The Ethics of Nonfiction: Rhetoric, Ethos, and Identity 3031391861, 9783031391866

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The Ethics of Nonfiction Rhetoric, Ethos, and Identity George H. Jensen

The Ethics of Nonfiction

George H. Jensen

The Ethics of Nonfiction Rhetoric, Ethos, and Identity

George H. Jensen Department of Rhetoric and Writing University of Arkansas at Little Rock Arkansas, AR, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-39185-9    ISBN 978-3-031-39186-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To my daughters-in-law Leigh Lorraine and Rosie with gratitude

Preface

I began to think about the ethical issues of writing nonfiction when I was working on Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir About an Alcoholic Family (2009). As I was writing about my father’s drinking and how it affected my family of origin, I often questioned my drafts, process, and motives. I had read Charles M. Anderson and Marion MacCurdy’s Writing and Healing as part of my research. I knew that I wanted to write a healing narrative to take me beyond a limited view of my father, largely formed when I was a boy. I also hoped reframing my childhood would make me a better father and husband. I knew this exploration of self was important, and I hoped to be in a better place once I finished the project. It was a journey, but much of my process could be described stumbling and wandering. While I do not believe that questions about ethics can ever be fully resolved, I do believe that it is important to have strategies for exploring the implications of how we write about the self and others. Anderson’s description of a healing narrative, from his article on Rita Charon’s Stones of Ibarra, will be at the core of this book: Healing narrative enables narrators not to fight or flee, but to return to actual and remembered sites of trauma in as full, as truthful, and as comprehensive a way as possible through three symbolic acts: (1) naming the trauma, (2) acknowledging that it will always be a part of the person the sufferer has and will become, and (3) telling the stories trauma engenders to the self and others. As narrators, audiences, and witnesses engage these stories, telling and retelling them, they are freed to try out alternatives, to see both experience and themselves as they are, as they were, and, most importantly, as they might become. (“Me Acuerdo” 361) vii

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As I was finishing my memoir, I wondered if I should publish it. Maybe it would be better to finish it and then burn it as a ritual release. I often wondered if publication might ultimately do more harm than good. These are typical concerns for memoirists and essayists. But, as Anderson says, telling our stories to others is part of our healing and part of theirs—those who read our stories. There is risk in narratives that delve deep into family history—and not just for the writer. To find a more sustainable truth about ourselves, we must be vulnerable. We must deconstruct the stories that we have been telling about ourselves for years—stories that are comfortable and true enough on the surface. In writing my memoir, I went through a number of transformations. Even though my alcoholic father left my family when I was seven, I came to realize my family was still alcoholic long after his departure. After my father left, my brother was sucked into the role of the alcoholic father. The alcoholic father was gone, but the structure of an alcoholic family survived. In the course of writing and revising, I went from telling a simple story about my family (“my father was an alcoholic, he left our family, drifted about, ended up in New Orleans, where he drank himself to death”) that was fixed in time to a more complex story— actually, multiple stories—that moved through time. I also came to realize that I had been limiting my own development because I was measuring myself against a limited view of my father. Learning more about him, partly through research and partly through imaging what he might have thought and felt about leaving our family, I was released from being bound to him. This is how I explained this movement in my memoir: It might be, and this is but a vague idea, that seeing my father as more than an anecdote brings him into my life even as this new, fuller story releases me. My father is no longer a still point, a stark value, that I used to move into adulthood even as it keep me a little boyish. As I was leaving my teen years, I often said to myself, “I will be a better man than my father.” I knew I wanted to move past the man that I believed my father to be, but I found that the still point was always with me, defining me. (70–71)

I didn’t end the journey there. I didn’t arrive at anything like absolute self-knowledge, even after the writing was finished. But I was in motion. I was writing myself into a new way of living with time. As we write, as we reveal layers of our own identity, we move past the veneer of our families and friendships. In this process, I faced what seemed like looming ethical questions almost every day, some as localized as word

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choice, others as expansive as exploring new ways of conceptualizing my identity, rethinking my family history, and shifting the emotional frames of my past. If we commit ourselves to this journey, how can we speak of and for others who may want to remain home in a comfortable and familiar identity? If we honestly examine our own past, we cannot avoid making others vulnerable. How should I write about my father who had harmed our family, especially my brother? How should I write about my brother, who had harmed me? How should I write about my mother, who had asked my father to leave our family when I was only seven? How should I write about my own past and examine my responsibility in my family history? Everyone in my family of origin had passed away by the time I began writing, but would that mean I had freedom to write anything? And what about the minor players in the memoir, those who were still alive? Did they have the right to read drafts? Should I change their names? Should I hold back and not write everything? After my memoir was published, my motive for exploring these questions was less of a postmortem and more of an extension of the project. I have always seen myself as more of a teacher of writing than a writer. As someone who was trying to teach himself how to teach writing nonfiction while in the process of writing a memoir, I wanted to better understand how to work with students. I hope that this project will help students to understand their process better and make them aware of new options. I hope it will help teachers to better guide students. This project was also influenced by my experiences at the NonfictionNow conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2017. On the first day, I participated in a panel on the ethics of nonfiction and was struck both by how much the discussion grew out of the granular problems that the participants were facing in their own writing and how none of us seemed to have a framework for navigating these issues. Everyone in the room gave advice, but no one, myself included, seemed to have the terminology they needed to reframe questions or shift the ground from advice to broader concepts. For example, how do these ethical questions relate to the genre of nonfiction? Or, what does this say about the role of style? Or, how does our writing affect our relationship with others? Or, how does writing nonfiction transform the self? Certainly, as I would later find, writers have explored a range of issues related to what is often called “life writing” and “autobiography,” terms often used to cover any genre where the author and the subject are the same. Similarly, autobiography and memoir are sometimes used interchangeably (see Eakin “Introduction” 10). Part of

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helping students and teachers to see options, as Aristotle did in his Rhetoric, means identifying both general options in “life writing” and specific options within genres. One other unofficial themes of the conference affected this project. Because the conference was in Iceland, it was truly international. The conference was called NonfictionNow; it was unambiguously a conference about nonfiction. Yet, participants from Iceland, Sweden, France, and Germany kept saying, “We don’t distinguish between nonfiction and fiction; we just tell stories.” Since then, in draft after draft of this book, I have thought about this comment. As I wrote, I kept reaffirming my initial belief that nonfiction is a genre—in the broad sense that fiction, drama, and poetry are genres. When writing nonfiction, we are writing about our world, our truth, our unique lives. We are claiming a connection to our stories. These truth claims make the ethical questions about writing nonfiction different than those of other genres. It is not enough to say nonfiction is about writing true stories. There is, I believe, more to it. My views on the differences between nonfiction and fiction were further reinforced by writing a novel, released serially on a website. Before beginning the novel, I had been trying to write an extended essay about suffering and mourning in the aftermath of my wife’s death in 2008. It was not going well. As I read drafts, the voice in some sections sounded like a pompous old man offering advice even he couldn’t follow—too detached. The voice of other sections sounded like a lost soul whining about the difficulties of life—too enmeshed. I just couldn’t find the right voice. In the midst of my frustration, a friend, a novelist, kept encouraging me to write a novel. I kept saying, “I don’t write fiction.” One day, as an experiment, I tried shifting to fiction and everything opened up. Within the genre of fiction, I could create a character who was, in my mind, clearly not me, even though I was drawing on material from my life. It was okay if he preached or wallowed in his misfortune. Creating a fictional persona allowed me to write, and I soon found that writing fiction was quite different that writing nonfiction. When I was writing my memoir, I often wrote about some of my feelings and then, either immediately or when revising, thought, “This is not who I am.” Or, “This is not how I want to think.” Or, “I need to write myself into another place.” I rarely cut this material. Instead, I added reflection that critiqued or redirected the line of thought. As I was writing my novel, I did the opposite. I felt free to keep exploring the implications of thoughts that I didn’t think were healthy or that didn’t relate to who I was or who I wanted to be. It was more about some other person who lived

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a life similar to mine. Facts about the protagonist’s life aligned with my life, to some degree, enough so that friends who read the emerging novel online would look at me with a pained expression on their faces as they said, “I read the first chapter of your novel.” I would try to explain that that character is not me, but I think most of them didn’t believe me. In some ways, they were right. I was exploring a reality that could have been, which is part of the horizon of fiction. While I write about the genres of nonfiction in this book and argue that nonfiction allows writers to explore self in unique ways, this is not to say that other genres, like fiction, do not serve the author and reader in other important ways. In this Preface, I wanted to explain that this book comes from my own experience as a writer, which is not directly discussed anywhere in what follows. It also comes from my experience as a teacher of writing, which is occasionally referenced in a general way. It is, in this sense, a grounded theory that has emerged from practice. I do not, however, want to downplay the importance of theory and history, which helped me to conceptualize and broaden what I was seeing in nonfiction. Theory and history also helped me to see rhetorical moves I would not have otherwise noticed. Much of this book is about the importance of perspectives. In The Situation and the Story, a book that analyzes many important works of nonfiction, Vivian Gornick wrote that “you cannot teach people how to write,” but “you can teach someone how to read” (159). The assumption behind this statement is that good readers become good writers, that this transition from reader to writer will happen naturally, without conscious thought. So many of us were trained as literary critics, and we see this as the path rather than a path. From the perspective of a rhetorician, I believe that writing can be taught. We can look at genre, form, style, and how all of this connects to an emerging self in a way that provides options to writers—in a way that accelerates their development as a writer. As I worked through the issues covered in this book, I had help from a number of colleagues and friends. Thanks to Heidi Harris, Jim Baumlin, Greg Graham, Lee Nickoson, and Elaine Stuart for reading drafts and offering feedback. At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, I piloted drafts in a course titled Foundations of Creative Nonfiction. My students’ questions and comments helped me to revise. My appreciation to Karen Babine, Editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, for granting permission to reprint “Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s ‘The Love of My Life.’” Little Rock, AR, USA

George H. Jensen

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Works Cited Anderson, Charles M. “Me Acuerdo: Healing Narrative in Stones for Ibarra.” Literature and Medicine 25:2 (Fall 2006): 358–75. Anderson, Charles M. and Marian M.  MacCurdy, eds. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. NCTE, 2000. Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narration. Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Jensen, George H. Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family. Moon City, 2009.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Making Truth Claims 21 3 Critiquing Habit, Habitus, and Modernity 57 4 Fighting Narration 77 5 Shifting Roles, Mimesis, Sustaining Community101 6 Critiquing and Claiming Memory121 7 Making Confessions137 8 Reflecting on Self as Other149 9 Situating Scenes171 10 Conclusion189 Index199

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About the Author

George  H.  Jensen is Professor Emeritus with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His recent books include Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family (2000), Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis (2000), and Identities Across Texts (2002). With Heidi Skurat Harris, he has written Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty, which is forthcoming. His hobbies included backpacking, cycling, and fly fishing. He retired in May 2023 and now lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Subjectivity is primarily an experience, and remains permanently open to inconsistency, contradiction and unself-consciousness. Our experience of ourselves remains forever prone to surprising disjunctions that the fierce light of ideology or theoretical dogma convinces us can be homogenized into a single consistent thing. —Nick Mansfield (Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway) The odd thing about form is that it makes it possible to say certain things but not others. —Karl Ove Knausgaard (Inadvertent)

In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a series of lectures from 1981 to 1982, Michel Foucault traces the “care of self” (epimeleia heautou) from Plato’s Alcibiades to—not through—Saint Augustine. That is, he moves through history to an important historical moment, Augustine’s Confessions, and ends his lectures for that year. In the first lecture (as you read, remember the text is the transcript), Foucault offers the following overview of his project: • First, the theme of a general standpoint, of a certain way of considering things, of behaving in the world, undertaking actions, and h ­ aving relations with other people. The epimeleia heautou is an act toward self, others, and the world; © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_1

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• Second, the epimeleia heautou is also a certain form of attention, of looking. Being concerned about oneself implies that we look away from the outside to… I was going to say “inside.” Let’s leave to one side this word, which you can well imagine raises a host of problems, and just say that we must convert our looking from the outside, from others and the world etc., toward “one-self.” The care of self implies a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought. The word epimeleia is related to meleté, which means both exercise and meditation. Again, all this will have to be elucidated; • Third, the notion of epimeleia does not merely designate this general attitude or this form of attention turned on the self. The epimeleia also always designates a number of actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself. It involves a series of practices, most of which are exercises that will have a very long destiny in the history of Western culture, philosophy, morality, and spirituality. These are, for example, techniques of meditation, of memorization of the past, of examination of conscience, of checking representations which appear in the mind, and so on. (10–11) Foucault, as one might expect, spends the rest of his lectures expanding this summary. He discusses letters, sermons, Socratic dialogues, and commonplace books, but he does not make connections to the genres that emerged in the wake of Augustine—the personal essay, autobiography, or memoir. Nonetheless, he is exploring the tradition of care of self, a turn toward self and a transformation of self, that predates Augustine and Montaigne, the authors most often cited in origin stories about autobiography, memoir, and the personal essay. His lectures are, thus, a prehistory of the genres of nonfiction, which can inform how we conceptualize current practice—how we write nonfiction and how we teach nonfiction. Writing about the self can be traced far beyond Augustine and Montaigne to the origins of writing and across multiple cultures, as D’Agata shows in The Lost Origins of the Essay. The pursuit of self-knowledge and the care of self are part of this tradition. Before drawing out those connections between Foucault’s lectures and the practice of nonfiction, which I suspect a number of readers are already seeing, we need to unpack some portions of this quote because Foucault’s lectures strike at the core of how this book will approach the ethics of

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nonfiction. I will attempt to look beyond moments of unethical behavior—lies and distortions—to broader issues: How to live a full and meaningful life with others as part of a community in a particular time and place. Care of self cannot be separated from care of others and care of community and care of the environment. At the same time, care of self serves as the foundation for other forms of care. As we look to the self, we understand the complexity of our own subjectivity and identity, the difficulty of maintaining an ethical self, and the inescapable networks that are formed each time we act. What Foucault’s lectures uncover is that, long before Augustine wrote The Confessions or Montaigne wrote his Essais, a tradition existed that viewed ethics as a deliberate daily practice. Foucault specifically mentions “practices,” “meditation,” “memorization of the past,” “examination of consciousness,” and “checking representations which appear in the mind.” He describes the care of self as a techné, a term Aristotle often employs in his Rhetoric. A techné refers to the knowledge that emerges from the practice of an art, often through the application of a set of technical skills. And so the care of self, especially for the Stoics, is practiced daily through techniques like meditation, a nightly self-assessment of one’s actions, or memorization of maxims (see Hadot 81–125). In Subjectivity and Truth, his lectures for 1980–1981, Foucault says this of techné: It is “the technique that concerns existence understood as life to be led, the technique that enables this life to be fashioned” (34, see also 104, 251, and 370). The care of self and techné, as Foucault traces it, are less like psychoanalysis and more like working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (see Jensen, Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 50–57). Genres like the protreptic, a widely practiced in Ancient Greece and Rome (Alieva 44–45), can also be viewed as a techné. Diane Swancutt wrote that protreptic was used “to train adherents’ minds and behaviors” and “reform their convictions and characters” (qtd. In Alieva 42). Some consider Augustine’s Confessions to be an example of protreptic (Kotzé 41). There is a long tradition of using writing about the self to build an ethical life; this tradition also includes certain forms of reading. Foucault says that the care of self is an “attitude toward the self, others, and the world.” It is, in short, the exploration of the ethical subject, which means more than just not doing harm. It also includes—to cite a contemporary concept that reaches far into the past—self-actualization. Foucault points to the importance of “attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought.” This involves “thought on thought,” or reflection

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(Hermeneutics 454), which includes a turning away from outer experience to a focus on the self and the self’s mode of thinking. In explaining this turn, Foucault hesitates to say the turn toward the self is a turn inward. As becomes clear with later lectures in the series, this turn is toward the self as engaged in the world—to cite another contemporary concept that reaches far into the past—in a mindful way. In terms of narratives about the self, this can take the form of what Freadman calls “moral self-­ imagining,” a complex and nuanced thinking about how we might act when facing a complex moral decision, an imagining that creates an image “not just of self but of my best self” (143). Morson and Emerson use prosaics (their term, not Bakhtin’s) to describe Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach to ethics. Bakhtin felt that ethical rules ignored the “essential particulars” of a specific time and place. Rules mechanically prefigure ethical decisions that ignore the uniqueness of context. He preferred “a moral wisdom derived from living rightly moment to moment and attending carefully to the irreducible particularities of each case” (Mikhail Bakhtin 25). The best way to understand “the particularities of each case” is extended narration. As we will see, the work of Foucault and Bakhtin complement each other. Foucault also speaks more generally about “actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and through which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself.” Throughout The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault addresses the connection between speaker and message: It is, in short: knowing (savoir) that the world is a common dwelling-place in which all men are joined together to constitute precisely this community. … What is involved is simply knowing them differently.… It is by making us appear to ourselves as the recurrent and constant term of all these relations that our gaze should be directed on the things of the world, the gods, and men.… What authenticates the fact that I tell you the truth is that as subject of my conduct I really am, absolutely, integrally, and totally identical to the subject of enunciation I am when I tell you what I tell you. (235, 407)

The Stoics and Epicureans of the first- and second centuries, Foucault says, were seeking a practical knowledge, a wisdom on how to live a full and ethical life, an understanding of the self, not as an abstraction, but as embodied and engaged in a community and a material world. It is a knowledge, a way of knowing, that cannot be extricated from the experience of the subject in the moment without stripping the self of its

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meaning. This is ethos, but not an Aristotelian ethos. As Baumlin points out, “Aristotle recognized that delivery is, in effect, coterminous with invention—of the speaker’s character.” Isocrates, on the other hand, believed that “the rhetor possesses and displays ethos before speaking and writing, that his ethos is manifested in ‘all the actions of his life’” (xvi). Isocrates directs us to a broader notion of ethos, one beyond the boundaries of the text to the broader project of the care of self, not just the author as manifest on the page but also as the person engaged in the unfolding experience of living, a dialectic between the text of the author and the author’s life. Bakhtin calls this answerability. In out texts, we explore how to live. How we live answers our texts.

Care of Self and Experience Later in the first lecture of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault speaks more directly about the connection between the subject and truth, which is more overtly at the core of nonfiction than in other genres. He contrasts the care of self to the kind of disembodied truth dominant in much of the discourse of Modernism, that is, truth after what he calls the “Cartesian moment.” In Subjectivity and Truth, his lectures from 1980 to 1981, he presents an alternative to the “Cartesian moment.” We could, he wrote, think about the “code of sexuality” as “imposed from above.” Or, he continued: Shouldn’t the question be posed the other way round? Rather than wonder how the individual psyche was able to interiorize pre-existing codes imposed on it from above, would it be better to wonder what experience was defined, proposed, prescribed to subjects that led them to have a certain experience of themselves on the basis of which precisely the codification of their conduct, of their acts, and of their thoughts became possible, legitimate, and in their own eyes almost obvious? (100)

In this series of lectures, Foucault is not so much discounting “pre-­existing codes” as he is exploring what they erase—experience. He is proposing a different methodology, a different epistemology, a different approach to ethics, which is at the core of nonfiction. As Paul Lauritzen says: “The appeal to experience functions as an effort to reach moral bedrock. This is why the possibility that the experience is not factual is so threatening. If the experience is fictional, there is no foundation on which the arguments finally rest” (20, 31). Readers see nonfiction as having its own unique

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moral force. Even when reading fiction, they often want to know if the story is true. We could call this a naïve form of reading, or we could say that these readers are recognizing a way of finding truth that is important. Writing from experience, this book will argue, is an important form of generating knowledge, one often a counter to epistemologies like science, and it carries moral force because it comes from experience. At the core of this writing is the human subject. The path to exploring the self, however, involves more than writing about the experience of the self. It is also about how we write about the self. In “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” a review of an exhibit of “home movies showing everyday scenes” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which was displayed in the basement of the museum (a statement in itself), Leslie Jamison wrote: It would be a lie to say that I was blindsided by the beauty of the ordinary at MoMA; more truthful to say I’d gone looking for it. By the time I stood in front of those home movies, I was nearly a decade into an ongoing fascination with the grace of ordinariness: an increasingly insistent belief in unextraordinary lives as sites of meaning. For me it began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements, in distant cities—riveted by the stories or clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal. Recovery was teaching me that every life held profundity. Banality was just a call to look harder. And while I was starting to attend these meetings, I was also reading and ranking applications for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—expected to decide whose stories were better than others. This produced a certain tension: Why were stories valuable for their exceptionality in one sphere, and for their interchangeability in another? (NYRB, 14 May 2020, p. 53)

This section of Jamison’s review could be read in a number of ways. One view: She references the conflict between stories told as art and stories told to heal, a tension she explores in more detail in The Recovering. Another view: She sees her story—her personal perspective—as the foundation of her review, and she values “unextraordinary lives.” We could say she is writing in the tradition of Montaigne, not the tradition of Descartes, not even in the tradition of art for art’s sake or the celebration of the wounded storyteller. Like Foucault and Kittler, she sees these ordinary lives, lived inescapably within human bodies, as “sites of meaning.” Another view: There is both the division between private and public and its fusion. While she may not have intended it, the passage is a good gloss of Hannah

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Arendt’s work: We must have private space and public space, and the best way to fight totalitarianism is to establish the importance of each individual in the public space. In other words, we need individuals and community. Without a private world, there are no individuals who have the ability to stand apart from norms. Without a public space that is pluralistic and inclusive, it is hard for individuals to develop. How do we develop both functional individuals and healthy communities? By individuals, ordinary and exceptional, telling their stories. In “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Arendt writes: “Thinking and remembering … is the human way of striking roots, of taking one’s place in the world into which we all arrive as strangers. What we usually call a person or a personality, as distinguished from a mere human being or a nobody, actually grows out of this root-striking process of thinking” (100). This essay was written after Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, after she introduced the phrase “the banality of evil,” her description of the unthinking, bureaucratic Eichmann. For Arendt, thinking is when the dialectic is internalized and the individual embodies two selves that interrogate each other yet live in harmony. This thinking individual, in a particular time and place, an individual who has struck down roots, is the foundation of her ethics: “If he is a thinking being, rooted in his thoughts and remembrances, and hence knowing that he has to live with himself, there will be limits to what he can permit himself to do, and these limits will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set” (101). Writing and reading nonfiction plays a role in developing this kind of individual. The word “individual” might seem to convey self-reliance, independence, and even suggest what is sometimes called the isolated Romantic self (Parker, The Self in Moral Space 89). In contrast, we can think about the individual as both an “I” and a “we,” as a consciousness that emerged from the social, has the power to reimagine the social, and contributes to the maintenance of the social. Habits and values play a role here, as do rituals. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow write that the seasonality of social structures—how the same society might be highly ordered in summer and anarchistic in winter, a notion often neglected by not just many anthropologists but also many historians and political scientists—can help us to understand how humans are imaginative and creative as they find ways to live together. They have “the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another” (86). Today, we see traces of seasonality in festivals and carnival,

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which can keep “the old spark of political self-consciousness alive” and reconceive how we think of individuals and their roles within a particular social order: “The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world” (116–17). Although Graeber and Wengrow do not make the connection, genre can be viewed as a social space, a form of carnival, where new social forms are imagined. Nonfiction is such a space. It is a means for exploring ways to be in this world. It can also, I will argue, help to maintain democracy, a particularly fragile institution. In The Government of Self and Others, his lectures for 1982–1983, Foucault explores the importance of parresia, which in Ancient Greek means “to say everything” (43). Its foundation is self-knowledge (44), and its manifestation includes speaking truth to tyrants (50). It is necessary for democracy (155). The genres of nonfiction can be sites for both the exploration of self-knowledge and the practice of parresia.

Care of Self and Texts Throughout The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault talks about the importance of the subject undergoing transformations of self as preparation for receiving truth, and the improvement of self to become capable of embodying truth—his own version of answerability. At the end of the last lecture, he says that Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is the “summit” of the care of self, which he views as a neglected area of Western philosophy. He doesn’t explain this claim, but I suspect he wants to nudge his audience in the direction of considering the relationship between truth and the subject who embodies that truth and how the knower and the known and community emerge together in a dialectal relationship. As Merleau-Ponty wrote of Montaigne: “The same author who wanted to live according to himself felt passionately that we are among other things what we are for others, and that their opinion reaches us at the core of our being” (207). Writing about the self is not an egomaniacal dive into the isolated individual. It is about finding connections to others and one’s community. It is about finding the self in others. This is why Foucault was reluctant to describe the process as a turn inside. He didn’t want to suggest the individual was seeking self-knowledge in isolation. The exploration into self is a dialectic between self and others, self and community, self and the world. It is a form of Bildung or coming of age, maturation, and

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personal development, if we are willing to extend Bildung to a life-long process. For Hegel, who was once the headmaster of a boys’ school, Bildung is the process of developing individuals so that they will be capable of dialectical thought—or, as Foucault described it, capable of embodying truth. In The Spirit and Its Letter, Smith writes that Hegel’s Bildung involves two processes. First, because “natural consciousness remains trapped in its habitual behavior,” the self needs to “recognize itself as a rational agent in an external world.” It needs to find some separation or independence from its habits. Second, the self needs “to impose itself forcefully on external objects.” It needs to act (17). The process of Bildung, in Hegel, begins with a movement outward toward the world and others, followed by a return to the self, with the self transformed in the process. This movement, the very flow of consciousness, includes exploring “a model of representation” that “derives from practice of reading, imitating, translating, and writing … to develop a historically grounded sense of self-expression” (Smith 20–21). We cannot know ourselves apart from others, and expression is never pure. We speak from others to others. As we write in a genre, even if this act is imitative in our early attempts, we experience “the self’s loss into and gradual appropriation of the Other of tradition” (21). One of the genres at work in this process is hupomnemata, the commonplace book, the embodiment of a tradition, which is manifest in the quotations scattered through Montaigne’s essays. The commonplace book is a genre. As genre, it provides writers with a particular path to the care of self and the building of self. Each genre, I will argue, has its own ontology, epistemology, and ethics, which authors adapt to their own ends. As we imitate the style and form of another author (“the Other of tradition”), especially an author who is instrumental in the creation of a genre, we move out of ourselves. We experience another, not as an exterior, as objectified, but as an interior. As Karl Rosenkranz wrote of Hegel’s own rhetorical education and his use of imitation: “By copying, he was able to penetrate the finest fibers of the foreign and he attained the ability to project himself into every, even the most individualistic, standpoint and speak in its own terms” (qtd. in Smith 87–88). If care of self is about an individual seeking self-knowledge, Bildung is about entering the consciousness of another. This is the creation of—to use another contemporary concept that reaches far back into history—empathy. Imitation is— or, at least, should be—more than mere copying. Smith argues that a turning point in Hegel’s own development was Das Leben Jesu, a

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rhetorical exercise in which he created a life of Jesus by translating portions of the Bible into the framework of Kant’s principles of practical reason (113–14). Imitation crosses over into translation, imagination, and transformation. Bildung, which embodies intuition, is a process of moving toward “independence through imitation” (119). It is a form of play during which writers lose themselves in roles, in another form of being, that has the possibility of educating, even transforming, the author. It is what Bakhtin calls “sympathetic co-experiencing,” which he equates to acting. We come to see the world through the eyes of another, and we develop empathy (“Author and Hero” 77). In current creative writing classes, students are often asked to copy a passage from their reading, analyze it, and then imitate it. This is often described as a lesson in style, but it should also be viewed as part of the tradition of Bildung. The Cartesian Rational I

Even though Descartes’ philosophical system seems to be founded on subjectivity, his rational “I” is actually more objective than subjective, more abstraction than experience. His “I” has more in common with logic and mathematics than feelings and experience. In The Dream of the Enlightenment, Anthony Gottlieb writes: “For Descartes the difference between soul and matter was the most fundamental difference in creation. While the essence of matter was ‘extension,’ or existence in space, the essence of the soul was something else altogether. Descartes reckoned that a malicious demon could in theory deprive him of all his attributes except one: ‘At last I have discovered it—thought; this alone is inseparable from me’” (16). Descartes used “thought,” the thinking subject, as the foundation for his epistemology, on which he believed he could ground all of science. Any “clear and distinct” idea, he assumed, must be true. To reach “clear and distinct” ideas, he pushed aside experience, including the sensations of his own body. Descartes’s tendency to regard the human body as a machine even led to rumors that “he was often accompanied by a life-size working doll that was practically indistinguishable from his illegitimate daughter, Francine” (5). A genre, to summarize this line of thought, has its own ontology—its own way of thinking and acting, its own way of being in the world. As we

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enter the tradition of a genre like the personal essay, we act out an ontology (we enter Montaigne’s way of being in the world), explore a way of knowing (a mindfulness about bodily experience and the quotidian), and consider ethics (how to be with others, our community, the world). This loss of self to tradition is initially disorienting, a movement into another consciousness. Over time, it evolves into transformation and leads to an expansion of self. As the writers move past imitation they return to self—a return to the particularity of the author’s life (see Parker, “Life Writing” 65–71). Said differently, as we begin to learn the tradition of the personal essay, we become like Montaigne. But we cannot live in the sixteenth century. As we continue to write, we move beyond imitating Montaigne to becoming our own self, with our own habits and values, finding connections to our own time and place. In the end, we must find our own approach to the ontology, epistemology, and ethics of the genre.

