Examining the Nonfiction Essay

This past week I read Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water.”  The essay catalogs her pilgrimage in Spain from Compostella in northern Spain.  It is written much as a journal or diary would be; Carson writes the date and the place where her entry and then an introductory (Japanese) poem and then writes her own thoughts on the day, etc.  It doesn’t sound much like an essay, does it?  Well, that’s what I was thinking at first.  Then under further investigation I recognized how it is an essay.  (You’d think I’d have the hang of it by now, but I’m still trying to figure it out).  Carson’s form, first off, is essayistic.  Sure, it’s poetic and lyrical (which is all I could think about at first) but it is very intentional.  At the end of each entry (with the exception of a few), Carson writes a statement about Pilgrims.  Her first one is “Pilgrims were people who loves a good riddle” (183).  Some are in the form of questions; the second one reads: “When is a pilgrim like a sieve? When he riddles” (184).  Carson’s entries always lead to these statements, and when they are absent, which happens a few times, the reader is forced to stop and either determine their own “Pilgrim” statement based on Carson’s entry, or else determine another reason Carson would leave it out.

The essay is also a part of this genre because of its presentation of ideas.  Ideas on the human condition, journey, and a general questioning attitude.  Carson doesn’t presume to know more than the reader, or her traveling partner, “My Cid.”  Before the pilgrimage, Carson recounts her thoughts on Cid prior to their trip.  She asks, “Who is this man?  I have no idea.  The more I watch him, the less I know.  What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?” (190).  These rhetorical questions occur throughout and drive the essay towards the reader.

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t addressed the title.  Carson constantly refers to water throughout the essay.  She repeats the phrase, “Kinds of water drown us.  Kinds of water do not” (186).    In Carson’s essay, water serves to act as both a destructive and regenerative force.  She often reflects on the water she comes across throughout the trip: waterfalls, rain, streams, etc.

It’s happened.  The essay has disappeared.  This week I read David Antin’s “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto” and Eliot Weinberger’s “The Dream of India.”  I say the essay disappeared because in Antin’s essay there was no punctuation and in Weinberger’s essay there was simply an assembled list.  So why are they in D’Agata’s anthology?  Because the essay is obsessed with form.  And even more obsessed with how form and content are interconnected.

Antin’s essay includes only vital punctation (a few question marks and quotes).  Other than that, the rest is left up to the reader.  The theme of choices, art, observation, and relationships all are seen through the lens of Antin’s struggle to purchase a new mattress with his wife.  Antin conveys the trues sense of the essay being about itself.  That is, while the essay is about Antin’s proposed narrative (he and his wife Ellie need a new mattress), it is more about his “practice of postmodernism”; his essay is about itself.  Antin draws attention to this at the very end of the essay.  He and Ellie have finally chosen a mattress, but she still has back problems (the main reason they went out to buy a new mattress in the first place) and so Antin claims that, “either / this is the best possible mattress for her and for us     or not and / this is the situation that think best describes our postmodern / condition     with respect to which I believe descartes / advice     if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way / to go     go straight ahead     because its not likely to be any worse than anything else” (122).  In other words, Antin’s essay becomes about itself: postmodernism.

Weinberger’s essay was more just an assembly of facts about India up to 1942.  At the end of the essay there is a footnote that “All of the imagery and some of the language are derived from works written in the five hundred years prior to 1942″ (135).  So in “The Dream of India,” Weinberger lets the reader ‘fill in the gaps.’  That is, find patterns, themes, or ‘something to take away.’  It’s in these essays that we get a better sense that the essay is evolving into something that is showing and not telling.  That is, “The Next American Essay,” is one that let’s you ponder why Weinberger arranged the list in such an order.  Or why Antin didn’t include punctuation or capitalization, etc.  The next American essay is the essay that let’s the reader walk away feeling changed by themselves, not the essay.

Does that make sense?  In other words, the past four essays (the two from this week and the two from the past week) – but especially these two – are not only ‘experimental,’ but exponential.  They allow the reader more interaction with the essay.  They allow more growth.  There are more places for the essay to go – if Antin and Wenberger’s essays are essays, then the posibilities are potentially limitless.  (OK, not limitless, but let’s see where the rest of the semester goes.)

