ADVENT 12/7: Robert Atwan: The Assault on Prose: John Crowe Ransom, New Criticism, and the Status of the Essay

The Assault on Prose: John Crowe Ransom, New Criticism, and the Status of the Essay

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Robert Atwan

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Prefatory:

What follows is a little bit of literary history that grew directly out of my curiosity as to why the traditional or familiar essay went into decline for so many decades of the twentieth century. I see the rise of the “New Criticism” in the 1930s as a major contributor to the essay’s diminished literary status. One enduring effect of that critical movement was its relegation of the essay to a minor or even sub-literary genre, a relegation that led to the genre’s rapid disappearance from serious literary study. This attitude in large part developed out of John Crowe Ransom’s assimilation of Paul Valery’s aesthetic principles, which argued for the inherent primacy of poetry over prose. These principles-- reinforced by the work of a Chicago semiotician, Charles W. Morris—are central to Ransom’s enormously influential criticism that, as I try to set out in a small space here, would shape the study of literature for many years and, in some ways, despite formidable theoretical rivals, still shapes it.

I believe the essay is currently experiencing a revival—at least editors and publishers no longer seem afraid of the E-word, as they did when I first proposed an annual series of essays back in the early 1980s. (“Isn’t there another word we can use?” my editor asked). But when it comes to the promotion and marketing of literary works, and book review attention, essays can’t compete with fiction.  And when it comes to literary status, essays can’t compete with poetry. How many essayists do you think are short (or even long) listed for the Nobel Prize? And when it comes to literary theory, essays have none that I know of aside from studies that are mainly rhetorical. Yet, as I suggest below the long association of the essay with rhetoric has prevented the genre from being wholeheartedly classified as literature.

So, essayists, though their tribe may be increasing, will still, in my opinion, be denied the awards and attention a novelist receives, will be less esteemed creatively as are poets, and will continue to be read without a coherent criticism that would enhance their literary achievements. But perhaps that’s what makes essayists essayists.

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When I decided back in the early 1980s that an annual collection of outstanding essays seemed like a good idea, I was surprised by the negative responses I received from the publishers I approached.  Some were put off by the E-word and its marketability while others doubted essays had serious literary value or, if they did, that not enough of them were published in a year to form a collection. Finding a publisher for the series was largely an uphill climb.

I began to wonder about the resistance I encountered. My interest for years had been to advance the essay as a literary genre but here were many editors afraid to use the word “essay” in a title. One literary magazine editor wrote me to say that no one ever submitted personal essays to his journal. His larger point was that essays were written about literature—they weren’t in themselves literature.
At the time I realized that essayists—and by that term I mean writers who regularly compose personal, familiar, or reflective essays—knew they worked in an underappreciated genre. Just a few years before I proposed an annual series, E. B. White (in 1977) famously lamented in a preface to a collection of essays that he was not “fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth century American letters.” “The essayist,” White continued, “unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.” I wondered how this situation had come about.

As I studied the twentieth-century essay, I began to think that its marginalized literary status could be connected to its place in the university writing program. Although well-known to a reading public, E. B. White may never have realized it, but his work was—and perhaps still is—read and admired at the university level only in composition courses. For at the time, well before the growing popularity of MFA programs, such courses were with few exceptions the only places where essays were assigned, studied, discussed, and imitated.

Was the essay tossed out of the literature curriculum as a bone for composition teachers? Was the essay identified as some sort of literary degenerate to be sentenced and exiled to an academic Gulag? Did literary studies deliberately and systematically “purify” itself of the essay? What exactly happened in the English curriculum? For let’s acknowledge that at one point there was a strong belletristic curriculum in which the essay played a vital role. This was back in the days when belles lettres was not a pejorative term, when novels, short stories, and lyric poems didn’t sway the syllabus.  Years ago, in a Partisan Review essay, “What Henry James Knew,” Cynthia Ozick made an eloquent plea for the essay: “A while ago,” she writes, “coming once again on Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Virginibus Puerisque’—an essay not short, wholly odd, no other like it, custom-made, soliciting the brightness of full attention in order to release its mocking charms—I tried to think of a single periodical today that might be willing to grant print to this sort of construction.”

The process that resulted in the death of belles lettres and the essay’s loss of literary status is, of course, a complicated phenomenon. (A valuable recent study is by Ned Stuckey-French, The American Essay in the American Century, 2011). The process involves a spectrum of cultural, social, and economic factors; by the 1930s, for example, the nation’s leading magazines were already starting to turn down essays in favor of topical articles. This trend, bemoaned by a number of the leading essayists of the time, was also reflected in a peculiar book that will be the focus of what I have to say about the decline of the literary essay, a decline that began during the Great Depression and lasted into the late 1980s or early 1990s, when the personal essay received a robust boost with the ascent of the confessional memoir.

The book I want to consider was published by Henry Holt & Company in 1935; it was directed to college composition courses. Its catchy title: Topics for Freshman Writing: Twenty Topics for Writing with Appropriate Materials for Study.  What especially interests me about this collection is that it was compiled and edited by none other than the illustrious poet and critic, John Crowe Ransom, one of the most influential literary figures of his time and a founder, along with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, of a formalist methodology that would come to be called The New Criticism (after the title of Ransom’s 1941 book).

Ransom chose the no-nonsense title of his college reader deliberately. The older belletristic essay is conspicuously absent from the collection. Instead of recommending the literary prose of such notable essay stylists as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, or Robert Louis Stevenson, Ransom turned instead to contemporary magazines to find pieces for such elevated essay subjects as “The Planned Society,” “Machinery, Overproduction, and Unemployment,” or “Nationalism and Foreign Trade.” Nearly a fifth of the selections were written by his students, all identified in the table of contents as “anonymous.” Clearly, though compiled by a distinguished poet and one of our major literary aestheticians, this was no guide to the belletristic or familiar essay.

In fact, it was decidedly anti-belletristic. A question I want to pose here is this: why was Ransom, a poet-critic whose own literary essays would surely be classified as belletristic, so resistant himself to the older familiar essay? He refuses to expose students to the genre in his reader and rarely refers to it in his criticism. Why would this be?

Actually, Ransom’s choice of selections for his college anthology should not be surprising to anyone who closely follows Ransom’s literary criticism. The only surprising thing about his textbook venture is that—given his literary disposition—he didn’t assemble a volume of poetry instead. Of course, his colleagues Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would do just that and make both critical and pedagogical history in 1938 with the first edition of Understanding Poetry, a book whose announced literary agenda was not much different from Ransom’s; was, in fact, quite indebted to him. Although he helped promote the poetry textbook, Ransom was never entirely in agreement with the overly “scientific” way his new critical colleagues approached the understanding of poetry.

Throughout an illustrious career—in well over one hundred published critical essays—Ransom kept returning to a single literary theme: the primacy of poetry over prose. I say this at the risk of reduction, since his is such an agile and fertile intelligence. Yet—as we read essay after essay we can see why two literary scholars (Thomas Young and John Hindle) began the introduction to their fine collection of Ransom’s criticism as follows: “No other literary critic of this century has devoted so much time and intellectual energy as John Crowe Ransom in attempting to distinguish between scientific prose and poetic discourse.”