Care of Self and Trauma The self cannot remain lost in tradition, and pedagogy is—or should be— part of the process of finding meaning as students engage with and disengage from tradition. Rhetoricians have always dealt with more than the practice and theory of oratory and writing. They have always been equally concerned about pedagogy, especially as it related to the development of individuals who would play a central role in their communities. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler draws “educational tracts” out of the shadows and into the core of how discourse functions. He draws from Nietzsche’s “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions” to investigate “the educational machinery of the university” and the student “who dangles from the umbilical cord of the university” (18). Kittler writes: “Even in the deadsilent, solitary rooms, the gymnasium students of the nineteenth century were never alone; the ‘totality of their education’ could intend and understand everything that paper patiently took and gave” (181). To illustrate the danger of strict imitation, a move toward tradition but not beyond it, Kittler quotes an example of “the German essay,” a practice at the core of early nineteenth-century German education. The following excerpt from one of these German essays provides a glimpse into an oppressive pedagogy and a student using parody to write beyond it: It is deadly still in the room—the one sound is the pen scratching across the paper—for I love to think by writing, given that the machine that could

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imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented. In front of me is an inkwell in which I can drown the sorrows of my black heart, a pair of scissors to accustom me to the idea of slitting my throat, manuscripts with which I can wipe myself, and a chamber pot. (181)

While writing is one way we deal with trauma, it can also be its own form of trauma. After quoting this essay, Kittler comments: “When writing remains a writing exercise, a spare and dismal act without any extension into what is called book, work, or genre, there is no place for the ‘personal presentation and information’ so dear to the essay pedagogies” (182). Teachers who have not dealt with their own trauma can inflict trauma. Pedagogy and schooling have their own interpersonal dynamic. The teacher teaches a certain way of being in the world, which might limit the development of individuals, which might fail to explore new ways of being in the world. The student reacts, becoming its complement or rebelling against it. Either way, the teacher defines the student, who responds by defining the teacher. Neither finds what lies beyond the technology and ideology of their times. For this German gymnasium student, writing was nothing more than a mechanization of self that emerged during the Industrial Revolution and a shallow conception of Modernism. It is a self that becomes like a machine. We can speak, as postmodernists often do, about how modernism and technology have made us more like machines, how we are moving into a period of history that might be “posthuman,” but we must acknowledge that the practices of humanism, which emerged about the same time, can be equally dehumanizing. On their OK Computer album, Radiohead has a “song,” if it could be called a song, that Thom Yorke speaks in a voice altered to sound like it comes from a computer. The mechanized voice utters goals for self-improvement: Fitter, happier More productive Comfortable Not drinking too much Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries At ease Eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats A patient, better driver A safer car, baby smiling in back seat

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Sleeping well, no bad dreams No paranoia

It goes on, but you get the idea. Self-actualization can carry its own burden and its own trauma. One TED lecture might encourage us to be more productive, and another might look to a future when computer chips are implanted in the brain for easier access to the Internet. Human perfection is yet another way of producing human machines. The productivity promised by easy access to our smart phones can be a way of dealing with loneliness. While the Internet and social media have clearly increased our loneliness, especially for digital natives, this is an abstraction of experience that has been emerging since at least the late nineteenth century with the advent of high-speed rotary presses and daily newspapers, which began to fill column inches with reports on the rich and famous. Radio, television, 24/7 cable news, and eventually the Internet followed. Media theorists commented on this trend long before the birth of the Internet around 1990, such as Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord says we are living in a spectacle, “a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (2). This keeps people in “a state of unconsciousness” that is built on separation, “a vicious cycle of isolation” (10). Saturated in media, we need to find ways to ground ourselves. Thankfully, a personal essay is not a TED lecture; a memoir is not a psycho-salvation self-help book filled with bullet-pointed lists of advice for every situation. Montaigne was not about human perfection. He was about becoming human, with its own share of shortcomings and failings.

A Rhetorical Approach This book, as should be clear already, will explore the ontologies within the genres of nonfiction—how genres can be a means of both developing the self and reimaging the social. In Graeber and Wengrow’s work, it is important to acknowledge their approach to ontology, even though they don’t use the term. So much of the current thought on ontology, which rarely escapes Heidegger, explores being and time. That line of thought is important. In this work, however, I will rely more on Bakhtin, whose work has some overlap with that of Heidegger but who more fully connects forms of being to genres; Bruno Latour, who explores multiple forms of

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being; and, finally, Graeber and Wengrow, who explore the social effects of imagination, which operates outside of time or beyond it. I have emphasized the multiple views of Jamison’s quote above as preparation for reading this book. In the tradition Kenneth Burke’s pragmatism, his concept of “terministic screens,” his advocacy of “perspective by incongruity,” this book will not provide ethical rules or principles; it will attempt to reveal ambiguity, either by providing multiple interpretations or by working against established traditions. As we find ways to decenter or shift perspectives, we see ambiguity where we once embraced dogma and we develop connections where we once felt isolation. If we see decentering and shifting perspectives as rhetorical moves, as moments within a process, these moves become part of exploring the world from the perspective of the “I,” especially if we understand that the “I” itself is not a fixed and unchanging position. The “I” can move and develop. And it should. The purpose of the book is to explore the techné of nonfiction—to open options for writers and teachers. This book should raise questions, not provide answers. If this book provides even one answer, it is that most nonfiction genres, not all, teach us to live with complexity and ambiguity. Sample of the Cartesian Rational I

Now, it is manifest by the natural light that there must at least be as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect; for whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? And how could the cause communicate to it this reality unless it possessed it in itself? And hence it follows, not only that what is cannot be produced by what is not, but likewise that the more perfect, in other words, that which contains in itself more reality, cannot be the effect of the less perfect; and this is not only evidently true of those effects, whose reality is actual or formal, but likewise of ideas, whose reality is only considered as objective. Meditations on First Philosophy, Part III This book will argue for a rhetorical approach to the ethics of nonfiction. Part of this, as we shall see, is moving beyond the ethical implications of what we have already written, which has been the focus of most treatments of the subject. While discussing breaches of ethics in the history of nonfiction is important, it will not be my focus. Rather, this book will

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explore opportunities for ethical action; in other words, it will move beyond “not doing harm” to seeking out the means of doing good or working on the “project of self.” When we are too focused on “not doing harm,” we can sometimes become paralyzed. We can neglect the potential for doing good (Eakin “Introduction” 4). Not writing, similar to not acting, does not ensure an ethical stance within the world. The most unethical pieces of writing are the ones that were never written. As Morson and Emerson write of Bakhtin’s ethics, “Dishonesty may result not from a motive, but, quite often, from the failure to undertake the project of responsibility” (31). So, what does it mean to approach ethics from a rhetorical perspective? Aristotle defined rhetoric as “an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion” (On Rhetoric 36). He defines and discusses three types of rhetoric—epideictic, forensic, and deliberative. He wants his audience “to see” all available options, those inherit in rhetoric at large as well as those specific to these three genres. He is, in short, focused on the teckné—the art, the socially and historically evolving practice—of producing texts. This is the approach I will apply to nonfiction. After this introduction, the chapter headings will begin with the progressive form of a verb, as in “Making Confessions.” The intention here is to remind the reader that each chapter presents writers with an option for an ethical act. As in Aristotle, genre will play a role—at least, a particular approach to genre. In the Poetics, Aristotle’s approach to genre is more focused on the experience of the audience, as he reveals the structure of the genres of his time. He does not teach the speaker to see options; rather, he analyzes the finished work and its effects on the audience. As Herrington and Moran state, Aristotle’s focus in the Poetics is on “the formal properties” of a work (2). In the Rhetoric, he is focused on genre as it is “manifest in the world around him—in actual and recurring social situations,” more from the perspective of speakers (3). In books that discuss how to write nonfiction, a great deal of discussion is similar to the Poetics, that is, more like literary criticism. There is much value in this approach, especially if we acknowledge the transformative effects of reading. In The Self in Moral Space, David Parker explores the ethical self in nonfiction from the perspective of reading: “Readers are often drawn to the lives of others because they are searching to know how to live themselves” (7). As a balance, as an

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alternative view, we can also benefit from a discussion that is more like what we find in the Rhetoric, that is, writer-based rather than reader-based. As an illustration of this difference, we can look at Philippe Lejeune’s On Autobiography, which is written from the perspective of readers, more like the Poetics than the Rhetoric (3). While he discusses several genres, such as memoir, in general, he uses “life writing” and “autobiography” as umbrella terms for any writing about the self. His definition of autobiography is, on the surface, elegant and sound: “In order for there to be autobiography (and personal literature in general), the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (5). When defining a genre as a reader or as a literary critic, the definition needs to be precise and set clear boundaries, which raises the issue of how to handle exceptions to the definition. If the author, narrator, and protagonist must be identical, does this mean that an “anonymous autobiography” is possible? Lejeune says it is not (19). Similarly, what about “autofiction” (for example, much of Hemingway’s work), works written about the self in the third person (Henry Adam’s The Education of Henry Adams), or a work in which the author, narrator, and protagonist bear the same name but is labeled as fiction (Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It”)? If we move to a more granular level, more issues arise. Is the author ever “identical” with the protagonist? Lejeune says that the “I” of autobiography is “elastic.” In his discussion of Roland Barthes, he says that Barthes plays “ventriloquy games” (44). While readers might view the “I” position as simple, which Lejeune appropriately calls naïve, it takes many forms: “All the imaginable combinations reveal more or less clearly what is the distinctive feature of the person: the tension between impossible unity and intolerable division” (36). As Barthes explores different identities, does this break the identity between author, narrator, and protagonist? In On Autobiography, Lejeune spends entire chapters discussing exceptions or border cases to his definition of the genre. Writers as well as readers need to understand genres, so they also need definitions—a different kind of definition. In the Rhetoric, as stated earlier, Aristotle defines genres, but his definitions are more general. Forensic rhetoric, for example, relates to the past, it attempts to determine what happened, and it is most often used in legal cases. Exceptions to this basic definition expand—rather than weaken—the definition. We don’t need to discuss whether or not an anonymous autobiography is possible. It exists. For the writer, every exception becomes an option. Every option becomes a way to push the boundaries of the genre and find new modes of

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expression. This is closer, I believe, to how writers actually use genre. Rhetorical definitions of genres do not need to set precise boundaries around a genre; they just need to provide writers with a starting place. The problems related to constructing a precise definition, from the perspective of a reader or a literary critic, become, from the perspective of a writer or a rhetorician, a way of identifying—seeing—options. A rhetorical approach to genres is about expanding choices. Part of the discussion will highlight some moments in history—in textboxes or in the “Detour to Genre” sections at the end of chapters—to provide some historical context or interpretative frames for reflecting on current practice. The search for rhetorical options needs to explore history, but that is not the same as writing a history. While this book will not directly promote a pedagogy for teachers of nonfiction, it does draw on theory to explain genre and the options within genres. As I have worked on this book, my teaching of nonfiction has improved. It is my hope that some of what is in this book will find its way into classrooms. I will also attempt to address the world beyond the classroom. At several times in this book, I will repeat some version of the phrase “much is at stake.” It is my view that nonfiction should be viewed as distinct from poetry, fiction, or drama, that it serves both writer and reader in ways that other genres do not, and that it provides a unique path for dealing with trauma—both personal and cultural—and for understanding our history and moving into the future. Detour to Genre: The Commonplace Book Many writers keep notebooks that they use, as Randon Billings Noble says, to “jot down ideas for writing projects, make lists for writing projects, and write sketches of writing projects.” These notebooks often contain dreams, quotations, an insight, an interpretative frame, or a memory, but the Commonplace Book has a broader purpose than simply supporting writing projects. The practice originated with account books (hupomnemata) that were later expanded to include quotations from one’s reading when books were rare. As Foucault says in “Self Writing,” they were often used for self-­ improvement and even “a guide for conduct,” as a means “to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (211). While hupomnemata might be viewed as a substitute for memorization, they were actually part of the process of memorization. As we read from scattered texts, we select quotes that

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resonate with us, write them down, review them, reflect on them, until we begin to embody the quotes as maxims. Seneca wrote in Letter 84: “We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged or it will be no part of us” (283). This becomes a practice, a habit, part of what Foucault calls the technology of self. In short, hupomnemata connect the individual to something greater, to a shared wisdom. As Foucault writes: Such is the aim of the transmitted hupomnemata: to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and as accomplished as possible. For us, there is something paradoxical in all this: how could one be brought together with oneself with the help of a timeless discourse accepted almost everywhere? (211)

This practice eventually becomes the commonplace book, a form of rhetorical invention, and its trace is found in the personal essay as Montaigne interjects quotations into his meditations, typically without connective tissue.

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Modern Library, 1907, 1999. Alieva, Olga. “Protreptic: A Protean Genre.” In When Wisdom Calls: Philosophical Protreptic in Antiquity. Ed. Olga Alieva, Annemaré Kotzé, and Sophie Van der Meeren. Brepols, 2018. 1–45. Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Oxford UP, 1991. ———. Poetics. Oxford UP, 2013. Arnedt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin, 1963, 2006. ———. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment. Ed. Jerome Kohn. Schocken, 2003. 49–146. Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 4–256. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Hill and Wang, 1977. Baumlin, James S. “Introduction.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S.  Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Southern Methodist UP, 1994.

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Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and Other Writings. Ed. Michael W.  Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y.  Levin. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Belknap, 2008. 19–55. Burke, Kenneth. “Terministic Screens.” Language as Symbolic Language: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. California UP, 1966. 44–62. D’Agata, John D., ed. The Lost Origins of the Essay. Greywold, 2009. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Ken Knabb. Bureau of Public Secrets, 1967. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 1647, 2017. Eakin, Paul John. “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing.” The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. John Paul Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004. 1–16. Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley. New Press, 1994. ———. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collége de France 1982–1983. Ed. Frederic Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Picador, 2005. ———. “Self Writing.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley. New Press, 1994. 207–22. ———. Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1980–1981. Ed. Frédéric Gros. Trans. Arnold I. Davidson. Picador, 2019. Freadman, Richard. “Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life.” In The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. John Paul Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004. 121–46. Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of the Enlightenment. Liveright, 2017. Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. Herrington, Anne and Charles Moran, eds. Genre Across the Curriculum. Colorado UP/Utah State UP, 2005. Jamison, Leslie. “Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York Review of Books. May 14, 2020. ———. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. Back Bay 2019. Jensen, George H. Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis. Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford UP, 1990. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. Inadvertent. Trans. Ingvild Burkey. Yale UP, 2018.

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Kotzé, Annemaré. “Structure and Genre in the Confessions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s “Confessions.” Ed. Tarmo Toom. Cambridge UP, 2020. 28–45. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 2013. Lauritzen, Paul. “Arguing with Life Stories: The Case of Rigoberta Menchú.” In The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. John Paul Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004. 19–39. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited with a Foreword by Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minnesota UP, 1989. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago UP, 1976. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. Allen and Unwin, 2014. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Reading Montaigne.” Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Northwestern UP, 1964. 198–210. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Nobel, Randon Billings. “On Keeping a (Writing) Notebook (or Three). Brevity Magazine Craft Essays. Posted: 6 January 2016. https://brevitymag.com/ craft-­essays/on-­keeping-­a-­writing-­notebook-­or-­three/ Parker, David. “Life Writing as Narrative of the Good: Father and Son and the Ethics of Authenticity.” In The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. John Paul Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004. 53–72. ———. The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good. Cornell UP, 2007. Radiohead. OK Computer. Recording. XL Recordings, 1997. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND. Smith, John H. The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung. Cornell UP, 1988.

CHAPTER 2

Making Truth Claims

To tell nothing but the truth—must, in all cases, be an unconditional moral law: to tell the whole truth is not equally so. —Thomas De Quincey (Letter to the Editor, London Magazine, November 27, 1821) When it was decided (when was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, those two collapse inside of each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings. —Pam Houston (“Corn Maze”)

In the first paragraph of the first book of The Confessions, addressing God as his primary audience, Augustine writes: “You stir us up to take delight in your praise; for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds its rest in you” (I.1.1). Although it might not be apparent at first, this sentence, when read within the context of The Confessions, contains a truth claim: Truth is found in God. The single sentence also reflects an ontology (the human spirit is restless, caught in the flux of time, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_2

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only finds peace in God), an epistemology (to know God is to know truth), and an ethic (sin is being apart from God; goodness comes as God enters your soul). In this work, often considered the earliest extended examination of self in Western culture, Augustine begins his exploration of identity by seeking knowledge of God. So, this single sentence embodies a view of identity that, in a largely secular age, we might want to write off as early Christian theology—except there are lessons here. The first important lesson is that a truth claim is more than a statement. It emerges from a complex context—an ontology, epistemology, and ethic. In nonfiction, this context often unfolds as part of a journey. For Augustine, seeking truth means coming to God, and part of coming to God is his personal journey to a spiritual life. He needs to place himself into the spiritual space where he can accept Grace (Drecoll 110–19). Everything begins with Augustine’s spiritual journey. In this sense, Augustine’s Confessions bears many similarities to current nonfiction, especially memoir and the personal essay. Rather than seeking an objective truth, current nonfiction speaks from a situated “I.” If we are going to speak a truth from a situated “I,” then we must know the self and the self’s world. One of the foundational truth claims made in nonfiction is this: My knowledge of self allows me to understand what it means to live in this body, in this locale, in this moment, and within this community. A situated “I” is not an isolated “I.” How we write about the self, thus, is embedded in a time and place, a community, an entire world. We look outside of ourselves, toward this context, to understand the self. We even, through imitation, act like someone else to become ourselves. As we strive to understand the life we are living as it is unfolding, we strive for something else as well. Even though we are not of Augustine’s time and place, we grapple with some of the same issues that troubled him. We want to know how to live a full life, how to find truth, and how to live with others. We are not only attempting to understand the past—how we have lived. We are also attempting to imagine the future—how we should live.

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Stein’s Alt-I

Gertrude Stein is both the author and the primary subject of The Autobiography of Alice B.  Toklas (1933). The assumption behind adopting an alternative-I, another persona (in this case, Alice Toklas), is that the author can then strive to objectify herself, to imagine how some other might view her. It could just as easily be a way to glorify, even fictionalize, the self without coming across as an egotist. In the voice of Toklas, Stein is able to call herself a great genius, as great as Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. We might also say that she questions the nature of the “I” in autobiography, hers and those written by others. As Ben Yagoda writes: “In reality, she is suggesting, it is a Chinese box of identity where the ‘I’ of the text and the name on the title page are not, and can never be, completely equivalent” (180).

This is not an easy journey. Writing about a life being lived is like walking on a bog. The ground sinks beneath us and then takes a different form seconds after we move on. A large part of that marshy reality deals with shifting time, exploring an existence that is constantly negotiating multiple forms of time, even when writing about facts. We are ultimately, as is certainly true of Augustine, writing about a self, a way of being in the world, which does not yet exist. While the truth of nonfiction is typically gaged by the author’s accuracy in writing about memories and history (the past) and striving to find meaning in them (the present), the future is also there (in an ontological sense) in the author’s voice, the “I,” a striving for a fuller version of the self. If nonfiction embodies multiple forms of time, it can also simultaneously embody multiple identities. At the very least—a past self, a present self, a future self. This could be labeled a postmodern view of identity, even though we could also argue that it is present in Augustine’s Confessions. Whether ancient, modern, or postmodern, it is a view that raises questions about authenticity. If we have multiple selves, how can we speak about being authentic in our writing? Authenticity, as typically considered, comes down to how we view the referential aspect of the nonfiction contract, and this often comes down to identity—or a clash of identities—each with its own unique story to tell. As John Paul Eakin wrote: “How is it possible to

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honor the obligation to self-referential truth without first determining whose is the truth to be told?” (Foreword xix). Even if we only focus on the author, we have multiple identities. Does authenticity relate to an identity established between the author and the past self? The present self? Some future self. The exploration of the potential of the self? The authors of nonfiction often act out roles. Some of these roles are clearly signaled, like writing in the third person. Others are more subtle, like shifting from the present self to a past self. This might be signaled by a shift in tense, but not necessarily. What a particular author means by identity at a particular moment might seem clear to a casual reader, but how could it be? Can an embodied self ever be fully captured in an essay or a memoir? The more we think about authenticity, the less possible it seems—if we remain in the position of a reader. Or, if we remain in a binary—the reader versus the writer. Rhetoricians have always viewed speaker/writer, listener/reader, text, and context as part of a fluid dynamic. The definition of terms can disrupt this dynamic. In academic circles, it is easy to position oneself for or against certain terms and phrases, which we can place into binaries: the authentic self versus the performative self, the search for identity versus the social construction of identity, inner self versus outer self, introversion versus extraversion, the private self versus the social self, the individual versus the social, modernism versus postmodernism, and so on. We defend intellectual property and argue for the phrase “the social construction of identity” over the term “the search for identity,” or vice versa. We have critiqued and problematized these terms. We have found them inadequate. All of them. They should have disappeared long ago, but we continue to use them, or at least some of them, seemingly a random selection, as we grapple with the complexity of identity. Yet the importance of knowing the self endures. In Sources of Self, Charles Taylor explains the development of Western Civilization by focusing on the search for identity and the exploration of ways to express it. David Graeber and David Wengrow, who have studied cultures across the globe and through history, say that identity historically “came to be seen as a value in itself” (504). Indeed, identity may very well be the only term in this group that we all use. While I will invoke most of these terms at some point in this book and I will attempt to define them, I understand that many readers will argue with my definitions, how I use them, and where they pop up. I hope that readers will accept how I try to frame problematic terms. Definition has been part of the dialectic since Plato. If we study how

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definition is used within the dialectic, we can see that it opens up discussion. It doesn’t shut it down. A perfect definition, if that were possible, has no place in the dialectic. Definition is part of an evolving negotiation. As Charles Taylor says in The Ethics of Authenticity: “The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning” (73). Here is what I hope will not be lost. We may not be able to adequately define these terms and phrases and we may use them imprecisely, but we still find value in them. Maybe, we should not analyze the terms and phrases and think more about the dialogue that emerges from them. We might find that we use these terms more like signposts pointing us in a certain direction, opening up certain lines of thought. Terms like the Romantic Self are, as David Parker argues, useful and perhaps even necessary to advance any discussion of ethics. While the “Romantic ‘autonomous self’” might, under much current theory, be viewed as “ontologically dubious,” we still need a subject with agency to make ethical decisions (The Self in Moral Space 89). If we are going to have an ethics, we need a self who assumes responsibility. The exploration of self cannot be separated from considering when and how the self should act. Let’s try to think through the term authenticity, which is so central to making truth claims in nonfiction. Debates about authenticity often swirl around the nature/nurture binary. This binary can take a number of forms: the Romantic self that one discovers versus the constructed self that one builds, the stable self one knows versus the self-in-process that one explores, the unified self that is responsible for its actions versus the decentered self that slogs across shifting ground. In this book, as a general procedure, I will attempt to blur or deconstruct binaries, an approach that precedes poststructuralism. It is a thinking move that dates at least to Hegel, who viewed binaries like Being and Nothingness, not as separate, but as moments in a fluid process. In this vein, Antonio Demasio argues that there is a core self (he also calls it a proto-self) that is bodily unconscious and nonverbal. This self emerges from visceral encounters with the material world and others. It bundles emotions and images. While this core self exists prior to language, it would be inaccurate to call it essential human nature or a true self. It is unformed, a bundle of experiences and memories, material that can be shaped into an identity. There is also a reflexive self that develops within language, which means it also develops within culture and history. It is conscious and is built through reflection. Referring to Damasio’s model, Hunt and Sampson write that we can have

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a conception of the self that “embraces both the notion of a felt core self that arises out of the body and a linguistic self of extended consciousness.” This allows us “to make sense out of a self that is experienced as stable and continuous but also constantly undergoing a process of change” (21). If we agree to work with a model like this, authenticity as “the search for some pre-existing self” need not conflict with “the freedom of constructing a self within a cultural and historical context.” These seemingly contradictory approaches can be moments in what we might call the greater project of self. Let’s try another angle. The discussion about the authentic self is also derailed because we tend to think of it as the self at birth or the self in isolation. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that we are not only thrown into language; we are also thrown into an existence of others and connections to the social. We might become lost in our own subjectivity, and we might become an object as we encounter the gaze of another. It is easy to forget or negate the world beyond our own skin. Once we engage in dialogue, however, isolation dissipates: “In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground, my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric” (354). What does this have to do with the authentic self? Part of what we seek to discover as we search for the authentic self is the intersubjective, how our identity emerged from our connection to others and to our time and place. It seems authentic because it was there all along, even though it is constantly transforming itself. The authentic self is not about the myth of some child raised by wolves. Yet another attempt. Among these terms and phrases, the least problematic are “sense of self” or “project of self” because they hint at something without any pretense of precise boundaries. The most problematic are “the search for the true self” and “the social construction of identity.” They seem to force a choice. But maybe the concepts are less pure and more complex than we might first expect. While we might think of authenticity as the search for and expression of the true self, it might at the same time be viewed as emerging interpersonally and socially as a negotiation within social norms. The authentic self might come to be in what we consider to be a private space, but any private space, no matter how separate, is never entirely apart from the social. Nonfiction often plays out a negotiation between these terms and phrases as we struggle with the project of self. All of these terms and phrases fail us, but it is hard to avoid them. If we align ourselves with a selection of them, we are simplifying the process. We may

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seek resolution and closure, but, as Bakhtin often says, that is always beyond our grasp when we write about a life in process. Even so, it is at the core of nonfiction, the search for identity, and part of that search is finding the right words in the right context. This means moving into a narrative, an ethics that is more about prosaics (a self in time) than propositions (commandments or principles beyond time). It is more about recognizing the limits of language, which includes recognizing how language shapes us, than it is about finding the “thing-in-itself,” some unmediated reality. Another try? In the narrative, we explore both the private self and the public self. It seems intuitively evident to most people that we have both, but the boundary between the two is always fuzzy, especially if we think about different cultures and historical periods, different forms of media. One of the seldom acknowledged effects of social networking is its damage to private space with both saccharine praise and brutal trolling. We seek “likes.” We encounter bullies. While private space was never apart from the social in any absolute sense, it is less so now. It is less safe. If the private is affected by the social (C.S. Peirce says that individuals are a “we” before they are an “I”; see Jensen, Identities 40–41), in what sense does privacy serve authenticity? While pure isolation does not exist, we can still find spaces where we feel less pushed by the social. In such spaces, deep reflection—a critique of social norms—is more possible. In a safe private space, we are more able to assess the effects of the social on our bodies. We might think of this as exploring our emotions, but this experience is ultimately rooted in the human body, which is not the same as biology. Science will never fully explain the human body. Nor will theology. Let’s try to move toward some tentative conclusions. When we explore the social construction of identity, the socially constructed self seems to be the totality of identity. But should we ask who is behind the wheel of this drive toward a construction of self? There must be some “I” there (see Hacking’s Representing and Intervening, The Social Construction of What?, and Rewriting the Soul). Coming to know this “I” is problematic, certainly, but that doesn’t mevan we need to abandon the project. And it is hard to imagine this construction of self as happening without some kind of negotiation with social norms, without the expression of an authentic self, or something like that, to enact the negotiations. If we view identity as evolving rather than set, if we find value in the process of exploring identity, in the journey itself, then we should value multiple paths. This is what should fascinate us: The project of self is like a journey that can explore multiple paths at the same time.

