography” appropriate when many readers will suspect ghost writers and censoring has taken place? Can a piece like Trudeau’s, in the context of Canadian politics, fall evenly between ‘political’ and “memoir”, between ‘campaign’ and ‘life narrative’, or must it undoubtedly lean to one side?

What I mostly wanted to concentrate on this week was the old idea of ‘show, don’t tell’ in literature in regards to Diamond Grill by Fred Wah and Missing Sarah by Maggie De Vries. Wah seems more partial to this way of story-telling than De Vries, most likely because her work is so much more news-related both in its content and its form. De Vries, therefore, is less likely to embrace the ambiguity in text that Wah enjoys. What I wonder is whether one of these method of story-telling (in life narratives in particular) is more effective than the other? I’ll confess, I initially was completely convinced that the ‘Show, don’t tell’ mantra was the obvious choice, but the question requires more consideration.
Wah, throughout Diamond Grill, encourages engagement and confusion in the reader simultaneously. A perfect example of this is the Head Tax chapter we discussed in class and how Wah is drawing the reader into Chinese-Canadian history in a confusing but intriguing selection of run-on sentences that force us to do research ourselves to achieve understanding; we are expected to make sense of “…Grandmpa Wah’d white Canada’s xeno-heat for long shimmered their open portals union jacked adapt miscegenated legislated fish heads…” and so on (130).
De Vries, on the other hand, will more often than not explicitly explain information or events to you at a time Wah would have most likely stopped. For example, the book begins with a series of anecdotes about Sarah as a child to exemplify her strong-headed personality. De Vries describes a time Sarah was told to not eat a spicy pepper but eats it anyways, and ends up crying with sore eyes and a burning mouth. The anecdote, standing alone, communicates to the reader the curious and sometimes stubborn personality of Sarah, but De Vries continues: “Experiences like that with the peppers didn’t teach her to trust adults’ advice and save herself some pain. She went right on following her own lead” (11). Indeed, this style could be seen as a weakness by some; Ernest Hemingway, in particular, put forth in his ‘theory of omission’:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due only to one-eighth of it being above water” (Qtd in Nakjavani 14).

If you’re interested in learning more about Hemingway’s theory, you can read about it here.

Whereas Wah is a “subject [that] will not stay still” (Saul, 103), De Vries is relatively stationary. While Wah makes us research, De Vries presents her research to us and explains it. However, I then considered this may partially be because she is on the outside looking into Sarah’s life, and wants to give a more accurate and documented portrayal of her rather than just an impression (Literary Impressionism is another interesting literary theory in regard to Wah, that you can read about it in Jesse Matz’ Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics). If De Vries left gaps to be filled, perhaps we would fill them with stereotypical ideas about residents of the DTES, the very ideas she is seeking to challenge. To make her goal clear, it makes sense she chooses a much clearer format than Wah.
Another example of this inherent difference is chronology – the lack of chronology in Diamond Grill suits the biotext. In an interview, De Vries regards both the directness of her message and her use of chronology. She mentions she even had to take out “some parts where [she] became too preachy” and she was told to make the story chronological, which was “an amazingly useful piece of advice…Chronology itself pulls the reader through”. (qtd in Raoul).
You can read the interview here.

Lastly, I include a link that directly argues with my preconception that ‘Show, don’t tell’ is an inherently correct statement. In a short article on the Writer’s Digest website, Joshua Henkin argues we should reject the concept as an all-encompassing rule:

“If you ask me, the real reason people choose to show rather than tell is that it’s so much easier to write ‘the big brown torn vinyl couch’ than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language. You will never be told you’re cheesy if you describe a couch, but you might very well be told you’re cheesy if you try to describe loneliness. The phrase “Show, don’t tell,” then, provides cover for writers who don’t want to do what’s hardest (but most crucial) in fiction.”

To read more, click here.

What do you think? Is one style more effective than the other?

Works Cited:
De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah. 2nd ed. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. Print.

Henkin, Joshua. “‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops'” Writer’s Digest. Writer’s Digest, 19 June 2012. Web. 24 Sept. 2014. .

Matz, Jesse. “Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics”. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 24 September 2014.

Nakjavani, E. G. “The Aesthetics of Meiosis: Hemingway’s ‘Theory of Omission’ (Interdisciplinary Study, Cezanne)”. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1985. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web. 24 Sep 2014. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/303448162?accountid=14656. (303448162).

Raoul, V. (2004). “You May Think This, But: An Interview With Maggie De Vries”. Canadian Literature, (183), 59-70. Web. 24 Sep. 2014. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/218810664?accountid=14656

Saul, Joanne. “Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature”. Toronto, ON, CAN: University of Toronto Press, 2006. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 24 September 2014.

Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2006. Print.