I’m starting a new book!  I’m now in the second half of my independent study and am moving on to John D’Agata’s essay collection, The Next American Essay.  In the work, D’Agata anthologizes a significant essay from each year, starting with the year he was born, 1975.  I started with the essay D’Agata picked for 1976 (I had already ready the essay for 1975 anyways, “The Search for Marvin Gardens”), Barry Lopez’s “The Raven.”

On first thought of this title, I thought of Poe’s work.  It’s nothing like Poe.  Lopez’s essay made me question at this point, what the essay was evolving towards.  Facts?  Impersonal nature?  Excluding the “I” in order to let the reader focus on the topic?  However, discussing with Professor Rafferty what Lopez attempts, this is, “pushing” the essay, I can see that Lopez attempts to stretch the essay to become almost fictional in it’s exploration of fact.  There is more said through what he doesn’t say in the essay.  The essay relays a number of facts and intentional comments on attributes of not only ravens, but of crows, and Lopez contrasts the two birds in order to reveal their significance.  It is with Lopez’s essay that facts begin to get “pushed around.”

After Lopez comes Dillard.  Praise the gods of creative writing, Dillard kind of makes sense, and I can see where she’s coming from.  But even Dillard’s essay, “Total Eclipse,” was lost on me at times.  I thought entirely too much of how it relates to the essay “Seeing,” which I read not too long ago.  ”Seeing,” is essentially what the title claims it is: Dillard’s attempt to reconcile what she sees with what she knows.  In “Total Eclipse,” Dillard takes on a similar questioning tone, but this time about an even more basic question of life: life.  That is, what is life and why does it appear this way.  I think I got confused when I initially read the essay, and thought it was about “sight,” because Dillard uses the word and its relatives about a million times.  But in reality, the essay asks what happens with life.  At one point, Dillard even prays, “God save our life.” Not to mention her incredible language, tone, and voice, which reflect her reverent attitude towards nature and existence.

In Dillard and Lopez and in the essays for this week, and in essays to come, the essay meets art.  How will the human condition be explored even more?

Alas. It has happened, I am officially behind in blogging. Due to this fact, I will be writing notes from my meeting last week on four essays and writing another (hopefully *real* and thoughtful) blog on the two essays I read for this week.

Last week I read “The Crack-Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White, “Seeing” by Annie Dillard, and “Under The Influence” by Scott Russell Sanders.  Yes.  It was a lot of reading.  So worth it though.

“The Crack-Up,” about Fitzgerald’s mental breakdown was a boundary-breaker at the time he wrote it.  No one had really delved into their own breakdown in an essay before.  The interesting notion is that Fitzgerald writes about it in a somewhat sane way.  The essay is completely understandable and has a lot of logical perceptions of the world.  And by logical perceptions of the world I mean, keen insights into the human nature, even if it’s one that has a twist of broken reality.  The essay was written in four parts, for publication in Esquire, and in the third part, he addresses the fact that he is talking about his breakdown using the metaphor of “being cracked,” and tells the readers that he is giving “a cracked plate’s further history.”  If nothing else, read this essay because it’s a legitimate response to the harsh reality that people do ‘crack.’

“Once More to the Lake,” was White’s connection with how time does and doesn’t pass.  He discusses trips with his father to a lake in Maine where he passed many wonderful Augusts.  He decides as an adult to return to the lake with his son, and realizes that, minus the fact that there is now a paved road to the edge of the dirt road to the cabin, everything is how he left it.  He describes the place as literally the same.  He says, ‘There had been no years.”  Up until the very end of the essay, the reader (or at least this reader) felt comfortable in White’s description of the Lake and his trip.  At the end however, White realizes that despite the lake’s apparent permanence, life isn’t permanent.  He watches his son throw on his bathing suit to jump in the lake and says, “suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

Annie Dillard’s essay, “Seeing,” was a Montaigne-esque essay that collects Dillard’s thoughts on sight.  (Montiagne-esque in it’s non-linear nature; Dillard creates a cyclical essay that imposes new images and sub categories as the essay progresses and eventually returns to initial themes, etc)  The essay expands from Dillard’s perceptions of natural phenomenon and everyday creatures of life.  The driving force of Dillard’s essay is the personal aspect of the essay as a way to make connections in the essay for the reader.