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I have been trying to explore a basic question that is central to nonfiction and writing about self: Are we thinking about authenticity and identity in the wrong way? Should we avoid or reframe terms like the “true self” or the “social construction of self”? Should we focus more on how we choose to live each day (habits), how we plan to pursue meaning (values), how we want to live with others (the interpersonal dimensions of identity), and especially how we are going to create an independent space to think all this through without cloning existing ways of being? Should we focus on critique and reflection? Why especially critique and reflection? Because they set the whole project in motion. In one form or another, they question the weak norms that cover important ideals, like authenticity. In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor spends little time addressing authenticity directly. Rather, he writes about the social forces that are making the pursuit of authenticity problematic: individualism (if the individual is viewed as isolated), instrumental reason (especially statistical and bureaucratic thinking), and political forces that we might refer to as loss of freedom and isolation (such as dogma and ideology). These forces obscure authenticity as a moral ideal and allow “thinkers” to criticize—not critique—authenticity as being a form of relativism or self-fulfillment. True authenticity is constructed through connecting with others and engaging the world, not by pursuing some form of radical individualism. Absolute freedom is the worst prison. Taylor says this amounts to a criticism of an inauthentic form of authenticity (21). If we follow his lead, then authenticity is not just “inner” but also “outer,” not just “individual” but also “social,” not just “biographical” but also “historical,” not just “biological” or “neural” but also “ideological” and “cultural.” We can expand our terms, which means we expand the territory of our search. What makes “authenticity” and “the social construction of self” seem so different is the term true self, which is not a particularly useful concept. (Instead, I will use Damasio’s core self.) What makes “authenticity” and “the social construction of self” seem more like parts of the same process, which we might call “the project of self,” is “freedom” or “agency.” Certainly, how power works within our society is also part of the process. Some have used an understanding of institutions, culture, genetics, and ideology to question free will. In The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor says, “We don’t want to exaggerate our degrees of freedom. But they are not zero” (100). We can understand the limits on our freedom and resist them. The project of self is complicated, but that’s what makes writing and reading nonfiction interesting and important. As will be explained later,

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nonfiction is a particularly useful realm for the negotiation of identity because the ground of our thoughts, our words on a page, is our emerging I. This leads us to a particular and peculiar truth claim: I am searching.

True Stories For a moment, let us move back to what seems obvious to most readers of nonfiction. Let us return to the simple statement that nonfiction makes a certain kind of truth claim: This is what actually happened. This truth claim defines the broad genre of nonfiction, and this is where we begin the search for its ethics. In “Living to Tell the Tale,” Lynn Z. Bloom writes about what might be called the categorical imperative of nonfiction: “Writers of creative nonfiction live—and die—by a single ethical standard, to render faithfully, as Joan Didion says in ‘On Keeping a Notebook,’ ‘how it felt to me,’ their understanding of both the literal and the larger Truth. That standard, and that alone, is the writer’s ethic of creative nonfiction” (278). Bloom is even against changing names, which she feels is the first move toward fiction. But, does the genre itself embody this kind of absolute fidelity to facts? Writers of nonfiction certainly create a contract or pact with their reader. In On Autobiography, Lejeune says that authors have a contract with their readers, and they use that contract to draw a line between autobiography and the autobiographical novel. In terms of the actual text, he says, “there is no difference” (italics in original, 13). Beyond the boundaries of the text, however, an author’s contract with the reader, the assertion that “this is a true story,” means that readers will read an autobiography in a different way: the reader becomes like a detective who “looks for breaches in the contract” (14). Autobiography, thus, is referential, almost like scientific discourse. For Lejeune, this seems to mean that the facts of the story correlate with the facts of history and biography. The contract might be announced by a subtitle like “A Memoir” or the label “Nonfiction” on the back cover. It is easy to problematize this view of the genre. The assignment of a work to a genre is, at some level, arbitrary, more related to marketing, the cataloging system for the Library of Congress, and the layout of brick-­ and-­mortar bookstores. But some works are simply hard to pin down. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior has been labeled nonfiction, fiction, sociology, anthropology, biography, woman’s literature, Chinese literature, and Asian literature (Hsu 35). I will go further in this

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direction later. For now, let’s explore the contract. It all seems to come down to a simple transaction: When this contract is violated, when the facts don’t correlate, readers are offended. Thus, when a truth claim is made, it is obviously important to many readers. James Fry first tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as fiction, without success. He later sold it as a memoir, and it became a national bestseller. Oprah read it and recommended it to her viewers. Fry appeared on her show. Then, she learned that large sections of the book were fabricated. In other words, Fry violated the contract with his readers. She demanded Fry come back on her show so that she could vent her rage. It was pretty ugly—for Fry, at least. Oprah did not appreciate being lied to, nor did other readers (Crouser Memoir 16–17). Similarly, when nonfiction authors are accused of breaking this contract, they are often equally offended. In “The Singular First Person,” a personal essay about writing personal essays, Scott Russell Sanders admits: “What the essay tells us may not be true in any sense that would satisfy a court of law.” Yet, he and other writers of nonfiction often recoil when their work is described as fiction—as untrue. He continues: Not long ago I was bemused and then vexed to find one of my own essays treated in a scholarly article as a work of fiction.… To be sure, in writing the piece I had used dialogue, scenes, settings, character descriptions, the whole fictional bag of tricks; sure, I picked and chose among a thousand beckoning details; sure, I downplayed some facts and highlighted others; but I was writing about the actual, not the invented. I shaped the matter, but I did not make it up. (10)

Writers of nonfiction acknowledge that they must shape the story, as Sanders does. But how much shaping is permitted without violating that implied contract? In shaping the matter, if the author goes too far, does the work cross over from the true (nonfiction) to the invented (fiction), or outright lies? Is the Hollywood claim “based on a true story” an acceptable way to modify the contract and thus to allow the author more latitude with facts and chronology? Should authors go further to protect themselves by labeling their works of nonfiction as fiction, as Dave Eggers does with Zeitoun and What Is the What? Or, is it more important that authors own that their works are true stories, even though some details have been added to enhance the narration? Should we view all truth claims as equal? Is the claim that what happened to the Lost Boys of the Sudan is true, that the

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horrible brutality is a history that should be acknowledged and remembered, the same as the claim that the layout of a refugee camp is true, as imagined by Eggers? Is it ethical to make both kinds of truth claims in the same work of nonfiction? Could Eggers claim his book about the Lost Boys is true with a disclaimer in the Preface: “I imagined some of the details to construct a fuller narrative”? Would this maintain the moral force of the story—that the story is true—while fulfilling the nonfiction contract? In the implied contract, the author is at least claiming to tell as true a story as possible. Does this mean that the author cannot craft the story, as Sanders indicated when he wrote about “using the whole bag of fictional tricks”? When Michael Herr was asked about whether or not he created composite characters in Dispatches, he replied, “Oh yeah. A lot of Dispatches is fictional. I’ve said this a lot of times. I have told people over the years that there are fictional aspects to Dispatches, and they look betrayed. They look heartbroken, as if it isn’t true anymore. I never thought of Dispatches as journalism. In France, they published it as a novel” (Ciotti). In many parts of Europe, narratives may be described as “novels” or “stories,” rarely with a distinction between nonfiction and fiction. In the United States, however, Dispatches was published as nonfiction. Americans expected it to be true. Some of them felt betrayed. Is the need to certify nonfiction as fully true, the “single ethical standard,” particularly American? In our ethics, should we account for cultural differences in how we read? But not all Americans view the divide so purely. Pam Houston says her fiction is about 82 percent her—as in things that actually happened to her, that is, about 82 percent true. She also claims her nonfiction is about 82 percent her. What do we do with that 18 percent? Do we call it craft? Does even 1 percent of “not me” mean the work is fiction? Should even works that are mostly nonfiction, say 93 percent true, be called fiction to protect the author against claims of fabrication? Or, is this just a cop-out? Given that there are at least bits of factual reality in most works of fiction, should parts of fiction be viewed with the same standards for truth as nonfiction? Fry basically accepted and then violated the nonfiction contract. Both Kerr and Houston have said openly that their works are at least partially fictional. Apparently, they refuse to embrace the nonfiction contract, but readers still want to read their work as if they were pure nonfiction, accepting for the moment that can possibly exist. This raises the question of where the contract exists and how it is invoked. The contract seems to be

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more than just a label on the back of the book or where it is placed in a library catalog. Despite what Lejeune says, the contract seems to be embedded in the form of the work. Something is triggering a response in readers, maybe not in all cultures, to read the work as nonfiction, and this “something” seems to override disclaimers by authors or publishers. In The Lifespan of a Fact, we can see conflict within the contract—the absolute fidelity to facts versus crafting a story—play out in real time. John D’Agata wrote an essay, commissioned by Harper’s, about Levi Presley jumping to his death, in 2002, from the observation deck of the Strastosphere Hotel and Casino. Harper’s then declined the essay due to inaccuracies. Later, The Believer considered publishing it, knowing in advance that D’Agata had intentionally taken liberties with some facts. They assigned Jim Fingal, still an intern when the process began, to fact-­ check the essay. Tension between author and fact-checker develops almost immediately. D’Agata admits to Fingal that he had taken some liberties but says “none of them are harmful.” Fingal wants to make sure “all of the facts in the piece add up,” but he runs into problems early—both with the process of fact-checking and with his interactions with the author. D’Agata, for example, claimed that there were thirty-four strip clubs in Las Vegas in 2002. He established this fact by counting what appear to be strip clubs in the Yellow Pages of the 2002 phone book. Andrew Leland, then editor of The Believer, wants Fingal to check this fact, but should Fingal fly to Las Vegas and attempt to find a 2002 Las Vegas phone book? (15–16). How far into the weeds should a fact-checker go to verify a fact that is supplemental, not crucial, to the story? D’Agata says, for example, that the sidewalk where Presley landed was brick in a herringbone pattern (24). Fingal was able to confirm this fact, but is fact-checking at this level reasonable or important? D’Agata mentioned that one of his sources had a beard. Fingal finds a photograph of the source taken close to the time of the interview to confirm the source had a beard (68). Is this necessary or important? Much of the drama on the pages of The Lifespan of a Fact—and there is true drama—relates to how genre is viewed: the essay (D’Agata’s preferred term) and nonfiction (Fingal’s preferred term). D’Agata sees himself as an artist and essayist, not a reporter. Fingal, serious and meticulous about checking facts, believes nonfiction should not only stick to the facts; the facts should also be interpreted correctly and described accurately. When Fingal points out that D’Agata changed the color of a dog grooming van from pink (as stated in his notes) to purple, D’Agata responds that he needed two beats at that point in the sentence instead of one (39).

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Many might view altering facts like this acceptable or trivial, but the essay is ultimately about Presley’s suicide and the facts of how he died and what this says about the culture of Las Vegas and even the culture of the United States. Because the essay addresses these important issues, shouldn’t factual accuracy be more important than the rhythm of sentences? Most of us would probably say yes. But, again, how far does this concern for accuracy need to go? D’Agata wrote that Presley’s body took nine seconds to hit the pavement. Using the coroner’s report as his source, Fingal wants to correct this to eight seconds (19). The coroner’s report is the more reliable source, but could the coroner’s math be off? His knowledge of physics a little shaky? Should Fingal check his calculations? Would it be equally acceptable for D’Agata to be inaccurate about the suicide rate in Las Vegas or statements about the causes of suicide? Facts about suicide rate are fairly easy to check, even though some sources might vary. Facts about the causes, data from scientific studies, is less easy to confirm (29–33). Studies employ different methods, and their data don’t always agree. Is it acceptable for D’Agata to cite a few recent studies, or should he and Fingal review the entire literature on the subject, as if D’Agata were publishing in an academic journal? Some facts are clear-cut. Some are open to interpretation. Some are open to negotiation. I suspect that most readers of The Lifespan of a Fact will feel that D’Agata is too loose with facts and Fingal is too rigid. The process of fact-checking D’Agata’s essay took eight years, and it was never published in The Believer. D’Agata keeps telling Fingal that he is not a reporter. If a news story were fact-checked so thoroughly, it would no longer be news by the time it was published. Here is the point I wish to make: If we define nonfiction as a story that is factually true, shouldn’t we as a community of writers acknowledge that facts are sometimes fuzzy and fact-checking is not so simple?

The Contract The nonfiction contract operates like ideology. Readers may not consciously think about it, but they act as if they know it. Embedded within this basic contract is a definition of the genre of nonfiction: Unlike fiction, which strives to tell “the larger Truth,” nonfiction, no matter how creative, must also tell the “literal” truth. Bloom’s discussion of what it means to tell the truth—her single “standard” or foundation for the ethics of nonfiction—raises a series of issues: Is it okay to change the names of “characters,” should the author resist urges to self-censor, should the

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“real” people who form “characters” in nonfiction be allowed to read drafts, and should secrets be revealed, even when it might harm others? We might consider this definition of the genre simple (nonfiction tells true stories) and this basic version of the contract as naïve (truth is what aligns with the facts of the material world), but this is how Bloom seems to see it. Bloom is a scholar and author of nonfiction, and she has seriously invested in the nonfiction contract, although she doesn’t use that phrase. If Bloom’s version of the contract is brought out into the open, clearly seen rather than vaguely sensed, most readers would probably agree with her. This is how they read nonfiction. They expect the author to tell the truth without thinking about what this means. Again, we might consider this naïve, but these readers represent the core of what nonfiction is, more accurately than those who might be considered more sophisticated readers. Said differently, they more accurately reflect the general expectations of readers in the genre. We should not dismiss their view, but we should explore how authors work within and against this basic contract. We should first acknowledge that the terms of this contract are more difficult to follow than we might expect. This view of the contract hinges on referentiality. That is, in nonfiction, we should expect the facts in the text to correspond to facts in public records and the material world. As we saw with the interactions between D’Agata and Fingal, a fact is not such a simple thing. Also, this focus on “literal” truth—facts—ignores other aspects of telling a story. If an author sticks to the facts but shapes the narrative, does the work cross over into fiction? If an author sticks to the facts but alters the emotional frame of the facts, is that enough to move the work into the territory of fiction? More importantly, how does telling a story from a situated “I,” which I have argued is at the core of most nonfiction, affect the trueness of the story? Does a strong authorial voice necessarily fictionalize a story? While acknowledging that these are important issues, they present a limited view of the ethics of nonfiction because they evolve from a limited definition of the genre. Traditionally, nonfiction is defined as a genre that tells stories that actually happened; it is a product of the author’s memory and thought. In contrast, fiction is, in part or whole, a fabrication, a product of imagination. We seem to accept this definition even though, as sophisticated readers, we know the simple dichotomy often dissolves, and we are often skeptical about explicit contracts with the reader. On the verso of the dedication page of Hemingway’s In Our Time is the following note:

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In view of a recent tendency to identify characters in fiction with real people, it seems proper to state that there are no real people in this volume: both the characters and their names are fictitious. If the name of any living person has been used, the use was purely accidental.

I don’t know if the note was written by Hemingway, his editor, or his lawyer. But, whoever be the “author,” it is as much of an admission as it is a denial. Even with such denials, readers often assume Hemingway is drawing on his own experience, that it is, in the end, a story about some part of his life. Bakhtin says that readers naïvely read fiction as autobiography (Morson and Emerson 428–29). This “tendency,” as mentioned in the note, may come from naïve readers, but it comes also, to some degree, from Sherwood Anderson, F.  Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway himself for creating characters that are identifiably close to themselves, their families, and their friends, many of whom were known to readers of the day. The “tendency,” in short, points to a bleed between fiction and nonfiction. And what about statement: “There are no real people in this volume”? Are there ever “real people” in any book? As Lopate pointed out long ago, even nonfiction writers must create characters on the page (To Show and To Tell 112–15). We find statements about truth, similar in form and content to the Hemingway denial, at the beginning of some memoirs. Before the half-­ title page of Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries, the following statement is presented, apparently written by Elliott, maybe as a parody of the Hemingway-type denial: This is a work of nonfiction. Situations may have appeared in other works in different forms and significantly different contexts. Characters are not conflated. Events are sometimes presented out of sequence, but timelines are not intentionally altered. Many names and details have been changed to protect identities. Much is based on my own memories and is faithful to my recollections, but only a fool mistakes memory for fact.

What should the reader take away from this? This story is true. Well, sort of. Maybe. At least, some of it must be true. The subtitle says the book is a memoir. This note says it is nonfiction. Yet, multiple versions of events exist. Names and details have been altered. Events are out of sequence but oddly in an unaltered timeline. Memory is faulty. And, after all this, the first line of the memoir is a qualified statement of fact: “My father may

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have killed a man.” His father said he did, but Elliott is unable to verify the act. Truth is slippery in this work, but Elliott seems to sincerely seek it. Maybe that’s important, even in a postmodern, post-Freudian, postie kind of world. However problematic the truth might be, nonfiction is a story about trying to find out what really happened. The truth of seeking truth, how this journey validates the importance of truth and even changes the author, is as important as the shards of truth that might coalesce in the narration. If we view truth “as collective and problematized and contested,” as Fleishmann says, then we need a form to express that view of truth (46). In “Fighting Narration,” a later chapter, I will explore this in more detail. Because nonfiction often ends with shards of truth, the boundaries between truth and fiction, truth and fact, truth and reality (these pairs are not the same) are often blurred. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a “novel” in six volumes, some 3600 pages, is labeled on the back cover of the English translation as fiction, even though the central character is Karl Ove Knausgaard. The last volume, which will be discussed later, deals with the reactions of Knausgaard’s relatives and friends to what he wrote about them in earlier volumes. At one point, Knausgaard’s uncle threatens a lawsuit to prevent publication of the novel/memoir/autobiography. Knausgaard’s first wife, Tonje Aursland, presented her objections in a Norwegian broadcast radio documentary (Gundersen), while his second wife, Linda Boström Knausgaard, answered with an autobiographical novel of her own, October Child. Yet, despite the “realness” of My Struggle and everything that surrounds it, many readers wonder about the accuracy of Knausgaard’s vast memory. How could anyone remember that much of his life in that much detail? Could this possibly be anything other than fiction or the recollection of a long string of faulty memories? Knausgaard himself waffles about how he views the work’s genre. He doesn’t seem to mind calling it a novel, yet he describes his process as what a Freudian analyst would call automatic writing. With the first volume, he said that his editor brought some form to his draft. After the first volume, according to Knausgaard, his editor didn’t change much; in other words, his editor did not try to bring the form of a novel to Knausgaard’s string of memories (NonfictionNow keynote). But how do we manage a work that seems to blur genres or defy form? Some read the volumes as memoir, even though it doesn’t have the features of a memoir. For example, there is not much reflection. Others read it as a novel that seems to explode the form of the novel and that is probably as true as most memoirs. It has long

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sections without the overt presence of a narrator interspersed with shorter sections that are more traditionally narrated, as if to jar the reader back to consciousness, to the awareness that this is not a typical novel, maybe not a novel at all. Even the length means that we must read it differently. Most of us have been trained to read a novel with the expectation that every detail is important, but how can we read 3600 pages like that? So, it is either a novel that redefines the form of the novel or something else. At the 2017 NonfictioNow conference, Knausgaard was asked about how he categorized it. (Think of this, in a room of hundreds of academics who specialize in nonfiction, pretty much everyone wanted to know the answer to this question. They had been arguing about it for days. In other words, they had not read anything like it. That is remarkable in itself.) Knausgaard said, “It’s autobiography.” It’s not like typical autobiographies. Whatever it is (Bakhtin might call it “pure confessional self-­accounting”), it comes across as brutally honest. Part of that honesty is Knausgaard’s willingness to share every memory with his reader, and that is a large part of its appeal. But must every author of a memoir, if it is a memoir, be so completely and brutally transparent? Probably not. The world is not vast enough to embrace many six-volume memoirs. In Inadvertent, part of the Why I Write series published by Yale University Press, Knausgaard discusses form as both allowing certain kinds of expression and shutting down others. With My Struggle, he seems to have begun with a mashup of genres that he then broke from by establishing some rules for himself, as if he were doing an extended writing experiment: I wanted to get close to reality, and at the genre with which I felt the greatest affinity at the time was the diary. What would happen if I combined the diary’s closeness to the self and urge for reflection with the realist step-by-­ step novel? The rules I would set for myself now were exceptionally simple. I would write only about things that had actually happened, and I would write about them as I remembered them, without doing research or amending my memory to conform to other versions. I also had to write a certain number of pages every day, first five, later ten, and toward the end up to twenty. In that way I simply wouldn’t have time to think, to plan or to calculate. I would have to go with whatever appeared on the screen in front of me. (37)

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We could say that genres have rules, but it seems like Knausgaard’s rules are more about breaking from genre rather than working within a standard form—or about blurring several genres. Interestingly, some have called it a “nonfictive novel,” or a true story in the form of fiction. Truman Capote made the same claim about In Cold Blood. This is how authors use genre—as a starting point, a form to which readers bring clear expectations, but also a form that can be stretched or blurred. The essays in Singer and Walker’s Bending Genre explore this practice in more detail. If we accept the possibility of a “nonfictive novel,” might we also accept the possibility of a “fictive memoir”? Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir wants to map that “kind of Heideggerian truth,” or so says Hayward Krieger, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, in his introduction to the volume. One problem here. The professor doesn’t exist. Reporters have looked for him. If he does exist, he is more hidden than most academics, which is saying something (Kirkpatrick). This is the entire text of Chap. 1: “I exaggerate.” In the Afterword, Slater writes: “Lying is a book of narrative truth, a book in which I am more interested in using invention to get to the heart of things than I am in documenting actual life occurrences” (219). In Chap. 7, which takes the form of a letter to Kate Medina, her editor at Random House (a real person), Slater discusses why she wants the book to be marketed as nonfiction: “We have to call it fiction or we have to call it fact, because there’s no bookstore term for something in between, gray matter” (156). It seems to me that she dances around the real reason: She wants to question the nature of narrative truth, and whether or not the narrative is factually true only matters in nonfiction. But how do we define this work? To me, it reads like Fry’s A Million Little Pieces. There is something about how it is written that makes it hard to believe the characters, the dialogue, or the events. While Slater might want to question the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, she seems to leave most readers perplexed or angry. Maybe that’s a good thing. Slater is right, however, that we are living in an age when truth (or Truth) is not simple. In a post-Freudian age, how can we claim to possess self-knowledge? Can we know the whole truth about ourselves? Can we even imagine that is possible? In our limited view of the genre, are we arguing for a certain view of truth (truth is knowable, a fact is a fact is a fact as surely as a rose is a rose is a rose) and language is transparent (once I find truth, I can relay it to you without distortion)? In “Reflections on

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the Personal Status of the Personal Essay” (Harris) writes: “The personal essay often seems honest even though not comprehensive, and thus necessarily less than fully truthful” (917). Vivian Gornick says that good writers know who they are at the moment of writing; what they know is how they relate to their topic (30). In a postmodern age, how can we find a path to truth? In a postfact age of Truthiness and Fake News, why even bother? Maybe, we might argue, nonfiction is even more important than ever precisely because of the kind of world we live in. And, if the problematization of self-knowledge begins with Freud, perhaps with the publication of Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria in 1895, we also find, in that very volume, the importance of uncovering suppressed memories, that is, searching for what really happened and expressing it to at least one other person. While we acknowledge narrative truth and metaphorical truth, there is still something important about getting the facts right, even if this is not easy. It is not, I believe, overreaching to say that democracy depends upon our willingness to try, in an admittedly complex world, to sort fact from fiction. Equally important is an acknowledgment that some areas of nonfiction will remain murky and, beyond this, that absolute certainty is not always a virtue. Instead of defining nonfiction as the genre that deals with what is true, we could say that nonfiction is the genre that deals with the difficulty of sorting out what we know from what we don’t know and from what we thought we knew. In short, nonfiction is a genre where we witness authors (real people) as they struggle to establish what happened. If works of nonfiction often point to the difficulty of establishing the truth, the murkiness of truth, maybe this should be considered part of the genre, maybe even foundational to it. Or, Knausgaard’s My Struggle, if it is a nonfictive novel, might push us to the realization that nonfiction is not a genre at all. It is an approach to genres. Nonfiction, if fully considered, might encompass more genres than journalism, biography, autobiography, memoir, the personal essay, history, and ethnography. It might also apply to some novels, especially what is referred to as autofiction and works like Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It.” It might also apply to Sylvia Plath’s lyric poems, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, and William Carlos Williams’ Patterson. Maybe even Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Nonfiction might relate more to how an author forms truth claims and answers to them. This is a murky business, but authors have found ways to navigate it.

