Emre covers a number of books in the piece I'm about to link to.
I've seen the book mentioned a couple of times at Mockingbird and no sentences excerpted from the book could convince me to actually read the book. I can get behind "lyrical" but while I'm sure that those who have tried reading this blog would not regard the posts as wonderfully meandering the aim here isn't to meander. For instance, "If earning a fresh perspective on the past and growing into something new are the goals of the personal essay, Durga Chew-Bose achieves them both with grace in Too Much and Not the Mood. " ... I don't think the goals of a personal essay are earning a fresh perspective on the past and growing into something new. Those may be side effects of writing some personal essays ... .
Emre, as we'll see, was not charmed by the book. There's a bit of a mood-setting wind-up but it's not too long before:
http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/merve-emre-two-paths-personal-essay
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But what makes “Heart Museum” so dispiriting is not the quality of Chew-Bose’s prose. Rather, it is how the essay not only celebrates its aesthetic failings, but also insists that these failings testify to the author’s success as a sensitive ethical thinker. If the prose is clunky, if the posturing is overindulgent, if the plot is lost and never found, then, Chew-Bose would have us believe, we have no recourse as readers but to grant how the formlessness of her writing—she would call it the “breathlessness” or perhaps the “messiness” of it—forces us to reflect on timeless quandaries about life and art. [emphasis added] Is the writer a reliable witness to the past? Can she ever truly know the human beings she writes about? Can she ever truly know herself? Chew-Bose’s answer to all these questions is “I guess? Sort of.” “Is there anything better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated?” she concludes in “Heart Museum.” “The marvelous, hard-to-spell-out convenience of what’s indefinite.” These are pretty phrases that mean nothing and teach nothing. Their only purpose is to “clinch” (to echo Chew-Bose) the author’s status as a beacon of complex selfhood. But for whose benefit?
The scope and focus of the first-person industrial complex is something I've blogged about a little bit in the past but this essay is interesting for pointing out that we have too short a perspective on just how ancient the first-person narrative essay is and that the internet saturation of these personal narrative essays may trick us into thinking the vintage of this genre is younger than it is. So, let's get back to Emre:
In a sense, there is nothing unique about the pose Too Much and Not the Mood strikes—and this is the real problem. For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy. [emphasis added] Messy feelings, messy reality, messy relationships, the messy unfiltered stuff of life; the personal essayist evacuates all in one, big messy outpouring of repurposed clichés about love and life and pain and joy and men and women and whatever other themes readers of these essayists are, by now, primed to receive as universal human concerns. “Style is character,” Joan Didion proclaimed in her 1979 essay collection The White Album. However imprecise this statement of equivalence may be, one suspects that it has been thoroughly internalized by personal essayists today who elide aesthetic judgments—judgments about the formal or stylistic features of prose—with ethical and subjective ones that assess the character of the human being who would produce such prose.
The eager transposition of the aesthetic into the ethical is not new; nor is criticism of the personal essay’s manipulation of its readers (its intimate “grossness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once sniffed). The form has always grappled with the many valences of the term “personal” and the kinds of authorial projections it allows. Taking an unapologetically snobbish tone in her 1905 essay “The Decay of Essay Writing,” Virginia Woolf lamented how the nineteenth-century democratization of literacy had flooded the literary marketplace with personal essays. A new class of writers, blinkered by the “amazing and unclothed egoism” that came from asserting one’s importance through reading and writing, thought nothing of sacrificing “their beliefs to the turn of a phrase or the glitter of paradox,” Woolf complained. Theirs was a mass demonstration of newly acquired cultural capital over and above any aesthetic or political purpose they may have had for putting pen to paper in the first place. “You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast in the form of the essay,” Woolf wrote, scolding those middle-class writers who would dare leave their grubby prints on the windowpane of good prose. If one can set aside her disdain, there is a larger point: too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.
