"Our Secret" Reflection

Griffin's essay/chapter "Our Secret" jumps around from topic to topic (or subject to subject) as you read from the beginning to the ending. Bartholomae and Petrosky suggest the reason Griffin does this is to draw unconsidered connections between different topics or subjects, in a sense to weaving threads between seemingly unrelated ideas, whether they come from world history, from Griffin's personal history, from science, philosophy, or from somewhere else. 

For this forum discussion, I'd like you all to collaborate in order to do three things:

1. Name/list all of the different topics/subjects present in Griffin's "Our Secret." Cite specific page numbers/examples for each topic/subject you list.

2. Reflect on the connection between two of these topics/subjects. Write about how the two topics/subjects are (or could be) connected.

3. Reflect on the connection between one of the topics/subjects in Griffin's essay and one of the topic/subjects in Richard Miller's "Dark Night of the Soul."

As a group, you all can choose to collaborate on this however you like, but the response should demonstrate clear evidence of communicative interaction/discussion and collaboration. You can use the forum as a site for generating this interaction and discussion, or you can use the forum as a site for figuring out how you, as a group, will generate this interaction and discussion. 

I agree with what the others put as topics. I think there are also greater, more encompassing topics here, perhaps not so explicitly stated among the pages, but instead built out of the smaller subjects.

That includes:

The narrator’s story: 307, 311, 312

Heinrich Himmler’s story: 301,302,305,309,310,313

Laura’s Story:

The facture of a story: 301,304,307,315,318,313,318...in between the lines

(yep I'm Just going to do that. Maybe I should just go through and repeat what the others said but I didn't...I find this topic prevalent on every page of the story. The topic of what we keep secret and keep out of our lives vs what material we decide to use to manufacture the story. )

I think the concept of how story’s are facture, meaning what people choose to represent, what story society chooses to spread, plant, and nurture so that it grows, is the main subject of the essay. It encompasses so much. In looking at journal entries of Heinrich and how they grew over time, at first there was a struggle to find his own words, always under the eye of his oppressing father. His father ended up telling him what to write anyway. Then, Heinrich’s words became his fathers. He wrote freely but part of it was the consequence of his father’s impression on him through his upbringing. Subsequently the author looks at having people over and being afraid that they will find out how you “really” are. Everyone puts on a show, a nice family dinner with light small talk. Everyone dresses up a bit. Stories must be manufactured. The details left out, purposefully or otherwise, are pieces that those on the receiving end do not get to receive. People leave out the bad so that their representation of themselves meets the receiver’s standards, whether it be society as a whole, some friends over for dinner with the family, your father, or even yourself.

As Griffin writes about the standards of society (for example her comments on gender roles (311).) and how they shape one's being in the sense that people oppress parts of themselves to fit in with society, as the narrator's grandfather did, this in turn shapes what they write down. In conjunction with "The Dark Night of the Soul"'s point on the effects writing can make on a person, those being to think, to go out into the wild and give up on the world, or to spread an idea to the masses...when what we become and write down is shaped by society and then further when what society is effected by is the written word among other forms of expression, there lies a loop of the same topics being consistently oppressed. Furthermore, who is to say that society's standards are correct when the same path has been followed for so long.