The Use of Narrative Sequence and its Effect in Getting Home Alive (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-13-2013)

Joseph Melanson

U.S. Women’s Multicultural Life-Writings

Prof. Koplewitz

11 December 2012

The Use of Narrative Sequence and its Effect in Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales

In the book Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales, a daughter and mother and collaborate to tell their respective struggles for finding and developing their own respective identities. Their collaboration is told through various literary forms like poems, stories, and essays. The entries of the Morales and Morales book are not continuing, do not complement one another, nor are they chronological as is found in a typical linear narrative approach. The entries of the mother and daughter instead express how the mind works, moving about through different periods of their lives as they occur, intertwining not only their individual experiences, but their separate but distinct experiences as well, in the overall narrative.  The approach of the book also allows both authors to tell a universal story through a sequence of multiple of voices, relating the stories of the people who influenced them, and shaped their experience. The narrative strategies that both Aurora Morales and Rosario Morales choose, through poems, essays, and stories, allows them a broader range of expression to relate their individual respective narratives sequence of identity creation is always in process. This range of expression that Morales and Morales use allows them sequence of mental experience, the sequence of shared reality with others, and the sequence of personal identity creation.

In Getting Home Alive, the Morales women demonstrate through their writings the sequence of mental experience, or how the mind is amalgamation of lived experience, rather than a straightforward narrative with a fixed beginning, middle, and end.  In her essay “Hace Tiempo”, mother Rosario shows how one’s mental experience is only ever known to the individual, how the mind can go backwards and forwards through time. The mind blends memories and recollections, with various thoughts and ideas, the mind a narrative jumble and blend that only puts itself into order for others through what it chooses to reveal, and what the meanings the mind can make of its woven experience. “Hace Tiempo” occurs over an undisclosed period of time, with Rosario Morales recalling her youth of growing up “in apartments” (28). Now her and her husband live in their first house, bought from money that came from his inheritance. Rosario Morales recalls “the rain on the roof, pit pat pat, just those first drops before the storm” (28). “How loud they are”, Morales recalls, “I can hear each separate drop hit the tin roof like a pebble falling” (28). The first home of hers is dark and gloomy, “dark all day, darker if the lights fail, the small glow of a candle in the gloom of these brown wooden walls – at two in the afternoon” (28). The very air here too makes her uncomfortable, as it is “’wet as a saturated sponge”, turning her clothes “clammy: cold and always a bit moist” (28). This dreary and damp weather of Ithaca, N.Y. where Morales and her husband reside causes Morales to “daydream fireplaces and the hot tropical sun my friends back home fantasize for me, hot tubs followed by big towels and freshly ironed sheets, and even underwear creased from the iron, all things warm and dry” (28). Rosario Morales then goes into the future to her and her husband’s decision to move to Puerto Rico. Not only to escape the bleakness of Upstate New York weather, her disinterest in her studies at Cornell, her husband’s impending graduation and his being urged by the college that he “should go to graduate school somewhere else”, but the most important factor of all was the war in Korea, and the looming probability that he would be drafted, or “jailed any day for refusing to fight” (29). The reason for escaping to Puerto Rico in particular, was because Morales had been raised there, and her husband “wanted to know it” (29). Morales, at this point of existence in her recollection, lets the reader know about the outcome of her desire and ambition to leave, “we would go”, one short sentence tells us, the following sentence tells us the outcome of their determination, “we did”. (29). Before moving on to the experience of Puerto Rico, she returns to her place within the  recollection of the experience of Ithaca. “God, I hate the smell of kerosene”, Morales writes, as it “gets over everything, penetrates and never comes out again”, and “even my skin smells of it” (29). As she is cooking a meal, Morales writes about a little neighbor girl that used to live next door to her at the home in Ithaca. Morales shows us the discomfort that the girl brings out of her. “Her eyes travel from the counter to shelf to pots to wall to floor to me, picking up and storing details”, Morales writes, this girl causing her to feel “lumpish and out of place”, wishing she “wouldn’t stare so” (30). The girl who remains nameless in this piece, either because Morales forgot it or chooses not to acknowledge the name in this recollection, first comes to her in search of some herb that grows near Morales house. This herb that the girl searches for is supposed to cure a cold, either a true herbal remedy that she has been told about, or part of a little girl’s fantasy world, Morales never lets us know. The girl is granted permission to pick this “yerba buena” yet lingers to observe Morales as she prepares dinner for her family, only taking off as Morales goes where the girl can’t follow: the outhouse” (31). Morales now flashes to another place where they had moved, to a farm in the coffee region of San Felipe, in Southern California. California is more agreeable to Morales over Ithaca, “it’s bright and sunny and smells so good, of grass smells and coffee roasting” (31). At this point in the piece, Morales is pregnant, her husband is suffering from the effects of hepatitis. Morales is so much more happier in California, among “my plants, my house, my neighborhood” (33). Morales then moves on to another recollection within the same narrative, to 1955, “pregnant again” after she’d already “miscarried one, and I nearly lost this child” (33). Morales has either a dream or a fantasy, she doesn’t say which, of a “big stout woman in a Nazi uniform” who is involve in an operation in which they are operating on her daughter’s brain after they have taken the “top of her skull off” (33). Morales then flashes to her experience after having delivered her daughter, pregnant again she is now “so tired, so sleepy” (33). Morales describes this moment in her recollection as a tiredness that seems like a “dense heavy feeling that starts at the top of my head, weights my eyelids down, slows my arms, and when it hits my legs, I have to lie down” (33-34). Despite Morales exhaustion, she still has to maintain her home, taking care of her daughter, taking care of herself for the sake of the unborn child within. “I’ve got to fatten up”, Morales writes, but “how, I don’t know” as she doesn’t “feel like eating most of the time”, but “at least I’m not throwing up any more”, and “I’m not losing weight” (35). Morales is alone in the remainder of this moment, except for her daughter, and the requirements of her role of motherhood, the need to prepare dinner for the three of them: Morales, her daughter, and the unborn child within her. Taking a break from her cooking, Morales writes, the food needing twenty minutes to cook she pushes “open the lower half of the door to sit on the step in the warm sun, watch Lori play with sticks in the dirt, and wait” (36). This moment in Rosario Morales narrative piece shows how the mind experiences as a mixture of the past, present, and future, a blend that only gets sorted out by the individual to the individual’s best capacities. Our minds, in Aurora Morales piece shows, are a blend of experience of time that goes from recollections and memories, to our hopes and aspirations of the future, occurring in our ever-present experience of now. If Aurora Morales had chosen to obey narrative convention, she would have had to more clearly distinguish these several experiences that she blends together, into several distinct stories that would have had to been put into a certain order, thus giving her narrative a less personal feel to her particular experience.

