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
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