La Inseguridad

There’s something I got stuck on when looking at the Essay Prize nomination for Finnegan’s “Silver or Lead.” It’s that this piece is “the kind of real-world essay I’m always dying to share with anyone around.”

What, exactly, is a “real-world” essay?

Are other essays, say the work of past winners Mary Ruefle and Aaron Kunin, not of the real world? Ruefle’s world has fantasy elements, sure, but does the weight of Finnegan’s “real world” trump these, I don’t know, less-grounded works? I am reading “real-world” here as a signifier of relevance, of importance. I’m inferring that, to the nominator, the scope of Finnegan’s work – not just the depth of reportage, but also the topic’s scale, from a private ranch owner outside of Zitácuaro to international relations – makes it significant in ways that other essays of 2010 were not.

This seems problematic to me, the idea of an unspoken sliding scale of relevance and import as applied to works that, when it comes down to it, are pretty tough to compare. But of course I do it, too. One of the things that bothered me about “Plastic Bag,” for example, was the way it was essentially a commissioned project resulting in what I saw as a form of propaganda. But since Finnegan is a staff writer for The New Yorker, does that make this project commissioned as well? What stake does he have in telling this particular story? He traveled, as he seems wont to do, to places where his personal safety was at risk. I don’t get the sense that Finnegan is only telling the story because he was paid to in the way I felt that Bahrani was. Finnegan doesn’t have an agenda. Or! Is it that any agenda he’d be pushing would come from the prize scapegoat of conservative activism, the liberal media, whose bias I’m blind to because I share it?

The answer to that, at least, is below in Lucas’s entry – that Finnegan’s uncertainty is so visible on the page that I think it’s clear he doesn’t have a stake in pushing the reader to develop an actionable political stance on the vast clusterfuck of issues facing Mexico—its cartels, its government, its ordinary people – and of course – the basic issue of supply (Mexico) and demand (U.S.) that seems to be at the root of all the power grasping. I mean, this is the stuff of book-length essays. Like The Devil’s Highway. Or the back catalog of unapologetic breast man Charles Bowden (seriously…read Desierto and try to come away with a different impression).

There’s a book’s worth of material in La Familia. That Finnegan was able to wrangle this into a comprehensible and digestible piece of journalism strikes me as an accomplishment in and of itself. And I can’t overlook the fact that to me, “Silver and Lead” was not only comprehensible and digestible, but devastating, once we moved from the attempt to untangle the post “Pax Mafiosa” political environment and into the personal stakes of nearly-executed ecology officer Delacruz or retired school teacher Don Miguel. I am invested in these people. The uncertainty about Don Miguel’s ranch at the story’s end is more upsetting now, because I’m reading it almost a year later, and so much can happen in a year.

Call me out for misspeaking, Lucas, but it seems to me that initially you had some doubts as to whether this piece of literary journalism qualified as essay per se. On my first read, I had reservations about its contention for the Essay Prize, not because I don’t think it’s a very fine piece of work, but because I too have some lingering parochial concerns about category. It’s journalism! It’s reportage! Lucas quotes: “Work that is defined by what it does—the activity that it engages in—rather than what it is—its ‘nonfictional’ verifiability.” To which I additionally quote that the Essay Prize “emphasizes the activity of a text, rather than its status as a dispensary of information.”

This is a dispensary of information, yes, and important information, but on second read, it seems to me that it is the presence of Finnegan’s first person narration that tips this work into essay territory. And not the “I” alone, but the action of the “I” – Finnegan’s relentless lines of inquiry are visible on the page. We know when he is conducting an interview in Mexico vs. Washington, D.C. We know when information is second-hand. We are aware when he has been forced to choose sides (traveling with the “Queen of the South”) for the purposes of information gathering. And we get loaded observations: “Such violence sounded so benign and neighborly that I felt odd asking about the kind of violence that La Familia is better known for.” I think that Finnegan’s methods in “Silver or Lead” are unequivocally essayistic.

Which brings me back to the question of weight and scope and the idea of a “real-world” essay. It’s so hard to shake my own poorly-defined sliding scale of relevance and import. One way would be to ignore content in favor of structure and craft. But these are all interrelated, and discovering the way that they integrate in this particular piece (thinking here of the way that this formally traditional essay controls the release of information, from the abstract to the personal), is evidence, I think, of a fine mind at work.

So as far as I’m concerned, at this juncture in the nominee discussions, it’s Finnegan’s hand-carved walnut box to lose.

The better question is whether a thing essays

and whether the way that thing essays--which is perhaps to say wiggles slightly, in a provocative or interrogative manner, as if by its act of unsurety, or doubling-back, renouncing its previous movement of mind or body--whether it reveals or illuminates some edge of meaning. I am thinking of Mary Ruefle, with whom I took half of one class one semester of graduate school some time ago. I left the class at break time because I was under the impression that all she had said she would talk about was things I already knew, nay, was master of. And besides, from what I had seen, Ruefle was clearly on the edge of something, a precipice, probably, and on the other side--what? madness? an effervescent otherness? the clouds? a descent or ascent into something uncalculable and therefore terrifying because it remained beyond my sight? I don't know. It was other, and it didn't appeal to me. I had drinking to do. I had workshopping to do. Not necessarily in that order. She appeared to be one in a series of professors brought in for the semester who would half-ass their way through a "class" on some subject that devolved into gossiping about whatever and gave little fuel to our small, desperately churning creative engines.