The Morales women use a narrative strategy of sequence that illustrates the dimension of shared reality of individuals, an experience that while it may coincide with the presence of others, our internal experience may not correlate to others in the experience of our shared reality. In “Kitchens” Aurora describes cooking in her own kitchen, flashing back to the women of her past, teaching her how to cook. As she prepares her meal, Aurora Morales relives the experience of growing up around maternal role models, who hand down this important and necessary ability to a girl who will more than likely be in need of it one day when she has her own mouths to feed. “Mine is a California kitchen, full of fresh vegetables and whole grains, bottled spring water and yogurt in plastic pints, but when I lift the lid from that big black pot, my kitchen fills with the hands of women who came before me” (77). As she goes through the various activities that go into making the meal, she ruminates on the women who taught her this “magic, a power, a ritual of love and work” (38). Aurora Morales demonstrates in this piece that we are just the culmination of developed skills of generations and generations of people, and everything we do is only what has been passed on to us, only brought out of us in either how the world requires us to behave. If Aurora Morales constructed this in a typical, straight-forward narrative sequence she would have had to completely flesh out the individuals that she writes about, these maternal influences, putting them in their respective times and places of her existence, as well as giving more development to her own place and time, making the moment seem more like a recording of history than a recording of shared experience with others.

The third use of narrative sequence that the Morales women use demonstrates the sequence of identity creation. In her essay “Destitution” on pages 94-95, mother Rosario recalls the fear of poverty, an influence that Morales believes she inherited with her birth. “I was born in August 1930”, Rosario Morales writes, and “I have always feared destitution, always” (94). “Even before I was born, the fear seeped in with my nutriments through the thin capillary walls of my placenta into my heart” (Morales 94). Morales tells the story of her mother having to marry late in her teens, a necessary decision as the family was now destitute after losing the family store.  “The older girls all found husbands in a hurry”, Morales writes of her aunts, and her uncle, “the older boy” had to settle for the practical job of being a policeman, sacrificing his dream of being a social worker (94). Morales relates how her mother was “shipped to the United States within hours of the marriage ceremony, landed in New York in time for the crash, arrived to recurrent joblessness, discrimination, poverty, fear” (94). Morales was conceived within this stressful and uncertain time and realizes that her birth may have been just another burden for her family to carry in this new land of uncertainty. Rosario Morales relates how this origin in her parents has informed he her core identity with the fear of poverty. “I could live in luxury: yachts and champagne, diamonds up to my eyebrows, and I would worry about food, about a roof over my head, about whether the money would run out” Rosario writes, “the Depression is part of every cell of my body” (94). Rosario Morales writes “my mother drank it in her teen years in Naranjito, those years of increasing poverty in the colonies before the stock market crash” and her father “migrated to New York, escaped long before he married, leaving the pan for the fire” (94). “Their anxiety was the breath of life to me, their hunger flavored my milk” (Morales 94). Because of this difficult time in her parent’s life Rosario Morales writes, “I don’t have many stories” as the family’s history “was too painful, too frightening, too omen-ous” (sic) (94). When questioned about this time “my mother often slipped quickly over the events, hinting” and my “father never spoke of it at all” (95). Rosario Morales in this moment in their book shows the sequence of how our identity forms, bits and pieces of influences from family and other people that informs how we choose to be within the world. If Rosario Morales had attempted to follow literary conventions these events would have had to be more fleshed out, names and faces given to her relatives, more details would have had to be given to the events of their past, rather than the briefest hint and summary. This piece by Rosario Morales, in this use of sequence, shows us how events and circumstances unconsciously yet strongly inform who we are, decisions and actions of others influence us, rather than us being a separate observer that we sometimes think that we are.

