Finding the Truth and its Speaker

A Review of The Situation and the Story

Vivian Gornick’s book on writing is titled The Situation and the Story because, Gornick argues, good personal narrative is not based on plot alone. Nor is it based on feelings alone. Rather, personal narrative is a pairing of situation and story. Gornick explains, “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” She then offers examples of several works where the “story” is clearly separate from the “situation.”

This insight takes a while to sink in. Many readers, through years of schooling and lessons about the plot arch, have come to identify the term “story” with “short story,” which is almost inseparable from event and plot, but Gornick asks her readers to see story as more than plot. She begins with the example of a eulogist. While the eulogist relates certain events in the life of the deceased, those are merely the situation, the backdrop for the real story. The story in this case is the conflict within the eulogist, which is also felt by her grieving audience. The eulogist has come to reveal her own complex emotions and insights about this loss. The situation is the funeral. The story is the grieving.

To apply this concept to one’s own writing is both difficult and productive. In my own project, the situation is a series of events related to religion and philosophy: going to church, receiving the sacraments, falling in love, learning about sex, reading particular books, meeting a variety of spiritual groups. But these events taken at face value are generic. In fact, anyone could have had any or all of these experiences. The trick is to give them meaning, to know why they matter. In this case, they matter because they are part of a journey, one that is not and probably never will be complete. All these events make up a situation, but the story is the seeking.

Knowing the story, a writer can then apply Gornick’s next point, also exemplified by the eulogist: “The speaker never lost sight of why she was speaking – or, perhaps more important, of who was speaking. Of the various selves at her disposal … she knew and didn’t forget that the only proper self to invoke was the one that had been apprenticed.”

Knowing who is speaking is a part of having a trustworthy narrator. The writer must separate all her other selves from the one who is speaking in order to create this persona on the page. Gornick uses George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” as an example of an essay that requires a particular aspect of the writer to narrate. She notes that in everyday life, Orwell was insecure and could be quite unkind and that, “revisionist biographies now have him not only a sexist and an obsessed anti-communist but possibly an informer as well.” It would appear that Orwell the man was not exactly trustworthy, but the narrator he brings out for “Shooting an Elephant” is civilized and wins the reader over with apparent ease. This, as Gornick’s argument goes, is because Orwell understood that he must find within himself and bring forth the narrator who could tell the story of “a civilized man made murderous by the situation he finds himself in.” The narrator must be that man, both civilized and murderous.

Gornick’s advice and instruction throughout the book is at once practical and elusive. One must meditate on the meaning of “story” almost endlessly, turning over and over the idea that story equals plot, an equation that has been driven into writing students since their earliest elementary composition courses. One must stop visualizing the classic plot line at any mention of story. Some readers, myself included, balk at this distortion of the definitions we learned, but with time, the new perception Gornick lends proves more useful than the old. As it turns out, a book that requires patience to read and comprehend does have value even to the impatient reader.

If this book has a downfall, it may be its extensive quotations from all the essays discussed. When the paragraphs of quotation are commingled with Gornick’s commentary, they are less conspicuous, as when a page of quotation from Joan Didion is followed by Gornick’s analysis. Then Didion comes back to the forefront for two paragraphs, and Gornick returns with annotation. This is particularly useful because Didion’s essays are expertly crafted and not easy to deconstruct, and a reader can get from the beginning to end without quiet understanding how it all happened. But during all this quoting and explicating, the point can get lost behind thoughts of, “Wow, Didion writes so beautifully,” and “Where can I find a copy of this essay?”

The one truly baffling inclusion in this book is that of Jean Améry’s writing on aging. The first statement that makes me turn away from Améry is where Gornick writes, “The terror of the concentration camp, he said, was ‘less filled with internal horror and anguish than the experience of aging.’ ” Perhaps, having been born well after World War II and having no contact with any Holocaust survivors, I forfeit any right to criticize the feelings of an actual Holocaust survivor by default. On the other hand, everything in me balks at this statement and I wonder if Améry is fooling himself in the exact way for which Gornick criticizes Oscar Wilde and Thomas DeQuincey. Gornick herself admits that she does not agree with Améry’s sentiments, but she writes that “Améry’s focus, like acid on zinc, bites deep into the grain of his experience,” and that it is this focus and intensity that merits our attention. It’s true that his negativism is overwhelming to the point that the reader feels (quite unwelcomely) put directly into Améry’s shoes, but I’m not convinced that putting the reader through that misery is at all effective or necessary.

For an essay as crotchety as Améry’s to come through as purposeful and skilled in a manual like this would require much more than the paragraph or so of explanation Gornick offers. Writers must remember that readers can be weak. I am one of those, and I do not wish to be in the skin of a sick and angry old man – at least not without warning. Reading Améry feels like I’ve been invited on a Sunday drive and suddenly find myself careening down a mountain before I’ve had time to put on a seatbelt. If I am to accept this wild ride of misery, I need the author to prepare me for it, and perhaps to assure me that there will be time to catch my breath when we get to the bottom of the hill. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but the narration must not be myopic as Améry’s seems to be. Finally, I spent so much time puzzling over the purpose of including Améry that I lost sight again of the overall goal of the book, which was only to coach writers on the important distinction between situation and story.

Finally, Gornick issues a warning against writing without knowing the situation and the story. Perhaps the worst thing an author of personal narrative can do is to fail to know herself or himself. That is, when Oscar Wilde wrote his autobiography, he lacked the honesty with himself to acknowledge his own complicity in his life’s failures. Instead, he runs in circles of self pity and blame and never reaches any revelation. In Gornick’s eyes, the same goes for Thomas DeQuincy as he wallows in self-pity and extols the virtues of opium despite evidence that his addiction is to blame for most of his strife. Both Wilde and DeQuincy, Gornick alleges, ignore the truth of their stories, the human flaw of which they are both possessed. It is this flaw, when acknowledged and treated appropriately, that makes the best stories. The eulogist, after all, was cognizant of the conflict within herself, and using a narrator who felt that conflict, was able to give a moving speech. Wilde and DeQuincy, on the other hand, chose false narrators, thin characters who hadn’t the heft to take on the full weight of truth.

Thus, Gornick urges her readers and fellow writers to invoke their truth speakers. If you know what your truth is, you know what your story is, and then you must bring forth the narrator in you who has the strength to speak that truth.

Find the book here: The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative