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RANDOM
PROVOCATIONS —
THE PERSONAL ESSAY
AT UNIVERSITY I was one of those odd students who actually liked writing essays. It’s shameful, I know — such a solitary indulgence should not have been given in to — but now that I spend much of my life in this activity, I may as well admit that I enjoyed the teasing out of an idea, the propounding of a theory, the pulling together of various threads, the searching for words to say it all.
You will notice, however, that I have left out ‘research’. I did not enjoy research. The relevant textbooks had always been borrowed from the library already by far more organised and diligent students than I, it took ages to find anything useful in the odd, out-of-date texts left on the shelves, and when I did find something, I invariably failed to record the publication details for the footnotes and had to spend hours re-finding the scraps of information before the essay could be handed in. Even now, when there is endless availability of research sources on the Internet, part of me still resists the plunge into the sea of information and facts.
Ay, there’s the rub. The truth of the matter is that I do not have a passionate interest in, nor respect for, the facts. Fortunately for all concerned, I recognised this flaw in my character early on — indeed, before leaving high school. Although I achieved decent marks in the sciences, it was clear that I did not have sufficient respect for the facts to make a good scientist. Indeed, I would have been one of those reprehensible scientists who invent data to support the wonderful theory they have concocted.
It’s not that I don’t like facts perse. A few fascinating facts are necessary, even pleasurable, but my overruling passion is the mad leap from the fact into the ‘grand idea’. (Mine are not so very grand, more small meditations on odd fragments of middling ideas, but you know what I mean.) I like to circle around the idea, stretch it out, wriggle it about, snap it back, tease it out again and give it a good shake. That is why the endlessly elastic form of the personal essay is perfect — with only a fact or two in my possession, I can stretch and wriggle and tease to my heart’s content.
The personal essay is related to the academic or formal essay in that both explore ideas,but an academic essay requires that you have information and research and facts at your command. A personal essayist does not command anything; he wanders with great attention across the topic, regarding everything with wonder. A formal academic essay also demands objectivity — you are required to leave yourself out of the situation. A personal essayist is the opposite: she looks at everything from her own subjective point of view, and will often even tell stories about herself.
The personal essayist has something to say but is not quite sure what. She is like a Messenger who doesn’t know what the message is, who it is from, or where it is going. But she feels if she wanders around with it long enough, stares at it often enough, she will decipher what it is saying and where it needs to be delivered.
You may say that the personal essay is an excuse for every kind of intellectual laziness and self-indulgence, and maybe it is, but it is very charming at the same time. And it has the added advantage, in my eyes, of being closely related to memoir. If it is the academic essay’s disreputable, eccentric cousin, then it is also the memoir’s intellectually playful sibling and the child of confession — an expression of the urge to note as truthfully as possible the gap between the dream we have of ourselves, and what we actually are.
Genealogy
It sounds oxymoronic to say so, but it is often dull and dangerous to name ‘important people’ in any field. Dull because a list of names — without room for explanation or narrative — is unexciting, and dangerous because of the ire of those who know how many names have been left off the list. Still, a list also provides somewhere to start for the would-be essayist, an introduction to the complex extended family of the personal essay.
Where did the essay come from? Essai was the name given by the sixteenth century French writer Michel de Montaigne to his own style of writing — short explorations of himself in relation to his world. He took the word from the French essayer, meaning ‘to try’ or ‘to attempt’. He was attempting to know himself and thereby know humankind, believing that ‘Every man has within himself the entire human condition’.
Although he was the first writer to devote himself to it in post-Renaissance Europe, Montaigne did not invent the personal essay. At the beginning of the first millennium, the early Romans Seneca and Plutarch were writing essays; and in the tenth century in Japan,Sei Shonagon wrote her famous Pillow Book. Around the same time in China, Ou-yang Hsiu let his ‘brush write what it would’. In the early fourteenth century, Kenko, also Japanese, wrote The Tseurezuregusa, the original title of which comes from the expression ‘with nothing better to do’.
