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Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick Books

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Voldsomme bånd

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“In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.”

WritingSelfMemoirWriting CraftWriting MemoirMemoir As Literature
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”

EmpathyMemoirMemoir WritingEssayEssay WritingNarratorPersonal NarrativeCreating Dimension In Character
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“Min mors sorg var primitiv og altomfattende: Den sugede ilten ud af luften. En tung, bedøvet fornemmelse fyldte mit hoved og min krop hver gang jeg kom hjem. Ingen af os – hverken min bror eller jeg selv, og da slet ikke min mor – fandt trøst i hinandens selskab. Vi var bare i eksil sammen, fanget i en fælles lidelse. For første gang var jeg bevidst om, at jeg blev grebet af åndelig ensomhed, og jeg kiggede ud på gaden, vendte mig mod de drømmende og melankolske indre anelser, der var blevet den eneste lindring fra det jeg hurtigt opfattede som en tilstand af tab og nederlag.”

LossLonelinessSorrowMelancholy
Book:Voldsomme bånd
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“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human - the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques - was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time.”

LonelinessCity
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“Once again, I stared at him: only this stare was different from those other stares. A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn't know what I wanted [...] It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship. The person on the other side of the membrane seemed as unreal to me as I felt myself to be to him [...] the memory of that fine, invisible separation haunted me; and more often than I like to remember, I saw it glistening as I gazed into the face of a man who loved me but was not persuaded that I needed what he needed to feel like a human being.”

LoveSexRelationshipsPowerGender Politics
Book:The Odd Woman and the City
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“Si mi madre no era capaz de identificar en otra mujer reacciones a un marido o un amante que duplicasen las suyas, no lo consideraba amor. Y el amor, decía, lo era todo. La vida de una mujer estaba determinada por el amor. Cualquier indicio que probase lo contrario —y las pruebas, de hecho, abundaban— era descartado e ignorado por sistema, tachado de su discurso y vetado por su intelecto.”

AutorasAutobiografíaLiteratura Estadounidense
Book:Fierce Attachments
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“Fue en la cocina donde empecé a comprender el significado de la palabra "esposa”. Ahí estábamos, una pareja de 24 años: un día éramos una estudiante de doctorado y un artista, y al día siguiente éramos marido y mujer. Antes siempre habíamos puesto juntos sobre la mesa las rudimentarias comidas que tomábamos. Ahora, de pronto, Stefan estaba cada noche en su taller, dibujando o leyendo y yo estaba en la cocina, esforzándome por preparar y servir una comida que ambos pensábamos que debía ser adecuada. Recuerdo pasar me cobra y media preparando algún espantoso plato de cuchara sacado de una revista femenina para terminar engulléndolo los dos en 10 minutos, pasarme después una hora limpiando los cacharros y quedarme mirando el fregadero, pensando: "¿Será esto así durante los siguientes cuarenta años?”.”

Men And WomenMatrimonioMarriage LifeMachismoSexismo
Book:Fierce Attachments
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“Así que estaban los Kerner, llenos de odio, entrelazados en secreto por el espasmo sexual, y estaban mis padres, que se llamaba el uno al otro pero cuyo lecho campaba castamente en campo abierto. Abajo la casa un desastre, el marido estaba exiliado en el salón, a las posar una soñadora medio lunática; arriba todo estaba como una patena el marido en el centro de todo y la esposa, vehemente y obstinada.”

OrderMarriageCleaningMatrimonioOrdenLimpieza
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“Nej, dét der drev hende, og som skilte os ad, var dét at jeg tænkte. Hun havde ikke forstået at dét, at tage en uddannelse betød at jeg ville begynde at tænke: tænke sammenhængende og tænke højt. Hun blev voldsomt overrasket over det. Mine sætninger blev længere allerede efter en måneds undervisning. Længere, mere indviklede og med ord hvis betydning hun ikke altid kendte. Jeg havde aldrig før sagt ord, hun ikke kendte. Eller frembragt en sætning hvis logik hun ikke kunne følge. Eller forsøgt at fremsætte et synspunkt, der var resultatet af en abstraktion. Det gjorde hende vanvittig. Hendes ansigt fik et udtryk af dyrisk snedighed når jeg påbegyndte en sætningskonstruktion som umuligt kunne afsluttes før der var blevet fyret tre bisætninger af. Snedigheden førte til vrede, vreden flammede op og blev til raseri. “Hver er det du snakker om”? Råbte hun ad mig. “Hvad er det du snakker om? Tal engelsk, tak! Vi forstår alle sammen engelsk her. Så tal engelsk!”

Family RelationshipsMothers And DaughtersEducationation
Book:Voldsomme bånd
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“We arrive at 69th Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. ... 'Come inside,' she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. 'Come, you'll feel better.' I shake my head no. 'Being Jewish can't help me anymore,' I tell her.”

StorytellingOral History
Book:Fierce Attachments
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“The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”

InspirationMemoirEssayCreative NonfictionEssay WritingNarratorPersonal Narrative
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.”

WorldWritingPersonsSelfHumanityRoomsCompanyVirtueWrittenLonelinessSolitudeConversationEmptyLettersAssumingPrimeTelephonesMy ThoughtsImaginativeImmediacyEmpty Rooms
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.”

NeedsIdeasSelfMoneyRiskStyleMaterialsStandardsIllusionIndependencePropertyPossessionTiedMore MoneyNew LifeInabilityPatheticReducingBourgeoisSense Of SelfStandards Of LivingPowerlessnessShabbyNew Work
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.”

PeopleWantFeelsKindTodayScienceAliveGeniusPromiseUniqueDrawsContemporaryAll KindsFlamesDimensionsMediocrityIncomparableCharlatansWorking Life
Book:Women in Science: Then and Now
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“Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father's death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned.”

WayYearsFormFoundFatherInterestCompanyAliveGrewHigherTiredBoredThirtyKitchenDeniedDevotedNew WaysRestlessSeriousnessMamaThirty YearsWidowhood
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“No man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of those relationships as instruments of his prime function in life. Yet every woman is raised, still, to believe that the fulfillment of these relationships is her prime function in life and, what's more, her instinctive choice.”

MenBelieveDoeStillsChoicesFatherWishHusbandFunctionInstrumentsRaisedFulfillmentPrimeSaltHusband And Father
Book:Essays in feminism
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“A people who have only just begun to emerge from a state of subjugation are in no position to be even-handed ... and it takes much patience and understanding and good will on the part of the strong ones both in the subjugated group and in the group holding the power to provide an atmosphere of stability in which the frightened bravado on both sides of the fence can dissipate itself without increasing the chaos that is already intrinsic in the situation.”

PeopleStatesStrongUnderstandingSidesSituationGroupsPositionChaosAtmosphereFrightenedStabilityFenceBoth SidesGood WillSubjugationBravado
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it.”

PeopleNeedsMovingPoliticalMoralArmsMassRootsDifficultyCriticalPaceAppetiteComplaintsImperativesUnbearableDiscomfortPrevailingDominatingSnailInsurmountableCritical MassPersonal Needs
Author:Vivian Gornick
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“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.”

KnowsLongImportantHardFactsGirlHouseLanguageWorkClassBrotherMembersDressesMy BrotherSignificancePantsWorking ClassPapa
Book:The romance of American Communism
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“Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.”

GivingEndsPainPoliticalDesireCertainPoliticsForceFearPoorStruggleSacrificeAmountOffersGiving UpJewEnormousDiscriminationRationalCrueltyOverwhelmingPrimitiveIrrationalStemThreateningInfantilePower Struggle
Author:Vivian Gornick
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