Dr Merve Emre - The Impersonal Essay

hi everybody thank you for joining me today the title of my talk is the impersonal essay and it is the first part of a longer essay on the history and the aesthetic function of the personal essay as a genre that will be appearing sometime next year in the cambridge companion to the essay edited by evan kindly and cara whitman so the talk as it is structured begins with an epigraph and that epigraph comes from theodore adorno's the essay as form and here it is the essay form however there's some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand to speak of the personal essay is to speak of a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce in a loud almost indignant clamor to the world at large the offending element is rarely the essay as a form it passes unscathed but its apparent content the personal a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false prophecy does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality writes theodor adorno in the sas form consulting even the soberist of entries in the oxford english dictionary does nothing to shape the dismissal and suspicion the personal evokes if anything it only intensifies it the personal we are reminded is what is individual and private its concerns are bodily physical it signals the presence immediacy and particularity of a singular entity not an abstraction or an impersonal force nothing we might associate with social or collective cognition list of antonyms to the personal essay might include the structural essay the communal essay the public essay the political essay the critical essay or the impersonal essay or as adorno insinuates in the epigraph to this talk the good essay which prioritizes elucidating the matter at hand instead of telling stories about people as bad essays do what makes essays that tell stories about individual people their bodies their personalities and their private lives bad for adorno as for walter benjamin whom adorno names is his favorite essays essays about people betray an irresponsibility to their true object the private individual the private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell no matter how distinctive original or purely bizarre the elements of that story may be the private individual is not a proper name neither virginia woolf nor elizabeth hardwick not joan didion david foster wallace john jeremiah sullivan or whomever you consider to be your favorite personal essayist it is not the essays author or its narrator rather it is the idea that animates all of these figures the powerful and unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity the private individual is the ideological apparatus that puppets the genre's first-person mode of address the eye that posits itself as both the subject and the object of its own understanding and asks its readers to receive it as such now most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its eye is by both necessity and choice and artful construction watch they say as it flickers in and out of focus as a simulacrum a chameleon a made up self a distorting representation of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers and i should say that those descriptors all come from different people writing about the personal essay ranging from edward hoagland to karl krause to philip lopey yet having marveled at the first person's aesthetic flexibility and freedom few critics if any put this claim through its dialectical paces what if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction an illusion as the i with which it so prettily speaks what of stressing the artifice and ornament of the first person were a clever if largely unconscious strategy for masking the personal essays problematic the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say what if the conceptual limitation of the genre or its interpolation of both reader and writer into the ideological process of individualism it's glittering veneer of expressive freedom its seductive promise of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject what if no performance of stylists could stylish confession or sly concealment no amount of fashionably anguished hand-wringing over the sa's complicity or her privilege could shake this ideology loose what if it only intensified its enchantments to answer these questions about the personal essay its motive address and the private individual that enlivens both requires a biography of sorts though assuredly not a personal one according to walter benjamin the private individual was conceived sometime between 1830 and 1948 during the reign of louis philly the citizen king and first bourgeois monarch under his rule the european ruling class and the middle class came together to realize their defining goal the separation of the public from the private domain where as marx observes the bourgeoisie could retreat to rejoice in property family religion and order while nevertheless continuing to participate in the exploitative politics of the public realm once labor had been cordoned off from life once the productive activity of work had been separated from the apparently unproductive experience of dwelling the private individual was born he was quite naturally blind deaf and dumb to his own history as a derivative creature an artifact of political and economic processes that he possessed little incentive to interrogate the domestic sphere was his incubator his sanctuary from any commercial and social considerations there he could retreat wide-eyed and muelling to probe what he earnestly believed to be his thoughts lodged in his self his mind his body his home the private individual who in the office needs to deal with reality needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions that he wrote in the arcades project explaining how the material ownership of private property mirrored the illusory ownership of subjectivity he continued from these derived