The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick [Gornick, Vivian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: writing
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

Written only twenty years later in the century, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth strikes an altogether different note on the register of “becoming,” one in which the writer describes a condition of life cruelly hostile to the very idea of an inner self, whole or otherwise, and does so through a narrator whose speaking voice will become painfully resonant of the brutishness she is documenting. Above all, it is a voice that identifies wholly with the culture from which it springs:

“What I [write] is not a work of beauty, created that someone may spend an hour pleasantly; not a symphony to lift up the spirit, to release it from the dreariness of reality. It is the story of a life, written in desperation … I write of the joys and sorrows of the lowly … For thirty years I have lived, and for these years I have drunk from the wells of bitterness … [T]here are times when … [t]o die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty. I belong to those who die from other causes—exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in a great cause. A few of us die, desperate from the pain or disillusionment of love, but for most of us ‘the earthquake but discloseth new fountains.’ For we are of the earth and our struggle is the struggle of earth …”

So begins a masterful piece of primitive writing: crude, hot, immediate; its images cropped, the picture it forms all foreground, without perspective and without margin. The protagonist in Daughter of Earth moves across a stripped-down landscape where inner life is an outpost in the wilderness and she a creature who must make herself out of chalk and clay and human rubble.

Agnes Smedley was born in 1892 in Missouri into a family of poverty and ignorance. Her people were farmers who labored in the field from morning till night; endured drought, tornadoes, and failed crops. The father was a man “with the soul and imagination of a vagabond”: handsome, restless, a teller of tall tales. The mother was beautiful for a minute; after that, a hard-worked farmwife old at thirty. Within a few years of marriage the parents are quarreling bitterly. He wants to break away, make money, feel alive: “There were but three or four festivals a year. The rest of the time he had to follow the lone plow … stumbling over the clods with his bare feet. He wanted to wear shoes all the year.” The mother spits back at him that he sticks to nothing, is always complaining, always telling stories that aren’t true and singing songs instead of working.

The quarrels deepen. He curses, she weeps, he storms out, she’s left staring at the kitchen table: “But he won at last, for we all went away. And from that moment on our roots were torn from the soil and we began a life of wandering, searching for success and happiness and riches that always lay just beyond—where we were not.

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