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

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Recognizing similarities between the memory work of autobiographers and the everyday workings of memory on a conscious and subconscious level helps us to see the ways in which our experiences and the stories we tell about them do, in effect, create us. Even when they are crafted into literary dramas of social inequality, black and white autobiographers’ childhood stories often remain open-ended, retaining some part of the trauma that could make a particular moment unacceptable and thus destined for repetition in both the psychoanalytic and the narrative senses of the word. It is in the lack of closure that we can read black and white southern children’s dramas of socialization—dramas that are marked by an irresolution and depth of emotion that suggests that a meaningful interaction between the individual and his or her culture has taken place. These are moments when one learns, in Walter White’s words, that “there is no isolation from life”—that social categories impinge upon individual psychology, shaping individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and convictions at a level beneath consciousness, beyond even the autobiographer’s, much less the experiencing subject’s, control. Thus, in Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith compared her lost sisterhood with Janie to a splinter that “worked its way . . . down to the hurt places in my memory and festered there” (38). Many other autobiographers assert along with James McBride Dabbs that they “never forgot” or were, in fact, unable to forget the moments of racial learning they describe (11). It is the unforgettable quality of such moments—the almost inevitable seepage of underlying feelings of rage, fear, frustration, confusion, guilt, or pain into even the most calculated narratives—that reveals their true formative power.