Lately I’ve been concocting a theory about the relatively dramatic shifts within the creative nonfiction genre. Not that these types of changes are new; from the personal reportage that began as a way for journalists to convey more adequately the horrors of the Civil War (as opposed to simply recounting battle outcomes and numbers of the dead) to the New Yorker writers of the 1940s who wrote themselves into their pieces and felt it perfectly justified to create composite characters (Joseph Mitchell’s essay “Up In the Old Hotel” is a good example), the agreed-upon rules of nonfiction have changed over time—and continue to be controversial. But my thought is this: perhaps the shifts and development of the nonfiction genre can be seen as a way to address the need to create, in the words of essayist Susan Griffin, “another knowledge”—so that writers change the way material is read and subjects understood by transforming the mode of presentation.
Information theorists use the term “noise” to describe any
signal, interruption, or disturbance in the channel of communication that
alters the quality or quantity of information. Borrowing this idea may be
useful, since a variety of contemporary nonfiction structures seem to
strategically incorporate “noise.” The lyric essay is a prime example, making
use as it often does of short sections separated by white space. As Brenda
Miller writes in “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” the lyric essay
“has been called disjunctive, paratactic, segmented, sectioned.” At the beginning of a lyric essay, readers
are set afloat on a sea of seemingly unconnected statements. It is only as they
continue reading that the pieces begin to accrue meaning—meaning which is
deepened by the white space that allows, and even requires, a certain element
of participation from the reader.
A good example is Eula Biss’s essay “The Pain Scale,” one of
the first I remember encountering. The essay is a meditation on pain, inspired
in part by a physician’s request that she rate her chronic back pain on a scale
from one to ten (one being no pain and ten being the “worst pain imaginable”).
The impossibility of rating one’s pain will be obvious to anyone who’s been in
this situation, but in the essay the difficulty is expressed in such compelling
and expansive ways that the very conception of pain must be reconsidered. Biss
uses the scale itself as part of the structure, moving from one through ten, so
the small segments of text are further contextualized. But in keeping with
Miller’s description, the essay often relies on gaps that the reader may enter
in order to not only consider the gradations of pain, but also the crucial
missing elements of the scale and the inherent political connotations of rating
one’s pain. For example, having already introduced Dante in the first
section—“The deepest circle of Dante’s inferno does not burn. It is frozen. In
his last glimpse of hell, Dante looks back and sees Satan upside down through
the ice” (Biss 29)—Biss then moves on to point out the problem of the pain
scale being limited by one-dimensionality and its inability to take into
account the length of time one has been in pain. Once again, she invokes hell:
The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration. This may be its greatest flaw. A measure of pain, I believe, requires at least two dimensions. The suffering of Hell is terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.
So at first encounter, and during the first page or so of
reading, a lyric essay makes use of disjunction, a form of “noise,” and
incorporates disparate strands of narrative, information, and reflection. In
this way, the form becomes participatory, allowing writers access to a wider
variety of discursive modes and subject matter, and requiring the reader’s
involvement in the analytic process.
However, with each subsequent encounter with a particular
form, readers find similarities and adapt by constructing systems of interpretation;
so as new structures become familiar and interpretive strategies become
routine, writers must once again imagine new architectures. (I would add here
that I see this as parallel to the development of poetry—from Walt Whitman’s
free verse and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented lines combined with conventional forms
(notably the sonnet) to e.e. cummings’ poems that break not only lines but also
words and Susan Howe’s poems in That This, which are so fractured they are
partially unreadable and rely on the book’s introduction to make sense.)
At this point in time, chronicling the variety of forms
could go on for some time. Jenny Boully’s The Body is an essay completely
constructed from footnotes. It can be an unsettling narrative to read, since
one must imaginatively create the primary text by reading the secondary
information a writer would deem worthy of a footnote. For example, the eighth
footnote reads: “The confessions denoted here are lies, as it would be
senseless to list my true regrets. The true regrets are indexed under the
subject heading ‘BUT EVERYONE DIES LIKE THIS,’ found at the end of the text”
(4). We understand from this (and the previous footnotes) that the primary text
is likely a personal narrative that explores a relationship with a poet, as
well as perhaps others. Boully does occasionally give the reader small hints
for how to read her essay in her footnotes. In footnote nine, she writes,
“Given this information, the definition of ‘footnote’ is of particular interest
to the overall understanding of ‘bedlam.’ Consider, for instance, this
denotation: n.2. Something related to but of lesser importance than a larger
work or occurrence” (4). While directly addressing the form she uses, this
footnote—nor, I think, the accrual of footnotes—does not provide a routine
strategy for interpretation. The Body, then, might simply be a consistent and
varying continuation of noise.
There are too many other examples to mention—Ann Carson’s
“The Glass Essay” comes to mind, since it looks like a poem but “thinks” like
an essay, turning over an idea and coming at it from many angles, careful with
language but privileging the conceptual. Similarly, Eliot Weinberger’s “The
Dream of India” is not a typical lyric essay, but does rely on short segments
to come together to create the whole “dream” of the place. Perhaps it is our
dreams that are the best model for this noise I’ve been describing,
complicating our vision and insisting on constantly creating new architectures.
Insisting, too, that we find new models of interpretation every time our
internal noise is altered.
~ ~ ~
Works Cited:
Biss, Eula. “The Pain Scale.” The Touchstone Anthology of
Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Michael Martone and Lex Williford. New
York: Touchstone, 2007. 28–42. Print.
Boully, Jenny. The Body. Athens: Essay Press, 2007.
Griffin, Susan. “Red Shoes.” The Next American Essay. Ed.
John D’Agata. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003. 303–316. Print
Miller, Brenda. “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay.”
Tell It Slant. Ed. Brenda Miller and Susan Paola. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012.
233–234. Print.
~ ~ ~
Kate Schmitt earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University
of Houston. She is a visual artist as well as a writer, and her work has
appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Weight of Addition: An
Anthology of Texas Poets, for which she won an Editor’s Choice Prize. She has
also published her visual and written work in literary journals, including
Third Coast, The Florida Review, and Louisiana Literature. She grew up in New
Hampshire and Hong Kong and now lives in Florida, where she teaches creative
writing at Florida Atlantic University.
No comments:
Post a Comment