Eakin autobiography of benjamin moore
Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative
February 7, 2010
I wanted to like this more than I did. I thought it might help me write the introduction to a set of autobiographical essays that will soon, knock on wood, be published.
It is, on the one hand, an easy read -- a short book with clean clear sentences. And Eakin is an authority on the topic, having devoted his career to all things autobiography.
And while I learned a few things -- e.g. that we "write" autobiography as a continuous everyday experience, we write autobiography to write our future selves, to bury an archival bone that we anticipate digging up in the future, that autobiography must be based in the body -- I was put off by the maleness, the whiteness, and the eurocentricism of the language, form, and analysis.
While there are bows to how his analysis might not carry past first world culture, the bows were meant to bracket this issue. Fair enough, we cannot write about everything and I am willing to give the author his premises.
His form struck me as swaying from topic to topic too easily. The book, I thought, needs a serious editor who was willing to push Eakin into tightening his argument and presentation. But, I suspect his reputation disallowed this.
But the most serious weakness for me was lack of attention to the abrupt, discontinuity creating, hard kernels in life. For Eakin, the problem that autobiography solves is how to create a continuous self: he asks, who are we if we are changing all the time? What "I" is the arc that gives coherence to a lifetime of activity and change? In other words, difference and discontinuity is the problem to which the unity creating autobiography is the solution.
But I see it the other way around. The hard rock of the real is that around which the autobiographical narrative orbits. The narrative never seals, heals, or fixes the tear created by the hard kernel in our lives. Even given such a healing effort, the wound still erupts. In that sense, I suppose I start with the premise that like the macro life of the planet, our lives are riven. And I assume that they remain riven, remain torn, remain alienated.
In my counter-story, the point of autobiographical narratives is to know and to learn how to accept such riven-ness. Freedom appears, not as opposed to determinacy, but within determinacy's complete closure.
Healing then is not a soothing, a smoothing, a unifying activity. Rather, healing is our capacity to imbibe the poisonous world we receive/achieve and thereby decrease the doping effect of the lullabies we tell ourselves when we take in an opiate induced version of the real and the actual -- what in music we call schmaltz.
Writing autobiography has achieved its desired effect when what writes back to us is so powerful that, for the moment, we cannot cope with what we have written and read.
Well, at least he forced these words out of me. Thanks Eakin.
It is, on the one hand, an easy read -- a short book with clean clear sentences. And Eakin is an authority on the topic, having devoted his career to all things autobiography.
And while I learned a few things -- e.g. that we "write" autobiography as a continuous everyday experience, we write autobiography to write our future selves, to bury an archival bone that we anticipate digging up in the future, that autobiography must be based in the body -- I was put off by the maleness, the whiteness, and the eurocentricism of the language, form, and analysis.
While there are bows to how his analysis might not carry past first world culture, the bows were meant to bracket this issue. Fair enough, we cannot write about everything and I am willing to give the author his premises.
His form struck me as swaying from topic to topic too easily. The book, I thought, needs a serious editor who was willing to push Eakin into tightening his argument and presentation. But, I suspect his reputation disallowed this.
But the most serious weakness for me was lack of attention to the abrupt, discontinuity creating, hard kernels in life. For Eakin, the problem that autobiography solves is how to create a continuous self: he asks, who are we if we are changing all the time? What "I" is the arc that gives coherence to a lifetime of activity and change? In other words, difference and discontinuity is the problem to which the unity creating autobiography is the solution.
But I see it the other way around. The hard rock of the real is that around which the autobiographical narrative orbits. The narrative never seals, heals, or fixes the tear created by the hard kernel in our lives. Even given such a healing effort, the wound still erupts. In that sense, I suppose I start with the premise that like the macro life of the planet, our lives are riven. And I assume that they remain riven, remain torn, remain alienated.
In my counter-story, the point of autobiographical narratives is to know and to learn how to accept such riven-ness. Freedom appears, not as opposed to determinacy, but within determinacy's complete closure.
Healing then is not a soothing, a smoothing, a unifying activity. Rather, healing is our capacity to imbibe the poisonous world we receive/achieve and thereby decrease the doping effect of the lullabies we tell ourselves when we take in an opiate induced version of the real and the actual -- what in music we call schmaltz.
Writing autobiography has achieved its desired effect when what writes back to us is so powerful that, for the moment, we cannot cope with what we have written and read.
Well, at least he forced these words out of me. Thanks Eakin.