MO Scheme 2
  • Above all, DB did not want to outline his own life story,
  • but the story and identity of the Oratory:
    • Initial inspiration
    • Those for whom it existed
    • Positive and negative circumstances
    • Distinctive elements of method and mission
    • Characteristic features
  • The MO is different from earlier accounts
    • These concentrated on the motives and events tied to a “Catechism classes” which became the “Oratory”: purpose, spelling out, activities, workers, results;
    • They were meant for authorities and the public, supporters and benefactors;
    • Without any connection with the author’s inner story.
  • In the MO, at the level of narrative, the story of the Oratory is connected with the inner story
    • of the narrator
    • and of disciples who would continue the work
  • from the past and take it forward
  • And it has a normative function
  • The “dear Salesian children”
  • “forbidding that these things be made public before my death or after”
  • Then:
    • Handing on an intimate family heritage (shared by author and readers)
    • Formation and animation, a mission, identity, method.
  • DB brings in those who benefit from these adventures in the Memoirs: He has them play an active part
    • In as much as they are disciples who share the perspective in which he places the story of how he sets up an identity;
    • In as much as they are interlocuters whom he asks to accept his view of the facts (historical and personal, real and poetic)
  • The presence of the readers condition DB’s narrative (he dialogues with them)
  • “It will be a record that will help people overcome problems by learning from the past”
  • “it will serve to make known how God himself has always been our guide”
  • “it will give my sons some entertainment, to read about their father’s adventures…”
  • The motivation for writing is more necessary and internal to the text than something “literary”
  • He refers to things “outside the text” as is characteristic of this genre (autobiography)
  • 5 reasons for autobiographical writing:
      • Requests from authority and others,
      • Defence,
      • Affirming identity,
      • Transmitting witness, teaching, values, exemplary experiences,
      • Approach of old age: recovering the past
  • These reasons urge DB to direct his writing by:
    • A complex, articulated and evocative construction,
    • that goes beyond the description of the Oratory (a work with its own purposes and method);
    • It is a kind of theological-ideological viewpoint,
    • that sets the birth of the Oratory within an inner and “spiritual” (vocational and missionary) range of events
  • The MO begins with DB’s birth:
    • A providential perspective on history
    • A personal event is filled with meaning that transcends its particular details.
  • Beyond the writing there is God who governs the individual’s and society’s history with a view to salvation, giving rise to vocations and inspiring ‘journeys',
  • But there is also a human being telling the story
  • Second beginning: the dream at 9 years of age (detailed and dramatic account)
  • Inserted into the text as the real beginning of ‘memory’ for the Oratory
  • He decides to break it up into subdivisions of a decade each
  • The dream at 9 years of age:
    • Anticipates meanings, strategies, structures;
    • Offers the outline for rhetorical organisation of the MO according to the intentions of the author
  • The encounter with Bartholomew Garelli: At the chronological and symbolic centre of the MO (2 decade, ch. 12)
  • The orphan lad from Valsesia (3rd decade, ch. 7)
      • Concludes the narrative span already prefigured in the dream at 9 years of age…
  • 3rd decade, ch. 8: narrative is broken, seems to vary with respect to the unity of the preceding composition.
  • Plot and intrigue are lacking:
    • A series of events ordered chronologically, but without the narrative weave,
    • And without the personal and intimate involvement of the earlier account;
    • narrative vignettes with less significance for the Oratory vocation (weak ending: Grigio).
  • Autobiographies: effort to provide unity and meaning, historical sense, to experience
  • DB, starting from perspectives that guided him at the time
    • Reconstruction of facts from the past attributing meaning to them
    • Reveals to us and himself how much he has been helped or prevented as he develops his oratorian calling
    • And how many experiences became part of his awareness and method
  • DB transforms the revisited experience into a resource which allows him to construct a spiritual and pedagogical “way of knowing” for his readers
  • Complex dynamics of memory, selection and interpretation of facts, their organisation into a plot, according to some superior and meaningful unity
  • Filtering of events, in the reconstruction of a part of life around the unifying core of his Oratory vocation/mission
  • An awareness “at a second level”: the return to the steps he took in recognising meaningful connections and the harmonious outcome of the various elements
  • It is a work of self-formation, in which DB:
    • perceives the events of the past in a different way and acts on them,
      • i.e. reconnects them to the history of the Oratory
      • And organises them around this unified meaning,
    • In fact gives new content to events experienced which did not have that global perception
  • The process of SELECTION is put into place:
    • With regard to FACTS
      • Selecting those most significant for the overall meaning and discarding others
    • For their SIGNIFICANCE
      • By interpreting them from a theolgocial point of view and according to concerns that moved him at the time
  • A process of ORGANISATION of events according to the weight given to each in the reconstruction of the overall unified design
  • From this planning arises the plot, and the way it is woven to control the narrative strategy of his account
  • A retrospective view revealing the intimate connection between events experienced at different periods in time (narrator's infancy, youth, maturity and present)
  • He favours the story’s point of arrival, gives meaning to all episodes by organising them into an intelligible whole
  • At the conclusion of the narrative the text of the MO seems to us to be
    • a continuous search for and highlighting of prefigured elements of the Oratory’s characteristic features
    • in weaving an existence that the author feels is marked by a divine call
      • (situations anticipating the Oratory; characters who represent the Oratory’s style and method)