Scott Russell Sanders’ essay “Under the Influence” is about is father’s alcoholism.  Sanders’ writes the essay to cope with the fact that as a 10-year-old he wanted to cure his father; he felt like he should be the solution to his father’s alcoholism.  Writing the essay to reconcile the fact that he now has a ten-year old son of his own, Sanders’ seeks to recognize and explore the notion that his own son wants to make him feel better when he’s down.  Sanders’ essay is about itself.  It is similar to Dillard’s essay in that cyclical nature.

Just a few notes.

Since I last posted, I have read Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Natalia Ginzburg.  Am I a changed person?  Not really.  Do I know more about the personal essay?  Yes.  Why?  Because Walter Benjamin is crazy.

The first essay of his that I read was “Unpacking My Library” and it was fairly sensical.  He is essentially writing to tell the reader of the essay that books represent order and disorder.  Benjamin’s sense of tidiness in explaining being a book collector reveals how form can match content.  That is, Benjamin’s writing on book collecting leads him to discuss more than just this topic, strictly.  But his form (a meandering set of logical strands) matches what he is discussing.

Benjamin’s other essay that I read, “Hashish in Marseilles” is totally trippy.  Probably because he is literally on a drug – Benjamin decides to write about his experience while being on hashish.  The resulting essay is The structure of the essay is completely nonexistent, but really, isn’t that a form in itself?  OK, maybe there is form to it then.  He even talks about how “unrolling a ball of thread” is completely joyful.  Benjamin’s work is intriguing and confusing while at the same time it examines the human condition while on drugs.  The work is an essay and not a memoir or biographical anecdote because it’s exploring Benjamin’s time on hashish.

Next up is Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “Blindness.”  Yes, he talks about being blind.  But more than that, he discusses other blind ‘fathers’ and ‘grandfathers’ of literature such as Homer and Milton.  He mentions many who are blind, and puts himself among the ranks, humbling his own blindness and ultimately recognizing “that bad things and some good things would happen to [him], but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words.  Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”  Thanks Borges.

Last I read Natalia Ginzburg.  If you haven’t read anything of hers, read “He and I” because it’s brilliant.  If for no other reason than the fact that her literary style is … well … simple.  But under closer review of her words there is a more complicated idea that relationships are more than just surface.  So here again we look at how form and content work to convey an idea.  The form is simple.  Ginzburg talks about her relationship with her second husband, using a basic form of “He … I …” For example: “He loves libraries and I hate them.”  From this statement and some of her others, her content could  be said to also be simple, but on the contrary.  Ginzburg is making a much deeper statement about the complexity of relationships (married or otherwise) and is doing so through a deceivingly simple form.  Wicked cool.  Check it out.

In the time since my last blog, I have read Richard Steele’s Twenty-four Hours in London, Samuel Johnson’s The Boarding House and The Solitude of the Country, Virginia Woolf’s Death of the Moth, and George Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys.  The progression of essays over the course of the past two weeks was interesting and increased in relatability.

Steele’s essay relayed his trip into London for a day when he wasn’t bored, but needed something to do.  Steele sets the tone of the essay by recognizing his insignificance at the beginning and explaining that observation is critical.  He doesn’t make a ton of realizations about the observations, more just recognizes that observing is key to discovery in general.  Or maybe more that observation is key to recognizing that the lives we live are both interconnected and separated.

Johnson’s essay The Boarding House discussed a landlady’s tribulations with boarders in a rented apartment that Johnson was renting.  He relayed her annoyance and disappointment in attempting to secure a sane boarder.  In his essay her character is more fleshed out than Johnson’s, but in doing so, Johnson reveals that he too is an observer.  And more so in his essay The Solitude of the Country, Johnson reflects on the type of people that retreat to the country to be introspective.  He explains that some go off to meditate, become more self-disci0plinary, or to learn.  At which point he explains that knowledge gained in solitude is not nearly as valuable or even worth it, simply because one is not around other academics or anyone of the like, in order to not just test the knowledge gained, but make it credible.  Johnson’s essays don’t necessarily contain a lot of “himself” per se, but he touches on existential beliefs and “The Maker” that can only be based on his own person.