            The Morales women through the use of poems, essays, and stories, demonstrate the sequence of mental experience, the sequence of shared reality with others, and the sequence of how our identity creates itself. The writings of the Morales women show how mental experience exists in its own sequence, or rather without any kind of sequence but how we give it sequence in how we relate ourselves to ourselves, and others. The Morales women’s writings show that despite occupying the same time and space, our internal planes of experience never completely match those with whom we are spending our time with. The Morales women, through their writings, show the sequence of how our identities form from events and circumstances, not only those of which we are cognizant of, but of other influences barely known to us, help to form the concept of ourselves that we hold in our minds, as well as coloring decisions and behaviors that we make later in our lives.

Works Cited:

Morales, Aurora Levins, and Rosario Morales. Getting Home Alive. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. 1986. Print. 


GRADE: 95
Greetings, Joseph. Your approach to exploring narrative sequence, non-linearity, and the proximity of the inner consciousness and sensory awareness of mother/daughter in the text, allows the reader to see the actual results of this non-linearity through the textual examples. I am glad to see the level of detail in your focus upon specific moments, whether the young girl, herbs, outhouse, or the kitchen and foods, or the sense of nostalgia or expectation, hope or disappointment, as conveyed in the stories. Each author's voice is quite unique, and yet as mother and daughter there is a generational set of influences that are present in the texts. The movements of the mind in non-linearity of experiential living, an impressionistic and sensory world view, are elucidated quite well in your examples and your narrative analysis. One other area that might be of interest for exploration is the entire concept of how'time' utilized- i.e. in the non-linearity how is time shaped, does it move in a straight line a circle, etc. - is there a larger metaphor involved.

Thank you for your fine essay and for your conscientiousness in completing your essays.  All best,  PRof LK

Coming to Terms with Traumatic Experience in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-12-13)

 Joseph Melanson

U.S. Women’s Multicultural Life-Writings

Prof. Koplewitz

02 December 2012

Coming to Terms with Traumatic Experience in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands.

          

             It is said that in order to make sense out of traumas of the past, one must tell a story about the event in order to move toward a better understanding of the experience. In regards to the story that Shirley Geok-Lin Lim tells in her book Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands, and in my own life, I find that this is true. Shirley Lim relates in her book many traumatic events of her youth and early adulthood, two of which were the trauma of her mother’s abandonment of Lim’s family, and the trauma of her family’s fall into poverty. Comparing my own experiences of traumatic events to those of Lim, I realize that there is a relationship in relating traumatic experience and being able to understand that experience. In relating traumatic experience, the writer is now capable of perspectives that may not have been possible before the traumatic event is reexamined from a distance of time and space. 