Eight years later, in the preamble to teaching my craft seminar in nonfiction (the rather-badly named "Essay as Activity") at the University of Arizona, I found myself reading The Most of It, her book of "prose" or possibly "fables" or possibly "poems" or possibly "prose poems" or possibly "psalms" or possibly "lyric essays" (I am not sure which genre tag is most appropriate, or whether any genre container can hold these in; yet Russel Edson sez: "if it's not something else it's probably a prose poem." Thus?). Now I'm convinced that Ruefle is a genius, which is to say completely unhinged, unbound, lovely. As in her brain opens--or a brain opens, a construction of her brain and a collaboration with whatever radio signals from beyond it picks up--and she gives us these odd, uncoiling, elaborate, lovely, hilarious, and above all things utterly surprising sentences.

And they are sentences. They certainly are sentences. Admittedly they have the lyric capacity of lines of poetry or crots of essay or whatever. Her associative shifts and leaps, the ways these sentences essay, are pretty awesome to watch. This extends to her lectures, which to this reader at least have the same odd conchlike and borderline insane quality:

"If you bother to read this at all it is a clear indication your life is intolerable and you seek a distraction by engaging in the activity you are presently pretending to engage in. I say pretending because you would never have reached the conclusion your life is intolerable had you not also reached the conclusion it is unreal.... This is what pretending to write looks like: it looks like this. Not a landscape and yet passing before your eyes, unrolling as featureless as a plain and often you are the antelope, scared to have been born under such dismal skies.... Isn't existence grand, the grandest bond between two you can imagine? Doesn't it outstrip your finest memory? Memories are worthless, have you ever stopped to consider that? Do you remember being by the seashore and watching the great broom of the sea come swooping down on the shore, pushing all the glinty particles of sand out of its way? The sound of the sea's broom was so tremendous, it sloshed the fluid in your ears?" ("Some Thoughts on the Lyric Essay, from the Seneca Review)

Or you could also try out her excellently wandering lecture at Vermont College, "On Theme," later published in West Branch, worth your time on interlibrary loan or at AWP.

As Brian Phillips notes in his essay, "Cocteau and Catfish: on Poets' Fiction," reviewing The Most of It: "What makes this ["Hard-Boiled Detective"] so funny is that the obviously insane theme is presented deadpan, as an essay, with a logically developed (and screwily persuasive) argument.... But the logical order is intrinsically a narrative as well, because Ruefle's sense of language and character is so vivid that the real fascination of the story comes from imagining the person who would create this piece of prose and the events that led to its creation."

(As an aside, I find her sentences incredibly tweetable: "Is there anything sadder than the sight of a medium heartbroken dove stuffed with French fries on Christmas morning?" At least, when they're short enough to tweet. Usually they are not--and the length is part of the pleasure of the magic trick: the longer the sentence goes, the more oddly it trajectories, and the more pleasure is arrived at when we get to the detonation of the period--assuming it works. It doesn't always work, of course, but it works a lot.)

That this book was the winner of the Essay Prize in 2009 seems about right to me. While it may or may not be nonfiction, it is quite clearly a brain on the page--not always Ruefle's brain directly as much as the product of Ruefle's brain and its capacity for imagining. Check out the excerpt on the site I just linked. The interview is absolutely worth your time.

Her class clearly would have been more than worth my time eight years ago, but as with many other things, understanding comes late. And maybe it's better to have had this near miss with Ruefle's actual brain to regret, and to essay, albeit briefly, here. This way I narratize and contextualize my rediscovery of some seriously kickass work--whatever tag you want to hang on it.

Or perhaps it is better to forget. As Ruefle says in a long essay on her erasures published in Quarter After Eight, a magazine I continually forget about and rediscover, to my pleasure:

And who can forget? And who can forget? I CAN, you may be thinking, because I never knew any of this before, or I CAN, because none of this is of interest to me, or changes my life-so I, I can forget.

And that, my friend, is the art of erasure, as it is enacted in your own life, and all lives: life is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don't know or haven't experienced, and on our deathbed, even that limited and erased "whole" becomes further diminished, if you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others having been erased; if you are lucky you will remember one place or one person, but no one will ever, ever read on their deathbed, the whole text, intact and in order.

First your life is erased, then you are erased. Don't tell me that erasure is beside the point, an artsy fragment of the healthy whole. If it is an appropriation, it is an appropriation of every life that has preceded your own, just as those in the future will appropriate yours; they will appropriate your very needs, your desires, your gestures, your questions, and your words.

Or so I believe. And I am glad. What is the alternative? A blank page.