the phantasmagorias of the interior which for the private man represents the universe in the interior he brings together the far away and the long ago for benjamin the best representative of the private individual was the collector the true resident of the interior as an architectural space of living and an existential space of being for us it might be the personal essay collection which now that the apartments are smaller and decluttering is in props up the same ideological fiction the purpose of this talk then is to argue that the personal essays historic and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good or unique but that is primordial that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that give rise to it this is a lie the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language art and education as adorno explains in the sas form and this is adorna the lie extends from the elevation of historical concepts in historical languages to primal words to academic instruction and creative writing and to primitiveness pursued as a handicraft to recorders and finger painting in which pedagogical necessity acts as though it were metaphysical virtue the personal essay appears as the purest most unflinching and degraded expression of this lie certainly more so than fingerprinting or playing the recorder i think this is for the simple reason that in order for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity adorno writes and so he concludes such essays confuse themselves with the same futon with which the enemies of the essay form confuse it by my account then the personal essay is a modern formation and a formation of modernity it is a wholly different creature from the essay birds by montane in 1570 and nurtured through the 17th century by sir thomas brown thomas fuller and abraham cowley each of these essayists is less willing than the next to disentangle the knowledge of the individual from the condition of man or nature a commitment reflected by how their prose slides with wonderful abandon into and out of the various third person singulars and i spent an afternoon running all of montane's essays through one of those websites that basically counts all of the words for you and it very helpfully told me that he and one appear with greater frequency than i across all ten volumes of the essays the i with and of which the personal essay speaks proclaims its distinctiveness from the wheeze that crowd the 18th century periodical essays of joseph addison and richard steele as well as the they throng the 19th century metaphysical disquisitions of lee hunt and william haslet it bears a distant family resemblance to charles lamb's essays of eliah the quintessence of the spirit of bourgeois intimacy according to maria paz yet if lamb begets the line in the mid-19th century and that would make sense given the kind of historical framing that i've offered for the personal faith then he nevertheless takes some care to thwart its autobiographical mode of referentiality writing under a pseudonym lets him throw a small but shattering wrench into the personal essays production of individual personhood its demand for a single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontestable readability of his proper name as paul deman put it in a related discussion of autobiography no one has approached the essays of elia writes virginia woolf in the decay of essay writing published nearly a quarter century before benye means the arcades project and a half century before adore knows the essay's form wolff's lament about the aesthetic decline of the personal essay grasped the problem of telling stories about people not head on but symptomatically and since there's no harm in admitting it snobbishly she does not open by offering a history of bourgeois individualism but by decrying its most obvious social and institutional manifestations first there is the spread of education which ritualizes the subjective illusion by stressing the personal and individual nature of all one's failures and successes second there's the proliferation of print culture all the tracks pamphlets advertisements gratuitous copies of magazines and the literary production of friends that arrive by post by van by messenger at all hours of the day wolfe complains for her the british public sphere is characterized by all manner of excess beginning with a dramatic increase in literacy rates then a rise in the distinct genres of literary production their means of distribution and their frequency of circulation the relentless churn of both schools and presses results ultimately in the flattening of all this written matter and in a feeling of over saturation of boredom on the part of the reader who impatiently bears the onslaught but her boredom is not the boredom one feels when confronted with an apparently infinite and depersonalized expanse of textuality the boredom of slogging through tightly packed columns of news items in a 19th century periodical for instance or marking dozens of anonymized student exams rather it is the boredom of having to attend to quote a very large number of people wolff imagines all of whom demand public recognition through the projection of a private interiority the intimate connection between education the bourgeois public sphere and the specter of private individuality however loose or schedule he arrived at compels wolfe to judge the personal essay a sign of the times it is the genre whose linguistic style the capital i think or i feel not only draws the individual into public but also insists upon the value the primacy and the spontaneity of the individual individual this ideological fiction unfurls regardless of the quality of the essayist's prose or thought in fact a little bit later on in this essay during a part that i probably won't read today i argue that there is an inverse relation between style and content or the quality of style and the quantity of personalized content