The differentiation between poetry and prose was consistently valorized—always in favor of poetry--and it often inspired an array of polarities that Ransom would entertain in the course of an essay.  I’ll cite just one example, an astonishing extended analogy taken from a 1941 essay, “Criticism as Pure Speculation:”

“A poem is, so to speak, a democratic state, whereas a prose discourse—mathematical, scientific, ethical, or practical and vernacular—is a totalitarian state. The intention of a democratic state is to perform the work of state as effectively as it can perform it, subject to one reservation of conscience: that it will not despoil its members, the citizens, of the free exercise of their own private and independent characters. But the totalitarian state is interested solely in being effective, and regards the citizens as no citizens at all; that is, regards them as functional members whose existence is totally defined by their allotted contributions to its ends; it has no use for their private characters, and therefore no provision for them…”

As we read through Ransom, we can easily construct two columns reminiscent of Norman Mailer’s old “hip v. square” or Nancy Mitford’s “U v. Non-U” types (I realize how these references date me!). At the top of one column put Poetry, at the other Prose, and as you read Ransom the list of opposites begins falling into place nearly at once. If poetry is art, prose is argument; if poetry is iconic, prose is statement. We can keep going: poetry is agrarian, prose industrial; poetry is mythic and traditional; prose scientific and progressive; poetry is religious, prose secular; poetry is concrete, prose abstract. Poetry is intuitive, prose logical and rational. This list branches out into all sorts of literary and cultural areas, even to the point that poetry is considered ecologically sensitive and prose environmentally aggressive. Ransom never quite gets around to saying it, but it’s also clear that, from his perspective, in the regional scheme of things poetry represents the South, prose the North.

It’s not hard to see, then, that in this binary scheme poetry is literature and prose is…well, let’s say prose is composition. For if we look closely at Ransom’s schematic we see that the critical dichotomy is not so much between poetry and prose as between poetics and rhetoric, between the aesthetic uses of language and the practical—or, I think it’s fair to say—between literature and the essay. Consider again the passage describing poetry as a democracy and prose as a totalitarian regime; Ransom’s value-laden analogy makes apparent just what it is about prose that devalues it as an aesthetic experience. Prose discourse is functional, purposeful, and efficient; it surrenders all its elements to expository or persuasive ends. To put it bluntly, prose is rhetorical. And whatever poetry means for Ransom, at its best, it is never rhetorical.

The old conflict between rhetoric and poetics wears many disguises, like the old philosophical debate between the One and the Many. It surfaces in one shape or another just about everywhere we look in modern critical theory and it has had a profound influence on literary and academic politics. As James Berlin once put it: “a number of powerful groups of academic literary critics have divided discourse into two separate and unequal categories: the privileged poetic statement and the impoverished rhetorical statement, the one art and the other “mere” science.” Berlin takes this split even further, discovering behind it an academic conspiracy in which literary critics within English departments seized on the dichotomy as an opportunity to leverage departmental and curricular power. According to Berlin, for these critics to “demonstrate the unique and privileged nature of poetic texts, it has been necessary to insist on a contrasting set of devalorized texts, the kind of texts described in current-traditional rhetoric.” What are these discredited texts other than our familiar types of prose discourse—mainly essays?

Although Berlin doesn’t reference him, Ransom was one of the early academic critics who consistently fought the older philologists and belletristic instructors—those duffers who gladly taught essays, resisted the New Criticism, and had no stake in carving out imaginative literature as a special domain of discourse. If Berlin is correct, John Crowe Ransom might be seen as part of this literary conspiracy, a very significant part given his enormous academic influence. In his career-long assault on prose he did everything he could to elevate the poetic statement over the rhetorical. “Something,” he once wrote, “is continually being killed by prose which the poet wants to preserve.”

His college reader, Topics for Freshman Writing, it seems to me, was no mere cynical or opportunistic production, but was specifically designed to further Ransom’s own critical agenda as well as the pedagogical regimen of the New Criticism. I’m by nature skeptical of conspiracy theories, but by promoting only a serviceable, topical prose, Ransom helped keep the essay in its place for years—that is, inside the first-year composition program and outside of serious literary study. A few years after Ransom’s textbook, Brooks and Warren would begin theirs with the following words to the instructor: “This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry.” Even now it’s hard to imagine an introductory textbook on the essay opening with a similar assumption.

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Note: this essay, largely revised, is based on a talk I delivered in Nashville, TN (birthplace of “The New Criticism”) in the mid 1990s. I wanted to revisit it for some time and I thank Ander Monson for offering me the opportunity to expand it and get it into circulation.  

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Robert Atwan is the founder and series editor of The Best American Essays. The 2013 volume, the twenty-eighth in the series, is guest-edited by Cheryl Strayed and has just been released. His most recent essay, a fictional retelling of The Great Gatsby from the point of view of the novel's villain, Tom Buchanan, can be found in six installments at http://logger.believermag.com/post/52795097781/that-summer-1922-a-counter-memoir-by-thomas-buchanan.

ADVENT 12/6: John D'Agata: The Essays of Ansel Adams: An Allegory

Until 1927, the photographs that Ansel Adams had taken were not very good: documentary records of an afternoon with friends, a tree that he admired, a sunset worth remembering.  They were placeholders for meaning, but not particularly meaningful themselves.

            Of course, this wasn’t that Adams didn’t consider photography art. Rather, he hadn’t figured out yet how to make photography work, how to render with light and luck and dark the deep and powerful truths that he felt when in the mountains.  As Adams will write toward the end of his life, “When I am ready to make a photograph, I think what I see in my mind’s eye is something that is not literally there.  What I am interested in expressing is something that is built up from within, rather than something extracted from without.”

            When I am ready to make a photograph.

            Not just “take” one.  Not just capture through hope and a lens whatever it is that the world might provide.  As one critic has written about Adams’ work, it is this acknowledgment of the difference between receiving information and actively making art that allows Adams eventually “to voice the moods of light, to use textures like different instruments, to make clouds float, waterfalls flash, snow reveal its hidden life, and grasses bend in infinite delicacy under dew.”

            It is April.  And once again Adams is in Yosemite National Park, halfway up the granite face of a structure called Half Dome.  He’s on his way to a popular spot among hikers called the Diving Board, a long and narrow projection of rock from which you can look up and see the sharp sheer face of the Half Dome’s cliff rising up before you.  Along the way, Adams stops to take some shots—his girlfriend, his buddies, a bird, his shoes—until he realizes upon reaching the Diving Board that he has only two pictures left.  He positions the camera to face Half Dome, that great and monstrous cliff face that looks as if it has punctured the earth from the inside out.

            Wow, Adams thinks, then clicks.

            Immediately, however, he knows that the picture he has taken is not going to work, will not relay to viewers the true experience of the Half Dome.  So with only one picture left, Adams takes a risk.  He allows himself to “revisualize” the scene.  (His word.)  He places over his lens a heavy red filter that immediately darkens the sky, transforms it even darker than the cliff face itself, so that an abyss opens up on the left side of the cliff, as if the brooding shelf of Half Dome has torn straight through it like a cleaver made of light, terrifying and bright, a threat to everything that is not there.

            As he himself later put it, this is the first time in Adams’ career that he has managed to make a mountain look like how it feels.  To do this however, he has deeply manipulated the mountain he loves, he has wrangled the reality of the world around him into what he has needed it to be.  “Photography is really perception,” he wrote.  “As with all art, the objective of photography is not the duplication of visual reality, but an investigation of the outer world and its influence on the inner world . . . .  All of my photographs are photographs of myself.”

http://www.afterimagegallery.com/adamsmonolith.jpg 

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John D'Agata is the author of On Knowing & Not, a collaboration with Belgian painter Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa, where he directs the Nonfiction Writing Program.

