“The
test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in
the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” —F. Scott
Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
In the Babylonian “Dialogue of
Pessimism,” c. 1000 BCE, a master suggests an activity to his slave, the slave
heartily agrees, the master changes his mind, and the slave again agrees. This
pattern repeats itself in nine dialogues, with a shift in the tenth and last. While
“Dialogue of Pessimism” may seem to be a dialogue between master and slave, then,
it is in fact a dialogue between the master and himself. Every idea the master
has is echoed by the slave in such a way that, except in the final section, the
master changes his mind. This is why “Dialogue of Pessimism” is such a pleasing
example of the essay to those of us working in the form today: because it shows
a mind in conversation with itself, a mind whose two opposing ideas must jockey
for preeminence.
An anachronistic interpretation might
even take “Dialogue of Pessimism” for a parable about writing: the slave is the
master’s page, reflecting back his every whim with unexpected force and vigor.
The slave’s echo instigates the master’s doubt, just as the act of writing so
often results in changing one’s mind. The successful essay will capture this
mind-change in print, as “Dialogue of Pessimism” does.
The dialogue thus takes place also
between master-and-slave and master-and-slave: for example between “I feel like
causing some trouble, what do you say?” “I like the sound of that, sir. By all
means, let’s wreak some havoc!” and its opposite, “But evildoing’s not very
proper, is it?” “Well they either end up killed, or flayed alive and blinded …
no, it’s really not worth doing” (section five). And the pleasure of this doubled
or tripled dialogue—master/slave, master/master, or master-slave/master-slave—the
way it becomes a dialogue between dialogues, at once all and none of these
possibilities—is where my real excitement about this essay lies.
Often when we think of nonfiction—I use the term deliberately
here to mean that which resists falsehood—we think of a search for stable
meaning. Certainly when I was in college, writing an undergraduate thesis about
how autobiographical fiction would always make better autobiography than earnest
nonfiction, this was how I perceived it. Static meaning, I knew, was impossible,
and antithetical to the act of writing itself. Putting words into print may seem
to freeze them for perpetuity, but in fact their meaning will change infinitely
over time—so the very idea of nonfiction,
as I then understood it, was founded on the fundamental falsehood that one’s intended
meaning might be fixed permanently to the page.
Later, I’d encounter in Mikhail Bakhtin’s
concepts of monologism and dialogism another expression of what I took to be
the same idea: the multiply-voiced novel, precisely because it avoided the authority
of a single voice or view, could approach truth more effectively than the story
that used a single voice or vision throughout. I continued to believe that, by
refusing to moralize or deduce explicit meaning from its own story, fiction could
come closer to truth than nonfiction could. But Bakhtin’s framing of the matter
helped me understand that old idea in a new way. Now, I understood that there
were two types of fiction, monologic and polyphonic, and in my mind these
categories corresponded to two types of meaning-making: static writing, which aimed to present a unified, unchanging
meaning; and dynamic writing, where
any meaning lay in the tension between a multiplicity of voices—somewhere off
the page, in the mind of the reader.
What now seems so obvious—that
nonfiction, too, can be categorized this way—didn’t occur to me until sometime
around my first encounter with “Dialogue of Pessimism.” Here, as in the ideal
of the dynamic novel, the essay’s meaning lies between its voices. Even better,
the in-between space, like the voices themselves, refuses to be easily defined.
Does the essay’s central tension—the thing that holds it together and keeps us
reading on—lie between the master and slave, or between the master and himself?
Is the slave’s response to the master a true reply, or only a kind of
crescendo? Do the demarcations of “master” and “slave” even make sense here,
when with his words the slave seems to exert such power over poor, suggestible
mister master?
These instabilities delight me in a
way that I once believed only fiction could. And though it’s probably important
to note that this essay would not have been composed as or interpreted as “nonfiction”
in its day, its truth-seeking is clear from both the aphoristic nature of its
content (“He who has children secures his name in the future”; “He who starts a
family ends up ruining his house”) and the punch of its conclusion. That tenth
section’s break with the essay’s established pattern and its final words—“You
agree with me, then? Lower your neck for me, slave, and I’ll put us both out of
our miseries”; “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. But may I first say, sir: I am not as
miserable as you”—suggest some moral,
or meaning, to the dance of absurdity that has brought the reader to this
point. Unlike in the previous sections, here the master sticks to his original
idea, even after hearing the slave’s reply, and the slave achieves the direct
impudence that his heightened repetitions of the master’s ideas have been
threatening all along. Our contemporary reading of this as an essay is justified,
then, even if no discrete meaning, in these final lines, can be named. Even if—as
in all good literature—the essay’s meaning is left to interpretation.
The distinction between fiction and
nonfiction is one sometimes structured around action and reflection: the action
of fiction which, taken alone, offers no definite meaning, versus the reflection
of nonfiction, which interprets and so makes seemingly definite meaning of the
actions it observes. Just as dialogue is a form of action, though, in which two
characters appease, conspire, or contend with each other, so too is reflection
a kind of action, as unstable and open to interpretation as any struggle
between selves. The best essays, like “Dialogue of Pessimism,” will enact this
uneasy work of reflection, perhaps the most common and most human act of all.
All quotations from Emily Dimasi’s
translation of “Dialogue of Pessimism” by Ennatum of Akkad, published in John
D’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay,
Graywolf Press, 2009.
Helen Rubinstein is an MFA student at the University of Iowa.
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