The English personal essay had a famous flowering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such names as Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson. The tradition was kept up in the early twentieth century by English and American writers: GK Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Walter Benjamin, Henry Thoreau, EB White and James Thurber. Later in the century and into the twenty-first century, the form has been kept alive by, amongst others, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes and Robert Dessaix. To read extracts from any or all of these writers’ works, look in Phillip Lopate’s wonderful — in fact indispensable — collection, The Art of the Personal Essay.
Substance
As Ou-yang Hsiu said, a personal essayist lets his brush write what it will. It is the literary form for the writer with an attic mind — everything is stored there, trash and treasure, and in no particular order. Your topic can be anything you find in that attic, often the smaller and less regarded, the better. Walter Benjamin wrote about the different ways one acquires books, a delight to anyone who is a compulsive acquirer of books, but not of world-shaking importance. I once wrote an essay on how to select a book-companion when travelling in foreign lands, again a topic of no great import. But in writing about the small, the daily, the ignored, the essayist is making a democratic claim for the wonder and complexity of all of life.
Wander into the attic or labyrinth of your mind and notice what is there. Not your large concerns about violence and peace, poverty and injustice, but the smaller, daily observations: the eternal battle between the tidy and the messy; the embarrassment people feel when they trip in public; the pleasures of obscure knowledge; the irritation of eternal cheeriness; the way people purse their mouths when they look in mirrors. In the hands of a personal essayist, these humble topics become an exploration of aspects of the human condition. GK Chesterton wrote about the foolishness a man feels when he is chasing his hat and it becomes a light but sharp meditation on the general absurdity of much of life.
However light the topic appears, there is always the struggle for truthfulness. Personal essayists oppose falseness, flattery, prudery, priggishness — any kind of dishonesty about the self. The American essayist EB White, quoted in The Art of the Personal Essay, wrote, ‘There is one thing the essayist cannot do — he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time.’ The essayist makes himself vulnerable and his best protection is truthfulness.
The personal essay is very ecologically sound because it is a way of using everything you know, of recycling every little scrap, not letting anything go to waste. That difficult book by a French writer you once read, that item you noted in the newspaper, your knowledge of odd historical facts, that childhood memory, the remark your son once made — they all connect to your subject. Thus, in finding a topic, what matters is that it has lain in the attic for a while. It must have gathered to itself various connections and associations. Perhaps it seems like a new thought — you have suddenly noticed the etiquette of pointing out scraps of food on someone’s face when out at restaurants, for example — but once you notice the new thought, you become aware that it has numerous associations. This, for me, is the test of a good topic — if, once you start tugging on it, a whole jumble of things comes falling out, landing on your head and clattering to the floor, then it is a good topic.
Voice
Now that you are standing there stunned, or perhaps knocked down into a foolish position by the assortment of material you have uncovered, you can hardly look or sound earnest and dignified about the matter. Carrying off this situation requires attitude. The personal essay is all about attitude — expressed as voice.
The voice of the personal essayist is often conversational, playful, confiding,amused. It can be serious but not plodding, nor complacent. If you are, by nature, self-satisfied and very sure about everything, then you possibly will not be a good essayist. As Montaigne suggested, an essayist is trying something, he is not sure. You can reveal your ignorance, your folly, your faults, not with a self-pitying desire for forgiveness, but with a humorous shrug — this is the way we all are. This questioning, intimate voice can be gently humorous, acerbic, world-weary, mock-bossy or as tender as Virginia Woolf writing about a moth fluttering to death against a window, but not earnest or pontificating. Nor is self-righteousness permitted, except to the ironic essayist who can do whatever he chooses.
The personal essayist can be as intimate and as subjective as she likes. An open frankness about topics not permitted in general conversation — anything from bodily functions to schadenfreude — can be very winning, allowing the reader to recognise her own thoughts and giving the curious pleasure of stripping away illusion, of seeing oneself in someone else’s mirror. You can even be frank to the point of shock — so long as it doesn’t destroy the reader’s trust in you. Be as cheeky, humorous, ironic as you like. You can also be as contrary as you like — a personal essayist thrives on contrariness. Phillip Lopate wrote a piece called ‘Against Joie de Vivre’, and manages to convincingly win the reader over to what looks at first like a curmudgeonly world view.
