Selves and Stories

For a great many years I have taught a graduate course in which I asked students to study the nature of stories and the stories they tell in the classroom. Curriculum, of course, is the story we tell our children. I hold that  to interrogate our stories is to discover the person we present ourselves to ourselves and to others, though I must admit that this program doesn’t always go over very well . . . “What is this shit,” I often heard from bewildered and sometimes angry students.
     But I receive some supportive comfort in Dickens’ character of David Copperfield. David writes, “I set down this remembrance here because it is an instance to myself of the manner to which I fitted my old books to my altered life, and made stories for myself out of the streets, and out of men and women, and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously develop, I suppose in writing my life, were gradually forming all this while . . .”  I have at times puzzled over these lines, but I think they suggest that David knows that his character evolved from the events of his life and the people with whom he had contact but that the character about which he will write derives unconsciously from the stories has once told and will now tell about his own life. In this way, I believe, David/Dickens suggests that the lives we declare to be ours are no less fictional stories than are the events of any intentional novel, short story or dramatic creation, and how our older stories become adapted to newer circumstances, events and acquaintances and become inevitably, then, fictional narratives. We are never fully known to ourselves or others except in the stories we tell about ourselves: we become our selves in our stories, and perhaps we are not much beyond those stories.

     And it interests me to consider that David says of his autobiographical tome, “This narrative is my written memory:” this narrative is David’s story and its narration creates the memory and the life. At the novel’s end the most secret current of his memory, that which did not ever come to the knowable surface, becomes the subject of the book’s conclusion, and narrates the consummation of his love of Agnes, a feeling that gnawed at him even in the midst of his passionate love for his wife, Dora. He had earlier written, “I had a great deal of work to do, and had many anxieties, but the same considerations made me keep them to myself. I am far from sure, now, that it was right to do this, but I did it for my child-wife’s sake. I search my breast, and I commit its secrets, if I know them, without any reservation to this paper.” You see, David knew then that it was Agnes that he truly loved, but it was the child-wife Dora he married. He did not at the time link these anxieties to his love for Agnes, but as he writes these earlier anxieties take shape and become defined by his relationship to Agnes.
     And I think many of us carry within us these secrets that only in writing we will learn. WE can form to the vague anxieties and turn them into our stories and our life.  It is in the writing that David will come to realize and to understand his love of Agnes and how the loss of her through his voluntary actions left a cratered emptiness in him that nothing but Agnes could fill. This David learns only through his writing.