ADVENT 12/5: Meehan Crist's 10 Thoughts on Elision

10 Thoughts on Elision

1. The act of writing nonfiction has always been an act of elision. Only when a writer knows what to leave out, does she know what to leave in.
2. You see this so clearly in the work of Joan Didion and James Baldwin and Janet Malcolm and, more recently, writers like Sarah Manguso. This is not matter of style—a baroque sentence can still be as pointed as an icepick. This is a matter of choice.
3. Elision is not the same thing as distortion, though it can result in distortions, some of which may be more truthful than anyone’s unabridged whole.
4. Abridged is not the same thing as incomplete, which implies unfinished—a house without a roof, a winter without snow. An aborted thought is not the same thing as looking at snowdrifts with one eye closed.
5. This is not news, but for some reason we keep needing to hear this report from the front, as if the frontline has ever been anywhere else.
6. Elision comes from elidere, “to crush out.” This violence is generative, resulting in “omission” but also “join together, merge, esp. abstract ideas.”
7. Any patient in an Oliver Sacks essay may be a composite character, an amalgamation of many patients merged into one, more useful person. This is not a secret. It does not put Sacks’ insights in danger. He has still seen what he has seen.
8. “You can’t do that.” Yes, you can.
9. “You shouldn’t do that.” Another matter, entirely. And utterly dependent on circumstance. Rules are only useful if everyone is playing the same game.
10. Choose your game. Then elide.

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Meehan Crist is Writer-in-Residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was reviews editor at The Believer and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Lapham's Quarterly, The New Republic, The Believer, N+1BR, Scientific American, and Science. She is a founding member of NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists and writers, and awards include the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship as well as fellowships from MacDowell, The Blue Mountain Center, Ucross, and Yaddo. She is working on a nonfiction book about traumatic brain injury.

ADVENT 12/4: Pam Houston on Rick Reilly's "Need a Fourth" from Sports Illustrated, March 31, 1997

For many years I read Sports Illustrated weekly, cover to cover, in the bathtub. And not just Tom Verducci’s signature baseball features, or Gary Smith’s memorable essay on reluctant superstar Mia Hamm, or his powerful piece on the death of Devaughn Darling, or Plimpton’s historic "Curious Case of Sidd Finch." I read everything. From the letters to By The Numbers to This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse, to Faces In The Crowd. I’m a workaholic, like my father, and his only son. He taught me to love the games’ many intricacies and complicated dramas, and like him, the only real leisure time I allow myself is watching, participating in, or reading about sports.

For years, Rick Reilly owned the back page of Sports Illustrated. His column, which predated the current Point After, was called Life Of Reilly, and the short pieces were always either funny ("Ten Travails of Tiger Woods," for example, this before Tiger actually had any travails) or feel good ("The Biggest Play of His Life" about the high school football captain who came out of the closet to unanimous team support). Sometimes they were both. Sometimes SI gave Rick more space than the back page and his essays were allowed to be funny and feel good and something more, as on March 31st, 1997, when Reilly wrote "Need a Fourth?" about former NFL star O.J. Simpson, suspected murderer of the mother of his children and golf addict, post-acquittal, now banned from his tony country club, hanging around the Rancho Park Public Golf Course in Los Angeles, trying to scare up a game. “Three players will be waiting for the fairway to clear,” Reilly wrote, “ waiting to hit their first drives of the day…when the starter will crackle over the public address system, “Sending a single to join you.”

With a few notable exceptions, in University English and Literature Departments in America (which have ceased to be about English and Literature at all) anyone who is knowledgeable or enthusiastic about sports is widely pitied. It is okay to utter a sentence like “Manchester United can beat Arsenal to get back on top” or anything else sporty that can be said in a British accent. In some academic circles it is even okay to like the Boston Red Sox, or at least it was, until they began winning, and spending more money than God on players, and changing their image from long suffering symbol of the striving proletariat masses into a super efficient cog in the machine of the Man. But if you actually own season tickets to the Denver Broncos. If you make it a point to go to Phoenix for Cactus League baseball every spring break. If you once got your nose broken by a punch delivered by a young man in a Saint Louis Blues cap when you were both sitting behind Patrick Roy’s goal in the third period of a late season home game that had playoff ramifications for your Colorado Avalanche, just because you tried to school him in away-fan-etiquette, it is best to keep that information out of the mail room chatter.

According to Reilly, in 2007, O.J. Simpson was a pleasant, if emotionally charged presence on the public course where he played at least one round a day without fail, described by the plumbers and contractors who welcomed him as a fourth as polite, gentle, and warm. He got no preferential treatment there; if he wanted a tee time his options were to call the computerized system at 5 a.m. a week before and be put on hold for over an hour, or just show up and put his name on the singles list. When Reilly asked one of guys who wound up playing with O.J. semi-regularly, ad salesman Ken Smitely, what his wife thought of him playing with the Juice, Ken thought for a moment and said, “let’s put it this way: Your wife isn’t going to like every friend you have.”

When I have tried to explain my love of sports to my creative writing colleagues, (and only, ever, to the ones I genuinely like) I use all the predictable arguments. Copious amounts of narrative tension. Multiple layers of understory. Ever changing probability and outcome. Think Bob Costa’s coverage of the Olympics. Think of the 1997 Broncos, who entered the playoffs as a wildcard, and beat team after team in a series of away games that led to them besting Brett Favre’s Packers in Super Bowl thirty-two. Think of Favre, the heavy favorite, unable to overcome his life-long hero worship of Elway, and Elway, winning his first Super Bowl in this storied career’s penultimate season after three Super Bowl losses in the days when he was younger, stronger, healthier, but not nearly as smart. Think of A-Rod, who got paid more money this year than the entire Houston Astros baseball team NOT to play baseball. People who hate sports believe them to be simple. Sports can be a lot of things, many of them unsavory (violent, greed-driven, sexist, racist) but if you take the time to know anything about them, simple is one thing they are not.

O.J.’s life, in 1997, however, was oddly pared down. He couldn’t get a job, a book deal, endorsements or public speaking gigs. His house was in the process of being sold and he was considering moving to Florida, but Florida didn’t much want him either. In one of the most brilliant moments in the essay, Reilly called him “a human unplayable lie.” Juice described himself at the time as having zero net worth, making “just enough money to play new golf balls. “If I didn’t have golf,” he told Reilly, “I’d be in Bellevue.” So he teed up, once, sometimes twice a day, and passed a little more time flirting with twenty-somethings in the Rancho bar. One young woman told Reilly that O.J. asked her if she believed in “love at seventh sight,” and she said “ O.J., if I went out with you, my parents would kill me, my girlfriends would kill me, and then you’d kill me. And then where would I be?” Everyone was relieved when O.J. laughed. According to Reilly, the former running back was even known to tell the occasional O.J. joke on himself. His favorite: “O.J. and AL Cowlings are in the Bronco, and O.J. is pissed. He goes, ‘I said Costa Rica, mother ----! Not Costa Mesa!’”

Rick Reilly, who has published ten books of essays and been voted National Sports Writer of the year eleven times still gets asked—to his constant irritation--when he is going to get out of sports and write about something that matters. At Invesco Field at Mile High, when the Broncos play—well anyone, really, but lets say the New England Patriots, and Tom Brady hurls a pass thirty yards in the air to his big tight end Gronkowski, and Gronkowski takes his eye off the ball for only a second and the ball tumbles to the field on a third and eleven, uncaught, and the announcer says, “And Tom Brady’s pass to Rob Gronkowski is…,“ 75,002 people will shout, in unison, “IN-COM-PLETE!” I don’t know too many situations where you could get 75.002 people to do anything simultaneously—though plenty of nefarious possibilities (HEIL HITLER!) jump quickly to mind, and while it would be cool if instead of IN_COM_PLETE they said, ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE or FEED THE HUNGRY, the sheer force and volume and regularity (every time an opponent drops a pass) of the chant means that at least to some people, sports matters a great deal.

“If you can talk sports,” my father used to tell me, “you can talk to just about anyone.” And while my decision to pursue a career in the arts has proven plenty of exceptions to that statement, I can attest to the truth of it in this slightly amended form: “Since I can talk about sports, I have something to talk about with all the people with whom I don’t have something else to talk about.” To this day, one of my greatest pleasures is to go into a sports bar and make everyone I am talking to forget I am a girl.