            In Among the White Moon Faces, Shirley Lim writes about the trauma of her mother’s abandonment of both her, and her family, when she was a young girl. “I did not learn to love my mother, who left us when I was eight, though she is perhaps more to be pitied than my father” Lim writes (34). “As a grown woman, I know that her life was harder than his, the odds in her struggles for a good life unfairly stacked against her” (Lim 34). “But as her daughter”, Lim writes, “when I think about her, I feel instead a stubborn resistance against pity and forgiveness, an adolescent resentment that will not grow up” (34). After her mother’s abandonment, Lim writes, “Mother became a huge silence” (52). “We never spoke of her to Father, nor to each other”, as talk of her mother was “forbidden”, about “someone who was not dead and also not alive” (Lim 52). Lim realizes that her mother loved her, in her own way, “at least later in life” (35). When Lim was sixteen, or eight years after her mother’s abandonment, they visited each other in Singapore where her mother was working. Her mother introduces the young Lim to all the mother’s fellow coworkers with pride. “Her pride was so evident during that social ritual, which continued in the afternoon and evening with taxi rides to numerous of her brothers and sisters homes, was a kind of love” (Lim 35). “But as my father’s daughter,” Lim writes, “I knew love as familial and daily proximity, not as social ritual” (35). Lim writes that her mother’s “abandoning family for society”, would never get over her estrangement to her mother (35). The loss of her mother had the significant effect of not giving her someone to model her behavior after, of assisting a young Lim in making decision, and being able to take one’s bearings in life. “The problem that confused me for years, until the years themselves shaped their own ironic answer, was what to do with my life as a woman: not simply, what kind of work I wanted, but how to grow up as a woman” (Lim 101). “Perhaps” her mother’s “physical and emotional abandonment had led to my despair,” Lim writes, “to my profound distrust of any available protection”, (101). “My childhood education, illuminating, powerful adults as unloving, unjust, and violent, had driven me underground to avoid further damage, exchanging the hurts of trust for the hurts of futility” (Lim 137). “Absence was the story my mother taught me,” Lim reflects later in life, but had I more time to talk to Mother, perhaps I could have learned to forgive, listening to her stories” (137). Comparing Lim’s experience with her mother, to that of my relationship to my mother, there are many similarities. My mother had me when she was only seventeen, a very young age to be saddled with the responsibility of having to raise a child. She gave me to my grandparents at an early age and that is the only experience that I have with parents. My mother, like Lim’s mother, related to me in the same way, as a responsibility, a chore, a child that one must take with them along on their own selfish pursuits. I was made to do things that were more appropriate for enjoyment by adults, rather than children. There were the boring trips to Winterfest, Balloonfest, and countless gatherings where drinking alcohol was the main concern. I realized that I became a social ritual for my mother, a thing that must occasionally be shown attention to. The majority of our relationship though, was marked by long absences, periods of time that ranged six months or more between our awkward visits. I saw my mother as a hassle as well, someone whose inclinations had to be entertained from time to time, and so I want along with her on these gatherings which consisted of the drunks that she met in bars and considered her friends. These gatherings only ever left me feeling irritable and bored, and left me wondering for many years if there was something wrong with me, that perhaps I was miserable and didn’t want to “have fun”. There were many good times in my relationship with her before she died of asthma in 2009. Looking back on my relationship with my mother, and comparing it to Lim’s relationship with hers, I have been able to put this experience with my mother into a better perspective. Like Lim, I realize that my mother was a culmination of various forces at work, forces that will only ever be known to her. Lim’s mother, like my own mother, only acted to the best of their capacities, were unfinished pieces in a larger whole, moving in the world in the only way that they knew how relate to it. I understand, like Lim understands, that a person is only the stories that they tell, and like Lim, I would only ever have gotten to truly know her if I had only had the chance to listen to my mother tell her own.

In her book Shirley Geok-Lin Lim writes about the trauma of falling from a comfortable existence to a life of poverty in her early youth. Lim’s family lost their house and was forced to move in with relatives. She remembers reflecting on her new situation while lying in bed one evening in her youth. “For the first time in my life I felt hunger” Lim recalls, adding that “my stomach growled and I pressed back against the lumpy mattress with a lassitude that came from being alone and from not having eaten all day” (43). She defines this new “odd sensation” of  hunger as “an emptiness,” that left her “giddy and weak” (43). After a while of suffering this hunger from her family’s new found state of poverty, the Lim children are tempted into stealing from her grandfather’s hardware store. Lim writes that her and her brothers stole “pipes, copper wires, shiny steel faucets, brass knobs, and iron hooks” to sell to another store on the “next street over” (49). “We knew we were stealing, although it did not occur to us that it was our own Lim family we were devastating with our thievery” (Lim 49). “How rare were those ten-and twenty-cent coins”, Lim writes, holding them “tightly in my palm” a young Lim “considered everything I could buy with them – dried lemon skins, pickled plums, sugared cuttlefish, preserved fruit” (49). “I longed for salty sweet tidbits that I nibbled slowly so that five-cents worth lasted and lasted all day”, Lim writes, “my thrift was that of the survivor who hoarded against starvation” (49). Lim writes about the trauma of losing a comfortable existence in which she had grown accustomed, for a life of poverty and all the uncertainties and difficulties that come with it. When I was young, I suffered a similar experience as well. My grandfather became very ill after coming down with cancer, and I went to live with my mother for a while. I did not have the run of the place that I was used to, my mother wasn’t as good a cook as my grandmother, and my childish selfishness had me more concerned with my state of boredom than my grandfather’s health and well-being. I stole from my grandfather’s coin collection and used them to play video games at the mall, and buy snacks. I had no understanding or appreciation for my grandfather’s hobby, only seeing the coins for what I could trade for them. These thefts only satiated a temporary sensation and relieved a temporary state of boredom. Like Lim and her siblings, I traded family loyalty for childish preoccupations when the circumstances made allowances for it. After my grandfather died, there was one less thing for our family to remember him, one more reminder of my lack of appreciation and gratitude for my relatives.

            Shirley Lim had suffered many traumas in her life, many of which occurred in the same short period of time during her early years, the loss of her mother, her families fall into destitution are only two of them. In writing about traumatic events, the writer is able to come to better terms with the events, now able to look at these events with more clarity and insight that one may have been capable of at the time. Generally when we suffer some traumatic event, we are only capable of a limited perspective, and one that is clouded by emotions. It is only through later revisiting these traumatic moments of our lives in our writings, can we not only put our past in clearer terms, but also clarify how the events still affect us to this day.

Abstract Analysis:

Writing about traumatic experience may be one of the most difficult things to try to accomplish in one’s life time. Traumatic events cause the sufferer to want to shut down in order to prevent more suffering, may result in various addictions and dangerous behavior in order to distract or deal with the trauma. Not coming to terms with early traumas can have us unknowingly pursuing habits and behaviors that only continue to harm us in some way throughout our lives. These habits and behaviors may not only hurt us, but other the other people in our lives as well. 

