Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

122 страница из 129

Ultimately, the conventional nature of both black and white autobiographers’ dramas of social inequality does not cast doubt on their objective truthfulness so much as it sheds light on how societal arrangements affect individuals and create subjective truths on a broad scale. Lillian Smith’s analysis of southern children’s racial learning as “dramas” that follow “scripts” written on the lives of children “before they know words” is important because it highlights the fact that autobiographers’ dramas of social inequality are dramas of socialization as well. That is, they are not merely literary conventions or self-conscious political statements; rather, they are a literary subset of a much larger category of narratives that embody the memories and the process of remembering that define and continually redefine individuals’ sense of themselves—regardless of whether they ever write these narratives down in memoirs. The somewhat conventional childhood stories that I have been calling dramas of social inequality are best understood as highly crafted versions of the usually unwritten stories we all tell ourselves about ourselves in an effort to understand who we are and how we fit in our world. No matter how much an autobiography may be shaped by adult concerns, the childhood stories that autobiographers tell contain a core of identity-shaping experience. They are touchstones of memory worn smooth by frequent handling. Thus, barring conscious deception, the “polished” narrative of an autobiographer does not necessarily tell us less about his or her experiences than a supposedly “unvarnished” account. Instead, if we recognize that every experience involves individuals’ subjective interpretations of events, we may find that the highly interpreted stories of autobiographers tell us even more than putatively transparent texts.