While reading Anne Boyer’s The Undying, I was struck by the way she simultaneously reinforces and subverts the writing techniques we’ve explored so far this quarter. Much of her discussion throughout the memoir surrounding the profitability or fetishization of patients’ “cancer stories” reminded me of Agee’s anxieties when writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boyer writes, “At a poetry reading I attend during my illness, a poet is nearly shouting about a cancer she doesn’t have… None of this literature is bad, but all of it is unforgivable” (111). She continues, “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is” (116). One of the proposed solutions to this issue was explained by Hartman and employed by Keene in Counternarratives. They both seem to be proponents of leaving gaps in narration which are necessary for an honest and non-presumptuous retelling of history and of social conditions which they may have not directly experienced. In other words, they highlighted the importance of “showing” rather than “telling,” underscoring the ethical responsibility to do so as an additional incentive beyond the fact that this form of writing is also more interesting to readers. 

Boyer, however, subverts this understanding of the potentially trite “Show, don’t tell.” She writes, “What being a writer does to a person is make her a servant of those sensory details, obedient to the world of appearances and issuing forth book after book compliant with deceptive and unforgivable showing… irresponsibly sparing every ethically required telling” (113). She says that “telling is that other truth, and the senses are prone to showing’s lies” (113). Boyer goes on to explain that “Showing is a betrayal of the real… showing and not telling is not reason enough to endure the disabling process required for staying alive” (113). Contrary to much of our discussion this quarter, Boyer believes that “telling” is a requirement when writing in an ethically responsible way. It is not enough to rely on the senses to illustrate her story, and as the one enduring this painful experience, she has the right to tell readers what she deems important. There isn’t a way that anyone other than Boyer herself can simply process what is being “shown” and then understand the truth behind the experience; this would be to neglect what Boyer calls the “other truth.”

I wonder if the approaches of Hartman/Keene and Boyer are really at odds with each other or if the tactics are simply particular to the types of narratives they are in reference to. Hartman and Keene both wrote with the intention of telling stories that deal with historical oppression and the voices of people who were silenced by that historical environment and are no longer here to share their experiences. Boyer, however, is writing about her own life. When dealing with memoir, perhaps the writer can never incorrectly or irresponsibly “tell” their own story.