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Bracketing Imagination Jill Christman begins “Burned Images,” the initial and focal chapter of Darkroom, with this sentence: “On December 7, 1998, I mailed a letter to my father, asking him what happened on the day that my brother was burned” (1). This is a memoir that begins with a family trauma. Christman’s father is on the phone. Ian, Christman’s brother—then, thirteen months old—climbs into the tub, turns on the water, and is scalded. The father turns off the water and picks up his son. His son’s skin comes off in his hands. In this chapter, as she attempts to find a story to interpret this trauma, Christman loops through the event, interrogating the “shared family memory,” more like memories collected—constructed—from her father’s letter, conversations with her mother, and the material evidence on her brother’s body. The looping represents a series of attempts to build a complete story of an event that seems beyond knowing, yet that needs to be understood, because it has shaped so much of her family’s history. Each loop is a metanarrative move. Christman is searching for the story and showing the process of the search. We might think of looping as a narrative device. We could also describe it as a form of consciousness that we all experience. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes about the “overlapping of time by itself” (423). He says, “With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change” (416). In this sense, there is not one past, but rather a multitude versions of the past that overlap. With looping, Christman is simply making the process more conscious and transparent. She is intentionally creating new versions of the past that open new horizons in the future. The narrative device becomes a way of exploring the relationship between her subjectivity and time. It becomes an escape from being fixed in time. If Christman were writing fiction, maybe we should say bad fiction here, she could fill in gaps in a “shared family memory” and consummate (complete, finish off) the story, but this is memoir. Christman has an implied bond with her readers to tell the truth as well as she can, but readers also want to know what happened, or at least what she thinks happened. Christman, who was not yet born when her brother was burned, must move beyond the limited memories of those who were there. And this is not an easy process. As we will see, Christman signals her use of imagination linguistically, often with a short phrase. This metanarrative move can be more overt. In My Father’s House, Sylvia Fraser has sections that present the facts of her life, including sexual abuse by her father, as well as sections where she uses her imagination to reconstruct some events. The sections

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are clearly marked typographically (see Henke’s Scattered Subjects 121–39). In Darkroom, the boundaries are less overt, but they are still there. While a “shared family memory,” given the limits of memory, resists finalization, the story that Christman tells reaches a conjectured completeness, in part, through her research, more often through Christman’s imagination. This is how Christman narrates the moment when her mother, working as a waitress that night, learns about the accident: It is around 8:00 P.M., and Martha is pouring Chardonnay, rotating her wrist to stop the flow of wine without a drip, and highlighting the evening’s specials for a couple at table number four. Another waitress touches her arm and tells her that she will take the order. There’s a phone call. An emergency. The baby. That is how I see my mother on the night that my brother was burned: content, busy, engaged in the normal restaurant bustle, until that tap on the arm. (6)

Is this fiction, or imagined nonfiction? Imagined nonfiction makes more sense. In that bond with her readers, Christman offers a compromise: She provides the kind of details readers expect in a story, but she also places borders, or brackets, around what she knows and what she has imagined. Readers have something like a whole story, but this kind of imagined nonfiction is less consummated, less finished off, less certain, than fiction, and the uncertainly is created with the phrase: “This is how I see my mother.” If this kind of phrase were spoken by a character in a novel, it would not have the same effect of creating a boundary between the known and the imagined. Elsewhere in the chapter, readers are shown that there is no single truth, no certainty, about this “shared family memory.” In the following passage, her mother’s words interrupt Christman’s memory of her mother’s memory, as Christman takes us into the process of writing the chapter: Today my mother breaks in: “I didn’t say that—I said that there might have been a phone call, and you wrote it down as truth. What does your father say? He was there. I wasn’t even there.” “He doesn’t remember anything before Ian screamed.” “Well, how do I know, then?” “Maybe he told you, and then you forgot.” “It was a long time ago.” (2)

Here, Christman’s mother brackets Christman’s notes of her mother’s own memories, raising questions about their entire conversation. More than once, I have used this chapter in class. My students have never once

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said that Christman was tricking them. They see the boundaries that she establishes, the demarcations between the known and the imagined, and the messages she left for them, the cautions that this memoir cannot be and should not be read as fiction and that we cannot be certain about some of the facts. This is part of nonfiction: Our skepticism about the facts is inseparable from our attempts to find out what really happened. Christman is consciously addressing the future response of her readers, shaping their experience of her story in advance. What emerges from several levels of dialogue— Christman’s dialogue with her family as she was writing, part of which appears on the page, and her dialog with future readers—creates the kind of form that was important to Bakhtin. It is a form that is less related to a structuralist map of the text and more related to how the text is created and experienced. Addressivity is Bakhtin’s term for this. The author’s anticipation of the reader’s response shapes the genre. We could also say that this is how the contract is invoked, not with the label “memoir” on the back cover but with how Christman searches for the truth, not with correspondence between facts in the narration and facts in the “real world” but with how she frames facts.

Metanarration An author can employ metanarrative moves to identify the entire work as somewhere in that gray area between fiction and nonfiction. Cathy Day’s “Genesis; or the Day Adam Killed the Snakes” is a story about two writers, Adam and Eve, who live in a farmhouse. I wondered, even as I first encountered the obviously constructed names, if this is really a story about Cathy and her husband. (Maybe this is a slip into naïve reading.) Despite the form, essentially a fable, it seemed to be nonfiction. One day, Adam discovers snakes in the attic, and, after consulting with Eve, he kills them. At one point, the narrator even says she (I assumed the narrator is a she, but maybe I shouldn’t) might change the characters’ names to John and Mary. Then, in the story about Adam and Eve, we have a story about John and Mary, as imagined by Eve (yes, this story is rather complicated): Sitting there on the porch, Eve listens to Adam washing the dishes and keeps thinking about her story. Maybe she’ll write a scene in which a worried Mary snoops through John’s briefcase, afraid she’ll find love letters

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from another woman or downloaded porn. Instead, she finds a poem typed on John’s office letterhead, a poem in which he imagines them as a couple, sitting in rocking chairs. This poem makes Mary cry, but not for the reasons you think. Mary cries because John has crossed out every word and scrawled “stupid” next to them. What is stupid, Mary will wonder, the poem or the thought of us growing old together? (16–17)

This section, presented as Eve’s imagination, seems more like nonfiction than the story proper. This sense might be related to the shift in names to John and Mary, names that seem more “real” than Adam and Eve, but Mary still doesn’t match the author’s name. As readers, we might be picking up on an emotional rawness in this scene that makes it seem like it is coming directly from the life of the author. Like Christman, Cathy Day loops back through this scene, trying out new versions. The second version begins: “You think this is how it happened, but it didn’t.” The third version begins: “The real truth is: ….” Does this mean the version really happened to Cathy Day, some person behind the signature on the story? Maybe that’s why I thought, when the narrator says that the story is about deciding to “leave him,” here, finally, is the real person, the author-creator (the embodied person who wrote the story) revealing the nonfictive core of the story, in the one nonfictive sentence in the entire story, which grounds everything as nonfiction. Then, the next paragraph begins: “But try to remember that Eve doesn’t know any of this yet” (17). This sentence marks the narrative as fiction because the narrator knows more than the characters on the page. Bakhtin calls this excess of seeing. The author sees the entire story, even beyond what is on the page. The seeing of the author of nonfiction is always limited. Do we call this story fiction or nonfiction? Day would say that it is somewhere in between. In the interview that follows the story, she said: Okay, let’s say that a metamove or metagesture is when the author intentionally draws attention to a work’s genre, its very existence as fiction or nonfiction. And let’s say that fiction and nonfiction aren’t categories, but two poles on a spectrum called “narrative” or “story.” If a story is presented as fiction, then a metamove brings that work toward the middle of the spectrum, toward nonfiction. If a story is presented as nonfiction, then a metamove brings that work toward the middle of the spectrum, toward fiction. A metamove is an intentional one.… Everyone seems so determined these days to separate fiction and nonfiction, to define them in opposition to each other, but I’m interested in that place where they overlap, how they hang out and talk to teach other. (18–19)

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Day’s metanarrative moves (including those in this interview) toy with our attempts to be naïve readers of the story, maybe of all stories. Here, we see a negotiation between author and reader, an unveiling of the complex transaction across a text. If we view Day’s story as fiction, the metanarration points to the “real” behind the story, or, at least, the possibility of a “real” behind the story. Metanarrative moves can also be used, as they were in Christman, to mark the imaginative moments and preserve the story as nonfiction, but I do not agree that metanarration nudges nonfiction closer to fiction. If anything, it preserves the nonfiction as nonfiction. One could even argue that it makes nonfiction truer by interjecting the author who must answer for the text. In this sense, it further grounds the story as nonfiction. The gray area between fiction and nonfiction is real, but there are ways to navigate it. If the ethics of nonfiction reveals the complexity of working through ethical decisions, then metanarrative is key to that process. It marks the author’s struggle to find out what happened and to attempt a mediation, even a resolution, between fact and fantasy, event and narration, self as projected onto the page and self as embodied.

Truth Claims Revisited No matter how much an author plays in the gray area between fiction and nonfiction, there is still something important about making the claim that this story is true, even if the claim is only made on the back cover, implicit in the author’s choice to use the real names of real people, the struggle to find what happened, or the framing of facts as either known or inferred or imagined. With nonfiction, because the characters are historical beings, many of them with oxygen still in their lungs, ethics must address how we treat others, specific living individuals, as well as humanity as a collective, as a community. As far as I know, no critic ever accused Melville of misrepresenting Bartleby the Scrivener or of maligning the Guild of Scriveners. Yet writers of nonfiction are sued for turning their family or friends into caricatures or being wrong about the facts, or even, one might argue, for having faulty memories. Readers are angry when they feel the author has lied or veered from some vague notion of the truth. We believe that there is a kind of writing that is true, and we expect nonfiction to be honest. While we could argue, as D’Agata does, that readers need to be more sophisticated, naïve readers are part of the reality of the world in which we write (110). In one of his last exchanges with Fingal, his fact-checker, D’Agata says: “Please don’t hold me to parameters for making essays that

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I’ve had no say in establishing, that I wholly disagree with, and that I believe misrepresent the true purpose of the genre. An essay is an attempt.” D’Agata acknowledges that his view is one “that most hard-core nonfiction writers” won’t accept (108). If so, then maybe the nonfiction contract, the expectation that an essay, while an attempt, is at its heart an attempt to understand a life as it is, facts and everything. This contract exists, and it is normative. It is hard to renegotiate it. While an “artist” (D’Agata’s preferred term) might fight against it in an “essay” (also, his preferred term), this battle verifies the very existence of the contract. So, how do “writers” (my preferred term) of “nonfiction” (also, my preferred term) struggle within and against this contract? We could say that this is the point: The genre of nonfiction is a forum where we struggle with what is true and how to tell true stories. After pushing the gray areas between fiction and nonfiction in this chapter, I want to end with a little certainly. To define nonfiction as true stories is to define an entire genre on content alone—rarely the truth of character, history, or culture; typically, only the limited focus of truth as adherence to the facts, with the assumption that facts are objectively knowable. If Knausgaard’s My Struggle is a novel that is reportedly an accurate telling of the facts of Knausgaard’s life and the lives of those around him—at least, as accurate as is the typical memoir—and if we accept that it is not a memoir, then our definition needs to include something about form as well as content, maybe also other categories like technique and purpose. Sample of Stein’s Alt-I

It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed, and it was the period of the final examination, and there was the examination in William James’ course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left. The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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For now, let us look at form through the metaphor of a map. We can say that a map is “real” when it represents a material terrain. If we hold a map of a trail through a portion of Yellowstone National Park in our hands and we begin at the trailhead and use the map to keep us on the trail, we can say that the map is true, or true enough. But, at the same time, as Latour has pointed out, the map is not the terrain: “The world is articulated. Knowledge as well. The two respond to each other sometimes—but not always” (Inquiry 87). What would be more accurate is to say that the map corresponds to the terrain. To understand this correspondence, what happens between the two are a series of operations that Latour calls “chains of reference” (135). To explore the correspondence between our map and the terrain, we could start by aligning the map with a compass and landmarks. It helps to know how to read topographical lines. A map, after all, is a genre with its own conventions. It is, however, a genre that helps us navigate the world. If a work of nonfiction is like a map, if it has “chains of reference” rather than simple correspondence, in what sense does it relate to “the real,” if we can assume that there is a single reality and it is knowable? Is it enough to say this memoir is true because it is based on my memories? Does it become more true if we can back it up with documents or testimony? Is our ultimate goal to make sure that a relative or friend does not say, “That is not how I remember it”? Is it enough to make sure we have the facts as correct as possible? Is a good story, a tight narrative, ever completely true? Is nonfiction as an absolute even possible? Or desirable? The idea of “chains of reference” also pushes us to question the truth of nonfiction as a simple correspondence between narrative and “reality”—an admittedly vague term. For example, authenticity might be viewed as a correspondence (an identification that is not always exact) from the voice of the narrator (as much genre as individual author) to the persona of the author (a mediation between self and culture), then the persona to the author’s sense of self (more private and less performative than a persona), then sense of self to the core self (the author’s bodily experiences). While this “chain of reference” might seem to be like the slow drop of a long series of dominoes, it happens holistically in a moment. (The “chains of reference” might actually be a complicated series of networks going in multiple directions simultaneously.) If we view this process phenomenologically, authenticity describes a common experience. The author and reader sense it when this “chains of reference” line up and when they don’t. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that

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we come to phenomena with “a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning” (21–22). We have a perception of authenticity, what might be called a gut impression, which is part of how we experience ourselves and others; it is an integrated experience that precedes analysis or reflection, perhaps more related to what Demasio calls the core self. While we might experience the sense of authenticity in a moment, we also analyze it, which improves our ability to experience authenticity more accurately. Understanding this impression should be viewed as part of the project of self. As discussed earlier, Hegel’s concept of Bildung begins with the individual in a state of alienation from language. The individual then engages with the world, including its “linguistic and rhetorical conventions.” As John H. Smith writes in The Spirit and Its Letter: “Individuality becomes inextricably linked to a process of self-representation” (200). In other words, individuality is the exploration of self and establishing the self’s place in the world comes, in part, through mastering “rhetorical conventions,” which include genres. Smith continues: “Bildung allows the individual to be effective and thus literally real, for reality (Wirklichkeit) depends on the individual’s effect (Wirkung) in the world” (204). If we accept all this, then we should acknowledge that part of authenticity is a striving toward a fuller version of self through an ever-expanding notion of genre. Authenticity is not just about finding out what happened, as completely as possible. It is also about moving toward something that is not yet formed, in good faith. Merleau-Ponty says that subjectivity is time (Phenomenology 422). From this, we might infer that authenticity is not a state, the expression of some fixed identity, but a movement toward a future self. What is inauthentic, by contrast, is the expression of a self that is viewed as already formed, as fixed in time, which is a denial of any connection between subjectivity and self. The relationship between subjectivity and self is the search for meaning. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “It is the essence of time to be in the process of self-production, and not to be, never, that is, to be completely constituted” (415). Authenticity is an expression of a self in movement. Hegel’s view of mastering rhetorical traditions as a form of self-­ expression, a way of writing about entering the world and having an effect on it, can be paired with Bakhtin’s answerability. Bakhtin says we must answer for our texts; we must claim our texts as part of how we are in the world, which also means assuming responsibility for what we have written. The author of fiction can say, “This is not real; this is not who I am.” The

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author of nonfiction must say, “This is how I see myself—who I once was, who I am, and who I hope to become.” With writing nonfiction, taking responsibility for one’s texts is more than merely making sure that the facts of a piece of writing align with facts in documents or the memories of others. If we view nonfiction as merely facticity or representation as a mirror image of the material world (ignoring the physics of reflections, which reverses the image), we are thinking in one direction. If we view nonfiction as an interpretation of who we are and how we are in the world as well as a commitment to a certain path, then nonfiction is as much about a text transforming reality as it is about a text representing reality. Answering to our nonfictive text as if we embody its truth can be part of how its status as nonfiction is established. What is broadly called “self-writing” can be important even if the “self” and the identity that might emerge from this writing is ultimately beyond our grasp. In addition to asking if the self can be known completely (the post-Freudian question), we should also ask if the self can be in and of itself complete. Our knowledge of the self might be fragmentary, and the self—the object of our “self-writing”—is almost certainly fragmentary as well (one of the rare certainties in a postmodern world). This may not invalidate any notion of nonfiction as much as nudge us in a different direction. Maybe our goal is not some quixotic journey to establish complete knowledge of the self. Maybe we should focus, as Kegan sees it, on making meaning of our lives. Isn’t finding meaning in our lives worth our effort? Even D’Agata would agree with this statement (Lifespan 107). In this volume, little attention will be given to ethical issues relating to truth-telling: condensing action, changing names, or creating composite characters, or even on the role of the “creative” in creative nonfiction. While acknowledging that these issues are important, I will spend more time twisting the issue in another direction. We can, I would like to argue, tell the truth unethically—or safely. We can miss opportunities to act ethically within nonfiction. In other words, we need to go beyond the ethics producing writing that corresponds to facts. If Freudianism and postmodernism and everything that followed problematizes the whole project of knowing the self, the task of writing the truth about the self is not so simple. Is identity discovered or constructed? Postmodernism has questioned the very nature of “the Real,” a term that Lacan used to point to something beyond language, the Symbolic Order (Mansfield 44–45). I will use “the actual,” a less-majestic term borrowed from Scott Russell Sanders, to indicate a truth less certain than “reality” or “what actually

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happened,” a truth that has enough of a material reality to push back against any urge to distort and question the limits of memory. The term “push back” is important. The key issue in Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? is in the title. If we accept that reality is socially constructed, there must be something there—some material reality—that is being constructed. If ideology tells us that children working twelve-hour shifts in a factory are quite happy, many might accept this as their reality. But the children’s bodily experience of working in the factory is still there. If it is misinterpreted, it can be reinterpreted. If we look at the history of writing about social issues, we can see this reinterpretation happening again and again. Some might say this is just substituting one ideological view for another. I don’t think so. We can, I believe, write in a way that questions social conventions, culture, history, and even ideology. We can write in a way that fosters care of self and builds empathy for others. Part of this process is working to establish the facts, but it is more than this. The how is important. Writers need to reveal their process, and readers need to evaluate it. It will be more useful to think of nonfiction as related less to some simple correspondence between the facts of a story and the facts of some conception of reality and more about the relationship between the author and the text—how the author does research, how the author interacts with others, how the author seeks a story, questions memory, contextualizes documents, and seeks the right language. This should be part of the process. If authors are doing all this, aren’t they trying to find out what actually happened? Isn’t this different than fiction? Nonfiction will also relate to how authors answer or respond to their texts. Do authors claim their texts by saying “this is what happened”? Does this claim alter identity and even behavior? In The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor says, “Reasoning in moral matters is always reasoning with somebody” (31). We form our identity, he says, as we make connections to those we love (34). This is part of the process. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow state: “Human thought is inherently dialogic.” This is reflected in early forms of writing that are structured as dialogues, for example, Ennatum of Akkad’s “Dialogue of Pessimism,” which dates to around 1500 BCE. About the time dialogue disappeared as a structural form, “the isolated, rational, self-­ conscious individual” began to be viewed “as the normal default state of human beings everywhere” (94). With this shift, Graeber and Wengrow also see a move away from ritual and carnival, moments of “collective chaos, effervescence, luminality or creative play, out of which new social

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forms can come into the world” (117). As we will see, especially as we discuss reflection, the thought in nonfiction is essentially dialogic and playful. It imagines new ways of viewing how we live in a particular time and place. This should be part of the process. Nonfiction also needs to be viewed as in process, a striving toward, ultimately the search for an identity that is being transformed by the search. This needs to be incorporated into its truth claims. At the core of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction are appeals made by the author of nonfiction: • Not “this is what happened,” but this is my best attempt to figure out what happened. • Not “this is who I am,” but this is what I understand about who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming. • Not “this is objective and immutable truth,” but this is how I view the event from my experience, from the “I” of my present identity. • Not “this is what it means to be human,” but this is how I understand living in this unique body in this particular place and at this moment in time. • Not “this is the meaning of life,” but this is how I understand the meaning of my life at this point in my development. • Not “I have figured out truth,” but let me show you how hard I am trying to figure it out. • Not “I have uncovered the truth about my family,” but let me show you the damage that lies and secrets have done to me and my family. • Not “this is who I am in a state of absolute freedom,” but these are the choices I have made in the midst of the world and language I have been thrown into. I don’t think fiction writers make these claims—at least, in this form. Once you make one of these claims, you are creating a different kind of relationship between author and text, author and historical/cultural context, author and audience, and author and experience. Indeed, each of these claims might be viewed as a negotiation within the nonfiction contract. The author answers in a different way. This is a kind of truth that is open to its own process, even in a world where truth is constantly shifting and texts are a kind of erosion. Lejeune writes that “in fiction writers risk nothing” (37). I am not sure that is true, but nonfiction writers, in most texts, probably risk more. The potential rewards are also greater.

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The central problem with the idea of a nonfiction contract between author and reader has been viewed as relating to verification. First, as we saw with Fingal’s fact-checking of D’Agata’s essay, how much verification is appropriate? Second, if the verification is not done by an editor, factchecker, or reviewer, who will do it? A reader might have some knowledge of the topic and might fact-check in the process of reading, but often the reader is looking for subtle clues that make the author seem reliable. The reader can evaluate the author’s research (authors will do research for nonfiction), the author’s struggle to find out what happened, and the author’s skeptical framing of facts and interpretations. Readers pay attention to more global features as well. Authors who seem to embrace ambiguity about their identities seem more sincere. The search for identity seems more sincere than the pronouncement of identity. Authors who confess their shortcomings seem more companionable than authors who inflate their egos. A complex story, though uncertain about some facts and events, seems more authentic than a simple story that seems too neat and tidy. We also need to think about genre fluidly, as related to writers’ search to find new means of exploration and expression, as writers are faced with new challenges, especially related to changes in technology. When writing nonfiction in a digital world, we will have to push back against certain ways of viewing truth. With the Internet, with massive networks, truth is not established through authority or science; it is established through circulation. The more a claim moves through interlocking networks, ever present at the same moment, the truer it seems to be. It doesn’t need a foundation or ground. In fact, the statement seems more reliable because it doesn’t seem to have a source. In this gray world, we can admit defeat, become lost in what Baudrillard calls “the ecstasy of communication,” or we can assert a reality and an ethics that comes from a different time—the truth of our physical bodies living in a particular time and place. This kind of truth, the truth we seek in nonfiction, is at odds with the truth of circulation, which is often reduced to soundbites or tweets, to simulations, to clones, to “bodies without organs.” The truth of nonfiction is complex and situated and grounded. It is part of a dialogue. Even when authors do not directly make these claims, their approach to writing nonfiction often reflects them. The claims are implicit within the author’s form. Readers will likely contest some of the claims or all of them, especially readers who are also mentioned in the text. This, too, is part of the process, part of answerability.

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Detour to Genre: The Diary and Journal Ricardo Piglia’s The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, written over six decades, blurs the boundary between nonfiction and fiction. Similar to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Piglia writes his diary from the perspective of Emilia Renzi, a character in many of his detective novels. The first section of the first volume is metanarrative and switches back and forth between first and third person, further confusing the line between nonfiction and fiction. In the follow section, the narrator discusses how diary can evolve into autobiography: The diary was an X-ray of his spirit, of the involuntary construction of his spirit, to put it better, he said, and paused. He didn’t believe in such nonsense (with emphasis), but he likes to think that his life was made up of small incidents. In this way, he could finally begin to think about an autobiography. One scene and then another and another, no? It would be a serialized autobiography, a serialized life. (12)

As Piglia says, the diary is well suited for capturing “small incidents” and they might be part of the process of developing an autobiography or memoir. However, these genres lack the scope of a full life narrative. The writers do not possess an excess of seeing, to use Bakhtin’s phrase. They do not see the entire life arc of the hero, and so the author of a diary or journal is clueless about the future as the hero, the self on the page. In both the diary and journal, authors use the day’s date as a heading and then record the events of the day, which might include reflections on these events, sometimes even past events, as well as worries or hopes about the future. However, the focus is on the events of the day. Lynne Tillman writes of Charles Henri Ford’s diary: “A diary tells us what its author was thinking about then and how it was thought. It is different from a history, because it is an itinerary of lived attitudes, a catalog of attitudes. Attitude is in the air we breathe, and we don’t always think about what we take in and give out” (64–65). The diary and journal are of the moment, recording what we would otherwise let drift away. They become, thus, a substitute or supplement for memory. While they might include immediate reactions to events, they can hardly include the kind of deep reflections that are double-voiced, an interplay between the voice of a younger self and an older self, unless revised at a later date for publication, or unless the author reflects on events long past, in which case the diary or journal begins to cross over into memoir.

