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

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In short, there is something of unusual value to historians in autobiography’s retrospective and constructed nature. In autobiography and in related forms such as oral history, men and women of an earlier time draw on inside information that only they can possibly know to offer their own interpretations of how they came to be who they are. And though these autobiographical assessments are merely interpretations, they retain a link to the selves in question that no other person’s (and certainly no historian’s) necessarily outside observations can share.

As problematic as it may be for someone to extract an experience from the minute-by-minute flow of existence and say “this is the moment when . . . ,” it is equally true that we all do so all the time in our own minds. As Lillian Smith noted just before recounting her story about finding and losing Janie in Killers of the Dream, “to excerpt from a life and family background one incident and name it as a ‘cause’ of change in one’s life direction is a distortion and often an irrelevance. The hungers of a child and how they are filled have too much to do with the way in which experiences are assimilated to tear an incident out of life and look at it in isolation” (30). And yet Smith did go on to tell her story as a story, a snippet of experience, a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like Smith, we tend to think in terms of stories even though we know, if we think about it, that every beginning has antecedents and no ending equates to the end of a story’s possible significance in our unfolding lives. Indeed, one could argue that meaning exists only in the present, in our perpetual reinterpretation of our memories, which itself depends mainly on what we need any particular memory for at any particular time. Clearly, black and white southern autobiographers needed their stories of childhood racial learning to explain the Jim Crow system and their part in it. Their dramas of socialization, which they often narrated in a highly self-conscious form as dramas of social inequality, are not merely literary constructs but measured doses of perception and understanding. Such stories help us see not only what black and white southern children experienced, but also what part of their experiences they could take in, how they assimilated those experiences, and how they remembered and repeated them throughout their lives.