The essay is held together by the charm of the narrator,the ‘I’.Conversational language is part of the charm. The essayists will say things like ‘You might object’ and ‘Of course, you know’ — and the reader feels included in the conversation because she is being addressed. This is the pleasure and the danger of the essay. It is pleasant for the reader to feel confided in, often flattering to feel herself the recipient of considered thoughts, but there is the danger of the egotistical ‘I’ — crowding the reader.
The secret is to realise, in whatever you say as an essayist, that you are speaking not just for yourself. An essayist uses ‘I’ but, in a sense, she is really saying ‘we’. In fact, the ‘I’ is also sometimes modulated to ‘we’ or ‘you’, or for the more polite and correct essayists, ‘one’. This is a way of including the reader more closely, of acknowledging the reader as part of the conversation. A mixture of pronouns can work, but be careful not to be too random about who is speaking and who is listening.
At the same time, you have the chance to hold the floor, to be as witty and quick as you like with no one to interrupt you. It’s not a matter of ‘trying hard’ to be clever — it’s all about sitting back in the armchair or on the canvas chair on the balcony and relaxing with your idea.
The personal essayist is the perfect host, letting everything happen without seeming to do anything. He appears to be an idler, a wanderer,an onlooker;no one realises he has instigated the whole affair. He doesn’t rush about rearranging the furniture or organising anybody or making big speeches. He wanders quietly looking at things in the living room or out in the street or office or forest, and then idly begins to turn these things over in his mind.
The essayist agrees with RL Stevenson, who said, ‘Extreme busyness … is a symptom of deficient vitality … They (who cannot be idle) have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves to random provocations.’
Holding it together
If the voice of the idler — sorry, essayist — is that of an intriguing, challenging, amusing onlooker, it also provides the thread which holds the whole essay together. The voice of the ‘I’ and its characteristic attitudes and expressions creates the essayist’s ‘persona’, the strongest single element of an essay’s structure. The essayist cultivates aspects of himself — often a flaw such as a waywardness or clumsiness –– and makes it an identifying part of his writing persona. The American essayist James Thurber, for example, cultivated the persona of someone with a very short attention span, afflicted with ‘the permanent jumps’ as his great aunt used to say.
Throughout the various ‘random provocations’, the strong persona holds the reader’s attention, maintains a consistent perspective, wins the reader back if the challenges have been a little difficult. The persona needs to be flexible enough to move from gossip to wisdom and back again without jarring. The persona can address the reader, ask questions, challenge — in fact, be an engaging and interesting friend.
While an engaging persona is a necessity, it is not necessarily all. It is not a guarantee that you won’t end up with a ramble only marginally more interesting than Uncle Stan’s mishmash of tales that lasted all afternoon at a family get together last weekend. An essayist may use the same techniques as Uncle Stan — circling, digressing, meandering — but uses them consciously, always reaching towards some overall purpose. While an essayist might seem at times to be wandering off the point, he is actually elaborating, refining, teasing out.
The art of elaboration is a delicate one. It is not to be mistaken for mere embroidery, although I must say I have nothing against a little well-done embroidery — it can be very pretty. Elaboration, on the other hand, does not add pretty details, but unfolds, untangles, dismantles, what is already there. The personal essayist likes to pull out the tangle bit by bit, following various threads, finding origins and possible implications. This can involve examples, lists, quotes, historical references, anecdotes, personal history. It can be done step-by-step, but the essayist generally digresses and circles, moving from a childhood memory to yesterday’s item in the newspaper to a quote from Freud — bit by bit unfolding the whole curious piece of cloth.
While I am being metaphorical, it might also help to think of the structuring of an essay as a kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope breaks up the usual scene into many tiny pieces, but because of its inner geometry, puts the bits together in a new and rhythmic way. The essayist puts the bits of her world together in a new way so that the familiar is refreshed.
Or again, think of the essay as a ‘walkabout’, the Australian Aboriginal practice of breaking away from the restrictions of daily life and heading off into the wilderness for a period of renewal. Collect what you see as you go and hold it together with the shape and idea of the journey itself.
