A. Fill this statement into the blanks below: “That wasn’t my intention.”
1. My Wife: “That was a really rude thing to say.” My response: ________________________
2. My brother: “You didn’t call me for like one month.” My Response:___________________
3. My Wife: “Did you just say I was fat?” My response: __________________________
4. My mom (years ago): “I told you to clean your room and you didn’t.” My response: ________________.
B. In all of the above situations, my intentions were misread: saying or doing one thing apparently implied something entirely different. How often do we use the “not-my-intention claim”? I seem to use it increasingly as if once I say something wasn’t my intention I am released from the effects of the situation. My wife however, in all her loving and beautiful kindness, would most likely fervently disagree with me. She might say something like, “I don’t care if it wasn’t your intention, the outcome is the same: you hurt my feelings.”
C. Last week we spoke a lot about the intentions of collecting. Pearce said, collections attempt to construct the world (16) and the excerpted letters to and from Banks, seemed to say that collections were being made for the sake of science and the sake of curiosity. Collections had, and continue to have, intentions, but aside from intentions, collections also have outcomes and consequences. And as my frail examples above may begin to propose, intentions don’t always equate the outcomes. Maybe this is where narrative comes in.
D. What my examples from section A don’t show is what happened before or after the comments were made. In the case of examples 1 and 3, after my wife rebutted my claim of “not-my-intention”, I most likely proceeded to try and explain the context of my words, the back-story to the comment and what I really meant. In other words, because the intention was misconstrued, narrative became necessary. Maybe this is the why narrative often accompanies a collection. The narrative fills in the blanks, it describes the intentions and makes clear the context.
D. Intentions are often different from implications and maybe narrative helps to justify what has been done. In travel and science writing maybe narrative is important as a method of ensuring the collectors are seen in the light of which they choose.
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2 comments:
Tim
I like your real-world demonstration. It points to the potential meanings any collection can inspire (incur?). Then of course, once you fill in the blanks ( "I speak as a ________ married person"), or construct a narrative to give context, intention, and meaning, you then might have to answer to the narrative itself. "Oh, no,not that old song and dance again!"
An interesting take on collections and narratives, and certainly one that I can get behind. Although I was being all selfish and thinking that the reader/viewer/visitor of the collection is the one who ultimately makes the narrative, I see the power of the narrative for the collector to do just what you said, to fill in the gaps. Then again, that assumes there will only ever be the one narrative: the collector's.
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