When Reilly asked OJ, back in 1997, how he felt about spending his days with a “bunch of plumbers with loops in their backswing and Pabst Blue Ribbon in their golf bags,” Juice said, “Its my life now. It could be worse.” And he was right, it could and would be worse. Significantly. Currently, the 1968 Heisman Trophy winner is serving a 9-33 year sentence in the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada for kidnapping and assault he committed in 2008 when one imagines, daily golf on a public course had stopped being enough.

What makes an essay stay inside a person—with uncanny accuracy—for sixteen years, especially a person like me who reads constantly? Precision, humor, the unexpected turn, the suggestion of depth under a rich, well made surface. Rick Reilly’s "Need a Fourth?" has become part of my inner lexicon for all of these reasons, and also because I love the super sly way it gets at the heart of what it means to be an American. And by that I don’t mean O.J.’s super-funded acquittal, or his series of mistakes in Vegas that followed. I’m thinking instead of those good old boys out on the browning, poorly trimmed public course, guys who work hard for forty or fifty or sixty hours a week for an indecent wage and finally make it to the first tee and look up through the coastal fog to see the disgraced hero who is about to join them, a bunch of guys, who Reilly points out, “if given the choice between playing and not playing…would tee it up with Mussolini.” Soon the four of them will be talking about three woods and nine irons, the hole in one somebody shot straight out of the bunker on 13, that time they got to play Spanish Links at Pebble Beach and their wives went along and filmed the whole thing. “From what I’ve seen of him, I don’t think he could take the mother of his children.” Smitely told Reilly one day after O.J. shot a 76. And on one March morning, in 1997, maybe sports could be as simple as that.

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Pam Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. 

ADVENT 12/3: Michael Martone: More or Less: the Camouflage Schemes of the Fictive Essay

More or Less: The Camouflage Schemes of the Fictive Essay

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Michael Martone

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[Editor's note: The sections of this essay are in an arbitrary order, and
the reader is invited to read them in whatever order she or he prefers.]

The essay feigns linear narrative but initiates if not a circular notion of narrative time at least an ox-bowed doubling back and forth.  The essay purports to document Vonnegut’s journey to Pennsylvania, there to remember with his old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, the details of the bombing of Dresden in order for the author to write the book.  Within the journey from Cape Cod to Pennsylvania, two meanders are recounted.  Vonnegut is accompanied by two little girls, his daughter and her friend, who, he tells us, have never ventured from Cape Cod in their brief lives and who had “never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before.”  There was a lot to see, he says.  And he “sees,” himself, once again through the new lenses of the children.  One does not step into the same river twice.  It is time to go, he tells the girls. It is always time to go.  And, later, after the visit, on the return trip, crossing the Delaware at Washington’s Crossing, the pilgrims visit the World’s Fair, the other eddy in the stream, and there we are told of the dramatic and corporate representations of the past and the future in the present moment that Vonnegut metaphors and maps into a Mobius river of time: “how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

“'I don’t know anything about it,’ he said. ‘That’s your trade, not mine.’” Writing is depicted as a “trade,” and the writer as a tradesman whose expertise is the transformation of fleeting experience into solid stable reality.  Bernard V. O’Hare, who is said to have said the words above, is a prosecutor as well who uses words and witnessing to convict in the fictive theater of a courtroom.  But it is not true that this is not his trade.  He too is a storyteller.  He too trades in the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.  He has fooled himself, however, into believing he only deals in facts.  His critique has to do with the sorting of many kinds of truth, the truth and the whole truth.  Prosecutor O’Hare’s brief essay foils the larger essay by suggesting that there are essays and then there are essays.  There is truth and the whole truth.  The essays composed for his courtroom, his trade, he suggests, are the naked truth, not tailored, stable.  True truth not the disguised truth of fiction.

The essay disguises itself in the remnants of its own criticism and through elaboration it recounts its own failure to recount the failure of the writing of the fiction.  The book it introduces is a failure, Vonnegut writes at the end of the essay that recounts the series of failed attempts to write the book that, in the end, turns out to be a failure.  The essay attempts to animate the obsessive looping sensation of survivor guilt.  Vonnegut regards his survival of the massacre meant to kill him as a failure of the massacre.  “Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.” There has been a mistake.  There has been a mistake.  And the essay attempts to attempt not to rectify the mistake but to map its own paradoxical logic, the infinite, circling loop.  He concludes by writing that the book will stand as a failure, because it was written by a pillar of salt, another of Vonnegut’s disguises, a ruin that fragments, yes, and finally, like the book it inhabits and the essay it embodies, melts.

“All this happened, more or less.”  This is the actual first line of the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut though if you ask people they will tell you they believe that the first line of the book Slaughterhouse-Five is this: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” I myself believed this.  I remembered inexactly, remembering that the section of the book, Slaughterhouse-Five, that begins with “All this happened, more or less” was some kind of auxiliary writing, an essay, an introduction to the novel that began at its conclusion: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.  But the essay that begins the book beginning with the line “All this happened, more or less” is a faux introduction.  It pretends to introduce the novel, a nonfiction enabling device, a frame, a context for the fiction.  But, it is a nonfiction fiction embedded in fiction.  It is an introduction hidden in plain sight.  There, free-floating above the first line, “All this happened, more or less,” is not the titular banners: INTRODUCTION or PROLOGUE or PREFACE but the honest announcement of novelistic chapter: ONE.  The essay, disguised as an introductory essay, is an introductory essay that is really a novel’s chapter disguised as an essay.

“All this happened, more or less.”  A fact is a thing done. Finished.  Something that has happened, more or less.  A fiction is a thing made.  Fabricated.  Oddly, once something has happened, in fact, that fact, no longer exists.  We are left with the residue, more or less, of its happening, the physical evidence of the happening but not the happening itself as the happening has, already, happened.  That residue, that evidence, can be faked, manipulated, distorted, counterfeited.  The essay, nonfiction, that opens the fiction, Slaughterhouse-Five, constructs a spectrum right at the start.  It suggests that all of this book, even the “nonfiction” part of it is, in fact, fiction, a made thing, more or less.  The book creates the pattern of ombre.  The essay is a fictive essay.  It is to be about blending.  It is about the collaboration of corroboration.  It feathers and shingles.  It is about shading shading.  It shades shading.

The essay suggests that it is a report of its research. It is in the guise of a “finding.”  The essay titled ONE, the opening chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, allows that it will recount the various research methodologies the author resorted to in order to write the book that follows.  Fact-finding trips.  Note-taking and outlining.  It should be read, it suggests, as a kind of after-action report.  The opening essay ends, quoting the opening line and the last line of the novel that is to follow. This suggests that though the essay appears at the front of the book it was most likely written after the writing of the book it seems to introduce.  It can be read then as a kind of memory of memory.  Or memory cloaked in memory.  It is the novel’s memoir.  But if it is the novel’s memoir it is to be read not so much as a reflection on the past but a premonition of a future, a future that is about the past and is about to pass.  Not about the writing of the book but about the writing about the writing of the book.

The essay that begins Slaughterhouse-Five assumes it contains a polemic aspect but then argues against itself.  Kurt Vonnegut introduces Harrison Starr, a filmmaker, the executive producer of the polemic movie Zabriski Point, who asks, “Is it an anti-war book?” to which Vonnegut says he says that yes, he guesses it is.  Starr engages in the argument, contributes to the drama by dismissing the validity of genre, the efficacy and aesthetic of the rhetoric of argument.  He says he says to people who say they want to write an anti-war book, “I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead.’”  Vonnegut goes on to interpret, concurring with Starr’s allegoric assessment that there would always be wars and that they would be as easy to stop as glaciers.  But is this a ruse?  By being amenable to the rhetorical position of being “anti” to the “anti,” one can contest it, confront the appeal to futility.  Is it about stopping the glacier or propelling it forward?  Is the book the immovable object or irresistible force?  Or both at the same time?  What’s that Frost said about the poem: Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.  Glacial essays as well.

