Analysis of a Writing Sample: J.R. Carpenter's "The Cape"

In composing this work, I believe Carpenter intended to get people thinking about the boundary between fact and fiction. I think s/he wanted us to question why we trust our memories more than our doubts. I think this because s/he told me so in the "Author Description." I was, however, grateful for these directions because I like to have an author's note on their work to give me a framework in which to think about the piece and assess how successful it is based on what their intentions were. However, I experienced the piece before I read the author's note, which I think is important--to experience it without assistance first so you can truly gauge how successful it was based on what you took from it without their instruction. Many components of the piece point to the dichotomy between fact and fiction, however, specifically the frame with text that says "these events happened so long ago that this whole story is in black and white" combined with the slide in which s/he admits there is no picture of their grandmother but that if they had one it would be there, which suggests that we construct our own memory of things based on what we have, which is sometimes very little. Perhaps the threads we create to connect what is left to us via our own memories or stories passed on are little lies or assumptions that help us weave a tapestry to explain to us who we are.

For example: I used to think I had memories from when my parents were still married. They divorced when I was two and a half. What I think happened was that I spent so much time looking through my baby book and updating it with new photos of me as a child, that I started to recall the photos and believe that I remembered being in the backyard with my dad and our dog Freckles and my mom pushing me in a stroller down a street made of bricks and sitting in a baby seat wearing sunglasses. But I didn't remember them. I saw them, and I recalled images of myself, where I was outside myself, so I remembered things like the silly sunglasses I had on and how happy my father looked because I looked at them from a historical perspective outside of the moment I was once in and noticed things about them. (I've always been fascinated with myself.) Also: I wanted to remember those things. My real memories begin when I am four, just after my mother re-married. I have always used photographs and letters, any kind of evidence I could locate to reconstruct my parents' love. I have this picture of them in California in 1984 or something, and my dad is wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen and that is all he is wearing, and my mom is wearing a bikini top and some high-waisted shorts and they are posed in an open parking lot in front of Mary Lou Subaru, a piece of shit car my dad bought for $100 that he had to turn off when they went down hills, and Mary Lou has a beer sitting on her hood, and in the background is a gorgeous bluff, covered in trees, with a road alongside it on which a VW van is chugging around the bend. I also have a poem my dad wrote when my mom told him she was going to divorce him that was tucked into an original envelope of photos my dad had developed (like it had our old address on it and everything) and it's horribly sad. It's like a Bruce Springsteen song. It's like "The River." It's "Downbound Train." It's deliciously sad and heartbreakingIt's my treasure. I have no memories of my parents being married, but through these artifacts I attempt to reconstruct their rise and fall, the arch of their love, some semblance of romance that I can cling to and attach myself to, to know that I am a product of this EPIC THING.

I think Carpenter actually wants to know more about their family and is constructing their history in a way to illuminate the emptiness of the threads s/he has. I know that s/he says it's about the fact/fiction binary because the pictures aren't family-related and the maps aren't to scale and are out of date, but now that I'm writing about this, I think it is about the potential empty-feeling of the threads of family history if you don't try to attach them to something with these little threads that fill in the holes and make your family history a tight knit blanket; better to have a tight knit than a loose one when the cold wind blows. We are from a linear-society, we must know ourselves from beginning to end. This idea is furthered to me by the frame that states "sound carries, especially in winter." There is a specific emptiness to winter that enables sound to carry. This suggests to me a kind of haunting, or the way in all of Bruce Springsteen's saddest songs there is that keyboard part that always, unmistakably sounds like a forlorn train bounding through the plains at night. It's that kind of sound carrying: grief, emptiness, the being without.

I think Carpenter chose not to use a traditional approach with this piece because we are talking about memory. Memory is non-linear; memory is especially nonlinear when you have very few memories with which to actually construct something. This is why I think the non-linear form has been utilized frequently in recent history for the writing of memoirs.