Writing about traumatic events allows us to put events into perspective, not only of the event at the time, but also in how we perceive ourselves in the present moment. Rather than a victim of circumstances, we are actually agents of change and action, it is only that we learn this lesson much later in life. When traumatic events occur we are often blind sighted by them, caught totally unaware and unprepared for these events as they occur. Instead of knowing how to react or even think, we instead shut down to the traumatic event, or lash out, not knowing how to proceed or act from the event. As each individual is a reflection of various influences, we can only proceed from what we are taught from our care takers when we are young when traumatic events occur. Later as we mature, our influences help us to better understand events as they occur, allowing us a broader range of ways in which to react and manage stressful situations.

It is only after maturing, that when we choose to write about painful moments of our past that we can analyze and examine these moments with the proper detachment, making sense of these moments and assigning them a more honest meaning through understanding, without the strength of emotions and feelings clouding our thinking. For instance, in the behavior of the nuns toward Lim, Lim relates this experience as harsh, once having to stand on a chair before the rest of her class, with a piece of chalk in her mouth for hours after getting caught talking in class. To a young Lim, this may seem harsh and abusive, perhaps even racist. But perhaps Lim intuited after writing about the time of her schooling that she played a part in the nuns decisions as well. The nuns may actually have had positive intentions in their forms of punishment towards Lim and her socially negative behavior. The nuns may only have treated Lim as they would have any other child, only punishing Lim for her behavior, and not intentionally singling her out like a youngster may lead herself to believe. Perhaps the nuns, despite their different ethnicity, only treated a young Lim as they had been treated during their school years, only following what was seen as appropriate within the educational system of that time. The nuns were supposed to teach proper social behavior, as well as the school’s curriculum. Perhaps the nuns believed that this form of punishment was necessary to keep control of the class, that if the children weren’t set these examples the school would end up in chaos. This view, while painful, may show Lim that a traumatic event may actually only be the experience of our being within certain circumstances, and that others actions and decisions are only the product of many other forces and influences. Writing about traumatic events allows us to see them in a new and different light, giving these new events meanings that we may not have been capable of at the time, and giving us a new light in which to shine upon the events that most disrupted and changed our lives.

Works Cited:

Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press. 1997. Print


GRADE: 96
Joseph, greetings. You have written with a poignant, heartfelt sense of the difficulties of Lim's life, including her mother's abandonment of the family and Lim's later trauma of poverty and having to move in with relatives. The analytical and experiential basis of your narrative is filled with many observations from your own life, the conflicts and difficulties of reconciling how to interact with your own mother, and then later, examining your relationship in terms of family memories and your grandfather.  The complexities of looking back and examining how one feels, in retrospect, with painful childhood experiences, can be quite revelatory and even healing, but it is not easy to do. I appreciate your courageousness in speaking candidly about your own life story, and your thoughts about Lim are compassionate, focused, and articulate.

Thank you for another very finely written essay.  All best,  Prof. LK.

Analysis of a Moment in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation through the insights of Ruthellen Josselson's article "Imagining the Real: Empathy, Narrative, and the Dialogic Self" (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-06-2013)

Joseph Melanson

U.S. Women’s Multi-Cultural Life Writings

Prof. Koplewitz

08 February 2013

An Analysis of Moment in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language,

through the insights of Ruthellen Josselson’s article “Imagining the Real: Empathy,

Narrative, and the Dialogic Self”.

             Ruthellen Josselson examines in her article “Imagining the Real: Empathy, Narrative, and the Dialogic Self” the idea that the story or narrative that a person creates of their life is based on an attempt at meaning-making of their world and thus their place within it. The narrative of the self in dialogue with itself and its environment is constantly in a state of revision as the meanings the individual makes during their life evolves and changes due to a greater awareness and understanding that only comes with maturation and development. It is the awareness that this process is always in a state of change, and only comes from the individual’s present but unfinished state that Josselson argues one needs a more empathetic stance to appreciate how the individual fits themselves within their world at any given place in time. Using a moment in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, one can see how Hoffman gives voice to this dialogic self, or the multiplicity of dialogues of the self in conversation with itself, and with the individual’s dialogue with its social environment as well.