The existential nature of the artistic medium called writing is linear.  It wants to move directionally.  It wishes to go someplace.  There is a beginning, middle, end. Literally, we read, in English, beginning at the top of the page moving our eyes left to write in lines that ladder down the page.  We turn the page from right to left.  The essay we read at the beginning of the fiction, Slaughterhouse-Five, might be a hack disguised as an essay to scramble the conventional code of the way the novel is to be read.  The essay as saboteur.  The essay infiltrates and makes possible a disruption of forward flow.  It inscribes and anticipates skipping and stuttering.  It is to get us ready for the unstuckness.  It unsticks us.  A river when one looks at it, moves and does not move, fluid and static.  A glacier, too, is the embodiment of static and yet is in a constant motion.  Language wants to line up, to lead someplace, to begin and conclude.  Narrative by its nature.  The lyrical essay attacks the line, in the wolf’s clothing of narrative, creates the illusion of the line that is actually a broad and rising tide.  Blot instead of plot.  It appears to condense and compress.  No way out of its specific gravity, only in deeper, a black hole, going nowhere fast.

Vonnegut’s essay is an accident.  My essay about that essay is an accident.  Accident as an accident.  Things happen in his essay and in my essay, more or less.  “Accident” stumbles into the essay as a charming mistranslation by a Dresden cabdriver in his Christmas card note to Vonnegut: If the accident will.  Vonnegut picks this up immediately and begins to worry it, adding the phrase and the pattern of accident to the weave of the writing.  Writing is the willing of accident.  Accident the engine of will.  Will the signpost of the future.  Will the document of the dead.  Living will.  Improvisation, accident, here is being cultured as not simply the technique but the aesthetic goal.  “It is so short and jumbled and jangled…” Vonnegut writes about the book and about the essay that introduces the book.  It is the costume of the controlled crash.

The illusion of forward momentum that masks the desired circular nature, the essay that opens the book, Slaughterhouse-Five, contains many rounds, many endings that are also beginnings.  It repeats and refrains.  The essay might be thought of as a staging platform, a work bench, scaffolding, and an assembly line to construct the one perfect phrase that encapsulates the lyrical essence, vibrates the emotional resonance, and becomes Vonnegut’s signature chord.  “So it goes,” that phrase, the incantatory Kyrie of the book and, escaping from the book into the vernacular, is formulated in the opening essay.  It seems to be a mutation of an utterance that appears earlier in the essay and is repeated, “and so on.”  Repeating encourages experimentation with inflection and, oddly, at the same time, the flattening of inflection.  Repetition flattens, bleeds the meaning out of the abstract scratches on the page.  Empties it of meaning.  Perhaps the only function of the essay was to be this ugly oyster with an irritant that spits out this pearl.  Persistent.  A perfect cyst.

The painter, Abbott Handerson Thayer, considered the father of camouflage, is the first to theorize disguise, his major book being Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909).  While interested in disruptive camouflage or dazzleflage and mimicry, his main contribution was in the art of countershading.  As a painter, Thayer employed the technique of chiaroscuro, creating the illusion of volume and depth on two-dimensional surfaces.  Countershading in nature, the brown back and white belly of a deer, reverses the illusion, flattening the three-dimensional animal.  Such tinkering confuses foreground and background and depth of field.  Sunlight falling on a deer’s brown back whitens, matching the white of its belly below, flattening the silhouette, making it much more difficult to take its range.  The splotchy spots of military camouflage countershade, light the dark valleys and blacken the lit peaks of the uniform’s draping.  The soldier flattens and blends, the foreground sifting into the background.  Here, in what ways are the truths flattened or highlighted, countershaded with the fictions?  Camouflage is designed to conceal, but can the understanding of the mechanism of perception that explains its use be reversed.  Can it be engineered to reveal?

The essay is its own origin story.  It also explains the origin of Slaughterhouse-Five’s alternate title, The Children’s Crusade, and connecting that explanation to the origin of the book’s dual dedication, for Mary O’Hare, Bernard V. O’Hare’s wife, and Gerhard Muller, the Dresden taxi driver whose first appearance in the book, on the dedication page four pages before the beginning of the essay, advertises their reality before they are introduced as characters in the narrative of the trailing essay.  We have no reason to believe that Vonnegut made these two characters up, but he does deploy them as characters within the essay.  He is as he says in the essay: “…a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontation…”  The nonfiction of the essay enables the fiction in the way the nonfiction of the event, the firebombing of Dresden, its irreal reality, enables the fiction.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut writes that he has written this book, Slaughterhouse-Five, within which this essay about the writer and what he has written appears.  The opening essay identifies the real drama of the book, which is not the firebombing of Dresden or The War or War so much as it is the agony, the struggle, of writing.  The character, “Kurt Vonnegut,” that Kurt Vonnegut has written, appears in different writerly guises.  He writes that he has written public relations.  He writes that he wrote as a newspaper reporter for Chicago’s City News Bureau.  He writes that he writes letters.  He writes that he wrote as a creative writing teacher at the famous Writers Workshop in Iowa.  And, of course, he is the writer of this book, Slaughterhouse-Five, you are reading, that seems to be being written as you are reading it.  Having created the character of the writer, the writer launches the written writer into the body of the book where he makes cameo appearances (“That was I.  That was me.  That was the author of this book”).  As a character he traffics with Kilgore Trout, a writer of science fiction, whose day job is the delivery of news as well as the double-agent propagandist, the air force historian attempting to write his book about Dresden, and novelists from the planet Tralfamadore.

A pilgrimage is about being unstuck but also being stuck.  It is travel and velocity but also about stasis and staying still, the station stops.  The movement of the pilgrim is not sustained but constantly interrupted, by design.  Vonnegut’s essay is a travel essay essay.  The trip from Cape Cod to Pennsylvania with many stops and starts.  The trip to Dresden.  The telephonic transportation of the late night calls.  The letting in and out of the dog.  As we read we move through the text but we are delayed by its bafflement. We are baffled.  At the beginning of the essay, Vonnegut and O’Hare have reached Dresden and tour the modern city with the cab driver Muller.  And there is the side trip considering the Crusades, the spatial and spiritual pilgrimage infused with belligerent invasion.  Specifically the Children’s Crusade which was a perversion of the perverse pilgrimages that were the Crusades.  The essay ends with Vonnegut making the trip to the trip to Dresden and getting waylaid in transit, stuck in a Boston motel, a non-person.  There he reads three books about being marooned in time and space and genre, stalled, in between the in-between.  Where is this essay located?  It is perhaps a non-essay essay.  Not a fiction but also not not a fiction.

From Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel written in the form described within it:

Billy Pilgrim can’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could, at least, see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.  Billy commentated that they might be telegrams. [1]  There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore.  But each clump of symbols is a brief urgent message—describing a situation, a scene.  We Tralfamadorians read them all at once not one after the other.  There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully so that when seen all at once they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.  There is no beginning no middle no end no suspense no moral no causes no effect.  What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

This could be a fairytale for all the gift exchange going on and the essay nothing more than an elaborate thank you note or a dramatization of the thank you note.  The propellant of the action of the essay, the trip to Dresden and the subsequent breaking of Vonnegut’s writer’s block, was the Guggenheim gift money.  God love it, he writes.  Later he writes: “Somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract…” Then there is the strange exchange (can we call it a gift exchange?) of prisoners on the Elbe, outside Halle.  Vonnegut arrives at Bernard V. O’Hare’s house, “carrying a bottle of Irish Whiskey like a dinner bell.”  There is this too, the part were they “give up” on remembering.  Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift calls gifts “erotic property” meaning that gifts are property that stay in motion.  The gift itself, the thing, is worthless.  It is only in the exchange and in motion that it is valuable.  The exchange binds us together.  The essay moves and moves.  It is relentless in its motion but like a planet, a galaxy spinning, it creates a stasis, a dynamic standstill, at its core.