Woolf’s brilliant essay, Death of the Moth, explores Woolf’s murder of a moth.  In the essay she describes the moth’s character, personality, and physicality, while almost personifying it.  As a person who is incredibly averse to most bugs, and especially moths, Woolf forced me to go outside of my own biases and get on the same page with her about this moth that was exploring the room she was in.  In this essay we see the insignificant (a little moth) becoming significant through the writing of this essay.  Woolf urges the reader to recognize through the death of this moth that not only will this moth die, but everything will die.  (Professor Rafferty helped me see that – I was more observant of Woolf’s fresh views of the moth, such as her descriptive nature: “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.”)

Finally, to the title of this post: Orwell.  Orwell’s essay Such, Such Were the Joys was the most relateable work I’ve read so far this semester.  But beyond that, Orwell’s essay accomplished what all that the previous essays had, while bringing an even more artful and dignified look at how the personal essay is developing.  Orwell writes about his time at a boarding school, Crossgates, and how atrociously he was treated and taught.  Lopate remarks in his short introductory bio on Orwell, that the author was “famous for his honesty”.  In his honesty though, is discovery not only about the world around him, as a boy, but about the world as a whole.  In telling about how he wet his bed a number of times when he first arrives at Crossgates, Orwell looks very clinically at how that was reprimanded and treated as something that a boy (or girl) had control over.  Through the lens of sin, Orwell discovers that he lives “in a world where it was not possible for [him] to be good.”  The reader’s level of identification with the author is incredible in this essay.  Even as someone who did not attend a boarding school (but attended a small Catholic private school for 7th-12th grade) I related to Orwell’s essay on not only an empathetic level, but a human level.  A level of recognition that the human experience, although not the same for every person, is familiar.  I might not have been forced to memorize dates of history or verses of Latin, but I struggled in school and didn’t understand why I learned some of what was taught to me.  Orwell’s language and description and scenes help us see that his experience is our experience, through his writing we can experience his time at Crossgates, which is what the personal essay should accomplish.

After reading what resembles the skeleton of the personal essay, I moved on to the the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne.  Phillip Lopate explains in a short bio on Montaigne that the writer would often “follow his thoughts no matter where they led him” (p. 45 of The Art of The Personal Essay).  More often than not, these thoughts lead Montaigne to examine his own view of the human condition and how the world shapes that view.  Even more common is his self-interaction with writing.  Montaigne looks into what he knows and why he knows it.

In his essay Of Books he discusses, among other genres, histories and historians.  Introducing the topic he explains that “man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place – the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him” (53).  Montaigne goes on to explain that delving into history, one discovers not only aspects of past culture and society, but also about human nature.  He makes an important discovery in explaining that history is not only important to write about, but that almost anyone can write a history.  Montaigne claims that “good histories are those that have been written by the very men who were in command in the affairs, or who were participants in the conduct of them, or who at least have had the fortune to conduct other of the same sort” (55).  Basically, anyone.  Montaigne’s inclusive nature and discovery that mankind doesn’t need elitest historians to “slant” their history, but rather just the “regular joe’s” is the initial signifier that this is truly where discovery in the personal essay is here to stay and will be a defining nature of it.

Looking at authors that Lopate calls the “Forerunners” of the essay, Seneca, Plutarch, and Shonagon, reveals more of a common viewpoint of the human conditions than I initially anticipated.  Seneca seems to ramble about everything from noise to maladies and asthma to death.  Plutarch, on a much more depressing note, writes to his wife on the death of their young daughter.  And finally Shonagon makes a list of things she finds “hateful.”  I found in all of them a sense of lived experience; each author wrote not only what they knew but also wrote themselves in what they knew.  That is, even though each essay contained narrative aspects that pertained to biographical and lived experiences, the human condition was contained in each of the essays.

