So, what I’ve been wanting to talk about is how I’ve become improbably captivated by essay writing during the process of applying to grad school (which is over and done! yay!)
To begin at the beginning, I should admit that a tome called “The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present,” has followed Jon around since college, and even made its way out to Oregon; despite the offputtingness of its large size and dull, textbook-like cover, it still seemed to have made itself a place in my boyfriend’s heart. Still, I never felt tempted to crack this 770-page book until incident this fall that I’m going to call “the bath of desperation.”
You can probably infer from the name that I was desperate to figure out how to write a personal essay (which, like the devil, goes by many names, including “statement of purpose” “statement of plans” and “candidate statement”). A calming bath, it occurred to me, would be just the thing to soothe my little brain. I’m not sure where this idea came from; I hadn’t done it before and I had none of the requisite “products.” In lieu of bubbles, I went to the bookshelf to find something to look at besides the ceiling. That’s how I ended up wrinkling the pages of Jon’s anthology with my pruny, wet fingers.
I was inspired just reading the introduction:
“The hallmark of a personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue–a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.”
In the Introduction to this book, Phillip Lopate uses some of the techiniques of the personal essay to explain just what it is that makes a personal essay compelling and functional. The intimacy, the frank, conversational tone, the admitted personal style, the very human, rambling shape of the personal essay all set up a relationship between reader and writer regarding the writer’s honesty. The style of the personal essay admits the style of its narrator, who, in turn, is promising the reader that he will use the essay to go about “delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible.”
“The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorbtion in return for the warmth of his or her candor.” In my own crude formulation, the personal essay equals the high-art version of a blog.
Which is why I thought it fitting to share this thought in this forum. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to plunge right in, and the noun “essay” has its roots in a verb meaning “to issue forth.” An essay once described the act of riding your horse forth from your stronghold, in search or pursuit of–
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4 comments:
Elsberry (tee-hee!), thanks for that. A very relevant "testing," essai: french. I like your quote- "the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue–a friendship.." I've been wondering the link between friendship and fiction/art for a long time. Maybe all friendships are fictions, in the best possible sense- our friends are our invented critics, our selves but better; and in the process of imagining a friendship with someone we've liberated the friendship from the dry world of function..
Our friends are our creations? There's a certain amount of unavoidable (painful) grandiosity along with a certain amount of truth. At this point it seems scientifically verified that what we see is our brain's creation, and that effect must be multiplied for those things that we "see" so repeatedly that we no longer see them but laminate our impressions onto them.
I am interested in the gaps between everyday thought and accurate thought. If metaphorical logic could be trusted, an impulse would be able to leap those gaps; and the next time, it would be easier; and the next time it would be easier; until we can access the truth with ease.
Lately Travis and I (I think having read it somewhere?) have been talking about the way the subconscious is becoming a new kind of mythology. In the absence of an all-powerful god(s) who controls our life, we have an invisible aspect of ourselves that is behind our actions and shaping our lives. And by calling it a mythology I don't mean to make it any less true. But I think its creating a new kind of backdrop for conceptualizing the old problem of meaning--the way we create and recreate ourselves and our visions of our friends without having a conscious control over it, as well as the desire to overcome ourselves, to get to the truth. The personal essay in an interesting format because it tries to create an intimacy through honesty, but is still very admittedly taking part in the creative process.
In response to Heidi,
I see three selves in your formulation:
The written self (the self as it is presented, and perceived)
The concious self
The subconcious self
It's really interesting to think about the ways in which these selves interact. When I read, one thing I recognize my(concious)self doing is trying to detect the force of the concious and subconcious in the written persona of the writer. Both are necessary. I want conciousness to shape the written piece: this makes me trust the writer. But I also find it delightful to identify what I perceive as flashes of the subconcious . . . I guess because it's humanizing?
Lila's draft comes to mind as something I've read lately that has a great balance of the different types of self: artfully created, the reader inhabits it naturally as a body. (Heidi, your draft seems more shaped by forces outside the self . . . )
I do regret the way the words concious and subconcious burden a poem. I especially hate, and cannot seem to avoid, using the word "self." I like the word soul but cannot use it because it says much more than I mean. Until I invent some new words I do not think I can address this issue further in poetry, as my brain poems proved . . .
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