Hello Sarah Parman, en gaurde!
This section of Art and Lies seems to be focused on the family and the lies that are a part of each family's history. The narrator talks about how her family, especially her mother, seems to value the lies and artificial history over the truth of what has happened to them as a family.
The following is my favorite selection from the chapter. It's located on page 42 of our edition:
"I have tried to follow her as she passes from room to room. I have tried to remember the things she sees with self-justifying power.
At Christmas, when all my family line up for the annual guided tour of the house, I try to keep up, but I fall further and further behind. When they gather on the bottom step of family life, to weep a few tears over the babies they used to be and the mother and father they used to be and the dinners cooked and squabbles mended, it's easy to be drawn in. They do dray me in, they scribble me in all their pictures, then lose their temper when I don't recognize myself.
'Wasn't she pretty?' (my mother again). 'Of course in those days she had long hair.'"
A room for each memory. But the rooms are different from mother to child. I know that feeling. I try to "walk down memory lane" with my mother, but I never seem to recognize the history she tells. It is frustrating and confounding. I don't understand where she gets her stories, her memories of the past. I am placed inside them, but like the narrator it is an image that is not the real me, a painting.Well I recognize that my interpretation may not be accurate, I think my mother and I have often reached a decent consensus on various issues of both our lives and, in cases of shared history (such as my upbringing) have managed to shift one way or another...usually with her to my side of things. In many ways I have shattered her image or me and done my best to replace it with the "actual" me.
The family has built an elaborate web of memories, false memories according to the narrator. The memories make up a whole house, a whole history of the family that is nothing but lies. They look back on this fake family and pride themselves on how normal they were. The phrase "squabbles mended" reminds me of a sitcom. It's like Full House. There was never an episode that ended with the family still fighting. All squabbles had to be mended before the half hour is up.
But life is not like this.But is it unnatural? I don't approve, of course, but are you surprised? I'm not saying you are or aren't, (in fact, I don't believe you are) but this still speaks towards a negative view point of people in general (not necessarily your view point, but the author's). Perhaps that is the real issue...wouldn't someone outside the family see the same things you do? This is also, perhaps, where the story fails due to a perspective on humanity that leans to the lower.
The fake memories take their toll. The narrator suffers. I suffer. Everyone suffers. The only variable is if one acknowledges the pain of the past or pretends it never happened. When the family, more specifically Matthew, calls the doctor it is like they are trying to cover up their past. They refuse to accept that they have made their daughter/sister like this. They have forced her to live her life through her art, in her own reality apart from their lies. Since she refuses to play by their rules, they have to silence her. Having her declared crazy by the doctor will allow them to act like she is the one lying about their past. By making her the liar their own lies are made truths. It's a genius act, but it is also cold and cruel.
I have discovered in my own life there is no point in talking about the past. Each person has their own version, and disagreeing about it accomplishes nothing. Telling my mother I was unhappy as a child will not change it. She will never admit she was less than perfect in her parenting. She doesn't see the times she left me alone, when I dont have any memories of her being there. So why open the doors? Why go near the house? I'm a few blocks down, staying at a hotel. I know the pain in my past, but I'm keeping the house locked up. I can't change it, so the only affect it has anymore is to make me (or my family) sad.Oh dear...I must absolutely disagree. We are where we've been at least as much as where we're going. While there are great things to be said for non-linear storytelling/thinking/processing, the truth is that we, as humans, live in a linear process of perception, time keeps on ticking as it were.
To claim there is "no point" in talking about the past, even in relation to "the accomplishment of nothing" as it relates to hopeful concessions between people - of agreed perception of situations - , is to give up on humanity in my opinion!
If there was "no point" then why be here? Why do anything? Why write a word? We must TRY despite the past and because of it. Otherwise, the future is just the past waiting for us to walk through it. The pain of the past may seem unpleasant but the pleasure of the possibilities is made by them.