If, in the early twentieth century, the “I” of the personal essay bespoke the educated man or woman, then today it inaugurates the mindful one; the subject whose apparently infinite capacity for self-reflexivity trades the precision of language and thought for “the baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose” (Chew-Bose again). Yet the shamelessness with which the bargain is brokered these days can leave a reader feeling like something cheap and tawdry is at work: a shortcut hacked through the dense thicket of form and feeling. More than the lack of conviction or the preciousness of prose, it is the peacocking of the author that chafes. What should we make of writing that serves primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to present the author as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others? It is the literary equivalent of the ill-mannered man who, thinking himself to be very mature, declares, “I may be an asshole, but look how self-aware I am about it.” [emphases added]
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That right there might be the most succinct distillation of the problems with what has been known as the personal narrative essay or the first-person industrial complex content. We'll skip ahead a bit:
Often described by her critics as a “distinctly” or “utterly unsentimental” writer (and human being), Gaitskill would have kept good company with the women Deborah Nelson assembles in her magnificent book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. Nelson’s study of the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality celebrates those icy, unsparing, and acid-tongued female artists who were committed to “looking at painful reality with directness and clarity and without consolation or compensation.” Many of these women depicted their own lives in uncomfortable detail: Mary McCarthy’s religious education, Susan Sontag’s breast cancer, Joan Didion’s loss of her husband and daughter. Others, like Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, documented the horrors of industrial modernity: the miseries of factory work, the devastations of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Yet none believed that the representation of human experience, no matter how complex or agonizing or imponderable, demanded emotional expressivity. Indeed, for them, compassion for the human condition required the opposite: the evacuation of emotion from art. [emphasis added]
Their unsentimentality was not a personal failing, Nelson claims, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy; a “lifelong project” that perceived, with great and terrible urgency, the limits of empathy after World War II. For the women of Tough Enough, dwelling on the emotional effects of an experience often occluded painful reality, shrouding one’s objects of criticism behind the cheap veil of sentiment and self-regard. Bringing an audience to tears was a parlor trick that preyed on people’s perverse attraction to suffering—their ability to take any awful situation, no matter how remote, and make it about their uniquely hurt feelings. Yet pain and suffering were as ordinary as living and dying, and absent-minded feelings of woundedness and pity and even love were the most illusory ethical grounds on which to build a shared world. “Generally speaking, the role of the ‘heart’ in politics seems to me altogether questionable,” wrote Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem after he chided her for the “heartless” tone she took toward the Jews in Eichmann in Jerusalem. “You know as well as I how often those who merely report certain unpleasant facts are accused of lack of soul, lack of heart. . . . We both know, in other words, how often these emotions are used in order to conceal factual truth.”
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Years ago when I contributed comments to The Wartburg Watch there were a few months where people reacted to my comments as though I were an apologist for Mark Driscoll. That was a frustrating period of time. It seemed that in spite of the fact that I had proposed that the disciplinary process of a member had been poisoned by double standards, conflicts of interest, retaliatory ploys and other things there were people who regarded my comments with distrust. Why? As best I could tell it was because I refused to denounce Mark Driscoll in the emotionally charged way that some others had (and still do in a few contexts). Demonstrating that the arc of Driscoll's public narratives began to form irreconcilable differences that raised questions as to the veracity of the larger narratives wasn't the same thing as categorically declaring "Mark Driscoll is evil". I wasn't willing to say that then and I'm not even really willing to say that now. I think Mark Driscoll reached a point where he betrayed every principle he once claimed to hold dear and that he compromised his ethics and integrity well past the point where I think a Christian can regard him as having any legitimate basis for serving in pastoral ministry of any kind. His history of engaging in what I now regard as propaganda of agitation and integration is also considerable.
But I resolved to take a course in which I did what I could to lay out what the history of Mars Hill was in a way that let people read through it all and come to conclusions about whether to stay or leave. I didn't tell people to leave. I suppose in a way that gets to the next part of Emre's piece I'm interested in quoting:
... More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer. The contract is not necessarily an emotional or intimate one, but, like all contracts, it is mutually constructed and it demands clarity. Just as the writer commits her imperceptible acts of cognition to language, asking the reader to accept this language as a poor proxy for her inner life, so too does the reader acknowledge and participate in this fantasy of self-construction. Together, reader and writer act as co-creators of a new fictional persona, the knowing self. This task is impossible, or at least impossible to derive pleasure from, without particularity and concreteness—a sense of reciprocity and respect.
To this I would add a warning a journalism professor shared decades ago about the editorial, that nobody actually cares what you think, they want to know what the facts are. If there's a thread in the personal narrative essay as a literary and critical form it's that it is in some sense usually some kind of journalism. I would venture to say that that is the contract between reader and writer with a non-fiction short form such as the essay. This doesn't mean that every essay has to inform or teach, exactly, but that we simply don't read non-fiction the way we read fiction. The way a music professor I knew years ago might put it is to say we must never underestimate the obvious. We can say that life is messy and ineffable in an essay and that is one thing, but at another level a baby who has had a blow out moment has a full diaper and that is a situation that is messy and, for the baby, ineffable. But we are not babies ... or at least supposedly we aren't.
I suppose the thing that these kinds of essays about personal essays revolve around but do not generally directly address is something I found myself thinking about a lot as I wrote for years about the height and decline of Mars Hill. Jesus said that you will know the truth and the truth will make you free, but Jesus didn't say that once you know the truth it will make you look awesome. In the wake of the collapse of Mars Hill there were all manner of predictable thinkpieces providing pious bromides for the red and the blue and the left and the right and the faithful and faithless. My argument then as now is to say this--if the lessons you want to impart to the world about what happened at Mars Hill Church in Seattle are even the least bit self-exonerating, self-justifying lessons then you learned nothing at all and are out to sell us something. What the may often turn out to be is a new contribution to the first-person industrial complex or the personal narrative genre.
The blight of the personal essay or the first-person industrial complex, at least as Emre's writing works toward examining that, is that it is full of people who want to arrive at self-exonerating "truths". When that path is taken up the path is a literary sacrament of self-vindication that we don't really need.
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