Tool: Old Photographs
I’ve become more than a little obsessed with old photographs of my family—near and distant—as I’ve been working on this project. As absolutely nobody not on my dissertation committee or on the staff at Assay: A Journal of Nonfictional Studies knows or cares, I hang my scholarly hat on integrating Levinasian ideas of selfhood and obligation to the narration of first-person nonfictional writing. (See, I told you that you weren’t going to care. By the time you’re writing a dissertation, you’re writing mostly for yourself and maybe five other people in the world who are as deeply embroiled in your topic as you are. And that estimate might be generous.)
At the core of these ideas is what Levinas calls “rapport de face à face,” in which he posits that the face of the Other “orders and ordains us” into being, and into “giving and serving” the Other. His ideas are closely related to that of another contemporary Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, and his construction of the “I and Thou” relationship between people. Both philosophers were deeply influenced by Jewish habits of mind, and this way of understanding how we are obligated to one another strikes me as simply modern restatements of the concept Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Lazeh (all Israel are responsible for one another), extended to humanity as a whole.
These photographs keep me mindful of my obligation to my forebears and my living relatives while I write. It’s tempting, now that I’m in the thick of things, to take shortcuts. To privilege my memory or understanding over the memories and understandings of the people I interview or the histories I discover, because I started out thinking this book was about one thing and those interviews and histories insist it is, in fact, about something else entirely. And so having these faces—which obligate me into service to the people whose stories I’m writing—keeps me mindful of their personhoods, when writing someone else always risks turning them into an object (of observation) rather than a subject.
What helps you remember that the other people in your stories are there for you to serve, and not simply to support the narrative you’re trying to build, fellow writers?
Some of my grandfather’s generation as children, taken in Charleston WV in 1912: Back Row: Edith, Ida, Albert (my grandfather), Irene Front Row: Julius, Charles G., Jack, Herman
How much I love this project; how much I love that picture. We are a mixture of all of our ancestors and the fact that we are here now is absolutely unlikely, and yet here we are
Thank you Sarah. We are certainly descended from a bunch of cuties.