#BookWalk – excerpts from Vivian Gornick’s “The Situation and the Story – the Art of Personal Narrative”

WARNING: This is a book for writers and should be avoided by readers at all costs, because it explains the trickery behind the illusion, basically spoiling your enjoyment of excellent books in much the same way that a floor-to-ceiling mirror can spoil an evening’s dancing at the discotheque or nocturnal shenanigans in the comfort of your own home. Allow me to illustrate:

“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

As a reader, you don’t really want to spend too much time wondering what it is the writer has come to say. In fact, many reading experiences are spoiled by writers getting in the way of your enjoyment by explaining what you’re looking at, much like an overenthusiastic tour guide.

The truth is that most writers don’t read such books to learn something new, but more in the hope of encountering themselves and seeing their own writing habits and beliefs reflected in the musings and work of legends in the field. Personally, I was advised to read this book by my Dutch editor, who felt I was being slightly frivolous about my temporary transfer from fiction to non-fiction, as if the latter is somehow easier to negotiate (reader, it most certainly is not). Gornick clarifies this as follows:

In fiction, a cast of characters is put to work that will cover all the bases: some will speak the author's inclination, some the opposition – that is, some represent an idea of self, some the agonistic other; allow them all their say, and the writer moves into a dynamic. In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension.

Naturally, Gornick elaborates and illustrates this with examples from classic works, ensuring that the reading writer is made to feel inadequate, not only because we haven’t read most of these works, but also because we seldom sit back and think about our own motives, partly because we like to believe we were born with an innate ability to churn out page after page of excellent writing.

When writers remain ignorant of who they are at the moment of writing – that is, when they are pulled around in the essay by motives they can neither identify accurately nor struggle to resolve – the work, more often than not, will prove either false or severely limited. D. H. Lawrence's essay “Do Women Change?” is a case in point. Ostensibly a meditation on the cyclical recurrence throughout history of the modern, the piece in actuality is a denunciation of 1920s feminists. It fails, in my view, not because of its opinions but because Lawrence himself does not know what he is about. It is the writer's unknowingness that sinks the piece.

With the following passage, Gornick, who already has the writer on the ropes, jams her well-read knee into the writer’s flabby, unknowing groin.

It is interesting to compare Lawrence with Hazlitt, a writer who also could have written “Do Women Change?” But if Hazlitt had written it, he would have been implicating himself continuously throughout his own rant. Repeatedly, we'd be given the line, the sentence, the image that would reveal Hazlitt's own anxieties about women. He would let us see the fear behind the anger, and this would make all the difference. We'd realize the writer is struggling to make sense of feelings whose complexity he acknowledges. The struggle alone would have made the subject vital.

With the fictioneer down on his little pudding knees, Gornick starts taunting him about the sad state of his “so-called art”:

To begin with, modernism has run its course and left us stripped of the pleasures of narrative: a state of reading affairs that has grown oppressive. For many years now our novels have been all voice: a voice speaking to us from inside its own emotional space, anchored neither in plot nor in circumstance. To be sure, this voice has spoken the history of our time – of lives ungrounded, trapped in inferiority – well enough to impose meaning and create literature. It has also driven the storytelling impulse underground. That impulse – to tell a tale rich in context, alive to situation, shot through with event and perspective – is as strong in human beings as the need to eat food and breathe air: it may be suppressed but it can never be destroyed.

Which brings me to one of the great perks of reading such works of literary analysis: they provide insecure writers with new ammunition to defend the illusion that we are not only exceedingly well-read, but also have the ability to compare and analyse the intricacies of that which we have read. The following passage, for example, is perfect for almost any literary soiree, because it can be effectively deployed in response to a wide array of topics – Orwell, Baldwin, commonality, racism, truth, emotion, elephants – which is why I’ve committed it to memory.

Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" have a powerful commonality. Both turn on race, both continuously interweave the personal with the political, and both are dominated by a murderous truth-speaking voice: the narrator using himself to demonstrate that none are exempt from the dehumanizing effects of racism. At the same time, in neither case is the writing pulled around by the emotions that actually drive the essay.

All of which brings me to a final excerpt from Gornick’s fascinating book, which really does explore dimensions that we writers often take for granted or, in my case, tend to avoid, much like that floor-to-ceiling mirror in the disco or bedroom, confronting us forcefully and eloquently with the intricacies and inadequacies of our preferred pastime.

In all imaginative writing, sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

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