The essayist also tells tales. And I mean tells. Here is where you can ignore EM Forster’s maxim,‘Show, don’t tell’, for the essayist tells everything they know, have seen, have heard other people say. As an essayist, you are a scavenger of anecdote, family tales, memories, all told in your own way to serve the purposes of your essay.
You can use knowledge gleaned from formal education as well. If you know about the making of copper, or the theories of Jung, or the history of European painting, or quotes from Wittgenstein, then let them find their place in your structure. This is not to show how erudite you are, but odd knowledge is part of the eclectic nature of the essay. The essayist is never too proud to think that other people have not said it better than he can. Even our hero, Montaigne, wrote,‘For I make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the weakness of my understanding.’ The trick is in creating an atmosphere of easy access to learning through the conversational voice, which will allow you to use such quotes or extracts without appearing pretentious.
Play, free-associate — these are your formal practices when you write a personal essay. I nearly said ‘sit down to write’,but I invariably find that I begin personal essays when I am out strolling. There is something about the easy movement of walking and the changing scenery that creates a model of the personal essay. It is not a static form, nor even a pre-existing form; it is found in movement, in play. Start writing because an idea or observation interests you, then follow any connections or associations as they arise.
The essayist needs to be a trusting creature, both in terms of pursuing ideas and finding structure. The essay is not a definite form, like a sonnet, nor is it even as recognisable as a short story, so you need to believe that you can head off into uncharted territory with no precise destination — and still get there. I usually start by jotting down some of the main landmarks, with no real idea of where I will end up, but somehow I always do know when I’ve got to wherever it was I was going. There is always an ‘epiphany’ as James Joyce called it, the aha moment — aha, this is where I meant to get to all the time.
How long one can permit oneself to wander is a question that needs to be faced. Personally, I find it fairly easy to decide — I stop when I am done, when I have got to my destination. It is much easier than deciding when a short story or a memoir or novel is done. There is an inevitability about the end of an essay which is easy to recognise. In some sense, I have an idea before I start that this will be a short wander, perhaps 1000 to 1500 words, or a long wander, 3000 to 5000 words. Of course, there are book length wanders as well, but these are generally made up of a number of shorter journeys.
While there may be a series of small revelations throughout the essay, its full meaning is not usually revealed until the conclusion — probably because the essayist herself did not know the answer until she got there. This is the delight of the essay; you really are trying something out, you do not know where you are going to get to. If you already know, there is nothing to try, no essai.You are working not with a pre-existing shape, not with a whole monolithic form, but a form which can endlessly break into smaller pieces and reform, like pieces of mercury fallen on a table. And Mercury, after all, was the messenger of the gods.
READING
Get the drift
by Patti Miller
Choosing the right book to take with you on your travels in another country is a delicate matter — it being a given that you want to take a book to read, not just a travel guide. It’s a bit like choosing the right travelling companion; you don’t want to arrive and then find your book likes to party every night while you want to gaze meditatively at temples in the moonlight, or conversely, your book wants to think deeply about the meaning of the Tao, and you plan to loll sensuously under the coconut palms.
Clearly, the right travelling companion book will be in tune with your experience and will heighten and interact with it. It will also have the capacity to refresh when you have become weary, give strength when you’re coming undone, and hopefully, give you perspective when you’re feeling ill-tempered with the difficulty of everybloody thing in this damn country.
The logical method for selection is to find a book which relates to your destination: if you are travelling in Canada, then Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro; if South America, then Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges; if San Francisco, then Armistead Maupin, or if Dublin, then James Joyce. But there is a chemistry between person and place and book which can be unpredictable. You don’t really know how you will react in a certain place, nor how you will react to your book companion in such a place.
That’s why I suggest the Slow Drift Method of Book Selection, which I came upon after a few false, and faulty, choices. The Slow Drift is a traditional time-honoured method, its origins lost in the dust of libraries past (I make no claims to having invented it), which, with a little practice, can be used by anyone. It requires the application of a slow, deep, almost non-attention — the Drift. Then, and only then, will you be able to discern the unspoken intuitive level of connection you need with a true companion.
