The Shape of Stories So Far
What Kurt Vonnegut, Doreen Massey, and James Baldwin might have to say to each other about memory
A few weeks back, there was an On the Media episode that referenced a well-known (but new to me) Kurt Vonnegut lecture about the shape of stories. Vonnegut draws two axes against which stories take shape. There is the ‘GI’ axis (good fortune to ill fortune) and the ‘BE’ axis (B stands for beginning, he says, E for… electricity).
This week in my Geography of Memory course we’ll be spending some time engaging with a range of material about memory, whiteness, and the United States of America. We opened the week by talking about an academic article published in 2010 - it’s well-organized and clearly written, serviceable and publishable. But it’s also kind of, well, flat. The students developed several important critiques, but the one that I’ve been thinking about today - as I read for tomorrow - is their observation that the article just sort of reported and presented a debate. It didn’t take sides or challenge or take a stand.
So what should taking a position involve? How does one do that? Obviously, one could write as an activist. But there’s also a linked project of rethinking the shape of stories - because if those shapes are the sorts of taken-for-granted meta-narratives that shape our expectation, part of the work involves figuring out a different shape for stories.
Thus Doreen Massey’s For Space, which is a book that seeks to give us a different way of thinking about space (and, by extension, a different shape for stories). She opens with a description of Cortés’ first encounter with the Aztecs, one in which space is imagined as being a surface across which Cortés travels. “Immobilised, they [the Aztecs, in this case] await Cortés’ (or our, or global capital’s) arrival. They lie there, on space, in place, without their own trajectories.” (4) So her call is to be attentive to many possible trajectories and, in the process, to challenge the single timeline, those “scenarios in which the general directions of history, including the future, are known” (11).
Tomorrow, we’ll be reading James Baldwin - both a few of his essays and a section from Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again. Glaude closes the Introduction with a summary of what Baldwin calls us to do - and what he hopes his book models - “Baldwin insisted… that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility” (xxix). So what is the shape of that story? And how does it help us imagine the world differently?