I like how the essay infects the fiction of the novel that follows after it.  It infiltrates the seams and the seems of the novel.  The essayistic voice returns with a vengeance to open the tenth chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five with the news bulletin of Robert Kennedy’s assassination  coupled with the current events of Martin Luther King’s death and the dead in Vietnam.  The “I” assigned to Vonnegut is like a needle, hypodermic and sartorial.  The “I” proceeds to memoir and his father’s death and returns once more to the return trip to Dresden with his buddy Bernard V. O’Hare.  Interlarded with the essayistic paragraphs are the final anecdotes of Billy Pilgrim and the witnessing of the exhumation of the corpse mines of Dresden.  “The I instead of the eye,” the New Journalism famously asserted, reacting to the irreality of the Vietnam War, borrowing and importing the techniques of fiction into the realm of nonfiction.  But here in the midst of the same moment Vonnegut reverses that osmosis, a new new journalism, that filters back into the novel the hybridized concoction of fact and fiction but gauged now to snag time while always letting it go.

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[1]    “What Hath God Wrought” was the first message sent by telegraph on May 24th, 1844. By coincidence, I was in Poughkeepsie, NY on January 27th, 2006, staying at a Marriott Courtyard next to Locust Grove, Samuel Morse’s estate on the day the last telegram was to be sent by Western Union. The last telegram sent, and several other telegrams sent the same day hoping to be the last telegram sent but were not, read: This is the last telegram ever sent.

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Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  His father worked for the telephone company as a switchman and would bring home many different kinds of telephones as each of the rooms in the house had at least one extension and some as many as four, a jack on each wall.  These were rotary dial phones as this was the era of mechanical switching before digital circuitry and touch-tone keypads were invented.  When a call came into Martone’s house, the whole house rang.  The bells then were not simulated bells, not synthesized alarms, but actual bells built deep within the many phones, and they rang in bursts, the duration of each varying slightly from phone to phone so that some phone somewhere in the house was ringing even when the others were between rings and then the volume increasing as the silent ones cycled round to join in some tinny telephonic harmony.  Martone’s father retired when solid-state wiring replaced the mechanical switches.  His last job was the cutting over of the old system to the new one.  Martone’s father had, earlier, cut-over the system of direct-dialing long distance as well, spending a long Labor Day weekend away from home to work full time even sleeping in the office, making it possible to dial anyone in the world directly.  Years later, Martone is working on a book called Four for a Quarter.  It is made up of fictions connected to the number four—the four chambers of the heart, the four winds, the four corners of the world, the four types of blood, the four-in-hand tie, the Fab Four, and the country code for the UK, 44, his father wired into all the phones fortnights ago in the switch rooms of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

ADVENT 12/2: Ander Monson: Short Lessons in Hybridity

 

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[Well, our neighbors have dropped the Christmas bomb all over their yard, as they do each year. They keep adding inflatable Christmas decorations, no duplicates between the two houses. This means it's advent. And as you may have noticed, our yearly Essay Daily Advent Calendar is live & up & running, featuring an essayist each day essaying a bit about an essay, the essay, or an essayist, leading up to Christmas. If you missed Phillip Lopate's great post on December 1st, read just below this one. This here is December 2nd. Keep an eye on this space as we mark the days. —Editors]

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Short Lessons in Hybridity: Four Introductions
 
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Ander Monson

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1: Lia Purpura

A hybrid is a thing that is also another thing, a double thing, or a thing that first appears as two but resolves into one. Or a thing that, under intense pressure such as an hour spent reading alone or a weekend without speaking, yields a doubleness. Well, perhaps we are rushing things: all of us, at our best, like the beasts we love, are multiple things, are capable of multiple things, of becoming more than just the one, we hope. Otherwise, how boring. We should fear too much unity.

Only those who live in fear should be troubled by a hybrid’s doubleness: yes, a horse with wings, a gleaming thing part eagle and part lion, two truths lying down with fiction and fogging up the windows some. Interspecies dalliances generate a lot of heat and sometimes shame: so says the lonely minotaur deep inside the labyrinth. Even if they’re fun, these dalliances, they arise from need. We wouldn’t still be growing citrus in this country if someone hadn’t thought to remix it. The roots of the tree that should in nature grow the sweet oranges that most of us enjoy eating or juicing are susceptible to a bark-destroying virus. The roots of the sour orange tree resist the virus. So top one with the other and you get a growing, thriving, brilliant thing, a tree with rings that do not always match from stump to branch. Or match.com a bison with a domestic cow, add a nice night, a little Teddy Pendergrass, and boom, a beefalo.

By the time you’re seeing two Lia Purpuras there are at least three or four, and probably a whole lot more. They’re everywhere. Teach Lia Purpura in a class and you recruit another pair. You can use her as a dowsing rod to predict your favorite students. One suspects that a Lia Purpura is simply faster than the eye can track and that her capabilities exceed our descriptive grasp. That is, we lack the language to say what it is she does or even specify where she was when we last caught her out of the corners of our eyes. My Monster Manual lists Purpura as a kind of displacer beast, which, as you may know but not admit, is a “vaguely puma-like creature” with a pair of dead black tentacles. “The molecular vibrations of the displacer beast are such that it always appears to be 3’ from its actual position.” They are very hard to fight and “hate all life, but particularly blink dogs”. Well, this Purpura is somewhat the opposite: her work exalts all life, even the blinky parts, the ones we skip, the undersung, as in her “On Coming Back as a Buzzard”, in which she celebrates “plump entrails crusting with sage and dirt tighten in sun: piercing that is an undersung moment, filled with a tender resistance, a sweetness, slick curves and tangles to dip into, tear, stretch, snap, and swallow.”

That’s quite a sentence. So much so that it’s not just a sentence but a time stop tool. As a critic noted of her work, “Purpura...puts readers into a state of aesthetic arrest.” Yes. Everything is an opportunity for attention, an afternoon for a dalliance, for a convergence. Here she is from the last essay in Rough Likeness: “I believe our best work on earth is in service of likeness. I don’t know what to call it—moments of interpenetration? To feel the exchange across borders.” Bravo to those moments. Bravo to that exchange. Ladies, gentlemen, hybrids, others, please welcome Lia Purpura.

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2: Maggie Nelson

In the genre of the introduction the convention is to list awards, which I refuse to do. That’s what genre often is to the hybrid heart: a guide of what not to feel obliged to do. The hybrid may crave constraint, knowing that in being bound we free another part of self.

In this series, we will see that sometimes the writing is the hybrid (I am thinking strongly here of Jenny Boully, our visitor two weeks from now), pitched between the seams of genre, perplexing those of us who try to describe or contain the thing we’re seeing with a label. But then sometimes the writer is herself the hybrid.

For instance, Maggie Nelson is obviously a hydra, multiple draconian heads snaking up from the one body, extremely fearsome, entirely smart, and very rare. Still the best source for hybrid consultation, my 2nd edition Monster Manual says she may be “found in marshes, swamps, and similar places, as well as in subterranean lairs.” I imagine her like this: astride her cache of gold and gems, one head orating lineated poems (doing so well and often, including several books). Another munching on memoir, most recently The Red Parts, about media spectacle, murder mind, sexual violence, and her murdered aunt Jane. Another, odder head approaches Jane again as a subject, this time fusing verse and prose and found text, in Jane: a Murder. Often with hydras two heads fasten on the same subject and open it up in surprising ways.