The way to apply the Slow Drift is to stand in front of your own bookcase or in a library or bookshop and slowly walk up and down, looking at the covers of the books but not thinking about anything. When you sense any stirring in the region of your solar plexus (the area under your ribs), take the book in front of you down, open it and read a sentence or two. If the words correspond with the sensation in your solar plexus, then this is the right book. If not, then return to the Slow Drift. It is very simple.
Using this method you can still end up with the same book as the logical method. For instance, for my first trip to Paris, it didn’t take much Drifting at all to choose Colette’s Rainy Moon. Although, when you think about it, why was Colette any more logical a companion than dozens of others? What about Balzac for some historical realism, or Barthes for a dose of semiotics, or Anaïs Nin for the claustrophobic narcissism of the Artist? Or the Paris-Americans — Edith Wharton, Henry James, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein … But, the Slow Drift had resulted in Colette, so I put Rainy Moon in my bag. The choice was rewarded even as I flew over the Timor Sea. When I came to the line ‘I found myself possessed of a more provident attitude for dealing with improvidence’, I laughed out loud and knew that Colette and I would have a superb time in Paris.
Sometimes the Drift results in a choice which seems illogical altogether. A few years ago I was making a sentimental journey back to New Zealand — as a young woman setting out to see the world more than a few years ago, I had hopped across the Tasman Sea, lived in a commune on the Coromandel Peninsula for several months, had a child, and not seen much of the rest of the world for too many years. I’d not wanted to return, fearing I would be caught again in New Zealand’s damp green embrace, but now I was old enough, nostalgic enough, to want to visit my lost youth.
I was also in the middle of writing a novel and needed some distance from it, a forced separation. I was feeling my way in the dark with it, not knowing where or how the story would finish but trying to trust that it was going somewhere. When the Slow Drift method resulted in Leaning Towards Infinity, Sue Woolfe’s novel of ‘mathematics and motherhood’, I couldn’t see how it connected to either my communal past or my present need. And Woolfe had given me the book to read in manuscript form. How could I treat it as a companion when I had seen it partially formed, undressed, made intimate comments about it to its creator? I thought the Drift must be wrong. I moved along to New Zealand writers, to my old love, Katherine Mansfield. But there was no silent response under my demanding gaze. It was no use; Infinity it was.
It flew to Christchurch with me, accompanied me through the wild autumn mountains around Queens town, traversed the deep mysteries of the fiords, wandered along the edges of milky jade lakes and was an agreeable companion, but not an intimate one. Then one night we stayed at Mount Aoarangi, the Cloud Piercer, and a snowstorm blew in as we lay snug in bed. I went to sleep with the snow and wind swirling past the window.
In the middle of that dark night, a line from Infinity suddenly woke me. It seems, she’d say, as if humans have been prepared for something other than survival. I lay awake with the sentence, the wind howling, the snow gusting, seeing my own youth here, and the half-finished novel at home, small streams in the ancient flood of yearning for ‘something other than survival’ which has so distressed us all. I felt pierced, as if by a kind of avenging angel’s sword, woken up to the mystery of existence. There is no better service a book-companion can give.
The Drift method of selection is a very subtle thing, however. The ego is always trying to take charge and can even imitate the Drift. It happened last year when I found myself organising to go to Bali. I didn’t really know why I was going — I did need a break but I knew it was western indulgence to go so far just to relax. And I felt snobbishly embarrassed at going to a tourist trap with so many fellow Australians.
In this frame of mind, I chose The God of Small Things. I had already started reading it and knew that for my taste Arundhati Roy’s writing was over-lush, probably overwrought, but thought that this would be in tune with a Hindu tropical island. It was also a beautiful-looking book with an intriguing title, so it would signal that I wasn’t a typical Oz yob lying around the resort pool. It’s exactly this kind of snobbery and pretension which pollutes the Drift, and even as it was packed, I had a sense that this was not going to be my true companion.
