Visiting Sydney is like a school reunion: the thrill of shared memories, the rediscovery of familiar places and the space to recall my young self – and the relief of returning home to my settled life in the bush capital.
Gulls fought over the scraps from tourists’ lunches, towers competed for sky while the bridge brooded over the sparkling harbour. The queues for Writers' Festival sessions stretched along the Walsh Bay wharves and people argued over the contentions pouring from the overhead speakers as they waited. The performance poets - or were they stand-up poets? – entertained us with comedy and psalmody. I listened hard to Kate Grenville, Amanda Curtin and Nava Semel as they discussed their fictive takes on history and people.
Nava Semel’s innovative blend of genres in her book And the Rat Laughed intrigued me. Narrative, blog, poetry, diary, testimony and legend are woven into a compelling account of a child’s holocaust survival story. Although it is a pseudo-autobiography/biography it confirmed that the genre of life narrative can stretch to accommodate a plethora of forms and points of view.
6 comments:
I think Kate's contention that 'life narrative can stretch to accommodate a plethora of forms and points of view' is correct. It can. No one would dispute life narrative's capacity to assume multiple perspectives, and that such an inherent flexibility can deliver a complexity that resonates with the actuality of life experience as opposed to the pseudo-life that might emerge from using different genres as mere contrivance.
There are aspects of life so volatile, so explosive that different perspectives enable one to create the 'distance' required to engage with those emotions without being swamped by them. However, it is also all too possible to aim for cleverness for the sake of cleverness, at which point the authenticity of the emotion is compromised.
Something the perceptive reader is bound to pick up.
And the question is: at what point is enough enough, and when does it become too much?
As an adjunct to my previous comment, I would point to John Donne's response to someone requesting he write a poem to celebrate a friend's death i.e. that he couldn't write a poem because his experience of grief was too raw - that he would have to wait before doing that - but he could write a sermon and - did.
So the further question is raised on the appropriateness of the various genres for the occasion.
Life narrative may even stretch to a screen play, an imagining of how it must have been, a working out of why certain choices were made and how forgetting was possible.
Yes. Wordsworth noted that a poem is the emotions and sensations of a time and place recollected in repose. There is too much to process in the immediate aftermath of an event. I guess in a sermon mroe can be said - and forgotten, dear preacher? - than in a poem.
Let's face it the styles of presentation are almost endless. I've been very conscious of that doing the torah's version of Jacob's story. Clearly the story is pitched in such a way that it conforms to certain expectations that the genre has been designed to meet: chaisms, a dispassionate approach among others that espouses a moral point of view but is tolerant of its characters foibles and weaknesses, and is prepared to challenge orthodoxy and even God himself.
Which is interesting in as far as you expect the story to be 'preachy' but it isn't. It invites an open ended response, incites controversy and discussion. Very attractive modum.
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