Joshua's Response: WT: Ch. 10, Ethics

[joshua]

#909

​This chapter really addresses some of the key issues that I consider when writing about my life: the unreliability and subjectivity of memory, the borders between story and event, the (possibly painful) emotional impact upon actual people about whom I’ve written. It is endlessly fascinating to me how people remember shared experiences and events in such profoundly disparate ways. There are, of course, as many infinitely overlapping perspectives of any experience as there are people. I once read a book about the theory of general relativity, for non-scientists, by Einstein, and in it he describes how someone dropping a pebble or stone from a moving train is an utterly dissimilar physical event to different agents from different vantage points, each with her own perspective. The person on the train dropping the stone observes, from above, the object drop straight down and hit the ground. The observer from an embankment sees a completely different trajectory, as though the stone falls in a curve, thrown almost horizontally for a moment until hitting the ground, at the train speed; same event, yet wholly distinct perspectives, of the exact same event.
When telling the stories of our lives, we attempt to fashion some kind of intelligible (for lack of a better word) meaning from the raw material of experience. People, from the innumerable perspectives of their innumerable subjectivities, render distinct meanings, one from the other.
The people about whom I’ve written most this semester are long dead. They can no longer speak for or defend themselves against how I construct them, but I don’t think this absolves the writer from ethical considerations. When contemplating how merciless I have portrayed certain family members in my writing, I think of Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, about his years as an expatriate writer in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway seems interested, in many passages, in wanting to settle scores and have the last word with his subjects, all of whom are dead. There is, in my opinion, a mean-spirited tone underpinning much of the memoir, so that even though many of his victims (e.g. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, or indeed even Hemingway’s first wife Hadley) are unable to respond to Hemingway’s account, in the end the author leaves the impression of being the pettier, lesser character. To further complicate the ethical aspect of this story, though, it is possible that Hemingway did not even intend to publish the memoir; after his suicide, his fourth wife, Mary, in her capacity as Hemingway’s literary executor, edited the manuscript and had it published.

I think Chrislande makes such an excellent point when she underscores the importance of respect in writing creative nonfiction. Whether our subjects are living or dead, litigious or not, Chrislande’s iterates the superb suggestion in Chapter 10 of WT: “Her advice is an excellent guideline for writing about family, friends– and strangers, too: to write honestly, but with respect.” (158)

[Sondra Perl]

#916

I think you are also saying that memoir writing is not the place for settling grudges. It probably makes for great reading but you are suggesting that the writer, in retrospect, can seem mean and vindictive. Interesting. Perhaps a better way is to write with some generosity of spirit — but one can only be true to one’s own self and that quality may take years to cultivate.

[Author]

Posts