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Works Cited Akkad, Ennatum of. “Dialogue of Pessimism.” In The Lost Origins of the Essay. Ed. John D’Agata. Greywold, 2009. 11–13. Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. “Art and Answerability.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 1–3. Bloom, Lynn Z. “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction.” College English 65 (Jan. 2003): 276–89. Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies in Hysteria. Trans. James Strachey with the collaboration of Anna Freud. Basic, 1895, 2000. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. Berkley, 1966. Christman, Jill. Darkroom: A Family Exposure. Georgia UP, 2002. Ciotti, Paul. “Michael Herr: A Man of Few Words.” Los Angeles Times, 15 April 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1990-­04-­15-­tm-­2121­story.html Crouser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford UP, 2012. D’Agata, John D. and Jim Fingal. The Lifespan of a Fact. Riverrun, 2012. Day, Cathy. “Genesis; or the Day Adam Killed the Snakes.” Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Ed. Jill Talbot. Iowa UP, 2012. 13–20. Demasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Vintage, 2012. De Quincey, Thomas. Letter to Editor, London Magazine, 27 November 1821. Drecoll, Volker Henning. “Grace.” In The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s “Confessions.” Ed. Tarmo Toom. Cambridge UP, 2020. 107–22. Eakin, Paul John, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Cornell UP, 2004. Eggers, Dave. What Is the What. Vintage, 2007. ———. Zeitoun. Vintage, 2010. Elliott, Stephen. The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir. Greywolf, 2009. Fraser, Sylvia. My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing. Time Warner, 1989. Fry, James. A Million Little Pieces. Anchor, 2005. Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narration. Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. Gundersen, Trygve Riiser. “Knausgård burde være glad.” Dagbladet, 3 Oct. 2010. https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/knausgard-­burde-­vaere-­glad/64730216. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021 Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge UP, 1983.

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———. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton UP, 1998. ———. The Social Construction of What? Harvard UP, 2000. Harris, Wendell V. “Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay. College English 58:8 (December 1996): 934–53. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. Scribner’s, 1925. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. Vintage, 1968, 1991. Houston, Pam. “Prologue: Corn Maze.” Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Ed. Jill Talbot. Iowa UP, 2012. ix–xx. Hsu, Huan. “The Making of Americans: The Genre-Defying Life and Work of Maxine Hong Kingston.” The New Yorker (8 and 15 June 2020): 32–39. Hunt, Cecia and Fiona Sampson. Writing: Self and Reflexivity. Palgrave 2006. Jensen, George H. Identities Across Texts. Hampton, 2002. Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. Harvard UP, 1982. Kerr, Michael. Dispatches. Vintage, 1991. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. Picador, 1977, 2015. Kirkpatrick, David D. “Media Talk; Questionable Letter for a Liar’s Memoir.” New York Times. 31 July 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/31/ business/media-­talk-­questionable-­letter-­for-­a-­liar-­s-­memoir.html Knausgaard, Karl Ove. Inadvertent. Trans. Ingvild Burkey. Yale UP, 2018. ———. Keynote Address, NonfictionNow. Reykjavik, Iceland, 2 June 2017. ———. My Struggle. Volumes 1–5, trans. Don Bartlett. Volume 6, trans. Don Barlett and Martin Aitkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013–2018. Knausgaard, Linda Boström. October Child. World Editions, 2021. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 2013. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited with a Foreword by Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minnesota UP, 1989. Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. Free Press, 2013. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. Allen and Unwin, 2014. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. Routledge and Kegan, 1945. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Parker, David. The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good. Cornell UP, 2007. Piglia, Ricardo. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years. Restless, 2017.

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Sanders, Scott Russell. “The Singular First Person.” Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. 1–11 Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House, 2000. Smith, John H. The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung. Cornell UP, 1988. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Important, 1932, 2018. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard UP, 1991. ———. Sources of the Self: Thinking of the Modern Identity. Harvard UP, 1989. Tillman, Lynne. What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Red Lemonade, 2014. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 455–501. 25–68. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. Riverhead, 2009.

CHAPTER 3

Critiquing Habit, Habitus, and Modernity

Every day includes much more non-being than being. —Virginia Woolf (“A Sketch of the Past”) It seems to me, that all the so-called literature of the self—private diaries, narratives of self, and so on—cannot be understood unless it is put into the general and very rich framework of these practices of self. People have been writing about themselves for two thousand years, but not in the same way. I have the impression—I may be wrong—that there is a certain tendency to present the relationship between writing and the narrative of the self as a phenomenon particular to European modernity. Now, I would not deny it is modern, but it was also one of the first uses of writing. —Michel Foucault (“On the Genealogy of Ethics”) Make the body do what your spirit needs to know. —Cheryl Strayed (Outdoor Magazine webinar, April 5, 2022)

In Memory and Matter, Henri Bergson writes that there are two general kinds of memory: the first is “motor mechanisms,” which we acquire through repetition, and the second is “personal memory-images,” which leave traces of entire events with action and dialogue and color. The first kind of memory can function without much thought or awareness. It is, in Woolf’s words, “more non-being than being.” Bergson says, “We commonly act our recognition before we think it” (95). We could add, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_3

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perhaps, that we often act habitually without thinking, at least, if “thinking” means consciousness of self. It is a “psychic blindness” at the “bottom of recognition” (94). And, as Bergson points out, this kind of memory, habit-memory, is more than a behavior; it is a connection to the objects of the world and the tools we have created to alter the world. Damasio would say it is part of the core self. At some basic level, habit is not only our connection to the world; it is also how we create the world we in-habit. At the same time, the terms “non-being” and “psychic blindness” and “bottom of recognition” convey a sense of loss, a kind of memory that forgets, a moving through time unaware. But is this a loss we need to mourn or recover? After all, this kind of memory or habit is often highly functional. As Bruno Latour wrote, “Habit is the patron saint of laid-out routes, pathways, and trails” (Inquiry 265). It organizes our daily lives and makes the necessary duties of life more efficient. “Motor mechanisms” work for us far more than they work against us. And habits can form networks that do more than move us through daily tasks. They connect us. Indeed, Aristotle believed that habits were part of the means of forming character (Grimaldi 186–87). Similar to Aristotle, Nietzsche recognizes the importance of habits and the need to examine them (Human 60). Habits can culturally evolve into better habits or calcify into habits of “increasing stupidity through transmission, which follows all stability like its shadow” (68, 120). But how many of our habits are examined and crafted? How much of language is habit? How much of language do we control, and how often does it shape who we are and how we act, without our awareness? Should we strive to be more conscious of our habits? George Lakoff says that the kind of discourse that saturates our environment—propaganda, advertising, political messaging, and digital media—can change our minds without changing our beliefs, that is, change how we act outside of our awareness (Don’t Think, passim). We are all vulnerable to social engineering. With the emergence of social media, we find ourselves in virtual Skinner boxes. We click, and we receive a reward. Bergson’s approach to this autopilot mode of being is cognitive; Pierre Bourdieu’s approach is anthropological and sociological. Bourdieu uses the term habitus to describe the same kind of nonbeing, which he sees operating in the tasks that move us through a day as well as in “myths, rites, or bodies of law” (70). It is “history turned into nature,” an ontology that has evolved but that we have come to consider as the way things

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have always been, another kind of memory that forgets. It forms what we might call a cultural unconscious: The “unconscious” is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus … Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning. Because his actions and works are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer and has no conscious mastery … The schemes of thought and expression he has acquired are the basis for the intentionless invention of regulated improvisation. (78–79)

We both carry and are carried by habitus, that is, “short of a radical transformation” (78). And, Bourdieu writes, without much awareness: “It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.” We carry with us “dominant frames of interpretation” that help to hold society together but also force us into “reductive molds” (Eakin “Introduction” 13). This is how ideology operates. A perpetual motion machine, “it feeds off itself like a train bringing along its own rails.” Bourdieu says that “witticisms”—we might add satire and comedy—can “surprise their author no less than their audience” because they unearth “a buried possibility” (79). To slightly paraphrase Bourdieu, humor and satire can break through the “dominant frames of interpretation” that are a part of habitus, which, like habit, work for us more than they work against us. It is all too easy to leave this kind of memory—habit, history, culture, ideology—forgotten. It is memory because it is in us, somewhere, affecting how we act. It is forgotten because it rarely enters our consciousness. It is, as Nietzsche summarizes it, part of a long historical process: “Compulsion precedes morality … Later on it becomes custom,—later still, free obedience, and finally almost instinct,—then, like everything long accustomed and natural, it is connected with pleasure—and is henceforth called virtue” (Human 62). The purpose of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogies is to uncover this forgotten history, and their work will play a crucial role in this book. Nonfiction writers are often doing similar work. Part of knowing the self is examining what we have inherited. We might easily recognize we carry the history of certain customs and manners, which we embrace as our culture. We might struggle to recognize we carry the history of racism, sexism, and other social ills.

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For a postmodern extension of Nietzsche’s view of identity, we could look to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. If we had read Anti-Oedipus when first published in 1972, we would probably see Deleuze and Guattari as arguing against fragments of Modernism—capitalism, industrialism, technology, and psychoanalysis—that lead to “a fantastic repression of desiring machines” (3). Shocking to readers, at least initially, they mimic the language of schizophrenics as they seem to praise schizophrenia. Then, we start to realize that this is a different kind of schizophrenia, not as diagnosed by psychoanalysts, but something else—something that breaks from predictability, repetition, and unending routines. Something like awareness or freedom. A form of satire. If we reread Anti-Oedipus fifty years after its publication, after the Internet, we might view it as an epic rap song about the perils of cyberlife. What better way to describe identity within social networks than a “desiring machine” or “a body without organs” (9–14)? In a modernist frame, we consider the stable individual who is integrated and whole as psychologically healthy and the quixotic individual, fragmented, and erratic individual as abnormal. With a shift to a postmodernist frame, Deleuze and Guattari want us to consider the value of inverting this notion: It becomes nevertheless apparent that schizophrenia teaches us a similar extra-Oedipal lesson and reveals to us an unknown force of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative, nonrestrictive, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the disjointed terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance, without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one, is perhaps the greatest paradox. “Either … or … or,” instead of “either/or.” (76)

We are part of broad historical forces, and we are tied to a particular time and place—both its materiality and its ideology. Deleuze and Guattari say “everything commingles” with “intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends in the flow of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical destinations, and even miscellaneous news items” (84–85). To stabilize who we think we are, we identify (“I am …”) or disidentify (“I am not …”) with particulars of our environment. In an age of New Media, simulations and copies and clones and bots complicate these acts. As Deleuze and Guattari say: “If identification is a nomination, a designation,

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then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where … the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice” (87). The problem with simulation and bodies without organs is that they make bullying on social media seem harmless and without consequences. It is easy to forget that an avatar represents a human with a body, an identity, thoughts, and emotions, as clearly as a name. In Capital is Dead, Mckenzie Wark says that “information really does turn out to have strange ontological properties” (42). To explain what she means, I want to go back beyond the emergence of the Internet and New Media to bureaucracies. We tend to think of bureaucracies as developing to manage large cities and becoming more abstract and pervasive in the wake of the Enlightenment and the creation of statistics. Ian Hacking says the “avalanche of numbers” began around 1820. Since then, governmental statistics create categories of people that change about every ten years, and then “people spontaneously come to fit their categories” (Historical Ontology 100). Yet, as Graeber and Wengrow argue in The Dawn of Everything, the first bureaucracies emerged long before Greek city states in small communities, and they were created to promote equality (420). Modern bureaucracies, the kind that evoke “mechanical stupidity,” emerged when “promises” (we could substitute “debt” here) became “impersonal, transferable” (426–27). Now, return to Deleuze and Guattari, who critique Modernism, and Wark, who critiques a more recent development, an economy where information becomes the dominant commodity. With Modernism, bureaucracies, the Internet, and New Media, we see a progressive abstraction of identity and social relations. Humans interact as avatars. We have not even begun to find our place within a world shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence, a posthuman world. What does this have to do with writing nonfiction—writing about the self as situated in a particular place and time? We may need to remember who we are outside of this new world, which means writing about our connection to a material time and place, our connection to each other, our connection to our own bodies. Current nonfiction often attempts to find meaning behind habit and history behind custom. It lingers over habits, it moves habitus into a timeline, it questions the values of Modernity and what has emerged almost simultaneously—an information-based economy. All of this is a means to opening up imagination, including what

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Graeber and Wengrow call the ability to imagine new ways of living with each other.

Resetting Modernity Modernity could be viewed as another form of what Woolf calls “non-­ being.” That may be a surprising assertion. After all, isn’t modernity—if considered a mode of being—a philosophy, an assortment of scripted, critiqued beliefs and methods that have consciously and collectively evolved over centuries? But maybe it is far less conscious and rational than we have been led to believe. Hegel wrote, in one of the few “LOL” moments in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that the Enlightenment was not very enlightened about itself. Within the Enlightenment, Reason becomes an abstraction separated from “specific being” (153). In other words, Reason does not account for the “I” of truth. As Richard Rorty says, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there” (4–5). The world exists. What it means for us must be constructed. In similar vein, Latour wrote that we are not moderns, meaning that we are certainly not only moderns. In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, echoing Hegel, he wrote that moderns “remain as opaque as ever” (14). What they fail to realize is that “there is more than one dwelling place in the Realm of Reason” (18). Latour does not seek to argue against Modernity or science so much as reveal what Bourdieu would call buried possibilities or additional modes of being, such as law, religion, habit, and fiction. In reset Modernity! (a book without a copyright page, as if he were poking a finger in the eye of Modernity), Latour as editor—or, maybe more appropriately, curator—brings together rather nonacademic articles written by academics and incongruous exhibits by a range of artists to extend the work of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and make it sustainable. What does he mean by “resetting modernity”? Latour and his collaborators do not seek a univocal answer. They want, rather, to develop multiple ways of viewing and solving problems that push us beyond the limits of Modernity and traditional science. One of the new methods or modes of being is to “relocalize the global”: “If we had to relocalize the global, it was because when you pretend to see the globe in its totality you occupy, virtually, a position that is cognitively impossible—that of an unsituated Godlike figure, a position that, because of this implausibility, has been called the ‘view from nowhere’” (91). Latour wants to move away from

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this “view from nowhere” to find more ways of viewing our place in the world. In “Recomposing the Humanities,” one of the articles in reset Modernity!, Stephen Muecke writes about a “mode of ‘due attention’” that will “assert its situated character” (113). This is what Vivian Gornick calls using herself, reflecting on her responses, “as a means of making some larger sense of things” (9). Latour, perhaps, should have included nonfiction as one of his Modes of Existence. Seneca’s Dialogic We

In a series of letters, the other always seems present. The repetition of “you” is the internalization of the other’s voice, so we hear the voice of the other person, even when the collection of letters is one-­ sided (at least, what has survived), as it is with Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, written in the first century. In these letters to his younger friend, Seneca clearly knows Lucilius well enough to anticipate his response. The dialogical nature of this exchange moves beyond our typical diurnal encounter with others, a random bumping into people on a busy street. There is an intimacy and a trust that has developed over the course of a long friendship. While writers of nonfiction may not have thought of our work as resetting Modernity, this has been the tradition nonfiction even before Modernity existed. In books X through XII of the Confessions, the books that read like personal essays, Augustine invites the reader into his thought process as he seems to ramble through a series of associations, thinking on paper (actually, in his case, dictating to a scribe), anticipating the openness and freedom of a Montaigne essay. His thoughts are more associational (thinking as a turn toward self) than linear (thinking in the presence of others) as he reflects on confession, memory, time, and interpretation. While his form is like a personal essay, his thoughts are less situated and grounded in his concrete experience and his daily life. Augustine’s terrain is biblical. In contrast, Montaigne will add mindfulness about the quotidian and the grounding of a specific time and place to the personal essay, features that have remained a part of the personal essay for centuries. In “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things,” Patrick Madden writes: “During my first extended encounters with the essay, I was struck (dumbstruck, moonstruck) by those authors who wrote from seemingly

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insignificant, overlooked, transient things, experiences, and ideas, who were able to find within their everyday, unexceptional lives inspiration for essaying” (2). In the personal essay, it is not the topic that matters so much as how the author, situated in a particular time and place, reflects on it. The reflection examines what it means to live in that time and place. We can find similar genres in other cultures. In The Lost Origins of the Essay, D’Agata includes Yoshida Kendo’s “In All Things I Yearn for the Past.” It is in the form zuihitsu, which dates to thirteenth-century Japan. D’Agata writes that the form is “best characterized by its associative, irregular, and incomplete nature” (91). There seems to be a human need to explore our thoughts and be connected to the material world around us. One of the most consistent messages in Montaigne’s essays, each its own bundle of inconsistencies, is to slow down and be in the moment. In “Of Experience,” he writes: “When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk along in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me” (Frame translation, 1036). Montaigne can teach us that the moments matter. If we learn that lesson, we can write ourselves into being connected to our bodies, our place, our time, and the now. Montaigne was writing at the beginning of Modernism, shortly after the invention of moveable type, in the midst of violence between Catholics and Huguenots, as empirical science and the industrial revolution were emerging, when time began to accelerate, when habits began a slow move from the quotidian to the factory floor. He often wrote about habits, but he never offered advice on how to make our habits more efficient. As Foucault explained in Discipline and Punish, the body is often used to control the wanderings and unpredictability of thoughts, to develop a common purpose, and to create a common identity. Montaigne wanted to find a way to navigate Modernism and even resist elements of it.

Living in Bodies We need, Montaigne wrote in so many ways, to understand our connection to our own bodies and the connection between our bodies and the world around us. In the introduction to Portrait of My Body, Phillip Lopate writes:

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We are all ignorant when it comes to knowing ourselves. No less an authority on himself than Montaigne insisted, “Que scay-je?”—“What do I know?”—or, as we now say it with a responsibility-avoiding shrug, “What do I know?” Montaigne was explaining the Pyrrhonian philosophers’ defense of doubt when he made this pronouncement, and it is worth quoting his actual words: “This idea is more firmly grasped in the form of interrogation: ‘What do I know?”—the words I bear as a motto, inscribed over a pair of scales.” What intrigues me about this passage is that Montaigne immediately connects the very attractive (to me, anyway) concept of skepticism, including self-skepticism, with the more disturbing question of judgment. (3–4)

Many of us have read Lopate’s “Portrait of My Body,” the essay, extricated from the context of Portrait of My Body, the collection of essays. And some of us have taught Lopate’s meditation on his body in courses on the personal essay and have been surprised when students are repulsed by it. Their disgust—this word is not too strong—registers on their face and echoes in their silence, their refusal to even discuss the essay. They find it odd that he writes about the smell of his bellybutton, but I assume it is Lopate’s discussion of his penis that bothers them. The same students have, no doubt, read about the penis—as an abstraction—in psychology or anatomy or even art classes. If they read Joyce’s Ulysses in a class on modern fiction, they would have encountered Bloom’s fascination with his penis as he soaks in a tub, but I don’t think they would react as viscerally as they do to Lopate’s penis. In the personal essay, in nonfiction, the effect of an author writing about his body is different. Something significant is at stake. If we return to Lopate’s introduction, to his recognition that Montaigne ties his skepticism to issues of justice, if we read the essays that follow “Portrait of My Body,” such as “Resistance to the Holocaust” or “The Invisible Woman,” we see that the body becomes the foundation for a view—not the only view—of ethics. In “Wild America,” Melissa Febos wrote: “Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body.” She was able to feel, within her body, something like the Sublime, a feeling that was both “terrifying and irresistible” (97). This feeling might be described as a result of fully inhabiting her body: The resiliency and strength of my young body was a source of comfort in the face of this dissonance between inner and outer worlds, because it offered a link between them. The body was a weird unfathomable masterpiece, a

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­ erfect shard of what coursed through that channel. My body was not, howp ever, subject to radical shifts in consciousness. It was always real. (98)

As she matured, this connection was lost: “By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body” (109). She had learned about beauty and felt disconnected from her body, especially her large hands, which seemed too masculine. Now, as a teacher of nonfiction, Febos has her students write a “love letter” to their bodies (123). The questions the body raises, Jacqueline Rose argues in On Violence and On Violence against Women, are most complex in the trans world, which is “why trans and feminism should be natural bedfellows.” The “male-to-female transexuals expose, and then reject, masculinity in its darkest guise” (116). A male-to-female trans does not have a female childhood and does not experience everything a cis female does. Rose quotes trans Paris Lees: “I am not a woman in the way my mother is; I haven’t experienced female childbirth; I don’t menstruate. I won’t give birth. Yes, I don’t know what it feels like to be another woman—but nor do I know what it feels like to be another man. How can anyone know what it feels like to be anyone but themselves?” (113). Trans narratives can help us to understand the connection and disjunction of living in bodies. In these narratives, Rose says there seems to be a “range of permitted utterances.” She continues: “I think this might be why, reading transexual narratives, I often get the sense of a psychic beat missed, of there being parts of the story which do and do not want to be told, moments which reach the surface, only to be forgotten or brushed aside in the forward march of narrative time” (121). As I will say later, the gaps in narratives raise questions and prompt reflection. The gaps in trans narratives help us understand that we live in bodies and our bodies are part of our identities, but our identities are also somewhere beyond our bodies. We might even say that consciousness evolves from this untold story of my complex and problematic relationship with my particular body. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty uses “not causing pain to others” as the foundation for his ethics. This is, he recognizes, an assumption, but it is an assumption tied to the material human body. How can we separate either emotional pain or physical pain from the human body? As if answering Deleuze and Guattari, Rorty encourages us to recognize that human beings are not “networks of beliefs and desires” but “beings which have those beliefs and desires” (10). Central to this move is a recognition of language as a medium, as part of habitus, as something that must be

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critiqued. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes: “A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language.” He adds, “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets” (2). Fanon is both recognizing the power of language and its separation from the material world, including the body. To recognize the power of language, we need not acquiesce to the notion that we are trapped in a “prison house of language.” The body and the core self are not in this prison house. Rorty argues that we should “accept the idea that there are nonlinguistic things called ‘meanings’ which it is the task of language to express, as well as the idea that there are nonlinguistic things called ‘facts’ which it is the task of language to represent” (13). How often do nonfiction writers examine their own language? Scott Russell Sanders rarely writes an essay without stopping to analyze, deconstruct, or historicize a key word. While it might seem counterintuitive, examining this history of language and its limitations is one way to connect to our bodies. This experience is shaped within the abstraction of language, which carries with it history and culture. As Nietzsche often points out, language becomes calcified. Beyond our awareness, it influences our thought and how we experience the world. While language no doubt plays a role in shaping how we experience our bodies, these bodies remain nonlinguistic. This means that the body remains as a material object that can be interpreted and reinterpreted. We cannot return to a prelinguistic, primal experience with our bodies and the material world. But, if we attend to our bodies, we can be more aware of how our language shapes our reality, often trapping us in a past that is not well suited to the present.

Nietzsche and Genealogy In Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, Robert Pippin argues that Nietzsche should be viewed as working within the tradition of the “French moralists”: Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and Pascal. Pippin writes that “the problem of value” is at the “heart of Nietzsche’s interests” (1), that he was concerned with “how we should understand what happens when people appeal to normative considerations, or try to live well, how those norms have come to matter to people, how even they could or could not come to matter” (8). When we are faced with the loss of traditional values in the wake of the Enlightenment, which Nietzsche presents as the death

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of God, how do we react? Do we become like the madman in The Gay Science who searches for God in the middle of the day with a lantern in his hand (§125)? Do we simply shutdown due to what Pippin calls “a failure of desire”: “The failure of desire and its experiential manifestations in everyday life—boredom, loneliness, and fatigue—are very hard to diagnose and extremely hard to respond to” (64). Without God or metanarratives, how do we make sense of our suffering? For Nietzsche, the role of values in our lives is complex. He believed that traditional values are no longer worthy of our belief, and he actively questioned those values in his genealogies, arguing that the values we inherit are not absolute but historical and contingent. As we discard staid, fossilized values, embedded in tired metaphors, we open ourselves to freedom. But what do we do with that freedom? Nietzsche wanted to find a way to act within this freedom, taking life on its own terms, accepting “the burden of the question of the meaning of suffering,” to find a way to be the kind of individual who engages in the struggle of life. Pippin writes: The somewhat mythic picture here is straightforward: the natural world is a world without genuine individuality (just mere particularity, in Hegel’s language), is formless, brutal, chaotic, and indifferent, and to live a human life is (and essentially is only) to resist this, to make oneself something other than this, all because, at least up till now, we have not accepted it and have found a way to provoke such dissatisfaction in others and for posterity. This resistance amounts to achievement of what Nietzsche calls “the sovereign individual,” in which individuality is understood as always a kind of fragile, unstable, threatened achievement, not an original state of being. (61)

Let us tease out some implications of Pippin placing Nietzsche in the tradition of “French moralists.” The personal essay, once Montaigne established it as a genre, became not just a personal project but also a historical project; others who followed, including the “French moralists” and Nietzsche, continue the work that Montaigne began. The project, which Pippin calls a “fragile collective historical achievement,” is concerned with continually creating the ethical individual who questions not only values, certainly habitus, but also seemingly insignificant habits and certainly language, as it also establishes values through engaging in the world in a way that leads to a robust life. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault writes about ethopoiein, a Greek term used by Plutarch and Denys of

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Halicarnassus: “Ethnopoiein means making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence. Ethopoios is something that possesses the quality of transforming an individual’s mode of being” (237). It is by living an ethical life that we can write about our lives with authenticity, but it is also through authentically writing about our connection to life that we can transform ourselves into more fully ethical beings. When we act, we answer to our texts. When we write, we answer to our acts. Sample of Seneca’s Dialogic We

This, I say, is the highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom— that deed and word should be in accord, that a man should be equal to himself under all conditions, and always the same. “But,” you reply, “who can maintain this standard?”… “But what,” you say, “will become of my crowded household without a household income?”… “Yes, but I do not know,” you say, “how the man you speak of will endure poverty, if he falls into it suddenly.” (Letter 20)

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores in detail what it means to live within a human body. Our bodies, he posits, are the medium that connects us to the world: “Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which means taking up my own account of the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it. I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total being” (198). Merleau-Ponty analyzes various approaches to understanding the body—materialism, psychology, and science. They all fail to capture the experience of living in a human body. His phenomenology sees what these other approaches miss. His method is close to what we find in nonfiction. Perhaps, this is why he had such respect for Montaigne. In Between the World and Me, written in the form of a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates uses history and his personal experiences to teach his son and us about race in America, to question the idea of race as it confronts the material reality of race:

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Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follow from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. (7)

Coates takes a word that is so common in our habitus that it seems to be part of “nature” and reveals its history and its material reality, a revelation that takes place in dialogue with his son: I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. (emphasis added, 9)

At times, Coates moves to a molecular view of a single event in his own life. At other times, he shifts to a broad historical view. There is not a single story, but stories, or perspectives, that are interconnected. Coates helps us to see 400 years of history in a single moment of his childhood. Yet he always brings the focus back to the body. Language, history, ideals, academic disciplines—indeed, all abstractions—have consequences that land on the Black body: There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage of legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociological, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. (10)

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In Between the World and Me and essays like “The Case for Reparations,” Coates argues from history, but it is not a history that comforts us. Nor is it a history that is familiar. He does not tell a history that reinforces abstractions and ideals. Coates tells a different history, one we have ignored or even participated in suppressing. He tells a history that uncovers the weight of experience. The experience of living in a Black body.