delivered the personal essay significance lies not so much in the fact that we have attained any brilliant success in essay writing but in the undoubted facility with which we write essays as though this were beyond all others our natural way of speaking wolf asserts with the amiable garility of the tea room it is primarily an expression of personal opinion though the stress almost always seems to fall on the personal its peculiarities its individual likes and dislikes rather than the strength of the opinion expressed or its style of expression while these individual likes and dislikes certainly add up to large numbers a word that wolf repeats with amazement and scorn throughout the decay of essay writing the numbers do not combine in any sensible or meaningful way they cannot be imagined as a mass a totality cannot be integrated and set to any collective social or political purpose even in aggregate they demand to be recognized as an actually existing set of potentially innumerable humans as michael warner has described the projection of personhood in the bourgeois public sphere now one of my favorite parts of the decay of essay writing is that it concludes with what i take to the two pitches for potential personal essays the first of which is aesthetically and ethically permissible according to wolf and the the second is just wholly unacceptable to say simply i have a garden and i will tell you what plants do best in my garden possibly justifies its egoism frights but to say i have no sons though i have six daughters all unmarried but i will tell you how i should have brought up my sons have i academy is not interesting cannot be useful and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the ark of penmanship and then the invention of essay writing are responsible her essays her examples sorry are as symptomatically revealing as the rest of the essay in the first the essays objects are her plans located in the garden outside the home their beauty is visible to any and all who stopped the gaze upon them the history of their climb and blossom is untouched in wolf's pitch by the presence of the gardener no one appears to fuss over tendrils and buds to damage to dramatize what needs no drama the impersonal passage of time the non-human action of growth and decay in her second example by contrast the essay object is herself how she has managed or fantasizes having managed the intimate affairs of her household the offspring she has collected cannot be discarded no one will have them the failure of these private people to leave the house to journey into the wider world offers on the one hand an uninteresting interior rumination how she should have brought up her sons had she had any and on the other a wishful allegory about the future of the essay form the tacit hope wolf expresses i think is that one day soon the sa-2 may find itself blocked from circulating stories about people outside of the house the decay of essay writing appeared in 1905 roughly the same time that the genre descriptor the personal essay began to spread through the english lexicon to speak of the personal essay before then would have been to speak in ciphers in gibberish as well as to traffic in redundancies and if you do a very quick google engram of the personal essay you'll see the track that it follows that sort of pops up right around the turn of the century and begins to rise in a sort of uneven way through the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and then by the time you get to the 60s and the 70s it starts to really rise precipitously from there for leveling out somewhere around the 2000s i only have a cold don't worry indeed prior to the 20th century the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only obliquely so reading across dozens of composition and expository writing textbooks from 1900 to 1940 reveals that the personal was not conveyed on the level of action not to echo wolf through the simple words i was born and a description of the startling events that may have been transpired rather it was on the level of style a different form of excess from the kinds of excess wolf deprives style was marked by the excess and the aberrant of language by an author's pace punctuation diction and grammar her distinctive deployment of adjectives adverbs and prepositions which as jeff dolvin has observed cannot be counted on to shore up the first person as a verb desk to give you just three examples from my favorite stylists and they're completely predictable consider wolf's ungrammatical fondness for semicolons her ecstatic tendency to stack nouns in threes and adjectives in fours consider elizabeth hardwick's love of trebling adjectives and pitching an adverb to the very last one so that her description of a person or object appears to increase in precision exponentially and within the smallest span of a sentence consider didion joan didion's habit of beginning an essay with a missing antecedent to create the impression that writer and reader have both arrived at a scene in media's race as wry and unobserved unobtrusive observers framed by teachers of writing as conversational and chatty its style characterized by its air spontaneity the essay suggested the author's personality as a diffuse and specular structure indeed its refusal to subject its bearer to direct observation or interrogation was an integral part of its formal signature so the essays from earlier centuries that are retro projected as personal today and and what i mean by that is that you will often hear people speak or you will see in essay collections about the essay people refer to montana's writing personal essays or people referring to hazlitt as writing personal essays but the tendency to call those writers writers of personal essays is actually a very recent phenomenon so the essays from earlier centuries that are retro projected as personal today were during the first half of the 20th century more commonly