Just when you think you’ve counted them all, another Maggie Nelson head rises wielding criticism (most recently The Art of Cruelty). It is certainly most fierce. I wouldn’t want to mess with it, so I wisely sheathe my vorpal blade. Then there’s whatever head made Bluets, her book that's most itself a hybrid, occupying the space between essay and poem, documentary, philosophy, personal, highly researched, and deeply, unreservedly passionate.

If you venture deep enough inside the poetry center’s subterranean lair, you may discover a hoard of rare Maggie Nelson treasure which she has been known to guard, including her first book Pacific, published (self-published!) eighteen years ago. You can’t find it anywhere else. The spine is broken. The pages fall from the binding when you raise it up to the rising sun in the map room like the staff of Ra. To read is to remix it like a beloved record. To read it is to damage it, like a sacred text. Well, to read a book at all is to grace it with your human trace. Books are yours and even when they are no longer the pages still hold a little you.

Follow the gleaming, swaying hydra heads down to the body underneath, the thing that all the mouths finally feed. It’s just a body. Turns out it’s just a writer—just a human—there. Maggie Nelson, I hereby free thee from this wack simile. So too, to you students of hybridity, be like Maggie Nelson, be the hydra, allow your heads to flex and go where they are drawn. Be otherwise fierce and we will fear ye too.

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3: Jenny Boully

A hybrid is a seamed thing that lives above and subsists on the fire of seam itself, where the earth’s crust is thinnest and what’s below can serve as fuel. A hybrid feeds on seam, or the steam that emanates from cracks when something underneath gets superheated and must at last emerge.

Jenny Boully’s work is self-evidently seamed. If all text is a body, and I believe that it is, then Jenny Boully’s drawn to where that body splits and does not mend and becomes multiple: its open wounds, its amputations, a little voice floating in a field of voice, its sutures, its erasures. See, for instance her first book The Body, footnotes on an absent text. See, for instance, her not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, a double narrative of Peter Pan and Wendy, one floating atop the other like concentric, descending tectonic plates. See also The Book of Beginnings and Endings, which includes just those, with the middles eviscerated. Or consider her newest book and her first of mostly lineated poems, of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoons: a book of failures. What else but a hybrid would present a book of failures, offering them up, collected, to be dissected, seams and weaknesses and all?

Even her bio suggests the split: “Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas.” She’s not fully either, nor both, exactly, not Thai, nor Texan, but somewhere in the split between—not located so much as dislocated, as in her essay, “A Short Essay on Being,” in which she writes, about her Thai-ness in Texas, “You don’t show others their errors—you let them eventually come to learn the errors of their ways and have them come to you for forgiveness later.” That is, you lair. You lay in wait. You take what’s given. For a long time you might burn or even eventually turn to stone.

So here’s the lesson: Find a seam and occupy it. Take strength from it like a salamander. I mean the fire-lizard from myth, not the cute wet thing that sings of slime. By seam I mean a crack in language or in genre or in form where there is some pressure. Or find a pair of seams, like the ones that run in lines down the sides of jeans, keeping our doughnut-lit-up thighs from bursting out like overeating eels. Once you have your seam, then straddle it.

When first you find your seam it might feel like there’s nothing there. Still, ask yourself: what is it that you do that is least like the others? How are you best an irritant, and to whom? Art’s not easy; it should produce some friction. If it doesn’t threaten someone somewhere then you’re doing something wrong. Emphasize that little heat you feel and try to kindle it. See what that means and why others resist.

Open up your seam. Slip a finger inside, then next a hand. It should feel warm and dark, long unused to light. With your hand inside of it, can you feel its pulse? That means there’s something moving, living here. This is your seam. There are others like it but this one’s yours alone. What does it abut? What does it hold closed? Slip yourself inside completely and see what’s there, what moves against your feet when you’re underneath. That is: your work is now to understand these pressures and give your voice to them. Write from it. Make this slit a home. Describe its movements well. Invite others there. Let it close above you at your own risk. In that case you may have to find a different exit.

Pliny the Elder tells us that the salamander, “an animal like a lizard in shape, and with a body starred all over, never comes out except during heavy showers, and disappears the moment it becomes fine… It spits forth a milky matter from its mouth; and whatever part of the human body is touched with this, all the hair falls off, and the part assumes the appearance of leprosy.” The Monster Manual assigns this hybrid beast a “copper-colored head and torso... copper colored, with yellow glowing eyes...its lair is typically at least 500 degrees...and such treasure as is found there will be the sort to survive such heat.”

Well, what treasure we find in Jenny Boully’s work has survived such heat and in facts subsists on it. To that end, before I am set aflame for boring you, I give you Jenny Boully.

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4: Thalia Field

By now you may agree that it may be time to blow up hybridity and insert something more solid in its place. Yes, we’ve seen the fire-seam and how it fuels Jenny Boully’s work, and how multi-headed hydraosity keeps the Maggie Nelson hungry, and how Lia Purpura’s displacer beasting makes her impossible to hit or track or tame. Yet every series has an end, and thus we arrive tonight at our temporary terminus.

I say temporary because, though it’s not officially blessed with the Hybrid Series moniker, the Prose Series is bringing another pair of hybrids in February, Arianne Zwartjes and Aisha Sabatini Sloan, so I hope you’ll return for that. And I would like to take the opportunity to thank Cybele Knowles, whose dark arts have given life to this series. Please: applause.

But: tonight! Maybe the better question is not to ask what makes a hybrid hybrid but to ask what writer of any worth is not? What does it mean to be a poet? A novelist? An essayist? And which tools are you not allowed to use when you are forced to pick a team? All to say that we hope you all transcend the categories you’ve been saddled with and are more magical and fierce than you think or know.

Back to our game. Of our smallish set of four, Thalia Field seems to me the least easy to metaphorize, monsterize. You can certainly call our other visitors essayists or poets, and they can live for a while in those cages—let us not forget how genre is a cage for the convenience of the marketer and the bookseller, and to some extent the academy. But I don’t have any idea how to pen one like Thalia Field. But from an interview, there’s this: across her work, she “attempts practices where hardened concepts can be softened.” These hardened concepts: objectivity, the unassailability of the I, genre, conventional understandings of story, “sanctified syntaxes and predictable forms.” She reminds us that the work we do in being, in naming and assuming, is a paradox: our sense of self is like a being afloat with a little life vest that we call I in exceptionally stormy seas, except the vest itself is dissolving as we move, are tossed, and as we think about our situation.

There’s an idea. In this case we have two great beasts from which to field. First, the rust monster, which corrodes metal weapons and armor at a touch. I really wish it could be so, but second, and I think better, is perhaps my favorite beast in all of Dungeons & Dragons, the gelatinous cube, a slow-moving 10’ motivated chunk of powerful animal jello, always on the move, sliding slowly toward you, more translucent than transparent, so you see through it but slant, and if it touches you first it paralyzes, then it consumes, then it digests you and your gear, rendering most of you a mush. The process is unpleasant but illuminating: oh, these blood, those bones, here’s who we loved and how and when until we didn’t anymore. There’s those words, that book we wrote, that crappy cloak, the paradox of I and being, part of and apart: these are our component parts, on which so much depends.

Her work reframes questions more often than it offers answers. Reading a text by Thalia Field is losing our balance and falling into wonder. First, Field is a reconfigurator, a recombination machine, a questioner, a dissident. She is perhaps a field of haze. A cloud of gaze and birds that somehow constitute a philosophy at a certain time of day. If held to the light her words seem a gauzy scrim through which we can see—but only partly, and what is seen is transfigured by the filter. Strangeness and irreducibility: isn’t that what we ask of art? Instead let’s just ask Thalia Field.