Bakhtin and Answerability In “Art and Answerability,” an essay of just 509 words, M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life” (2). This is, ultimately, a rhetorical view. Author, hero, text, reader—these are almost all of the components of rhetoric, a complex transaction happening in a broader context that could be called history, society, culture, or just plain life. These are the components—if we add the human body. For Bakhtin, this all finds unity in the experience of the unique individual: “Life can be consciously comprehended only in concrete answerability” (Toward a Philosophy 56). The “concrete answerability” could be called the position of the singular “I” in nonfiction, if we recognize that the “I” of nonfiction is not just on the page; it is also the embodied individual who writes that “I.” These two manifestations of “I” are not identical, but they must, Bakhtin says, be connected, and that connection is what he means by answerability. It is the human body, Bakhtin believes, that separates us and our world into an interior and exterior, and it is the body that allows us to imagine— even aesthetically experience—others, for they also live in bodies that are more similar to ours than different. Unity comes as individuals—both authors and readers—act and then answer or assume responsibility for the act. It is not surprising to say that authors must answer for their texts, that is, live in a way that assumes responsibility for what might seem like detached words on a page. It is a little more surprising to say that readers, too, must assume responsibility for how they have understood texts. In Mikhail Bakhtin, Morson and Emerson write: “The creation of an integrated self is the work of a lifetime, and although that work can never be completed, it is nonetheless an ethical responsibility.… There can be no formula for integrity, no substitution for each person’s own project of selfhood, no escape from the ethical obligations of every situation at every

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moment. Or as Bakhtin often sums up the point, ‘There is no alibi for being’” (Morson and Emerson 31). For Bakhtin, part of that “being” is writing and responding to texts.

Embracing Options With any kind of writing, even science writing, we expose ourselves to a dangerous world. Every argument and every counterargument are ultimately ad hominem, an embrace of or attack upon the Other (Baumlin, Jensen, and Massey). Every expression happens within a community. Some communities are healthy; some are not. Even when a single author is listed on the title page, the text comes from and returns to a community. Our own ethos cannot be separated from our environment, and our environment includes both people and things. As we shape our environment in the act of writing, we are also shaping ourselves. We are finding a way to be in the world. The only overarching comment we can make is that life is complicated and writing about life is equally complicated. Ethics, Bakhtin believed, cannot be predetermined or reduced to a formula. But, if we cannot codify an ethics of nonfiction, how should we explore it? We can identify rhetorical options for acting ethically. Since Montaigne published his Essais in 1580, the genre of the personal essay has, at its core, a meditation on self and the self’s place in the world. And this is, or should be, at the core of ethics. Detour to Genre: Letters Later, I will cover the importance of confession to nonfiction genres, especially the personal essay and memoir. In a diary or journal, the author might put private thoughts into writing, but writing to the self is not a confession. A personal letter, even a series of letters, certainly extends these thoughts to an audience, usually a close friend, but we are still in a private space. In letters, revelations are more like a shared secret, a mark of intimacy, than a confession, which entails a breach in the border between private and public life. With letters in some contexts, the revelations can help establish the ethos of a mentor writing to a younger friend, and the act of letter writing can be part of the techné of self, the rehearsing and memorizing—memorializing—of truths that will prepare both for future challenges. Of Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Foucault says, “The advice you give to the other is equally given to yourself” (Hermeneutics of Subject 361). In

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this relationship between mentor and student, the mentor establishes ethos by telling “the truth about himself” as he teaches; the student’s role is primarily to listen (363). After Christianity, Foucault says this need for authenticity becomes more present: Now the subject’s obligation to tell the truth about himself, or the fundamental principle that we must be able to say the truth about ourselves in order to be able to establish a relationship to truth in general in which we will be able to find our salvation, did not exist in Greek, Hellenistic, or Roman Antiquity. The person who is led to the truth through the master’s discourse does not have to say the truth about himself. He does not even have to say the truth. And since he does not have to say the truth, he does not have to speak. It is necessary and sufficient that he keep quiet. (364)

Foucault says that “the most remarkable feature of the practice of self in this period is that the subject must become the subject of truth” (365). In other words, the letter writer must speak the truth of himself (the collections of letters that survive from the first century of the Common Era are predominately between men) to speak truth about life to a younger, intimate friend. In “Self Writing,” Foucault describes the exchange of letters between two friends in terms that sounds remarkably similar to Bakhtin’s discussion of the self and other in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”: To write is thus to “show oneself,” to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence. And by this it should be understood that the letter is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself. In a sense, the letter sets up a face-to-face meeting.… The reciprocity that correspondence establishes is not simply that of counsel and aid; it is the reciprocity of the gaze and the examination. The letter that, as an exercise, works toward the subjectivation of true discourse, its assimilation and its transformation as a “personal asset,” also constitutes, at the same time, an objectification of the soul. (216–17)

One of the central concerns of Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero” is how we move past the separation of self (experienced as an interior) and other (seen as an exterior), a boundary set by the human body. This is also the

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boundary between the private and public worlds, which must be constantly negotiated, breached, and reaffirmed. Surprisingly, Foucault does not comment on the power relation between the mentor and student, which means that he overlooks an important function about the mentor’s revelations. As the master speaks the truth about himself without an obligation for the student to speak the truth about himself, the power of the mentor is undercut, which means that the student can receive the truth as a truth rather than dogma. The mentor also enacts the principle that the ultimate ground for his truth is how he lives, and the student should answer this offer of truth with how he lives. Certainly, social norms enter these private spaces. In “Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space,” Brenda Glascott writes: “The rhetorical agency denied to [female letter writers] is access to expressing dissatisfaction, to describing discomfort, to criticizing people in authority around her, and to undertaking rhetorical action that isn’t in service of other people” (165–66). These genres are not typically singular acts; they are more of a practice—a techné—that becomes a rehearsal of self that evolves over an extended period of time. This blurry zone between the private and public became even more problematic when letters morphed into emails, which are sometimes sent to the wrong person, blind-copied, or forwarded to others without permission. What is most important to the letter is authenticity, intimacy, and trust. In Letter 40 to Lucilius, Seneca begins: I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing your real self to me in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us, though they only refresh the memory and lighten our longing by a solace that is unreal and unsubstantial, how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidences, of an absent friend! For that which is sweetest when we meet face to face is afforded by the impress of a friend’s hand upon his letter,—recognition.

Part of Montaigne’s genius in creating the personal essay is that he was able to carry this complex of feelings, this relationship, this intimacy, into a more public forum.

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Works Cited Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. ———. “Art and Answerability.” In Art and Answerability. 1–3. ———. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability. 4–256. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Texas UP, 1993. Baumlin, James S., George H. Jensen, and Lance Massey. “Ethos, Ethical Argument, and Ad Hominem in Contemporary Theory: A Burkean Analysis.” In Ethical Issues in College Writing. Ed. Frederic G.  Gale, Phillip Sipiora, and James L. Kinneavy. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 186–219. Bergson, Henri. Memory and Matter. Solis, 2014. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge UP, 1977. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. One World, 2017. 163–208. ———. Between the World and Me. Spiegel and Grau, 2015. D’Agata, John, ed. The Lost Origins of the Essay. Greywold, 2009. Deleuze, Giles and Félix. Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin, 1972, 2009. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove, 2008. Febos, Melissa. “Wild America.” Girlhood: Essays. Bloomsbury, 2021. 95–129. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1995. ———. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley. New Press, 1994. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Ethics. 253–80. ———. “Self Writing.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. 207–22. Glascott, Brenda. “Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space.” College English 78:2 (November 2015): 162–82. Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. Grimaldi, William M. A. Aristotle, Rhetoric II: A Commentary. Fordham UP, 1988. Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Harvard UP, 2002. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. Joyce, James. The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses. Cambridge UP, 1922, 2022. Lakoff, George. Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green, 2014.

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Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 2013. ———, ed. with Christophe Leclercq. reset Modernity! ZKM Center for Art and Media, [2016]. Lopate, Phillip. “Portrait of My Body.” Portrait of My Body. Anchor, 1997. Madden, Patrick. “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things.” Quotidiana: Essays. Nebraska UP, 2010. 1–10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge and Kegan, 1945. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Muecke, Stephen. “Recomposing the Humanities.” In Letour rest Modernity! 224–29. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Thomas Common. New York: Barnes and Nobles, 2008. ———. Human, All Too Human. Digireads, 2018. Pippin, Robert B. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge UP, 1989. Rose, Jacqueline. On Violence and On Violence Against Women. Picador, 2022. Sanders, Scott Russell. Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND. Strayed, Cheryl. Outdoor Magazine webinar, 5 April 2022. Wark, Mckenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse. Verso, 2019. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Harvest, [1976] 1985. 61–159.

CHAPTER 4

Fighting Narration

Telling stories is a form of resistance. —Arthur W. Frank (The Wounded Storyteller) We are so used to these practices that we sometimes have trouble seeing the originality of a position that makes us sometimes authors of a narrative, sometimes characters in that same narrative projected ahead in time—a narrative that disappears as soon as the program for which it was written had been completed. —Bruno Latour (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence)

In “The Unstoried Life,” Galen Strawson begins by listing the beliefs of narrativists, a term I imagine him uttering with a smug half-smile: We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell. We invent ourselves … but rarely are the characters we invent. We make sense of our lives … by turning them into stories. We construct our souls by making up our lives, that is, by weaving stories about our past. (177)

Strawson, who claims to possess “no direct memory of the past, no memory from the inside,” only “propositional or linguistic memory,” wants to question these assumptions, which writers often repeat as if part of a catechism (208). Strawson is by trade a philosopher, so he unsurprisingly calls these claims. Though, a bit surprisingly, he doesn’t so much refute them © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_4

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as circumscribe their application. These claims may be true for some of us, but they are not universal. Telling stories is certainly, he claims, not essential to leading a good life. He does not himself lead a “storied life,” and he is sure that others do not as well. “What needs to be added” to these claims, he argues, “is that some of us are naturally—deeply, positively— nonnarrative” (179). As support for his argument, he quotes a number of writers, including Montaigne, who wrote, “Nothing is so foreign to my way of writing than extended narration” (196). The only kind of “lifewriting” that might be “100 percent nonfiction,” in his view, is “automatic writing” (183). Maybe, he would like Knausgaard’s My Struggle. If Strawson does not lead a “storied life,” we might assume that he doesn’t read many narratives and that he might have a limited view of narration. He seems, for example, to view nonfiction as being essentially narrative, despite the reference to Montaigne. He also doesn’t discuss variations in narrative form. We can hardly expect a nonnarrative person to have a complex view of narration. Nonetheless, Strawson should encourage us to question some of our most accepted views of narration, especially how narration intersects with identity. Is narration as connected to identity as we, as writers, have assumed? Is building identity through narration always good? Does a controlled and highly structured narrative constrict identity as much as it constructs it? Instead of embracing identity, should we fight it? By fighting narration, I don’t so much mean avoiding any form of narration. I mean fighting a certain kind of narration—the simple view of narration. What is that simple view? The most basic expectation of narration or storytelling is that the author or speaker begins at the beginning and proceeds chronologically to the end, including all key details along the way, perhaps relying on presenting fully mimetic scenes—a dramatized linear plot with characters and dialogue and detailed description. We, as readers, are moved through a narrative arc that begins with equilibrium, encounters unexpected events that destabilize the life of the main character, and then ends with the restoration of equilibrium. The author, to use Bakhtin’s term, consummates the characters and the plot. It is as if the characters had, in the writer’s imagination, lived a complete life. The story seems finished off, wrapped up, without gaps. We, as readers, are satisfied that we know all we need to know. We have certainty and are able to judge the characters and their actions.

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When we begin to think through narration, Strawson’s claim that some people do not lead “storied lives” is startling. If we allow ourselves to be startled for a while, if we linger a bit with Strawson’s claims, we can explore questions that do not have clear answers but might help us see options within the process of building a narration. If we agree with Strawson that some people do not possess “autobiographical memory” and lead nonnarrative lives, yet somehow seem to muddle along as well as the rest of us, should we do more than qualify the claims of narrativists? Are the claims of narrativists problematic even for those who live “storied” lives? Are some approaches to narration more ethical—more likely to lead to a fuller and more engaged life—than others? Rather than say a narrative is what brings order and meaning to our lives, could we say it has the potential to do the opposite—the potential to leave us unhinged and unmoored? And is being unhinged and unmoored always a bad thing? Does narrative ever force us to recognize our inability to capture life in a single story? Does it lock us into unhealthy patterns of behavior? Does it limit our mental scope and our ability to change? Should we fight the narrative closure on our lives, which are still unfolding, even as we are attempting to capture bits of life into stories? Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” might provide a path through these questions, if not definitive answers. When the series of essays first appeared in Esquire, before Fitzgerald stitched them together into “The Crack-Up,” some readers felt he was being too revealing. Quite the contrary, at least from current standards, even when compared to Montaigne’s essays. Fitzgerald hints at something, some kind of trauma, which caused him to be “prematurely cracked.” Was it a neglect to care for self, a “talent for self-delusion”? Was it reliance on others that led to a loss of self? Was it just the “emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime”? He struggles for an answer, and he also struggles to understand how the events that led to his crisis unfolded. He seems to say he was hit with a blow, then he improved, then he cracked. He writes: The realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve. He is alone in a cabin, sleeping often, writing seemingly meaningless lists, as if to find some area of life that he could control: --And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better. --And cracked like an old plate as soon as I hear the news. (522)

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Fitzgerald begins this short passage in third person, as if viewing himself from the eyes of another, then shifts to first person, an isolated subjectivity, as his world implodes. He realizes that “for two years” he “had been drawing on resources” he did not possess. Later in the essay, he writes: “I saw the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotions from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion” (526). His crack-up seems to coincide with a failure of narrative. If “The Crack-Up” has a threadbare narrative, is there at least a cause-­ and-­effect explanation of a life crisis, a proposition? How can one feel better, then, in what seems to be a reprieve, an improvement, crack without warning? Is the reference to hearing “the news” enough of an explanation? Fitzgerald doesn’t reflect on this progression, and it seems murky. Perhaps, because he was still very early in his own recovery at a time when little was known about treating trauma. Now, we might read into “The Crack-Up” what we now know about processing trauma, coming to terms with traumatic memory, and working with narratives. In the aftermath of a trauma, whether a single event or prolonged abuse, people disengage, shut down emotionally, and block access to memories (Herman 33–50). This is not the same as forgetting. It is the body protecting itself. It is also social. If a girl has been sexually abused by her father and her mother keeps repeating that her father is a good man, the girl might doubt her own memories or repress them. She will still, however, experience depression, nightmares, and flashes of images. Her body has remembered the trauma; she just has not let it into language and built a narration around it (Herman 181–87). If the traumatic event is narrated, it is usually a story as threadbare as “The Crack-Up.” Henke describes traumatic memories as “a kind of prenarrative that does not progress or develop in time” (xvii). Similarly, soldiers may become fixed in time, reliving the scene of a battle, reacting to common noises as if they have been transported back into battle. The traumatic event disrupts “linear time” and traps the soldier into the present where the event is repeated, as if on an endless loop (Young 96-99). One of the first steps to recovery

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is to build a narrative around the event, remember it, move it from a fixed point that recurs over and over into a sequence. In “From Trauma to Writing,” MacCurdy says, “The story must begin with the image,” the unprocessed bodily memory of the trauma (172). Then, a narrative is built around the image. Initially, especially when people—I am not speaking about writers yet—begin to tell the story of the trauma on their own, without the guidance of a therapist, their early attempts tend to be simple narratives in chronological order, or even just a series of phrases. The simple stories may cover up as much as they reveal. They might help them deal with the trauma initially, but eventually they need to build a fuller narrative. This is easier to do with the help of a therapist, supportive friends, a mentor, or in a group like a twelve-step program, or in writing, where the story can build with prolonged revision. As a fuller narrative is constructed, the traumatic event moves from the recurring presence into a point in the past. The narrative creates a distance, a separation. It also begins to build a new identity with agency. MacCurdy says, “Such tellings allow us to put our experience outside of ourselves. The images become stories which can be told, retold, studied, and compared with others’ stories. A cultural context becomes possible. Individual barriers of isolation have been broken” (185). I will describe this process in another way. After trauma, we develop a simple narrative that helps us recover, or, at least, function. The simple narrative hands us a simple subject position, which Charles W. Anderson describes with the Lacanian term suture: “Because meaning is essential to human beings and is dependent upon being located within the discourse of an other, the process of suturing ourselves into the discourse of an another is all but irresistible” (“Suture” 60). What does it mean to be “located within the discourse of an other”? The writer is fulfilling the norms and form of how basic stories are told. These stories are normative. They fit into a pattern and meet the expectations of readers who want stories that reinforce their own beliefs. In this early stage, writers place themselves into a simple narration, and they seem to improve. Then, at some point, this simple narrative constricts more than it supports. They seem to get better, and then they crack. This process might evolve over years, even decades.

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Norman Maclean’s Transcendental I

In “Retrievers Good and Bad,” Norman Maclean wrote that the death of his brother, Paul, “had no past and it never went on and turned into something else” (21). In other words, when Paul died, time stopped. The fixation on a traumatic moment, unmoving in an ever-recurring present, is sometimes called “traumatic time” (Young 22). In “A River Runs Through It,” Maclean escapes this fixed moment by writing about his brother as he moves through multiple forms of time: clock time, calendar time, historical time, diurnal time, biblical time, geological time, and eternity (see Jensen and Harris). In the last few pages of the story, the more mythic forms of time come together in a “spot of time,” Wordsworth’s term for a transcendental moment. The process of Maclean’s healing is that he places his brother’s death into a narrative without definite answers, and then he moves beyond time to commune with those he had lost. He wrote: “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

While some people might, as Strawson claims, lead unstoried lives, most of us use narrative to process trauma. In the early stages of recovery, these stories may need to be simple and linear. At some point, if we are to continue our recovery, we need to break these narratives. We later need to move into a different kind of narrative, one that is less tidy, one with holes and gaps and confusion and unanswered questions, one that allows for freedom and growth. In other words, a narrative that never reaches resolution, that is less than a full story—a narrative that is in process, still evolving. We need to name “a self not broken by discourse” in what Anderson calls “contra-discourse” (62). I will repeatedly come back to this idea of viewing the self as “unfinished” creating freedom for the transformation of self. While it might seem contradictory, part of this process is building what Gullestad calls a “sustainable self,” which includes “the possession of self-­respect and dignity over time, in spite of challenges and attacks” (218). The key word here is process. We need to cycle through periods of deconstructing the self and building the self. Part of this is building and living comfortably with a narrative that has agency but also does not blame the self for a trauma beyond the individual’s control.

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It is important to add a caution here. For most people, especially those who have experienced dramatic or sustained trauma, the process should begin with a therapist. The methods for treating trauma in a therapeutic setting have significantly evolved in recent years. For most therapists, writing about the trauma is part of the treatment. While we might build a satisfying narrative early on and feel this is progress—and it is in many ways—we need to revisit this narrative. As we mature and change, we may need to return to the trauma and reframe it—place it into the context of a new phase of our lives. There is no stasis with trauma. We either become better or we become worse. Writing can help us to continue to move in the direction of building a fuller and more integrated life. And this process of deconstructing narratives, trying to understand a new phase in our lives, is important even for those who are not trying to process trauma. In social media, many writers construct neat, chronological, idealized narratives, post after post, over years, which are more reflective of the ideology of their society than the reality of their lives. They need to escape their narratives. We could also say this process relates to our development as individuals. This other kind of story, full of gaps and fissures, allows the writer “to represent, to interrogate, and to resist the sutures” of the narratives handed to us, sometimes forced upon us (66). What does it mean to fight narration? It doesn’t mean—at least, not always—avoiding extended narration. If we are going to fight narration, we need a narrative to fight. We can both create narratives and let them unravel, or resist closure, or break chronology, or leave gaps unfilled. If we are willing to embrace Strawson’s claim that narratives are not essential, we might also find that we don’t have to tell stories—at least, simple stories with a narrative arc. We might start to read nonfiction in a different way, as more nonnarrative than narrative. Even when we are working within some form of narration, we might withhold an urge to tie up all the loose ends.

Suppressing Narration What we maybe have in “The Crack-Up” and other essays that avoid the “long narration” is the anecdote, a hint of narration that does not quite deliver a story. The narration that we can find in a Montaigne essay rarely is more than an anecdote. In “Seeing,” Annie Dillard shares her thoughts about how we see without sharing much of the person who sees. In the middle of the following paragraph, she does, however, share an anecdote:

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If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine débris fleeing high in the air.” White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: “As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer.” (24)

I placed the anecdote in boldface because it is easy to miss. Dillard writes about things she does not see before the anecdote (her quotidian life), and things she has read after it (her reading life), neither of which are narrative, at least, not fully narrative. The anecdote, which shares the kernel of a story that someone else experienced in a single sentence, is jarring, more of a reminder that this is not a narrative, at least, not a full narrative. Condensing time is another way to work against narration. In “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders writes about his father’s alcoholism in recurrent time, a form of narration often signaled by the modal “would,” as in “I would go to the beach each morning.” Sanders signals this time repeatedly, sometimes in subtle ways, as when he describes his father exiting his 1969 Bonneville: “He climbs out, grinning dangerously, unsteady on his legs, and we children interrupt our game of catch, our building of snow forts, our picking of plums, to watch in silence as he weaves past into the house, where he slumps into his overstuffed chair and falls asleep” (56–57). This is not a single event; it is a pattern that, because it was repeated for years with few variations, has become crystalized into a single experience. The recurrent time is signaled not with “would” but with the kinds of play the children might be engaged in as the father arrives. If we don’t read the essay closely, we might think we are reading a series of scenes, events that occurred in only one way at one moment of time, but this is a misreading. Notice the following section, which, if read quickly, appears to be a scene:

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For years, the chief source of incriminating bottles and cans was a brimy store a mile from us, a cinder-block place called Sly’s, with two gas pumps outside and a moth-eaten dog asleep in the window. A strip of flypaper, speckled the year round with black bodies, coiled in the doorway. Inside, on rusty metal shelves or in wheezing coolers, you could find pop and Popsicles, cigarettes, potato chips, canned soup, raunchy postcards, fishing gear, Twinkies, wine, and beer. When Father drove anywhere on errands, Mother would send us kids along as guards, warning us not to let him out of our sight. And so with one or more of us on board, Father would cruise up to Sly’s, pump a dollar’s worth of gas or plump the tires with air, and then, telling us to wait in the car, he would head for that fly-spangled doorway. (60)

This passage is similar to a scene, as signaled by the detailed description, except for the way the paragraph begins (“For years, …”) and the repetition of “would.” Indeed, most of the essay is told in recurrent time—without scenes—to emphasize the habitual and unrelenting effects of the father’s drinking on the family. This is not a memory of a single event, but is it a narrative? Or is it more like an outline or a summary? The description of a force too natural, too engrained in the lives of this family, to understand or control? It is as if Sanders is saying, “No narrative could or should even try to capture the singularity of what happened to my family.”

Breaking Narration Joan Didion begins “The White Album,” originally published in 1979, with a line that could have been one of the truisms Strawson attacked: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” After she explains what this means, she seems to switch sides and join Strawson: “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971” (11). She is referring to the chaos of the 1960s, a time when certain “images did not fit into any narrative” (13). As Nathan Heller describes her process, she brings together sections of a “Points West” column she and Gregory Dunne, her husband, wrote for the Saturday Evening Post with what might be called behind-the-scene texts, separated by “flash cuts”: She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in the process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote

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about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously penned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for the next fifty years. It made her farseeing and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told. (71)

“The White Album” is what has come to be known as a segmented essay, and each segment is an experience of the 1960s held together only by time and the writer’s consciousness, further fragmented by a series of seemingly random texts: a “psychiatric report” about Didion’s mental state, testimony from the Ferguson brothers’ trial, a verse on her mother-­in-­law’s wall, song lyrics, dialogue during one of The Doors’ recording sessions, chants from a political rally, the transcript of an interview with Huey Newton, testimony from the Corrine Leonard trial, and a list she used to pack for trips. Didion wrote: “All connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless” (44). She ends the essay by saying that “writing has not helped me to see what it means” (48). Her process is as interesting as the end product. This essay began with “polished sentences” on a “tidy magazine page.” Rather than move toward cleaner, more polished, more linear narrative, Didion went in the other direction. She brings together different kinds of documents and events into a collage separated by “jump breaks” that signal narrative gaps. She resists boiling down her experiences in the 1960s into a coherent impression or narrative line. Didion could have placed herself in a neat and linear narrative; this might even have helped her ego mediate the world in a time of crisis. But she did not. She decided, instead, to question the very nature of narration in a series of fragments. It’s pretty brave. The nonnarrative personal essay, the essay as shaped into a genre by Montaigne and the tradition that evolved from his Essais, allows the author to step out of narration and explore the fluidity of consciousness, the evolution of our thoughts as they create values. This is what Bakhtin calls “emotional-volitional intonation,” a term meant to capture the very movement of how we experience a once-occurring act or event (Morson and Emerson 133–35). Our engagement with the world cannot be separated from values—some handed to us, some critiqued and rejected, some

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reaffirmed—that carry an impulse or obligation to answer with our own act. The nonnarrative personal essay and the fragmented narrative essay bring this process—often only at the edge of our awareness—into the open. Didion moves in the direction of narration, offering the reader fragments of her experience in the 1960s, even as she fights the completion of a narrative. Her essay remains in process, moving in the direction of a memoir without ever arriving. Example of Maclean’s Transcendental I

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-­ light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-­ count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. I am haunted by water. “A River Runs Through It” If “The White Album” were four or five times longer, would Didion’s experience of the 1960s become fixed and settled? Not necessary. Jill Talbot’s The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir resists full narration—even in the title. Her Prologue appears to be the actual text of a “Modification Request,” a legal document written by the father of her child to request relief from child support. The document has ample redactions and typographic breaks, another kind of resistance to narration. From the Prologue, we move through chapters, each a fragment similar to the segments of Didion’s essay, with shifts in narration: some subtle, some dramatic; some stylistic, some formal. The first chapter is about her daughter who writes stories around a photograph of her (Jill, in this chapter, is addressed in third person) and her daughter’s unknown father. These are counternarratives that the absent father is not there to correct: “A friend recently asked when she’s going to stop, write about something else. Surely he was asking how long until we can let go, move on. How long do we live in the

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fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?” (6). From early on, we are told to suspect the true stories that will follow. One chapter is in the form of a syllabus for Talbot’s fictitious class (243: The Longing Professor), which unveils the nonfiction behind the readings and assignments: November 7 Joan Didion, “The White Album” Didion … discusses the house she lived in as being indicative of the times and her own state of mind. Things were fucked up. The world no longer made sense. The center would not hold. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I’ve become very good at this. Essay Due. Assignment: Discuss the significance of a character’s house and his/her relationship to it by focusing on three of the works we have read and discussed. You are also required to discuss two texts (poems, essays, films, stories, novels) that do not appear on the syllabus. The check I wrote last week at the Hyde Park Bar & Grill bounced. I knew it would. (81)

Talbot narrates sections of her life, but not for long. The reader is encouraged to stay in the moment; the past is not ordered and presented as a simple explanation of who Jill is and why she had become this person. Even if the reader mentally shifts the fragments around, constructs a linear narrative, imagines what happened in the gaps, the story ends without an ending. In the last paragraph, Talbot and her daughter are still on the road, still moving toward yet another new home: “We are signaling our arrival. We are letting everyone know we’re almost home” (226). So many memoirs are ultimately about the search for a story, on the road to someplace, a search for identity, a search for a fixed point. In the end, we have only the road.