referred to as familiar essays their antonyms were essays classed as didactic factual informative or instructed the familiar essay made no claims about the autobiographical nature of its content it seldom treated the author as its object of interest rather familiarity concerned the quality of the relationship the essay projected between its writer and its reader a relationship between two friends as opposed to the relationship between a teacher and her people always this friendship was mediated by the presence of an object to which the writer had committed her powers of perception and analysis and through it had compelled her reader's interest a novel or a painting a historic figure like cato a shape like a circle a creature like a moth a place like a garden familiar essay unfolded by creating a scene of triangulation between the essayist her reader and the object that now shared their attention one might put it thus wrote christopher morley in the 1921 introduction to his anthology modern essays that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done inadvertently by contrast the personal essay groping and stumbling its way into being distinguished itself from the beginning by its failure to maintain this practice of triangulation its unwillingness to commit to inadvertency it indulged the temptation to fall into monologue morally complained allowing its language to curdle into a content too ostentatiously quaint too deliberately whimsical the word which by loads of repetition has become a medic yet as nearly all of the composition textbooks from the early 20th century recognized direct address could not be avoided entirely any use of the eye ensured its projection yet its influence on the overall seeing writing and reading could be minimized unbalanced and overshadowed by competing forms of address that presented themselves as more sociable accessible and depersonalized in the kind of friendship they imagined indeed they held the imagination of impersonality to be a sign of the essays aesthetic and ethical success it has seemed to me lately more possible than i know to carry a friendship greatly on one side without due correspondence on the other wrote ralph waldo emerson in on friendship his 1941 essay about the poetics of familiarity the asymmetry in the exchange of written words between friends was not to be lamented emerson reassured his readers indeed from an aesthetic and ethical point of view it was to be celebrated for mediating sociality through the cultivated idiosyncrasy of prose rather than the incidental particularity of personhood the higher the style we demand a friendship of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood emerson concluded but this was a difficulty to be welcomed forcing relationality away from face-to-face situations of address whether real or imagined and dispersing it across a vast and indefinite public to write an essay in a conspicuously marked style was to labor to convert one's personality into prose cancelling the thick walls of individual character relation age sex circumstance emerson wrote whatever prejudices enheared in flesh and blood friendship indeed whatever prejudice is cruelly limited who one might consider a friend in 19th century america could be overcome by the skillful diffusion of an embodied and marked presence into an apparently unmarked language and i think something that's very important to that concept that i go on to explain a little bit later on in the longer version of this essay is is the idea of skill of the skill of style being visible and the labor of craft being something that's apparent in the writing itself as opposed to uh the mere relation of experience which anybody can have and so there's a kind of theory of distinction that's being offered there i think along with the theory of friendship or sociality of course as michael warner has noted any a vowel of impartial publicness is never as impartial as it exists public styles are always marked by the specifics of nationality literacy class and race there exists no such thing as a perfectly inclusive or universal or infinitely circulating language just as there's no such thing really as an inclusive or universal or infinite friendship and emerson's no doubt depends on the ethos of a particular time and place and way of being to secure his reader's feelings of affinity of mutual understanding yet his claim to mediating friendship through style nevertheless reveals how against the rising tide of individualism the familiar essay once demanded that its readers place the highest premium on the imaginative interactions of non-intimate selves its social and collective mode of address positions itself as countering if only partially and imperfectly the discursive performance of private personhood it is the friction between these two modes of representation that the contemporary personal essay smooths away or purges to extend morley's metaphor with ever increasing vigor as we reach the 20th and 21st centuries so that's the end of the talk the rest of the piece goes on to detail why it is that we see the personal essay as i framed it and described it as a genre begin to rise after the 1900s but particularly after the 1940s and 50s and it offers an account of the college admissions essay as the uh sub genre that takes up the majority of the field of personal essay writing and that takes you to about the 70s and 80s and then from there it offers um an account of the importance of confession and of confessional writing to a publishing industry that is under increasing pressure to simply convert experience into narrative um to do away with the kind of professionalized skills of craft and style that were so important to somebody like emerson in his imagination of what the saa could do so thank you very much for joining me and i'm looking forward to our

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Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021