            Josselson takes the title for her article from Martin Buber, an existentialist philosopher, whose concept of imagining the reality of other people is to attempt to understand “what another…is wishing, feeling, perceiving and thinking” not in a detached way, not as a set of variables, but as part of a process of a living Other”, or how the individual attempts to fit in with their greater world at large (4). Josselson argues that the individual is a “multiple of discourses” that is always in an ongoing process of making meaning in order to relate to its place in the world, and “it is this multiplicity of discourses that resists being reduced to a single voice” (7). This multiplicity of the selves that the individual is comprised of, Josselson states, is “a dialogue between different orders of individual experience” and “the dialogue of the individual with the social world of others” (11). This confluence of multiple dialogues of both the individual’s internal experience, along with the individual’s desire to gain what they understand as a favorable view of themself within their social environment is “a product of interpretation, grounded in social conditions in which we live, formed by inescapable ideology, and spoken in a consensual language” (2). As each individual comes to their own interpretations to the best of their ability, yet these interpretations change as the individual grows and learns new ways of both perceiving itself and his or her environment throughout the individual’s lifetime. It is because of the awareness that this “dialogic self”, a term Josselson takes from literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is in a never-ending struggle to come to terms with itself, and its environment. It is the dilemma of suffering that never-ending struggle with uncertainty that Josselson argues for the need for an empathic stance in understanding the narratives of other individuals relating about their life experiences.

           In this moment in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, pages 167 to 171 in the book, Hoffman is attending a party that is comprised of artists and intellectuals of whom she sees herself as an equal. The various members of the group display their varying degrees of social competence, being successfully rewarded for their insights or not, despite their literary gifts and talents, and despite what must have taken much effort and many years of education to develop them. Throughout the party Hoffman displays her ability to read the flow and shifts in the currents of the topics of the discussions which can range from Saul Bellow to the Castro regime, to “feminism and Nicaragua and psychoanalysis and Woody Allen”, to “the latest clashes between the PLO and the Christian militia in Lebanon, or the fin de siècle Viennese revival” (170). At this gathering Hoffman displays her capacity for social rules and customs, her knowledge of world events and history, and her skill and competence participate accordingly among various topics. At the end of the party, as she relates, outside of this familiar social environment with its learnable and rules and codes, she relates to herself as this “animal thing” (171), This “animal thing” that Hoffman relates her dialogic self to at that moment, this piece of meat that perhaps we all are as individuals at our cores, is demonstrated in this moment in Hoffman’s book as only as successful as it is aware of its environment, its capacity to learn to react to it’s information accordingly, and how it can apply the meanings and values that we learn are the most favorable within our social structures.

            It is only after one matures, can we look back on the memories of our youth, and place a different understanding of them that we were not capable of at the time. At one point in her narrative of this gathering, Hoffman writes, “the daughter of the hosts, six years old and pink with excitement in her Laura Ashley dress, runs by, clearly in heaven, and I flash back to a party about thirty years ago” (168). This flashback occurs “in a peasant house”, and while recalling “the echoing steps of people dancing on the wooden floor”, she remembers “my mother taking a glass of vodka from my father’s hand because he had had too many” (Hoffman 168). “He couldn’t hold it, she reminded him, she had a stronger head for it” Hoffman recollects (168). Josselson states, “narratives select the elements of the telling to confer meaning on prior events – events that may not have had such meaning at the time” (7). At the moment of the event that Hoffman recalls of her youth, her younger self probably had no means to discern what to make of her father’s inability to handle his alcohol, and her mother’s superior ability to withstand her intoxication. Perhaps some kind of assumption that the environment may have given her at the time would have her believe her father did not measure up to some kind of standard. It is only after having at this current moment of her later life, after experiencing intoxication herself, and the inebriation of others, can Hoffman now put this moment of her past in another perspective, perhaps clarifying and redefining her concept of her father as a man, rather than as a standard.  

            Eva Hoffman, at this moment that she has chosen to write about, at times reflects on her location within her new country, the United States of America. “This goddamn place”, Hoffman writes, referring to America, a country that she now has resided for almost two decades now, after emigrating to the East Coast from Poland, “is my home now” (169). “Sometimes I’m taken aback by how comfortable I feel in its tart, overheated, insecure, well-meaning, expansive atmosphere”, words that she chooses to apply to her homeland, can just as easily apply to herself as well (Hoffman 169). Hoffman writes “I know all the issues and all the codes here” (169). “I’m as alert as a bat to all the subliminal signals sent by word, look, gesture”, and she knows “who is likely to think what about feminism and Nicaragua and psychoanalysis and Woody Allen” (Hoffman 170). Josselson states, “only by observing the tensions and flow” in the dialogic nature of the self “can we construct a metanarrative of whole people, not by reducing people to their parts, but by recognizing in the interplay of parts the essence of wholeness” (11). It is only after we understand that there are many positions and many depths within the individual that are unknown to others unless expressed, and that the individual is comprised of many different positions of different understandings and interpretations as they are attempting to locate their self within their environment, can we then begin to position ourselves “to imagine the real”, or the true experience of another’s existence (Josselson 11). The country that we live in gives us its own meanings and value systems, and this information influences not only our perceptions of others, but influences us in how we examine ourselves as well.