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A note on the text: these four short introductions were delivered as part of the Hybrid Series at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, in October and November 2013, a collaboration between the UA Poetry Series and the UA Prose Series, which met for a short time and birthed another little something powerful and weird. You may view and listen to them all—though they may take a couple months from this original posting date to be digitized and made available—via the UA Poetry Center's VOCA archive. 

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Ander Monson is the author of six books, including the forthcoming Letter to a Future Lover (Graywolf, 2015). He is one of the curators of this site.

ADVENT 12/1, Phillip Lopate on A Little-Known Gem by Max Beerbohm

The sometime-caricaturist, drama critic and novelist Maxx Beerbohm once declared: “What I really am is an essayist.” By 1920, Beerbohm had hit his stride, publishing his best essay collection, And Even Now, that year. (With mock conceit, he had titled his youthful, thin debut The Works of Max Beerbohm. Thereafter, he tagged each subsequent gathering of essays with an afterthought—More, And Even Now, Yet Again—like a postscript apology for still taking up the reader’s time.) And Even Now especially should be singled out as one of the most consistently superior essay collections published in the twentieth century. “More of a personal manifesto than any of its predecessors,” noted his biographer, David Cecil, it included some of his most famous, frequently anthologized essays, such as “Going Out for a Walk,” “Laughter,” How Shall I Word It?,” “Hosts and Guests,” and “No. 2, The Pines.”

Tucked among these was one of his funniest essays, “Quia Imperfectum,” which, I feel, has been unjustly neglected. Perhaps the Latin title put people off: it means “Because Imperfect.” Beerbohm, though usually self-mocking when it came to his intellectual range, prided himself in his schoolboy mastery of Latin, which he considered essential “to the making of a decent style in English prose.” By giving this piece a Latin title, he was perhaps flattering his cultivated, English quarterly readers’ presumably classical education. Or maybe he was making fun of that snobbishness, since the subject of the essay turns out to be the unachieved, the imperfect, and the monstrously tony.

The essay begins with a leisurely preamble: “I have often wondered that no one has set himself to collect unfinished works of art. There is a peculiar charm for all of us in that which was still in the making when its maker died, or in that which he laid aside because he was tired of it, or didn’t see his way to the end of it, or wanted to go on to something else.” One may note a few things in this opening: the straightforward clarity of the first sentence, followed by the slyly complicated, diminuendo spiraling of the second, from the most dignified explanation for the piece being left unfinished, death, to the less dignified fatigue, confusion and finally boredom. The universalist assertion (“all of us”) temporarily unites Beerbohm with his readers, noteworthy because he will just as often push us away with his contrarian singularity.

He then rambles through some examples of works left incomplete, from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” to the statues Michelangelo never got around to finishing in the Baptisery, to Racine’s abandoned play, Asquith’s plan for the reform of the House of Lords, Leonardo’s St. Sebastian, etc. There is some hint of raillery in these paragraphs, at least a provocative lack of respectful tone in speaking of these geniuses, but we don’t know where he is going with this yet: we don’t see that it is meant to set the stage for where he turns next, his takedown of Goethe.

At the bottom of Page 2 he lights on his main focus, “a certain huge picture in which a life-sized gentleman…” etc. New paragraph: he starts to have some fun: “The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading Goethe’s Travels in Italy. I have.” He is no longer in league with the reader, but cheekily one-upping him. He continues: “Or rather, I have just been reading a translation of it, published in 1883 by George Bell & Sons. I daresay it isn’t a very good translation (for one has always understood that Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well—an accomplishment which this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And I daresay the painting I so want to see and have isn’t a very good painting. Wilhelm Tischbein is hardly a name to conjure with, though in his day, as a practitioner in the ‘historical’ style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome, Tischbein did great things, big things, at any rate.” “The word “rapturous” is a mischievous tipoff: Beerbohm keeps puffing up these historical figures, then pulling them down. He has dropped his superiority toward the reader for not having been in the midst of reading Travels in Italy, and is now colluding with the poor, puzzled, intimidated but (deep-down) skeptical average person who wonders if all these artists are really what they’re cracked up to be. A self-professed little man and minor writer himself, Beerbohm is saying, in effect: Don’t be intimidated! I am going to take you by the hand and show you what assholes they really are.

He starts by zeroing in on Goethe’s vanity. “Goethe has more than once been described as ‘the perfect man’…. But a man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, must sorely try our patience.” He enumerates: “he was never injudicious, never lazy, always in the best form—and always in love with some lady or another just so much as was good for the development of his art, but never more than that by a tittle.” Of course this is unfair, but the irreverence is tonic.

He then mocks Goethe’s unquestioning acceptance of a flunkey’s dedication as his due: “Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up. Had you and I been at Goethe’s elbow when, in the October of 1786, he entered Rome and was received by the excited Tischbein, no doubt we should have whispered in his ear, ‘Beware of that man. He will one day fail you.’ Unassisted Goethe had no misgivings.” Beerbohm loves to play the seductive game of bonding with his readers’ “trivial instinct,” while mocking the grandiose self-confidence of larger-than-life figures. “Goethe, you may be sure, enjoyed the hero-worshipful gaze focused on his from all the table of the Caffé Greco.” He also has fun mocking the opportunistic painter (“Pushful Tischbein!”) who latches on to the great writer and starts to paint his portrait in the hopes it will lead to some juicy commissions.

The rest of the essay plays out as a narrative, with Beerbohm quoting from the surviving letters and diaries and speculating as he reads between the lines. The flunky abandons the great man, preferring to chase some beauty. “Incredible!” Beerbohm writes with mock-astonishment. “We stare aghast, as in the presence of some great dignitary from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn, when he is in the act of sitting down.” One can almost hear Beerbohm giggling spitefully in the background as the condescending Goethe gets his comeuppance, but what makes the essay so effective is the tone of formal propriety and scholarly historical research maintained throughout. So much of Beerbohm’s humor is based on vocabulary and levels of diction, ranging from archaic to modern, always with am ironic whiff of parody that is difficult to pinpoint but apparent nonetheless.

Lord Cecil, his attentive biographer and anthologist, summarized Beerbohm’s approach thus: “Irony is its most continuous and consistent character; an irony at once delicate and ruthless, from which nothing is altogether protected, not even the author himself. Ruthless—but not savage: Max could be made angry—by brutality or vulgarity—but very seldom does he reveal this in his creative works. His artistic sense told him that ill-temper was out of place in an entertainment, especially in an entertainment that aspired to be pretty as well as comic. His ruthlessness gains its particular flavor from the fact that it is also good-tempered. On the other hand it is not so good-tempered as to lose its edge. Max’s irony is never that sort of ‘kindly’ irony that softens and sentimentalizes. His artistic sense tells him that softness, as much as savagery, would destroy the clear bright atmosphere needed for his entertainment to take place.”

In short, though his thoughts might disconcert, his formal shaping of each essay still aimed to give pleasure, and succeeded. So he rounds out this particular piece with some appropriate further musings on Goethe’s conceit and the charm of artistic incompletion. The essay, as we know, is a form that resists airtight perfection and invites impurities or digressions, so Beerbohm may also be commenting self-reflexively and even approvingly on his chosen métier. The irony is that, as Virginia Woolf remarked: “Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect…and then, as if one could swallow perfection and still keep one’s critical capacity unsated, one looks about for something more….For a second he makes his own perfection look a little small.” Still, perfection is not such a bad thing. Quia perfectum.

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Phillip Lopate's most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head (the fourth collection of his personal essays) and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.  He directs and teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.