Porter left the Old South. Porter survived the flu epidemic. Porter reported on society. Porter worked in the Rocky Mountain region.
And so did Miranda.
And so what?
Dr. Cook mentioned in class that scholars think that Miranda is the closest to an autobiography we get to in Porter's fiction. While I'll admit that I always like to fantasize that something like the book I'm reading happened to the author, these suppositions seem to have little place in serious scholarship. Am I wrong?
There is an excellent interview with Margaret Atwood wherein the interviewer asks if The Handmaid's Tale was autobiographical. Atwood is livid. "How can it be autobiographical," she asks, "if it takes place in the future?"
Obviously the prosaic point doesn't hold up my argument, but I think the spirit of her response - spat venom - gives an idea of what it means for one author to have the "autobiography" question leveled at fiction. (Remember also the story of Porter freaking out at her friend for changing the names in a real event and pretending it a short story? KAP and JCO would not have gotten along.)
If Porter is Miranda, does that tell us something more about Porter or Miranda? (I would say Porter; she told us everything she wanted us to know about Miranda.) Given the sparse characterizations that I can't shut up about, what does that mean that Porter wants us to know about herself?
You can know her (fictionalized) family and you can know her sickness, her love life, her independence - but can you know her?
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6 comments:
Good point. There are so many angles from which to view that. If the fiction is autobiographical, that's understandable. But as you say, do we truly know the author?
One thing we've learned from recent memoirs is that even when someone calls it autobiography, they're not necessarily a reliable narrator. When someone is expressing themselves through fiction, how trustworthy are they?
And to your point, is it even autobiographical at all? Good question. I guess only the author truly knows, but I wonder if those angry responses aren't a bit too defensive, as if someone is hitting a little too close to home?
I say that no, we cannot know the author because she is dead and we were not her friends. That being said, it does not damage this story to have some suspicion/hope that we are reading about the author in some way. I don't think that can inform the reading of this text in any mind-blowing sort of ways; we are left with what is written, and since we really know nothing of the individual that created it, all we will really be imposing on it is our own (mis)conceptions and experiences.
I don't think you can ever know an author/artist through their works because many artists do not allow their works to be just a portrayl of them but many artist like to capture a cultual view or a society which does not necessarily capture the artist. But I think you begin to see what is important to an artist through their works and you also get to see what is going on during the time period tht they are writing in.
In my opinion, the line between fiction and non-fiction is almost invisible. In every nonfiction work, fiction resonates with subjectiveness of the author's perspective and background experience. A history textbook writer will tell a story in the context of his education and his upbringing and it will be in the voice of an imaginary narrator, but a narrator nonetheless, so his text will be anything from truly unbiased and nonfiction. Likewise, a piece of fiction cannot remain truly and distinctly non-fiction because remnants of the author's identity saturates his work, also due to the experience and personal experiences he can never truly rip away from him. Porter, then, cannot say neither say her piece is autobiographical or fiction. Neither genre exists. We, as her readers, must accept that perhaps more of her backstory flooded PHPR than it did in other texts, but we must respect it and marvel in its ability to capture the beauty of both genres without being tied to one or the other...
No you can't know her. But I think you have to look at why so many people read fiction and identify with it. They read not to learn about the character but to learn more about them selfs. I think that is why we love learning about the author, to get validation for the way we feel about the character. If the author is someone we dislike, or one we can't relate to, or even intended something different than what we received from the text, then there is a certain hollowness that comes from it.
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