Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

7 Books That Show Storytelling Has Consequences

London writer Tody Lloyd explains that in is novel Fervor, the protagonist “aims to write and publish an account of her father-in-law’s experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka without his consent.” Despite the fact that no one in her family wants her to do this, she proceeds because “money and fame also seem to twinkle somewhere on her inner horizon.”

Lloyd here writes that he has “become interested in seeking out other novels where a character produces a ‘cursed book’—an object that reveals truths (or untruths) that were better left unsaid.” His list contains seven other novels about authors who have “chosen not to care what damage their books will cause.”

This article raises the question “Whose story is this to tell?” Or, expressed more forcefully, “Who has the right to tell this story?” Such questions come up more often in relation to writing memoir rather than fiction, but fiction offers the opportunity to examine questions like this in a safe space, one where the consequences play out in a made-up story rather than in potentially hurtful real-life experiences.

I rebuilt my self-esteem by changing the story of who I am

One of the basic elements of Life Stories in Literature is “change your story, change your life.” Patricia Olsen explains how she did just that to illustrate how narrative therapy works.

Why Is Our Culture So Obsessed With Individual Experience?

“From immersive art to personal essays and first-person novels, our culture is obsessed the idea of individual experience. Anna Kornbluh, the author of Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, spoke to Jacobin about why.”

Kornbluth says, “the emphasis . . . on experience: embodied, sensory, overwhelming experience” is “an aesthetic that takes styles or techniques out of their historical context and blends them together.” Also, “We furthermore have to understand that this is also an economic endeavor: cutting out the middleman is part of the model of big business in twenty-first century industry.” 

Kornbluh sees such emphasis in the cultural world with the rise of interest in both memoir and the personal essay. “Identifying immediacy as a cultural style involves connecting the arts to knowledge and economics as well as to politics.”

What is ‘lived experience’?

“The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity”

Patrick J. Casey, assistant professor of philosophy at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, writes:

Everywhere you turn, there is talk of lived experience. But there is little consensus about what the phrase ‘lived experience’ means, where it came from, and whether it has any value. Although long used by academics, it has become ubiquitous, leaping out of the ivory tower and showing up in activism, government, consulting, as well as popular culture.

Casey focuses on “lived experience” as a component of identity and of identity politics in building his analysis of the term. Throughout its history, the term has included two basic components: the personal confrontation with one’s environment (in its general sense of society or culture), and the meanings that collective history or culture have conditioned one to assign to such occurrences. 

“Finally, we should let go of the notion that only members of one’s own group can understand ‘what it’s like’ to have one’s experiences,” Casey writes. “If we persist in saying lived experience is private and can’t be shared, we undermine the impetus for trying to understand experiences other than those of one’s own group.”

The divided self: does where I live make me who I am?

Anandi Mishra, a critic who lives in Delhi, ruminates on the two months she spent in 2022 living with her husband in Frankfort while he worked on his master’s degree; the experience “forced me to consider life and its cadences, and their direct dependence on the spaces we call home”:

I wonder if our psychology alters in accordance with the physical living spaces we inhabit.

Having Become the Sky’s Tongue: Leeladhar Jagoori on Nature Poetry in Hindi Literature

Alton Melvar M. Dapanas interviews Leeladhar Jagoori, whose 1977 poetry collection has recently been translated by Matt Reeck into English as What of the Earth Was Saved. Jagoori speaks of the relationship between writers and the place and time in which they write:

I consider a poet’s job to consist of three things: writing about the society, the time, and the country. So What of the Earth Was Saved was important for me because it was at this time that all these goals came clearly into focus for me. Before, the poetry I wrote was somewhat more personal. But my process has always been the same. Language is like a river. It comes from a source, then takes its own shape. And a river can change its course over time. But it’s the same river. 

39 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall

This isn’t directly connected to the topic of Life Stories in Literature, but I include it here because it’s timely.

© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown