Here is a picture of the late Donald M. Murray
I was just going to attach, but I guess I cant...so I will simply copy and paste it.
William Meznarich
ENG 326
Prof. Downs
November 10, 2008
Thought 11: The Place of Stories in Reality
Sorry this took me a little longer to write than most of the other Thought Pieces. I really honestly had the paper more or less planned out when I took off for class at 3 PM, and after I spent around fifteen minutes listening to everyone’s responses to Murray’s article, I realized that everyone had read this article in an entirely different way than I had. It flabbergasted (good word) so much that I had to come home and rethink the entire project and after an hour and it being Friday, well I’ll just leave it to the imagination of how I got distracted until now. Regardless, I will here and now address that issue that so distracted my thoughts, while everyone else was concerned with autobiography and that everything written is based on our experience and or is a direct bi-product of our experience, I was more interested in Murray’s idea that anything written becomes a part of our lives, our memories, and most especially our autobiography. I will take an example from Murray to help explain my point.
It is true that the boy, myself, skated on thin ice and that he skated at Sailor’s Home Pond in Quincy, Massachusetts, although the thin ice may not have been on that pond. He did not, however, see a fish in the ice until I wrote the poem, although he was obsessed with the eyes of the fish, haddock and cod, that followed him when he went to Titus’s fish store in Wollaston. Readers believe that Alex is my brother, although I was an only child. There was no Alex; no one I knew had drowned by falling through the ice until I received the poem; I did not, after loving, stare up to see him skating above me until after I wrote the poem, I do now. The poem that was for a few seconds imaginary has become autobiographical by being written (Murray 70, emphasis added).
Now while the rest of the class was discussing how the trip to the fish store lead to writing a poem about seeing frozen fish in a stream, I was intrigued by Murray’s phrases explaining how he understands the images as they stand now. As he explains in the last sentence, what was once something that was contained in his imagination takes on real life and existence when he writes about it. It is something that I have came across before, in fact all the time, and like Murray all the authors seem to point it out implicitly and not explicitly. After writing this poem, all the images in Murray’s imagination have become real to him, in the very same way that the images are real to a reader, because they exist in reality, in this sense on the page in front of the reader. Stories have an interesting way of being turned into truth, just think of myth#, and how after so many time telling and retelling a story (and in conjunction hearing and rehearing a story) a story becomes real. Many of these myths took place before the advent of writing, allowing the stories to be rewritten and reheard with ease, but even after these stories are scribbled down, they still exert a power of reality even in somewhat stagnant form. The paper itself provides the writing with authority, or at the very least as something of importance, because someone took the time to record it.
Back to what I was saying before, I have also had this experience of imaging something that eventually became very real to me, as have probably any person who considers himself a good storyteller. I have been lucky enough to hone some of my skills to the stage of stand-up comedy, of which I have performed infrequently over the past two years. In my routines, much of my material is based on what I experience in the real world, however, that information is molded by me to accentuate what is funny about what I am talking about. This is a purposeful act; it goes without saying that not everything told in chronological order ends up producing guffaws, but with a little rewriting just about everything can be turned on its head for laughter’s sake. But the problem is that eventually, that made-up story is how I remember the event; eventually, I cannot discern what really happened versus what I made up to make it funnier. And it gets more complicated, sometimes I allow stories I tell people to be fabricated, sometimes parts and sometimes entire stories, making up events and situations in my life that never really exist for no other reason than entertainment. At first, this concerned me greatly, the thought of becoming a fraud or a liar even if just for entertainment’s sake scared me. I was convinced that I would lose the respect of my friends if they knew that a great portion of what I said was not reality. But that is when I made the connection, how fabrication and false reality are a total part of how the world really works. We do not differentiate what is reality and what is said as reality well, and in effect everything is reality (our classes point) because everything we think is based on the experiences we have had throughout our lives. Not only is all fiction, but to an extent, all speaking word is fabricated one way or another to make one point and reversed to make another point. If my goal is to make people laugh then the story will be different then if my goal is to provide a truthful account, like a police report (hopefully this example never comes to happen!). However, since language can only relate information and not reproduce an event as it happens and our memory is absolutely faulty in its attempt to recreate events in our lives exactly how they happened, it is fair to say that all writing and even all spoken word is in some way a fabrication or a rewriting, spoken only because its speaker has a purpose.
With this in mind, I know exactly what Murray means when he says that it is possible that all reading is autobiographical, and it parallels nicely to my research paper. Readers see different things in the same text because like writers readers have intentions and expectations when they read which lead to lead their discovery and interpretation. For a long time (and still today unfortunately), the goal of reading has been to discover what the author meant, and this can’t entirely be blamed on readers’ ignorance because think of language and its purpose, that is to convey meaning from one person to another. When someone says, “I’m going to the gas station. Do you want anything?” the meaning is clear; the purpose of the listener is uncover that clear meaning and respond, a person saying something like “Oh, just because I’m a woman you think I can’t get anything for myself? That I need help?” This is an example of that break of meaning and how language can sometimes fail us. What we thought was something that had clear meaning, can be reinterpretated by the listener to mean something else, while the original meaning is still left intact. This second interpretation is something guided by our values and what we are looking to discover, and is very much like my point in the beginning of how I can see something that no one else appears to see. I, like my made up feminist, am reading according to my values. Now remembering my reading and taking it with me, is how reading becomes autobiographical. How I can remember events and stories told to me by other people is how reading can become autobiographical. Language and learning even is itself autobiographical, which leads to Murray’s main point that writing is autobiographical, for what am I doing now? Isn’t what I’m saying here now a part of my life and my history?
