Tainted Witness by Leigh Gilmore

Author:Leigh Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC028000, Social Science/Women’s Studies, LIT003000, Literary Criticism/Feminist
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

NEOLIBERALISM AND ETHICS

Neoliberal life narratives do not impose an ethical demand on readers. They focus on one’s relation to one’s self rather than to others. They focus on what one person can do, and they distill politics and social change to an n of one. They suggest, as Clarence Thomas’s narrative did, that it is the work of the individual to overcome hardship. The ethical engagement a generic “I” elicits is too general to translate to action on another’s behalf. It does not prepare readers to engage with life writing that represents histories that exceed this framing. Critical here is the legacy of the Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú controversies. As witnesses, they demanded action in response to contemporary harm.

The clashing demands of entertainment and education offered by a genre that purports, in part, to teach us how to live, taxes our capacities to hold open the narrow portal of the “I,” and the singularities and histories it represents, even as the expansive market offered by O magazine and the interchangeability of the self-help “I” promise absorption in a fantasy of belonging. Even as readers’ investments in the redemption narrative expose them to a range of traumatic materials, the preference for stories that can be unmoored from specific historical conditions to become “everybody’s” story is currently edging out narratives that take readers into the anxious realm of nonnormativity and the lack of clear moral guidelines they associate with culturally protected privacies.

What are the obligations of citizens to national narrative forms that reproduce normativity as life story, eviscerate histories of harm, and urge women readers to follow Elizabeth Gilbert on personal journeys that lead more often to the purchase of O magazine than to the international travel few can afford, or acts to benefit others? In other words, what narratives will we get more of and be more conditioned to norm once the ethical work of veiling all the inappropriate exposures has occurred? In this context, consider, finally, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, the memoir of her 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail as personal redemption program, an American version of the Camino without the religious history of pilgrimage. As if to concede that readers seek specific outcomes from an array of interchangeable experiences, the subtitle declares its true destination: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed depicts her effort to cope with her mother’s death when Strayed was twenty-two years old. In the aftermath of this loss, Strayed’s marriage and life fall apart and she conceives the plan to hike in order to redeem her mother’s faith in her.

Strayed’s project differs from Gilbert’s: Gilbert is a successful writer whose trips were undertaken on assignment; Strayed, an accomplished professional writer at the time she wrote her memoir, took the trip on her own. Wild moves the personal redemption story to the wilderness, where it has often been located, and tests herself. Like Frey, her program is self-styled; unlike Frey, she does not present herself as winging it. She

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