              One influence upon the self that one needs to face in a lifetime, is the influence of culture, and how well we are able to place ourselves within it. “When I think of myself in cultural categories – which I do perhaps too often”, Hoffman ruminates, “I know that I’m a recognizable example of a species: a professional New York woman, and a member of a postwar international new class; somebody who feels at ease in the world, and is getting on with her career relatively well, and who is fey and brave and capable and unsettled as many of the women here – one of a new breed, born of the jet age and the counterculture, and middle-class ambitions and American grit” (170). According to Josselson, “the self can exist only in relationship to some other, whether that other be another person, other parts of the self, or the individual’s society, or her or his culture” (8). Like the many influences that the environment places upon us, one’s culture is one of the most important, as we judge ourselves by cultural values, and how well we are living up to those values throughout our lives, perhaps we learn to see ourselves and others in the polarizing categories we that we can divide ourselves and others into. 

             Hoffman, in this moment, can observed to liken the process of her dialogic self to the process of triangulation or the process to attempt to find “a position or location by means of bearings from two fixed points a known distance apart” (http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/triangulation). “A voice, almost unconscious, keeps performing an inaudible, perpetual triangulation”, Hoffman writes, her dialogic self trying to find its place within her environment as the “ancient Greeks tried to extrapolate, from two points of a triangle drawn in the sand, the moon’s distance from the earth” (170). “From my removed, abstract promontory, this Upper West Side apartment looks as surreal as a large foreground object in a Magritte painting”, a Belgian surrealist painter whose paintings which prompts the perceiver to question their perceptive reality (Hoffman 170). “Weightlessness is upon me”, Hoffman describes her experience at the gathering, “I am here, feeling the currents of conflict and warmth, but from that other point in the triangle, this is just one arbitrary version of reality” (170). Hoffman goes on to say “nothing here has to be the way it is; people could behave in a different manner; I could look different, flirt differently; I could be having entirely different conversations” (170). “Not any specific conversations”, Hoffman states, “as the other place in my mind no longer has any particularity” (170). Hoffman acknowledges to herself that being at this particular place and time, and with these particular people is just being aware “that there is another place – another point at the base of the triangle, which renders this place relative, which locates me within that relativity itself” (170). In analyzing a psychological interview Josselson states, we can track the “dialogue between different orders of individual experience or the dialogue of the individual with the social world of others” (11). This attempt at triangulation that Hoffman illustrates is the internal dialogue that we, consciously or not, do across the whole of our lifetimes. This process of triangulation is the social process of trying to find our own place within the particular environment that we find ourselves within at any given moment, and finding ourselves in the process by the reactions that our social worlds cause within us. The individual strives to settle its various dialogues that we have within ourselves and with the dialogues that come from our social worlds. These different dialogues within ourselves, along with our dialogues with our social worlds, are always evolving and becoming ever more complex. It is perhaps by learning to better socially triangulate that the dialogic self can better clarify itself to itself, and within its social worlds as well.

              As this gathering has stretched into the early morning hours, Hoffman decides to leave and calls herself a taxi. “Had a good time tonight?” the taxi driver asks tentatively, exploring my willingness to get into a conversation” (Hoffman 171). “Pretty good,” Hoffman replies to the man “laconically, signaling my preference not to” (171). Understanding Hoffman’s terse and contrite answer as her disinterest in pursuing conversation with him, the taxi driver “turns on the radio” to fill the air with noise. As a Madonna song plays, Hoffman ruminates over her location in this present moment of space and time. “This is not a place where I happen to be, this happens to be the place where I am; this is the only place”, Hoffman writes, “how could there be anywhere more real?” (171). Josselson states, “narrative models of knowing are models of process in process”, and “when we record people’s narratives over time, we can observe the evolution of the life story rather than see it as a text in a fixed and temporal state” (7). Hoffman illustrates in this cab ride home, that the majority of life is actually a continuous line of temporary conditions and states, many of which we take for granted, giving them only thesignificance with which we are compelled to attach depending upon the many factors that influence us. But the essential meaning of this particular cab ride home for Hoffman is that no other place than where we are at any given moment is real, not the future, not the past, but where we are in the process of our lives the ever-present now.   

             The taxi driver eventually delivers her to her apartment and Hoffman goes inside. Hoffman tells us that she is so tired that she gets “into bed without turning on the light” (171). As she begins to drift off into sleep she reflects back the evening, how the decisions and events of a lifetime have brought her to where she is now, creating the person that she is at the present moment. “How strange”, Hoffman marvels, “how strange what I’ve become, and then words cease and, in my drowsiness, I’ve become an animal thing I’ve always known, only myself” (171). Josselson states, “the essential message of hermeneutics” or the science of interpreting texts, “is that to be human is to mean, and only by investigating the multifaceted nature of human meaning can we approach the understanding of people” (11). As Hoffman likens herself to an “animal thing”, this concept seems to reflect on the basic, fundamental being that we all are at our cores. In life we are all essentially equal, made of the same substance, yet it is only how well this “animal thing” is capable of interpreting the environment, getting to where we will go in life by the meanings we make from our interpretations, and the ability with which we can put these ideas into practice. The only differences between us “animal things” is the meanings and interpretations that we make, and those meanings and interpretations are based on various factors that is only ever truly known to the individual.

            This moment that Eva Hoffman writes about in her book Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language perfectly illustrates the working-through of the processes of her dialogic self, both with itself, and also with its environment as well. Eva Hoffman demonstrates that the dialogic self evolves over time, redefining itself and its experiences as it accumulates more knowledge of itself after going through life experiences and the maturation process. The dialogic self as illustrated in this moment in Hoffman’s life, learns to the best of its ability how to comprehend its place within social structures after interpreting the values and meanings of the environment, and then attempts to reciprocate to the best of its ability. Hoffman shows us in this moment of her existence how the dialogic self applies to the degree that it is able, knowledge gained within the environment to how it communicates itself to others using criteria that the dialogic self believes will gain itself a favorable view within its culture. The process of triangulation that Hoffman writes about in this moment, informs how the dialogic self analyzes the social world by its components, clearly separating various environments and experiences, and behaving accordingly to the rules and customs of each environment. Hoffman, in this moment, portrays the dialogic self as a thing in a process of synthesis, comprising a combination of various experiences, sensations, and environments, becoming an amalgamated reality that is only ever known to the individual. This moment in the experience of Hoffman’s life gives an example of how the dialogic self evaluates both its inner reality within its environments, assigning meaning and worth according to criteria that evolves based on the dialogic self’s best ability to appraise experience both inward and without during the individual’s lifetime.

Works Cited

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.

Josselson, Ruthellen. “Imagining the Real: Empathy, Narrative, and the Dialogic Self” Interpreting Experience. Volume 3 of The Narrative Study of Lives.  Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. 1995. 27-44.  

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/triangulation



GRADE: 96
Joseph, thank you for your essay! This is an excellent analysis of Hoffman through the theories of Josselson, you expand upon the concept of the dialogic self and provide many fine examples for analysis within the text itself.  This is a 'short' review as I wanted to make sure to get your grade to you now. This is a highly ariticulate, insightful essay, and it is clear that you have grappled with central themes in Hoffman's writings, putting forth a paper that is well organized and has both depth and breadth of ideas.

A fine essay, insightful and well developed.  All best,  Prof LK

"Self-Research and Self-Experimation" - Discussion Four Post (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-04-2013)

“The results of our experiments are never self-evident in their import. They are merely the occasion for us to try to weave a narrative in which obtaining a certain set of “significant” results makes sense – sense in the context of ongoing narratives both of epistemology and of a developing communal tale of human experience. And “sense” is a product of interpretation, grounded in the social conditions in which we live, formed by inescapable ideology, and spoken in a consensual language.” (Josselson 4)

In her essay “War Doll Hotel”, Kiana Davenport likens mental experience to that of photographic snapshots. Snapshots are a bare narrative of brief seconds of our lives, a single second record of existence, only holding with it the true experience of our reality at the moment, and how we value that experience later on in reflection. Davenport’s metaphor can lead one to believe that our existence is one long collection of snapshots, each one to be examined on its own. Our minds, like the camera, capture the ever present now. Snapshots of our lives are just one way of looking at things one way amongst many, some that we can appreciate, learn, anticipate, intuit, some that will forever be lost to us unless they are revealed to us.

Our lives are essentially our experiments, experiments that are defined by the circumstances with which we are born and raised, our natural proclivities and predispositions, and the rituals and habits with which we find comfort in performing throughout our lives. At first we take the opinions and prejudices of our parents and families, not knowing whether they are right or wrong, not even being able to consider our parents capable of being wrong. We are too young to know for ourselves enough of the world to do anything other than follow what others tell us how the world is, and how it should be interpreted. As we grow older the opinions of our peers become just as important as those of our parents, giving us awareness that the interpretations of our parents may not be quite right for the present day and age as each generation sees its own collective experience and perception of its current world in different ways.  In the world of our peers, we recognize our own collectively shared experience as a culture separate from other generations. As we reach adulthood we realize that there are all kinds of ways to interpret our personal reality, and what works in one situation does not necessarily broadly apply to all others. Once an adult, our experience of our lives becomes a blend between our mental phenomena and the social environment. The snapshots of our lives are neutral, have no meaning other than what meaning and value that we give to them, and this meaning and value changes over the course of a lifetime according to our education and experiences. Once we accept that the experience of our life is nothing more than the ever-present reality, mixed with reflections of the past, and assumptions of the future, we could perhaps experiment with our reality, examining it as thoroughly as we can a tangible second of our lives. This experiment also allows us examine our experience in the moment, offering us the chance to enhance our present experience through self-examinations to best comprehend our “interpretations” of the current “social conditions in which we live”, what the “inescapable ideology” is that we live within, and how best to speak the “consensual language” with others during the ever-present  state of temporarily shared experience (Josselson  4).

Works Cited:

Davenport, Kiana  “War Doll Hotel” Daily Fare: Essays from the Multicultural Experience. Ed. Kathleen Aguero. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993. 65-77

Josselson, Ruthellen. “Imagining the Real: Empathy, Narrative, and the Dialogic Self” Interpreting Experience. Volume 3 of The Narrative Study of Lives.  Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. 1995. 27-44.