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This is starting to feel more like a conversation. I was glad (reassured?) to see that my own reaction to Kauffman seemed to have been brought out in the class discussion. I was having trouble seeing the point of justice if that precluded the personal. So I was glad to have Jesse’s well-thought-out perspective as a counter. The distinction made between “feminist academic literary critic” and, more broadly, simply “feminist” feels important.

For some years, I’ve been working with the idea that Story is the fundamental way in which we as humans apprehend the world. So the idea of abandoning personal narrative is difficult to accept, except in that academic context. Here is part of a “sermon” I wrote for a lay-led service at my UU church in summer of 2006:

Charles and Anne Simkinson, in their editors’ Introduction to the “Sacred Stories” collection of essays, point out that “We live our lives immersed in stories. Newspaper, radio and television feed us a daily diet of news; friends and co-workers tell us how their weekends were spent; parents punctuate their children’s days with bedtime stories; ministers weave parables into their Sunday sermons; and many spend leisurely hours indulging in murder mysteries, romance novels, sitcoms, or Hollywood’s latest film offerings.

“Stories seem to be everywhere. But while some stories entertain, inform or teach us, others move us deeply. They change us and bring us closer together. These are sacred stories….

“The critical difference, it seems, has to do not so much with the content of the story, as with the process the story ignites. Sacred stories move us; they get us thinking about what is important; they communicate through symbol and metaphor deep truths about the mysteries of life. Upon hearing a sacred story, even if we don’t understand the message intellectually, we are aware that some profound lesson has been imparted.”

So story-telling is not “just for children,” but can have broad cultural and psychological meaning. And it may even be possible to think of story telling as the very basis of human consciousness itself.

According to the theory advanced by Daniel Dennett, consciousness may be thought of as a story our brains tell us to make sense of what we perceive “out there” in the world—as structured and mediated by stored experience and memories. (Dreaming can be thought of as an extension of this process; but the story we tell ourselves can get a little weird when we’re asleep and cut off from the reality check of most sensory input.)

This building of what we call “consciousness” through an internal story-telling process seems to operate on several levels simultaneously. Sometimes we may even catch ourselves consciously “narrating” our own life story. “And then she fastened the seat belt, put the car in gear and headed down the road….” (Not necessarily rising to the level of great literature.)

Mary Catherine Bateson discusses “composing” one’s life story. “As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.” She goes on to say, “There are advantages in having access to multiple versions of your life story. I am not referring to a true version versus a false version, or to one that works in a given therapeutic context as opposed to others, or to one that will sell to People Magazine as opposed to ones that won’t. I am referring to the freedom that comes not only from owning your memory and your life story but also from knowing that you make creative choices in how you look at your life.”

Paula Gunn Allen’s piece was to me, as to others, the most enjoyable reading so far. It is fascinating and illuminating to me to see examples of valid ways, other than our western patriarchal model, to structure a viable social order.

Along these lines, I strongly recommend Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, which has been a touchstone for me for many years.

Alex ‘65