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

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In her contribution, Candela Delgado Marín discusses Bobbie Ann Mason’s memoir Clear Springs (1999), an homage to her family and homeland, as an example of the use of sensory memories for the exploration of self and region. Perceiving her family history as “a dismantled jigsaw,” according to Delgado Marín, “Mason embarks on a journey to collect all the pieces together” in order to reconstruct her past, achieve meaning and have a clearer idea of her own identity. Mason’s memoir unfolds around the intersections between the body, perception and place, tracing a mental trip to her family farm in Kentucky and her mother, in which material objects and physical sensations powerfully awaken her memories and evoke family history. Mason becomes a time traveller who looks back into the family past “to form a coherent map of their communal identity,” finding links “between the self, the senses, and topography,” which together create what Delgado Marín calls ”a psychogeography of the South in her writing.” As Delgado Marín claims, for Mason remembrance is linked to the sensory experience of interacting both with family objects and “the landscapes of the past,” in which “the body of the narrator becomes the channel that connects the reader with the past.” Mason’s “acts of recollection” result from the fusion of two abilities, “sensorial perceptiveness and imagination,” although in Clear Springs the effects of the second ability do not undermine the truth of her account of the past. Thus, bodily impressions imaginatively retrieved allow Mason to reconstruct a sense of self and a version of the South that is gradually disappearing.