At the airport bookshop I used the Slow Drift again and found myself holding Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters. Rationally, it didn’t seem the right book at all — it was set in northern Italy — but instantly I knew that this was my true book-companion. I started reading as we flew and was excited and calmed (both at once is possible — all good literature does it) by his eye on the world. I read of his meeting with a well-dressed middle-aged woman on a train as he headed into northern Italy, and was reminded of two well-dressed middle-aged women I had watched folding tea-towels into bon-bon and flower shapes on a train from Venice years ago. As these elegant women created tea-towel kitsch on the train, I had experienced an overwhelmingly delicious shivery sensation down my spine, a more intense experience than any of the marvels I’d seen in Venice had induced. It was the electricity of really noticing the every-day.
The ‘woman on the train’ image jolted me into wakefulness, but all during the days and nights in Bali, as sacred and sensuous as one could desire, even with the noise, traffic and hawkers breeding on us pale tourists, Night Letters continued to be the perfect companion. Each evening I watched a Balinese man light oil lamps on stakes around the rice paddies to keep the mosquitoes away; in the dim light, bats swooped over the rice, darting with more jagged movements than birds. These were the ordinary things of daily life on Bali. When you are travelling it’s easy to become jaded with the accumulation of marvels you are witnessing, to forget that you are seeing the ordinary things of other people’s daily lives.
Like all good companions, Night Letters reminded me of the exultation of truly ‘bearing witness’, observing and considering each moment; the moment when the masseuse plucked a stray marigold petal from my oiled body; when the backs of the kecak dancers gleamed in the moonlight; when the spicy meal I had at lunch time came up in a brilliant orange curve as I trod water on a coral reef. Of course, this last is stretching the demands you can make on a companion, but even so, a kind companion will tolerate the mess and even confess their own moments of disorder.
Disorder and alienation and losing direction are part of travel, along with joy and revelation. I am at a point in my life where I have no particular journeys planned, or rather, don’t have any clear idea of what direction to take next. A number of times in his travels across Italy, Dessaix offers the idea of following at random an unknown person so that conscious choice and decision are subverted, a kind of giving way to the forces of the universe. This is what I mean by the Drift as a method of choosing — a submission, at least for a moment, to what the world has to offer you. It really is the best way to select a travel book.
In this newspaper essay, advice on how to select a travel book becomes a metaphor for the philosphical notion of living in the moment. It maintains a light conversational tone — I had hopped across the Tasman — but manages at the same time to explore existential themes — woken up to the mystery of existence. The idea of the ‘book-companion’ holds the essay together.
WRITING EXERCISES
1. A week’s worth of thoughts
Write a list of the things you would think about in a week. Your list needs to be democratic and non-judgmental — that is, include things you may consider shallow as well as your intellectual or aesthetic thoughts. Include anything from choosing which shoes to wear, to the passage you read in Proust. Select one from the list and see if it starts pulling other associations out with it. Jot down whatever you think of in relation to it. Write a paragraph for each association. (30 minutes)
2. Another week’s worth
Write a list of the things you might think about in a week. As above, your list needs to include anything and everything — do not screen for suitability. This time, write about as many of the topics as you can, using as your central idea ‘the things I think about in a week’. Imagine it as a journey through your mind over a week— try it out. See where it goes — perhaps it will yield a new insight into life. Perhaps not. (1 hour)
3. Hateful things
Write a list of ‘hateful things’ — things that annoy or irritate you generally or in any particular situation. It could be a list of things that irritate you at parties, or in lifts, or at the hairdresser’s. Write a paragraph on each and see if they join up to become an essay on the minor difficulties of being human. (30 minutes)
4. Mirror
Look at yourself in a metaphorical mirror. Notice something characteristic in the way that you think or go about things. It could be anything from the way you love idiosyncratic or useless information to the way you always tidy the apartment when your mother is coming to visit although you are a grown woman yourself. See if you can use this observation as a way of exploring an aspect of yourself and others. Jot down associations such as other people you have observed with this same trait, scientific research on the trait, literary connections, news items — anything in the attic of your mind. Try out the various associations and see where it leads you. (30 minutes)