Family stories & converging landscapes

We talked about Barry Lopez' essay, Landscape and Narrative. I focused discussion on the first part of the essay - the exploration of stories and the convergence of inner and outer landscapes - but the last section, the discussion of truth - makes a transition to the consideration of truth we will begin with Wednesday's discussion of "How to tell a true war story." Lopez distinguishes several different kinds of truth. He presents truth as a distinction between what is authentic & what is inauthentic where myth rooted in the local landscape is "as real as the story of a wolverine in a man's lap" - as in contrast to a notion of truth as "something that can be explicitly stated." In contrast, authentic truth is "something that can be evoked in a metaphorical way" (though not reduced to aphorism, formulas etc).

He adds yet another twist to this discussion of truth when he nots that "because of the intricate, complex nature of the land, it is not always possible for a storyteller to grasp what is contained in a story. The intent of the storyteller, then, must be to evoke, honestly, some single asplect of all that the land contains. . .[and because] different individuals grasp the story at different levels. . . regard for truth must be at the primary (level)" - with focus on who was there, what happened, whe, where, and why things occurred." So that is something to think about as you read O'Brien - who presents a version of truth that is both radically different and the same as what is posed here.

You then recollected + wrote family stories. Family stories can become part of the "landscape" of an extended group - they define identities and realitionships, what is "done" and what is not"done." The unconscious choices involved in creating and telling family stories reflect both the culture at large, and the more local culture of a particular family. Adding to this list - can open up both a reflection on self - and on the ways the culture sets us up to be those selves. The stories I shared included a "rebel-hero" story, a 'wise' parent story, and a crafty pet story - all of which have corelates in the Arne-Thompson tale-type index for folklore. So it seems things change and stay the same. Our story heritage creates that are tellable - and it sets aside some experiences as not-stories - experiences that don't fit into our unconscious assumptions about what makes a story. Those experiences may need telling - but can become forgotten because their "unthinkableness" excludes them from the narrative carriers we use to hold & remember experience. One line of creative nonfiction is about telling those kinds of stories - and O'Brien's piece is one of those.

For Wednesday:

Read: O'Brien: "How to tell a true war story" http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/obrien_story.pdf

Blog 7: More brainstorming for Project 1