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Ground-Zero Project

It's convenient--woefully oversimple but tremendously reassuring--to assume that we choose the objects of our affection.

Michael Ondaatje chose to write novels built around the figures of Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden.
Julian Barnes chose to write about Gustave Flaubert.
Tim O'Brien keeps choosing to write about Vietnam.
Ross McElwee chose to make a film about General Sherman's march to the sea.
"Oh, yes," I say to myself. "I remember the day that I discovered Thelonious Monk. I was bored, really bored, with the music played on the radio. I went to the Chattanooga Public Library, looked up jazz' in the card catalog, and checked out a record by a pianist whose name I'd never heard. The rest is, as they say, history.

Conceptualizing our affections in this manner is, perhaps, responsible behavior. We make (or break) our own lives. We have free wills. But what's the cost of volition? Namely this: The more we emphasize our freedom--particular, unconstrained choices--the more we de-emphasize the role ideology plays in our lives--that is, the degree to which identity is defined and shaped by culture.

Jim Collins, in his book Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, takes up the dilemma that pits the individual (free-will) against culture (ideology). He revisits Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, a theorist who asserted that

"all ideology has the function (which defines it) of constructing concrete individuals as subjects." Interpellation is the very basis of the conversion process in which individuals are hailed or called in by ideology.

Collins further explains:

Althusser uses the example of Christian ideology to illustrate: If the individual reader's response to a phrase like " It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood'" is " Yes, it really is me!,' it obtains from them the recognition that they really do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world" (p. 178). Once this recognition is secured the individual becomes the subject constituted by and within that ideology. (1989:40)

Collins goes on to notice two points absolutely central to writing a ground-zero narrative.

(1) There are a number of "competing discursive ideologies" seeking to interpellate you and me as subjects.
(2) Our identity is the direct result of conflictive interpellation, of refusing to answer some calls but answering others, of using one mode of subject construction to "de-interpellate" oneself from another. (41)

In relatively simple terms, this means that you need to rethink the "subject" of your mystory. Did you choose him or her or did he or she choose you?

The ground-zero narrative requires that you tell what is, in effect, a conversion story. You answered the solicitations of the person who has become the focus of your docu-novella. How did he or she call? What were the circumstances that lead up to you being called by him or her? Why did you answer this call?

Need even more information on ground-zero narratives?

Here's some commentary. It focuses on Michael Ondaatje's use of the device in Coming through Slaughter.
Here's an example. It accounts for Michael Jarrett's interest in soul music.
Also reflect on the function of the "Linda story" in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the Ellen story in Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, and the story of testing a nuclear bomb in Ross McElwee in Sherman's March.