Seneca’s essays titled “On Noise,” “Asthma,”  ”Scipio’s Villa,” and “Slaves,” are at first the author ranting about his grievances with society almost and then gradually the essays move to bigger topics.  His essay on Asthma first details some of his ailments, specifically breathing, in which he describes with asthma, you are “constantly at your last gasp.”  From there he explains that being at death’s doorstep isn’t really that big of a deal.  Well, he doesn’t phrase it that way; he asks, “So death is having all these tries at me, is he?  Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.”  Seneca challenges the notion that death is something we should fear and be anxious about.  He goes on to explain that death is all that is before us and all that follows us.  In discussing such an ailment as asthma, Seneca takes his essay  through what seems to be an intentional train of thought.

In Plutarch’s “Consolation to His Wife,” he writes to comfort his wife after their two-year-old daughter has passed away.  He not only does this with a tone lacking sentimentality but rife with adequate nostalgia but also manages to critique how grieving should be outwardly advertised.  Plutarch consistently commends his own wife for her virtues in carrying out his advised prescription.  What I found most notable in Plutarch’s commentary was a comment he made about how friends react to other friends’ emotions: “When people see a friend’s house aflame they extinguish it with all possible speed and strength, but when souls are ablaze they only add kindling.”  In other words, he’s reminding his wife that she needs to grieve to herself, almost, because it won’t help her to grieve around others.  Plutarch’s essay as a whole was formated like so: 1. This is what the world does 2. This is what the world should do.

Shonagon’s essay, “Hateful Things,” at first came off to me as a list of things she wanted to write down of people’s actions that she didn’t appreciate.  The way each item was ordered appeared to follow either a stream of conscious patter, or some other connection to the previous item.  For the most part her list is comprised of things she hates about men, or more specifically things they do.  Shonagon’s sentiments can be summed up in her line: “I hate people whose letters show that they lack respect for worldly civilities, whether by discourtesy in the phrasing or by extreme politeness to someone who does not deserve it.”  Her list retains an air of, this is how the world should work.

… Which is in line with what I’m looking at this semester: how do the author’s look at the world and how does that play into their essays.  Seneca, Plutarch, and Shonagon all tackled aspects of their world: noise, slaves, grief, and decorum … There was a lot more I could have touched on, but I’ll save that for my 10 page paper due before spring break …

So I had my first meeting with Professor Rafferty today.  We went over some of the introduction to Phillip Lopate’s book The Art of the Personal Essay.  Lopate goes over a lot in his introduction and so we skimmed a few things and narrowed down what I’m going to focus on this semester.  I kept coming back to defining the personal essay.  So everything is going to be stemmed from that.  In other words, what makes the personal essay.  I would just scan my notes it, but they don’t make sense how they are right now, so I’m going to attempt to discern them for this post:

1.  Approach the essay critically: what does the essay say, how does it say it, etc

2.  Often a writer writes a story that reveals truth.  When it comes to the personal essay, the author has many choices in how to reveal that truth.  What kind of decisions do authors make with regard to truth and how to display it in their work?

3.  How do essayists present themselves in their pieces?  How do they make choices about the persona they take on when they write?  What does that convey to the reader?  (Lopate talks about how “The harvesting of self-contradiction is an intrinsic part of the personal essay form”)

4.  Rafferty and I talked about how even when the essay isn’t about the author, but is written about another topic (such as my first essay for the semester, Seneca’s essay, On Noise), the essay is still essentially about the author.  I want to look at how the writer seeps into their work and why writing about the self isn’t always necessarily on something of oneself.

5. The human condition.  This is a big one.  I’m going to look at how the essay represents the world and therefore the human condition.

6.  How do essayists get around the egotistical nature of the essay.  Essentially, how do they get away with writing about themselves.

Each of these are really big and maybe I’ll realize I just want to focus on one or two, or stick with looking at all of them.  They’re just questions and notes to get me going for the semester.  My assignment for this week is to read through the rest of the “Forerunner” essays, which Lopate has at the beginning of his anthology.  I will then be ascribing qualities to them, distinguishing what intentional (or unintentional?) features make them important as forerunners and how do they relate to anything writers would work on today?  This post seems like all speculation and questions, guess I’ve got my work laid out for me!