Counternarratives To resist narrative, we can also explore counternarratives. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in one of the italicized sections that stitch a series of essays into a memoir, Mary McCarthy presents a counternarrative, a brief fantasy about how her life might have turned out if both of her parents had not died on a train, leaving her brother and herself to be raised by relatives:

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I sometimes wonder what I would have been like now if Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula had not come on, if the journey had never been undertaken. My father, of course, might have died anyway, and my mother would have brought us up. If they had both lived, we would have been a united Catholic family, rather middle class and wholesome. I would probably be a Child of Mary. I can see myself married to an Irish lawyer and playing golf and bridge, making occasional retreats and subscribing to a Catholic Book Club. I suspect I would be rather stout. And my brother Kevin—would he be an actor today? The fact is, Kevin and I are the only members of the present generation of our family who have done anything out of the ordinary, and our relations at least profess to envy us, while I do not envy them. Was it a good thing, then, that our parents were “taken away,” as if by some higher design? Some of my relations philosophize to this effect, in a somewhat Panglossian style. I do not know myself. (16–17)

The “as if by higher design” is one way to think about the path a life takes. People of various religious sects often speak of God’s plan. When the right learning experience comes at the right time, members of twelve-­step programs often say, “It’s a God thing.” To even toy with the idea that things could have turned out another way, if only one random event were altered, if McCarthy and her family did not board that train, opens up a different kind of interpretation. What had always been viewed as tragedy may now be viewed as fortuitous, a way of viewing the past that doesn’t change the past—except how we think about it, which is no small thing. With this simple counternarrative, McCarthy is reframing her entire past and its connection to her present. This is not a modest shift to a more optimistic view. Her counternarrative doesn’t lead to a definitive view of her past. It simply opens an option—the possibility that events could have turned out differently. While the effects of this shift are admittedly subtle, the result is that McCarthy now has more agency. Events are not happening to her with effects that seem preordained. The counternarrative brings her back to decisions. Her parents decided to board that train. They could have made a different decision. In “Moral Non-Fiction,” Arthur Frank points out that counternarratives can also be a form of resistance against cultural norms. They are a way of seeing “morality as an ongoing story of possibilities” (190). With counternarratives, imagination—typically thought of as the core of fiction— enters nonfiction. It enters—not as the ultimate ground of the narrative—but rather as a disruption. The shift from memory (what happened) to imagination (what might have happened with the change of only one fact) is a move out of time. It is like a Jazz musician who steps

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out of the count and moves into “free time” to solo, and then returns to the count exactly on the one. The counternarrative might come as a reflection (a “what-if”) about a particular event that occurred once and only once at a particular moment of time, but the counternarrative itself is beyond time, unless we tie it to the moment the author is writing it. A single “what-if” hovers above the entire narration to question the apparent necessity of every event, to remind us of the hero’s agency and our inability to grasp the fullness of time. Telling counternarratives also means constructing narratives that move our vision into new eras and even new epochs. In How to Live at the End of the World, Travis Holloway explores the implications of living in the Anthropocene era and imaging living beyond it; he argues for expanding the range of stories we tell. We need to tell stories that are more fully human, and we also need to tell nonhuman stories and even nonbiological stories. He writes, “This blending of different human stories and different natural stories, distinct state-supported capitalisms and distinct environmental loses, is the work that remains to be done” (34). In this volume, I speak repeatedly about the importance of the author exploring connections to time and place. This is more than just exploring how I connect to the town where I live or writing about how I connect to the mountains, streams, and oceans around me. Holloway asks us to consider writing about the contaminated nature that we have created, that we can no longer hope to control, and that threatens the survival of our species (48–50). This relates to another theme of this book: The importance of decentering. This might seem to be a contraction to my argument that we need to explore the situated “I.” As important as this situated view is, we need to move through other views as well, including a decentered view. This includes the perspective of the earth—not reduced to geology, the human study of the earth—and this moves us into a form of time that exceeds the human lifespan, spanning millions of years rather than decades. Geology can be a means to thinking beyond the Anthropocene as can evolutionary theory and the first photograph of the earth from the moon. Yet, at some point, imagination needs to take us beyond science.

The Story of Searching for a Story In The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn writes about a search to discover the fate of Shmiel, his grandfather’s brother, Shmiel’s wife, and his four daughters, all of whom were killed in Bolechow,

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Ukraine, during the Holocaust. The first line of the memoir sets up a mystery: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry” (3). We learn that the young Daniel looks like Shmiel, and the early pages of the memoir include photographs that compare, side by side, the eyes and mouths of Shmiel and Daniel. Mendelsohn writes that be began a search for his lost relatives on the day of his bar mitzvah. The search takes him to Europe, Australia, and Israel. His narrative, like a picaresque novel, takes the form of a journey, Mendelsohn following clues that come from the fragmented memories of his relatives. Early in the work, he prepares us to read a nonlinear narrative by writing about how his grandfather told stories: When my grandfather told a story—for instance, the story that ended but she died a week before her wedding—he wouldn’t do anything so obvious as to start at the beginning and end at the end; instead, he told it in a vast circling loop, so that each incident, each character he mentioned as he sat there, his organ-grinder baritone seesawing along, had its own mini-history, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative, so that the story he told was not (as he once explained it to me) like dominoes, one thing happening just after the other, but instead like a series of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, so that each event turned out to contain another, and so forth. (32)

Mendelsohn’s search for lost relatives, a lost past, is written as a story without foreshadowing because the end cannot be known in advance. If we separate Mendelsohn (the author) from Daniel (the character), the author’s vision (from outside the narrative) is just as limited as that of any of the characters (from inside the narrative). The author-narrator does not, to use Bakhtin’s term, possess an excess of vision. On his quest, Mendelsohn learns much more about his extended family, meeting many relatives for the first time. But, even at the close of the memoir, he has not learned as much as he had hoped, when his journey began, about Shmiel and his family. The story is not concluded. It is without the kind of epilogue we find in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that summarize the rest of the lives of the major characters so we, the reader, can have the illusion of complete closure. The paperback edition includes a postscript, which begins: “For a long time it has been my hope that, following the publication of this book in September 2006, new information about my six lost relatives might come to light—that some

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reader who, against all odds, had special knowledge of my family would get in touch with me. As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait” (507). Yaacov Lozowick, an archivist, contacts him with some additional information about one of Shmiel’s daughters. Even this, though, is not enough to finish off the story. The structure of The Lost is often found in memoirs and personal essays. The story is the search for the story. The search for the truth both shows the difficulty of finding a stable past, a clear explanation for the present, and the importance of seeking the truth. The author cannot stand apart from time and above the story pronouncing truth. This is what Bakhtin points us toward with his concept of polyphony, which he found in the novels of Dostoevsky. In Narrative and Freedom, Gary Saul Morson writes: Dostoevsky’s major novels depend on a particular kind of simultaneity in which the real time of the creative process and the fictive time of the characters—two distinct ontological realms—somehow take place together. The clocks of parallel universes tick in unison. This is a simultaneity not in time but of times: the author makes his decisions as the characters make theirs. And the reader senses this simultaneity, which is why the work seems as open as the real world. No prior decision mandates what characters say or do. No need for ultimate structure or closure dictates a pattern for characters to fulfill unawares. (100)

While the simultaneity of times, discovering a story and telling a story, may be rare in the novel, it is fundamental to nonfiction. The attempt to find out what really happened, the sorting out of the past, our memories, the memories of others, documents and artefacts, is important, even if we are left with more questions than answers. We will find certainty, or we will learn to live with uncertainty. The journey is also full of surprises. Mendelsohn may not have learned as much as he had hoped about his lost relatives, but he connected with relatives around the world, many of whom he had not even known existed.

Abandoning Narration Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism is a memoir without a narrative arc. To explain Afropessimism, Wilderson argues that Blacks are slaves, have always been slaves, and will always be slaves. He says that “violence in a narrative must have an explanation, a trigger, a contingent moment that makes it make sense.” He continues:

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But anti-Black violence won’t cooperate with narrative. The explanation bleeds out beyond the actors. It is immune to rational thinking and logical predictions. It is a force from which there is no sanctuary. It is rainproof to rebuke; for it comes as enforcement followed by the law. When violence is the law, and not the effect of its enforcement, it presents the rules of narrative with a crisis; because what we have is a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that narrative’s causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call the causal logic (or “because principle”) of the story, is missing. (89–90)

How can a memoir exist without narration? Afropessimism does have plot, sections that tell a story in basically chronological order, even though the entire work often breaks strict chronology and ultimately lacks a narrative arc. In one section, Wilderson writes about how he and his partner had to flee their apartment because they were being poisoned by radiation. Their neighbor seems to be involved, maybe the FBI also, but we can never know for sure. The section reads like something from a spy novel as they flee some unknown “they,” staying with different friends, driving around the streets in a car that Frank stole from his parents. This section of the story has chronology—perhaps a parody of chronology. It is broken down into five days of action, by minutes and seconds (3:30 am, 3:26 am, 3:29 am, 3:31 am …), and even by factions of seconds (3:51:30 am, 3:51:45 am, 3:51:47 am …). It has chronology and suspense. It does not have a narrative arc. In a metanarrative section, Wilderson writes: Every story of despair has a three-point progression. Equilibrium: the status of the mind free of psychic trauma. Disequilibrium: the intrusion of a wounding trauma, which indeed all but destroyed equilibrium. Equilibrium restored, renewed, or reimagined: the therapeutic cure in psychology or the end of analysis in psychoanalysis. But if the mind has never known the first point of that progression, if madness (even low-grade and as-yet-unexposed madness) is your status quo, then time stands stills, for you cannot possess your own image as your ego ideal. You cannot love yourself as Black, but are made to hate yourself as White. And it is the word made that throws a wrench in the works of recovery; for your self-hatred is the product, not of your personal neurosis, but of violence so vast it birthed your other, the Human being. If the talking cure is the cure for Humans, what is your cure? You are not the subject of your own redemption. You are, as Cecilio M. Cooper explains, “a vector through which others can accomplish themselves.” (314–14)

Afropessimism has chronology and plot that run for a while and then break. The overarching narrative line, however, is flat. This is not how we typically think of narration.

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Apart from Time One of the most radical experiments in what I have been calling fighting narration is Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes, which could be considered an anti-memoir or anti-autobiography. According to David Parker, Barthes explores a decentered self that is “scattered, deconstructed,” which can only be defined by its preferences: “The fragmentary mosaic achieves only the illusion that the subject is ‘merely an effect of language … dispersed’ among its multifarious textual iterations. What it failed to obliterate is narrated identity, self understood as unfolding in time” (The Self in Moral Space 56, 158). Behind a decentered self is still some subject making the preferences. Parker points out that even Barthes “needs, like all of us, to make sense of his life” (36). With any life narrative, a hero who is moving through a string of events, “an evaluative consciousness at work in the world” (Bialostosky 104). Students who are new to the personal essay or memoir certainly need to make sense of their lives, and they often find it harder to fight narration when they have not yet established a sustainable identity. They might even believe that identity is something that is established early in adulthood and never needs to expand its boundaries or transform itself. They need to understand that having a full life means working on identity for a lifetime. Part of this process is breaking apart the simple stories, which might have served them well for years, in order to build more complex stories. It is all part of a process, a growth mindset. The real is always there, and it is always changing. We must find ways to adapt. Behind even the most fragmented essay, we find a life and we find form. Bakhtin would say that even a memoir with Barthes’ decentered self, Talbot’s not-quite-a-narration, Mendelsohn’s search for answers, and student narrations with simple, linear chronology all have their own unity and form. We can think about form from a structural or architectonic perspective. At its most basic level, a story is told in chronological order. This kind of narration tends to fix identity. Other forms of narration break from strict chronology. Many memoirs begin with a key scene and then go back to the story’s origin to relate a life story in basically chronological order, but not a complete life story. Talbot’s The Way We Weren’t shifts narrative structure from chapter to chapter; each shift in narrative structure is also a shift in perspective. The self in this kind of narration is less known and more fluid. The braded essay weaves together two or three stories. As the author shifts from one story to another, the reader finds connections and contrasts—disruptions in perspective.

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Or, if we follow Aristotle’s lead in the Poetics, we can think about form from the perspective of emotions. Tragedy is a form that evokes pity and fear. Tension builds and then it is released. Emotional form can be archetypal, like the search for a lost father or the transformation of self, but it need not have a narrative arc. Didion’s “White Album” captures a fugue state, a dissolving self attempting to make sense of chaotic times. Wilderson’s Afropessimism presents a hero moving through events, reacting to a world beyond his control. He feels a range of emotions that wane and ebb without catharsis. Even Wilderson, however, has an identity that emerges through the “emotional-volitional tone” (Bakhtin’s term for an evaluation of a once-occurring event; see Morson and Emerson 133–35) in each scene and in the second-voice of the narrator who is the traveling companion of the hero, adding another layer, another story that cannot quite be completed, the “emotional-volitional tone” from a later, more distant time. For Bakhtin, our ontology, our way of being in the world, is a series of values, the “emotional-volitional tones” of a hero reacting to a once-occurring act or events. For Bakhtin, texts are viewed as acts, so part of this process is the production of texts and the reaction to texts. In the narrator’s embrace of the hero, we see the unveiling of consciousness. In the gaps between fragments, as with open space on a canvas, we see what could have been or what might still be, and we can act. In Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes: “For Jaspers, human freedom is guaranteed by our not having the truth; truth compels, and man can be free only because he does not know the answer to the ultimate questions” (22). In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank writes: “Remaking begins when suffering becomes an opening to others” (176). This is the opening for others to find a place in what we write. A narrative with others is polyphonic; it is the narrative that can take us to a different view, apart from time, to sort through values and understand our responsibility to a community. I have, in this chapter, focused on fighting narration, not because that is our only option, but because it should be one of our options. I am not arguing against the narrative arc or plot or form. A Montaigne essay, which seems to ramble aimlessly in search of a thesis, is its own form—a powerful form. A memoir with a layered plot, shifting repeatedly from fast narration, a panoramic view, to slow narration and the circumscribed scope of a few days, keeps us unsettled. All these forms find some way of mediating what Nietzsche called the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the fixed and the fluid, identity and transformation (The Birth of Tragedy, passim).

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We certainly need to provide the reader with a path through our writing. At times, especially when we are in the early phase of dealing with trauma, we need to seek narrative control over our stories. When I work with students who are writing about trauma, their history in that struggle is on the page. If the trauma is still raw, the narrative is scattered. It can hardly be read. When they are further along in their healing, they have narrative control. This is good. It is an important moment in healing. We might pause there, even for years, but we should not stay there. At some point, we need to break that narrative, that simple story, that clear chronology, to continue our journey. While the purpose of autobiography might be to construct a historical past, the purpose of a memoir is to understand a life still being lived. Part of this understanding might rest on establishing a chronology of events, especially when the author needs to establish that abuse did actually happen, but this is not always necessary. A more likely aid to finding meaning is the disruption of what we thought was a series of events or resisting the desire to see meaning in a simple chronology. Why? Because that chronology often comes prepackaged, and it is often established from cultural scripts. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty discusses how we can be within an established narrative and so projected toward a prescribed pattern of behavior. He points out that “Proust shows how Swann’s love for Odette causes” him to become jealous and that “a certain way of loving in which the whole destiny of that love can be discerned in a glance” (425). He doesn’t go into detail, but he seems to be referring to the narrative tradition of Romantic Love, which has followed a clear pattern since Tristan and Iseult, the twelfth-century romance (see Rougemont’s Love in the Western World). It is easy to act out narrative patterns unconsciously. The consistency of this metanarrative comes from both history and culture and the human body (see Jensen’s Identity Across Texts 97–127). We can find a similar pattern is Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. In nonfiction, we can move from being trapped in narrative structures to metacognition of our place and our bodies within these structures and an exploration of how to lead lives that are, if not nonnarrative, at least not preformed narrative patterns. We often find meaning, the meaning that sustains us, that breaks normative thought, in the gaps of a narrative. There, we can also find freedom, but to open the horizon of freedom takes work. It is a project.

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Detour to Genre: Autobiography In the long history of writing about the self, a number of terms have been used to describe genres related to “life writing,” often without clear distinctions: confessions, diary, journal, autobiography, letter, essay, recollections, memoirs (plural), and memoir (singular). Augustine’s Confessions is often considered the first autobiography in Western literature, but Augustine does not tell a very full version of his life, at least, when compared to current autobiographies. Rousseau’s Confessions is close to what we consider to be autobiography in the modern sense. Rousseau presents a narrative that is both fully mimetic and secular. As an acknowledgment of the newness of this approach, he even apologizes for telling the full story of his life: Before I go further I must present my reader with an apology, or rather a justification, for the petty details I have just been entering into, and for those I shall enter into later, none of which may appear interesting in his eyes. Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at the moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence. (65)

Rousseau, addressing his reader directly rather than through God, as did Augustine, appears to tell a complete life, with the kind of scenes we might witness in the emerging genre of the novel. In Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda sees Rousseau’s Confessions as a turning point in writing about the self, establishing norms that are “so commonplace among contemporary memoirists” that we do not appreciate, looking back, the work’s originality. He cited four key innovations: [A] belief in total frankness and honesty; an emphasis on the inner life of the mind and emotions rather than on the external one of action; a significant attention to childhood and youth; and a recognition that mundane matters, like a lie about a ribbon, could be as earthshaking as a grand battle, maybe even more so. (62)

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If we look beyond autobiography and memoir to other genres, we can find at least three of these innovations earlier—in Montaigne’s essays. The exception would be the focus on childhood and youth, not a frequent topic in Montaigne. After Rosseau, autobiography slowly emerged into a genre that focuses on the celebration of a public self, a celebrity who has had an impact on culture, if only for being a social icon, that is, famous for being famous. Indeed, the rise of the fully formed autobiography tracks with the rise of celebrity and mass media icons, starting around the middle of the nineteenth century with the increased importance of daily newspapers and gossip columns. As autobiography moved more toward the celebration of a famous person, the serious examination of self moved into memoir. We now have twenty-somethings writing autobiographies that catalog their life accomplishments, although they are often called memoirs to add a veneer of humility. Autobiographies, in the current form, are typically double-voiced. The narrative voice is the mature self that the other voice, the younger self, will mature into as they progress chronologically through a rather stable series of events: birth, schooling, coming of age, building a career, marriage, having children, facing crises, aging, and so on. In one sense, the story is finished on page one. The finished-­off hero is already present on page one in terms of both the potential to be revealed (the voice of the younger self) and the narrator (the voice that the younger self will become). Readers expect to learn the author’s whole life story in what might be a multivolume work. With autobiography, readers know how it will end. They read for the behind the scene revelations as if they would find the secret to success. Bakhtin says that the form of autobiography and the biography is essentially the same, given that both attempt to tell a full life in chronological order (“Author and Hero” 150). Certainly, the author of both autobiography and biography possesses the same excess of vision that we find in most novels. In other words, the author sees the entire story, so it is a story that has the feel of being finished and complete. It is the form of autobiography that most current memoirs resist.

Works Cited Anderson, Charles M. with Karen Holt and Patty McGady. “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages that Heal.” In Writing and Healing. Ed. Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy. NCTE, 2000. 58-82.

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Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harvest, 1971, 1978. Aristotle. Poetics. Oxford UP, 2013. Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. ———. “Art and Answerability.” In Art and Answerability. 1-3. ———. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability. 4-256. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Hill and Wang, 1977. Bialostosky, Don. Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoriciality. Parlor, 2016. Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. 11-48. Dillard, Annie. “Seeing.” Three by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial, 2001. 21-39. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Crack-Up.” In The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. Random House, 1995.520-34. Frank, Arthur W. “Moral Non-Fiction: Life Writing and Children’s Disability.” In The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004. 174-94. ———. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago UP, 1995. Gullestad, Marianne. “Tales of Consent and Descent: Life Writing as a Fight against an Imposed Self-Image.” In The Ethics of Life Writing. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Cornell UP, 2004.216-43. Heller, Nathan. “The Falconer: What We Get Wrong about Joan Didion.” The New Yorker (1 February 2021): 70-75. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic, 1992. Henke, Suzette A. Scattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-­ Writing. St. Martin’s, 1998. Holloway, Travis. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene. Stanford UP, 2022. Jensen, George H. Identities Across Texts. Hampton, 2002. Jensen, Geoge H. and Heidi Skurat Harris. “Variations in Time: The Crafting of Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs through It.’” Western American Literature 55:1 (Spring 2020): 33-63. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Volumes 1-5, trans. Don Bartlett. Volume 6, trans. Don Barlett and Martin Aitkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013-2018. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 2013. MacCurdy, Marian M. “From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use.” In Writing and Healing. Ed. Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy. NCTE, 2000. 158-200. McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Mariner, 1972. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago UP, 1976.

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Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. Harper Collins, 2006. ———. The Lost. Harper Perennial, 2007. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge and Kegan, 1945. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadow of Time. Yale UP, 1994. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1872, 1967. Parker, David. The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good. Cornell UP, 2007. Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. Trans. Montgomery Belgion. Princeton UP, 1983. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Trans. J.M. Cohen. Penguin, 1953. Sanders, Scott Russell. “Under the Influence.” In Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. 56-68. Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Ed. and trans. Royall Tyler. Penguin, 2006. Strawson, Galen. “The Unstoried Life.” Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. New York Review of Books, 2018. 177-201. Talbot, Jill. The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir. Soft Skull, 2015. Wilderson, Frank B, III. Afropessimism. Liveright, 2020. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. Riverhead, 2009. Young, John K. How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production. Iowa UP, 2017(continued)

CHAPTER 5

Shifting Roles, Mimesis, Sustaining Community

We should not think that the evil that afflicts us comes from the outside; it is not external but within us. —Seneca (Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 50) The mirror does not flatter; it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face. —Carl Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)

In Conrad’s Shadow, Nidesh Lawtoo writes about mimesis and doppelgängers in the works of Joseph Conrad. He is, in the end, writing about ethics at the boundaries of identity. In a discussion of African rituals, part of a broader discussion of Achebe’s famous critique of Heart of Darkness, Lawtoo writes of rituals—specifically, the use of masks that invoke frenzy: These rituals of possession are … mimetic not in the simple sense that the mask is an imitation of a god. Rather, they are mimetic in the anthropological sense that the ritual mask enables a (dis)possession by a god, which, in turn, troubles the distinction between self and other, transgresses the line that divides the sacred from the profane, and generates outbreaks of affect that are transmitted contagiously across the social body. (182)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_5

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The cross-cultural use of masks in rituals, which plays a role in both Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, invokes a possession and then a dispossession of another spirit. In other words, it allows an individual—by extension, an entire culture—to step out of one identity and into another, and then to step out of that identity. Masks are archetypal, but they are rarely employed ritually in industrial nations. Exceptions are dressing up for Halloween or Mardi Gras. However, as Jung points out, our persona, our social role, is a kind of mask that involves more than wearing a uniform or business suit. As Jung says, the “persona is that which in reality one is not,” and it forces a “certain kind of behavior” on the individual (Archetypes, Part I, 122–3, 221). In more functional social settings, individuals move in and out of multiple personae in the course of a day, shifting linguistic registers (a kind of mask) and behavior (a mask), maybe even their clothing (a mask). If people are too locked into a particular persona, too locked into prescribed patterns of behavior, they become like machines of Modernism, as described by Deleuze and Guattari, or the subject in totalitarian societies, as described by Arendt. Our development as individuals, our ability to expand how we relate to others, our very ability to empathize, emerges from stepping outside of ourselves, from transgressing the boundaries of our identity. If possession and dispossession of another can no longer be evoked by donning a mask in a ritual, it can be experienced in art, most overtly in theater, but also in emersion journalism, travel writing, oral histories, memoir, and personal essays. In these genres, the author can shift perspective, wear the social mask of genre with its own gestures and language, see from the perspective of another, if only for a moment. Our personae, our roles, establish boundaries and they are also a means of breaking through these boundaries. In “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” (Appendix II of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics), Bakhtin writes: The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou). Separation, dissociation, and enclosure within the self is the main reason for the loss of one’s self. Not that which takes place within, but that which takes place on the boundary between one’s own and someone else’s consciousness, on the threshold. And everything internal gravitates not toward itself but is turned outside and dialogized, every internal experience ends up on the boundary, encounters another, and in this tension-filled encounter lies its entire

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essence.… To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another. (Emphasis in original, 287)

For both Hegel and Bakhtin, decentering, that is, movement toward another, the encountering of another’s consciousness, imagining the other as a subject rather than an object, is an ethical move. Boundaries must be crossed as individuals move into other roles. If roles are too rigid, too like self-contained monads, we find facile judgments, the abuse of power, and the illusion of solitude. While we are, by the very nature of our reality, connected to others, this is too easily forgotten. To remember that we are connected to others takes conscious effort and actions, if not through the practice of a ritual, then at least through physical movement or imitating the words of another.

