What are the extend of the honesty in self representation ?

LOISY Maëlia

DEVOIR DE SYNTHÈSE DE DOCUMENTS

Terminale spécialité LLCER anglais

Artists have shown themselves to express a lot of different things and emotions through so many different forms of art. T0day, we will focus on the way artists use the concept of self representation. This form has evolved a lot through the centuries and eras and keeps on doing so. Although, it has raised a lot of questions such as its truth worth, among other things. With the aid of this set of documents, including an extract of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast from 1964, an article about 'momfluencers' by Jessica Waller from 2022 and the famous Triple Self-Portrait of Norman Rockwell from 1960, we are going to analyse the extend of truth worth in self representation, how reliable it really is, through the multiple ways artists choose to express and represent themselves.
First, we will talk about fiction in self representation, the blurring between facts and made-ups, then we will talk about the ignored facts, the tendency of selecting just some parts of the facts in order to build one's own truth, which questions the honesty of self representation.

First, we will analyse the way fiction can sometimes get through the lines of self representation, a process supposedly honest and truth worthy of its subject.
Indeed, when we think about self representation, self portrait, we tend to think that the artist has finally shown themselves, decided to being fully honest with the audience and in a way, put themselves in a vulnerable position by exposing their true self. However, a lot of details and aspects from this form of art, including document A, Hemingway writing about himself, has revealed itself to be maybe not as honest and reliable as we might have thought. In document A, extract of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway has decided to represent himself in a writing where he is, himself, writing. He writes about his process of writing, as well as what's happening around him, 40 years after the facts. He's the narrator of his story, making him omniscient, and is the main character. In this process, of being a character in a story supposedly representing the author himself, Hemingway provides a lot of details, sensory details: "their strong taste of sea and their metallic taste", "the crisp taste of the wine", as in any book trying to produce the effect of the real, but by doing so in his self representation, Hemingway makes us question the authenticity of the facts that are supposed to have happened decades before the writing. This process, the reality effect, which is a fictional process, is a proof of a real blurring between facts and fiction and makes us think twice about the reliability of some aspects of artists' representation of themselves. To add on that, Hemingway generally writes in a way to attract the audience, keeping them reading, which is often the case in novels, fiction novels. More than representing himself, he provides us specific facts about specific elements, in this case a person, a woman, which sometimes makes us question the purpose of the writing, the aim of the author, as we end up reading about a girl waiting at a coffee shop and the weird obsession of the author on her: "She was very pretty with a face fresh as newly minted coin", "her hair was black as a cow's wing and cut sharply ans diagonally across her neck", "beauty, [...] you belong to me now, [...]".
To finish on this, we will point out the process of painting in self representation, self portrait. Indeed, more than any other artistic process, drawing, including painting, allows its creator to create, whatever their want. This process makes the artist able to make anything, with in itself questions the truth worth of self representation. In document C, Norman Rockwell represented himself painting, making us see him painting, him painted and him through a mirror. This Triple Self-Portrait, used as a cover for Rockwell's autobiography, is supposed to represent him and his true self. However, this art process makes it so easy to fake the truth and create fiction that we can only wonder about its reliability reguarding it's subject and who it represents.

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