Writing about the Other In the wake of Hegel, the phrase “the Other” has become commonplace in philosophy, ethics, psychology, and literature—a trope for discussing the role of power in relationships. In Jung’s model of the self, the Shadow, the dark side of our personalities that erupts not as isolated ideas or actions but as fully constellated personalities, is part of this dynamic (“The Undiscovered Self,” Collected Works, vol. 10, 290). The Shadow is the “other person in us,” often a parent or adult who harms us, a person we repress because we say to ourselves, “I will not allow myself to be like that person.” The more we try to be different, the more that person lives in us and affects our behavior. Stories with doubles or doppelgängers similarly attack a character’s conscious identity. In most doppelgänger stories, however, the hero flees the Other with disastrous results. Jung used the term enantiodramia, literally fleeing the opposite, to convey the idea that running from the Other is running toward the self (Jensen, Identities 77–96). The way to release the hold of the Shadow or doppelgänger is to explore our connection to it. In Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” the captain-­ narrator identifies with his double and saves him, even though this puts his command, ship, and crew in danger. Writing about the Other, if the writer attempts to move into the consciousness of another, explore the double, ultimately transforms into writing about the self.

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Within nonfiction genres, writers often grapple with a key question: If I am writing about a sociopath who has abused me, do I have to write about that person with empathy? It is almost like they are asking, “Am I ethically bound to be nice to a person who has treated me horribly?” We could shift the question—turn it on its head. We could ask, “How can I write about this person’s impact on me in a way that will write me into being the kind of person who can embrace life and show empathy, not for this destructive force, but for those who will deserve my love?” That’s a little complicated. I can shorten it: “In writing about the other, how am I defining myself?” The movement out of self into another’s consciousness, as much as that is possible, is another use of nonfictive imagination. This is where many novice writers become stuck. If they are too focused on their anger toward an abuser or neglectful parent, they have not moved from their own interior to writing for a community. Thinking about how to participate in a community and have an impact on it can bring us out of ourselves and into a dialogic relationship with others. Part of this process is learning to shift roles and explore a range of personae.

Shifting Roles Scott Russell Sanders’ “Mountain Music” is an essay about Sanders’ trip to Colorado with his son, Jesse. Sanders hopes the trip would heal a rift in their relationship. At the time of the story, Sanders is forty-nine and Jesse is seventeen. Sanders writes that he and Jesse had been quarreling for about a year. Some of the tension, no doubt, comes from a common developmental stage between the father, who wants to protect and hold onto his son, and the son, who wants to take risks and be independent. Between this father and son, however, is the additional strain of what Jesse views as his father’s dark stance toward life. As they are driving to a rafting trip on the Cache la Poudre, the conflict comes to a head. Before Sanders recounts the dialogue of the argument, he writes: I do not pretend to recall the exact words we hurled at one another after my challenge, but I remember the tone and thrust of them, and here is how they have stayed with me: “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.… (195)

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In the prefatory comment to this dialogue, we see the emergence of Sanders as the writer of the story (a position that Bakhtin calls the “author-­ creator”) from behind the mask of Scott as character in the story (a position that Bakhtin calls the “author-hero”) to a degree that rarely occurs in fiction—at least, Realist fiction in the wake of Flaubert. It is, however, at the core of writing about the self, as Lejeune points out: “Autobiography is a literary genre which, by its very content, best marks the confusion of author and person, a confusion on which is founded the whole practice and problematic of Western literature since the end of the eighteenth century” (20). This “confusion” should not be viewed as negative because it creates opportunities for authors to reflect on their identity. They can ask, How am I similar to or different than this person on the page? If we connect this to Bakhtin’s answerability, it also becomes a moment when authors can sense the distinction between writing about self and living what has been written. For example, the self on the page can represent an identity that the person behind the role of author needs to mark and move from or embrace and grow into. At this moment in the essay, in the disclaimer, the author-creator comes into the foreground to embrace his fallibility. By admitting that he cannot “recall the exact words,” the author-creator acknowledges that the account is likely to be inaccurate, at least in some details. Phillip Lopate says that part of the ethos of the personal essay is scrapping “away illusions” in a “struggle for honesty.” We could also say that it is breaking through the persona. If this is done well, we trust Sanders, the narrator, to be honest about himself and others. If the narrator fakes “a vulnerable tone,” Lopate says, the “skilled reader will turn away in disgust” (The Art of the Personal Essay xxv–xxvi). When Sanders says he might not recall the words exactly, he is, in a sense, inviting his son (perhaps, also his readers) to disagree with him. He is assuming a dialogic stance by inviting a response. A novel can be dialogic if characters seem to represent consciousnesses distinct from the author. With a novel, however, we cannot expect an embodied person to respond to the author and say, “That is not what I said.” This does happen with nonfiction.

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Virginia Woolf’s Situated I

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wrote: “Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened.” Woolf was writing about a version of memoir that is more like a biography written by a friend, relative, or close associate—like Thomas Beer’s memoir of Stephen Crane. Woolf is saying that we cannot understand Stephen Crane, or Beer’s understanding of Crane, unless we also come to know Thomas Beer. The author needs to be in the story. The story behind writing the story is part of the story. We need to understand how the “I” is situated. As the argument progresses, Jesse accuses his father of being too absorbed in his concern for sustainability and the environment, of hating “everything that’s fun”—cars, malls, TV, fast food, the Internet. Scott responds: “None of that bothers you?” “Of course it does. But that’s the world. That’s where we’ve got to live. It’s not going to go away just because you don’t approve. What’s the good of spitting on it?” “I don’t spit on it. I grieve over it.” He was still for a moment, then resumed quietly. “What’s the good of grieving if you can’t change anything? “Who says you can’t change anything?” “You do. Maybe not with your mouth, but with your eyes.” Jesse rubbed his own eyes, and the words came out muffled through his cupped palms. “Your view of things is totally dark. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet’s dying, and people are to blame, and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get along without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise, what’s the point? Why study, why work, why do anything if it’s all going to hell!” (196)

It is impossible for the reader to know if this dialogue is accurate— although a reader might have a sense that it does or doesn’t seem authentic. We could say the same for Scott and Jesse, for they would have trouble

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remembering their own words, even if the argument happened recently (Karr 1–7). However, I would argue that, if we asked Lopate’s “skilled reader” to read this passage out of context, that reader might assume Jesse is the wise father and Scott is the idealistic, morose teenager, except for, perhaps, Jesse’s tell-tale slang: “You bum me out.” Even if the words would not exactly match with the words on a recorder, had the dialogue been recorded, this seems to be a conversation between two clearly distinct individuals, each of whom makes valid points. It is not monologic. One voice does not dominate. It is dialogic. Sanders (as author-creator) has not allowed Scott (as author-hero) to dominate—define—Jesse. The inversion of roles that happens in this passage, a deference to the other, a move toward the other, simply cannot happen in fiction because it is a deference that extends beyond the frame of the essay, beyond the page, to the relationship between the embodied Scott and the embodied Jesse. As the story progresses, Scott is the one who changes, or, at least, changes first. As Scott gains insight into his son and moderates his position, Jesse has less emotional ground to defend, so he changes as well. In the following passage, Sanders (as author-creator) reflects on the argument: He was caught between a chorus of voices telling him that the universe was made for us, that the Earth is an inexhaustible warehouse, that consumption is the goal of life, that money is the road to delight—and the stubborn voice of his father saying that none of this is so. If his father was right, then most of what humans babble every day—in ads and editorials, in sitcoms and song lyrics, in thrillers and market reports and teenage gab—is a monstrous lie. Far more likely that his father was wrong, deluded, perhaps even mad. (197)

Sanders (as author-creator) is empathically imaging Jesse’s thought process, including Jesse’s view of his father. It is intriguing that Sanders uses “his father,” which is in itself a form of self-objectification, rather than “me.” Yet, Sanders has not disappeared behind the third person reference. Sanders (as author-creator) is not saying he believes Jesse is right, at least about everything. He is saying that, now, after their argument, he understands his son more fully. Lopate writes, “The conscience of the personal essay arises from the author’s examination of his or her prejudices” (xxxi). Foucault calls this “accusing yourself” (Government of Self 363). This occurs, in part, by creating a character on the page who can be viewed as another human being, as if in a separate body, that is, not as characters constructed but characters as representative of embodied human beings.

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After the float down the Poudre, during which Sanders catches glances of his son’s “beaming” face, he reflects: This is a habit of mine, the watching and weighing of my son’s experience. Since his birth, I have enveloped him in a cloud of thought. How he’s doing? I wonder. Is he hungry? Hurting? Tired? Is he grumpy or glad? Like so many other exchanges between parent and child, this concern mainly flows one way; Jesse does not surround me with thought. On the contrary, with each passing year he pays less and less attention to me, except when he needs something, and then he bristles at being reminded of his dependence. That’s natural, mostly, although teenage scorn for parents also gets a boost from popular culture. My own father had to die before I thought seriously about what he might have needed or wanted or suffered. If Jesse has children of his own one day, no doubt he will brood on them as I have brooded on him for these seventeen years. Meanwhile, his growing up requires him to break free of my concern; I accept that, yet I cannot turn off my fathering mind. (200)

An unskilled reader might see this as self-pity. If the self-pity is there, it is there within a process of Sanders moving outside of it and past it. A skilled reader, I believe, will see a number of moves in this passage, from a father’s view of his son, to his son’s view of the father, to the father’s view of his father, to his son’s view of children yet unborn, and back to the father. Four generations of time pass in this one paragraph. Through these passings between fathers and sons, Scott (this seems to be the author-­creator, but that role often blurs with the role of author-hero) comes to accept his current role as father, which has deepened after moving through four generations of thought. This is the kind of reflection, an imagining of others, that is crucial to the personal essay and so much of creative nonfiction. It is a reflection that begins with our limited understanding of those we love. It is out of this reflection that the altered self emerges. The alternative is to speak in only one voice, which will limit our human potential. Hunt and Sampson believe “that ‘finding a voice’ should be re-phrased as ‘finding voices’” (36). We can begin to understand trying on a new “voice” as a means of exploring the potential of self, a way of trying out new identities and roles. This is part of the process of learning to write in a new genre. Part of the voice we search for is in the genre, and the early stage of knowing that voice is experience first through imitation. Part of the voice comes from us, our core self. This comes as we continue to write in the genre and begin to push at its boundaries. Just as we cannot build our

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identity without interacting with others and the material world, we cannot build a voice without interacting with the persona and voice of a genre. To interact with persona and genre is to interact with culture and history, time and place, and community. This exploration of new voices and roles is part of the move toward a polyphony, the drama that emerges within a dialogic text as many voices speak independently. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin wrote: “The author of a polyphonic novel is not required to renounce himself or his own consciousness, but he must to an extraordinary sense broaden, deepen, and rearrange this consciousness … in order to accommodate the autonomous consciousnesses of others” (68). An author who learns to write in many voices is more able to bring in the voices of others and to allow these voices to speak. How can writers know when they have allowed the voices of others the freedom to speak independently? When those voices change the writer, and the author reflects on those voices. In this essay, Sanders moves through a variety of identities, social roles, and perspectives, all of which are part of the seemly simple “I.” Throughout this book, I have been illustrating varieties of “I” in text boxes. In this essay, Sanders adopts a number of “I” positions. For example, he wrote briefly in the third person. Writing in the third person is a more overt way of shifting roles or splitting the self or creating a “double,” but, as Sanders demonstrates, this shifting or splitting or doubling can take many forms. Why is this important? Lejeune says that identity “is a constant relationship between the one and the many” (34). By the “many,” he doesn’t only mean other people; he also means versions of the self that reside within or emerge from the illusory unity of “I.” Lejeune says, “The first person always conceals” (35). We could add that writing about the self often deconstructs the “I.” It unveils what the “I” conceals as the author explores the complexity of the “I.” Lejeune writes that the autobiographical author can “create rather bewildering plays of confrontation between what he was and what he is, under the pretense of an apparently singular ‘I’” (35). It is important to understand the complexity of the “I” in this interaction between the present self and the former self, but it is also important to think about this complexity as part of developing a future self. Shifting roles is a means of consciously exploring new ways of being.

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Carnival Bakhtin would call Sanders’ essay dialogic because the author moves through different kinds of consciousness. The stories told in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), especially those told by old-timers are also dialogic, often with the added dimension of parody, what Bakhtin also called carnival. The author (the speaker, the present self, the recovering alcoholic) parodies rather than celebrates the former drunken self as contrasting identities clash. And, despite the speaker’s confession of acts that most of us would rationalize, brush aside, or deny, there is an absence of shame— all of which could not happen without humor. In the following passage from an AA talk (quoted by permission from a cassette tape), Dr. Paul O. recounts how he was forced into craft projects when on the “nut ward” of a hospital where he, as physician, was on staff: They tried to convince me that the quality of my life would be improved if I learned how to make leather belts. It just … It made no sense. I told them, “I have a whole wall covered with licenses and certificates and diplomas and papers to prove that I had been educated way beyond my level of intelligence. And I didn’t see how making leather belts would improve my life in any way.” And besides they don’t understand the instructions. That wasn’t my fault. That was the fault of some Occupational Therapist. Cause I’ve always had the theory that if you don’t understand a thing well enough that you can explain it to me so I can understand it, then you don’t understand it as well as you’re supposed to. And she’d already explained it three times. I wasn’t going to embarrass her by asking her a fourth time. (Qtd. in Jensen, Storytelling 101)

Dr. Paul’s former self criticizes others, but the former self is parodied by Dr. Paul’s present self. Typical of the drunkolog sections of AA talks, we see multiple voices that represent “concrete reference points,” each a separate consciousness (Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy, 66). Drunkologs are filled with implied quotation marks (shifts in the intonation of the speaker’s voice to denote the voice of another) and markers of other voices: he said, she said, they said. These other voices, which were once marginalized in a monologic battle or regarded with indifference, come back to life in a parodic moment (Jensen, Storytelling 100-101). For old-timers, the drunkolog becomes a means of making amends to the voices that the speaker once stifled. It is through a parody of the former self—both an identification with and a distancing from a persona, similar to the

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possession and dispossession of spirits in rituals that employ masks—that solidifies the identity as a recovering alcoholic who has made a commitment to live a different kind of life. All of this happens within a supportive community, the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Recovering, Leslie Jamison often contrasts stories told for the sake of art and stories told to heal, including the stories told in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. At one point, she discusses Didion’s doubts about the value of stories in “The White Album”: [I]n recovery, I started to believe again that stories could do all the things Didion had taught me to distrust, that they could lend meaningful arcs of cohesion; that they could save us from our lives by letting us construct ourselves. I’d always had faith in doubt—but I started to wonder if sometimes doubt was just an easy alibi, a way to avoid the more precarious state of affirmation, making yourself vulnerable by standing behind something that could be criticized, disproven, or ridiculed. Maybe it was just as much a crutch to doubt stories as stand behind them. It was so easy to point out gaps without filling them, to duck into the foxhole of ambivalence. Maybe sometimes you just had to accept that the story of your life was a crafted thing—selected, curated, skewed in service of things you could name and probably other things you couldn’t. Maybe you could accept all that, and still believe it might do you, or someone else, some good. Recovery reminded me that storytelling was ultimately about community, not self-deception. Recovery didn’t say: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It said: We tell others our stories in order to help them live, too. (371)

In an earlier chapter, I wrote about the importance of fighting narration, telling stories that are unfinished and full of gaps. Jamison might seem to say the opposite here, but I don’t think so. At times, we need to doubt our stories about self, and part of this doubt might include writing fragmented narratives. At other times, we need to tell stories that we can believe in. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes: “If there is no center to the self, then there are only different ways of seeing new candidates for belief and desire into antecedently existing webs of belief and desire” (84). If, however, we convince ourselves that we have no doubts, if we tell a rigid story about ourselves, we cannot find a way outside of ourselves. We can only speak dogma; we can only write propaganda. This is less about convincing others to accept our beliefs and values than it is about us trying to push down our own doubts. If we can feel comfortable

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with our own uncertainty, we open ourselves to listening, to hearing the voice of others. We open ourselves to change. This is the way we find ground to stand on; this is the way we learn to speak our own truth. At the same time, we need stability. Especially when we are in crisis, we need to have a story we can believe in. If we are able to listen to others and listen to ourselves, we will know how to point ourselves to a direction—either toward uncertainty or toward stability—and to act. These are the stories that point to the future, to hope, to a belief in our own transformation.

Returning to Community In his analysis of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, the story of a ship almost lost to a plague, Lawtoo comments on how the “contagious pathology that infects the social structure of the ship from without” also “contributes to generating an ethics of sharing that has the power to reanimate the entire social organism” (107). The disruption of community, in other words, leads to a reaffirmation of community: “A catastrophic situation that infects the social organism and confronts the community with the spectre of death has, paradoxically, the power to generate the collective efforts necessary to keep the organism living” (122). I am drafting this in Fall 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a few weeks before an election that many say could end democracy in the United States. We are a nation divided by conspiracy theories and intentional lies that go viral on the Internet. We need to heal ourselves; we need to heal our communities. Much is at stake. Sample of Woolf’s Situated I

When I was a girl I had certain opportunities for snobbery, because though outwardly an intellectual family, very nobly born in a bookish sense, we had floating fringes in the world of fashion. We had George Duckworth to begin with. But George Duckworth’s snobbery was of so gross and palpable a texture that I could smell it and taste it from afar. I did not like that smell and taste. “Am I a Snob?” In The Last Street before Cleveland, a memoir about loss and redemption, Joe Mackall deals with the death of a boyhood friend, a relapse, the

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loss of faith, the search for meaning in his old neighborhood, and a recovery. It might seem to be a story of addiction affecting—infecting—an individual, but it is also a story of community. When Mackall hits bottom in the last chapter, he is emotionally exhausted, going through the motions with his teaching, not even caring if he is mean to his students, focused on finding more pills, and hiding his relapse from family and friends. When his family is out of town, he comes down with a bad case of the flu, and this shocks his system enough that he can begin to wean himself from drugs. He is not unlike the seamen in Conrad’s The Shadow Line. Early in this process, he is walking his dog on a snowy night, and he is struck by the beauty of an Amish horse-drawn carriage as it passes. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous would call this a spiritual awaking. He begins to accept the love of God and is grateful for his life. His recovery has begun. It would be easy to end the story here, with a happy and neat ending. Mackall doesn’t. In the Epilogue, he writes: I’d like to say that since my awakening, a year and a half ago now, I am a completely changed person who sees only beauty, feels only love, knows nothing of rage or angst, depression or doubt, spends his days smothering strangers with all he now knows of love, and plans on quitting his job so he can personally feed the beaten, battered, and abused children of the world. No can do. (147)

He ends, instead of wrapping up loose ends, by being honest with his readers about how, though he is recovering from his relapse, he still struggles with life and with the Catholic church: When I think back on the last street before Cleveland, I want all of the neighborhood, all of the confused, ignorant boys who are now men, those perpetually pubescent blue-collar boys who hated kneelers and loved spitting, to know that grappling with the unknowable should never end; that this life should always be a battle between what is and what could be, between here and there, spiritual and corporal, past and future, and ultimately, unbelief and belief, all examined through the sweet, brief window of the in between. (149–50)

Mackall ends his memoir looking outward to the boys of his neighborhood but also to us, his readers. He ends unfinalized, his story unfinished, awaiting an answer, on the boundary between self and other, what he calls the “brief window of the in between.”

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A Carnival Parade of Political Forms Bakhtin says that each text is an utterance, and the boundary of an utterance is marked where one speaker stops and another begins. This broadens to the idea of the dialogic, expanding it from a single text to the domain of a genre as it unfolds historically. All texts are answered, fiction and nonfiction alike. At the same time, nonfiction invites an answer more directly, both for the author-creator and for the reader. As Mackall ends his memoir, he announces how he intends to live his life. He also asks his boyhood friends and us, his readers, to join him. He has reestablished a connection and commitment to community. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt calls this “living with others for others” (74). Arendt writes about the loss of the “public realm,” which she believes is crucial for the performance and display of ethical behavior, as she discusses the simultaneous loss of privacy. The one depends on the other: Although the distinction between private and public coincides with the opposition of necessity and freedom, of futility and permanence, and, finally, of shame and honor, it is by no means true that only the necessary, the futile, and the shameful have their proper place in the private realm. The most elementary meaning of the two realms is that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all. (73)

For Arendt, a pluralistic public realm is needed for dialogue about values and policy, but some aspects of the public realm, such as bureaucracy and mass media, can limit the private realm, which is needed to shelter intimacy and reflection. Since Arendt first expressed her concerns about the blurring of both realms, the expansion of mass media into social media has further eroded these realms. The opinion of others and work obligations enter the home; the private lives of individuals are curated on the Internet. A boundary between the public and private is more difficult to establish and maintain. It is a boundary, however, that sometimes needs to be crossed. Confession, as a commitment to openness and honesty, is crucial to some genres of nonfiction, so too is privacy. Confession, which might be viewed as a break in privacy, occurs at the border between the private and public, Mackal’s “in between.”

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Confession is both a breach of that border and an act that reinstates the border. A confession is an act, a moment of time. It is not a way of life. Privacy makes the public realm possible, and it is in the public realm that words and deeds reveal ethical behavior—the uniqueness and value of individuals. This happens in narratives, which create a “web of human relations” before a chorus, readers who listen and respond (183, 187). As habits, habitus, and values are displayed in the public realm, they are evaluated and critiqued, and eventually imitated. A community learns who it is and how to act. As Arendt writes in Men in Dark Times: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (25). This is answerability. Part of “learning to be human” is rethinking our past and imagining alternative ways of living together. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow argue that even many anthropologists view our distant past through the lens of either Rousseau or Hobbes. Humans either became corrupt or they were corrupt all along. In their synthesis of recent discoveries, Graeber and Wengrow see a different history, one that emphasizes a variety of social structures: “The world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms” (4). Many of these forms were more humanistic than modern political systems: “Far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators” (4). They say we need to “imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves” (9). This begins with how we reimagine living with the persons closest to us and continues to how we reimagine living the symbolic Other. It begins with microhistories that unveil how we actually live together. This is what Imani Perry does each chapter of South to America. She visits a particular locale in the South and does a Foucault-style archeological deep dive into its history. It begins with coming to terms with our own subjectivity. This is a seemingly contradictory process. We need to detach from our time and place by understanding the hidden history of who we are told we are—the ways that habits and values have created social networks that both create opportunities and reinforce limitations. This is the kind of awareness that emerges from a particular way of viewing history found in the archeologies of Nietzsche and Foucault. The idea of home is powerful. We are always trying to find our way home. We cannot find home by skimming across the surface of our

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community. We have to unearth its secrets, its lies, its injustice—all that separates us. Otherwise, we are connecting to a fantasy. We need to also use imagination to find new ways of connecting to our time and place. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow write about the importance of three kinds of freedom: “(1) the freedom to move away and relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones” (503). In their review of anthropological and historical research, they found that human societies can be formed that allow for a high degree of each of these freedoms. They argue that our current social realities severely limit these freedoms, especially the freedom to imagine new ways of living together. They argue against teleological views of history—that both progress and decline are inevitable. They write: “One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book—indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us—was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation—even, in some ways, as an encyclopedia of social possibilities” (501). In this work, I will argue that the genres of nonfiction can be a “zone of ritual play” where writers can explore new ways of connecting to their time and place, new ways of connecting with each other. Detour into Genre: Memoir Memoir might seem to branch out of autobiography, but its origin is early Greek romance, in particular, what Bakhtin calls the Adventure Novel of Everyday Life, which emerged from folktales with “motifs of transformation and identity” (“Forms of Time” 112). Rather than presenting a whole life in chronological order, this early form of the novel focused on “self-­ sufficient temporary segments,” moments of crisis-transformation-­ purification-­rebirth, the “entire life-long destiny of a man, at all its critical turning points” (italics in original, 114). The hero is an ordinary person facing extraordinary difficulties, which mark the hero and move them out of the flow of ordinary life, providing a detached vantage point to observe and reflect on ordinary life: “The quintessentially private life that entered the novel at this time was, by its very nature and as opposed to public life, closed. In essence one could only spy and eavesdrop on it. The literature of private life is essentially a literature of snooping about, of over-hearing ‘how others live’” (123). Narrators of memoirs remain, in many ways,

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storytellers who reveal their private lives and witness the private lives of others. The arc of this kind of “novel” and of the memoir that evolved from it often involves a quest—a search for one’s past, a lost father, the resolution to a family mystery—and it often involves a journey, actual or metaphorical. As opposed to current autobiography, the author of a memoir is not famous, not known in advance. Indeed, the hero is typically not presented as fully formed, but as what Bakhtin would call an unconsummated hero. The narrative relates a portion, or a thematic slice, of a life, which is fragmented or full of gaps, often in a jumbled chronology. The story is certainly not finished on page one, nor is it necessarily finished on the last page. Authors search for the story, as well as for their provisional identity. Authors are changed by the story as they construct it, but the reader is still left with a story that is clearly in progress. As the genre of current memoir began to find in the late 1980s and 1990s, authors looked back to narrative experiments in fiction, primarily those in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, to explore the construction of identity through the experimentation with narrative structure. Thus, in terms of narrative structure, contemporary memoir is much closer to fiction than autobiography, which tends to follow a rather strict and predictable chronological form. At the same time, it is useful to understand what memoir is by defining it against what it is not—that is, autobiography, or what autobiography has become since the late nineteenth century. Another distinction between the personal essay and memoir may be useful. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault distinguishes between philosophy and spirituality: We will call “philosophy” the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth. If we call this “philosophy,” then I think we can call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth.… It postulates that for the subject to have the right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. (15)

The personal essay searches for a truth and explores ideas that are conditioned—limited—by the singularity of consciousness and context, that is,

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a particular consciousness at a particular time and place and its relationship with truth. The memoir is a transformation of identity through time and space that prepares the individual to receive and speak and embody that truth. This should be considered a dialectic rather than a binary.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Penguin, 1958, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago UP, 1958. Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. ———. “Art and Answerability.” In Art and Answerability. 1-3. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Texas UP, 1981. ———. “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination. 84-258. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Texas UP, 1993. ———. “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book.” In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 283-302. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Suzeteo Enterprises, 1902, 2018. ———. The Shadow-Line. Mint Editions, 1916, 2021. Deleuze, Giles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin, 1972, 2009. Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. 11-48. Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collége de France 1982-1983. Ed. Frederic Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982. New York: Picador, 2005. Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. Jamison, Leslie. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. Back Bay 2019. Jensen, George H. Identities Across Texts. Hampton, 2002. ———. Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis. Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

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Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. 20 vols. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton UP, 1953-1989. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. HarperCollins, 2015. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. Michigan State UP, 2016. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited with a Foreword by Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minnesota UP, 1989. Lopate, Phillip, ed. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Day. Random House, 1995. Mackall, Joe. The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage. Nebraska UP, 1992. Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Ecco, 2022. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge UP, 1989. Sanders, Scott Russell. “Mountain Music.” Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. 192-203. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Harvest, 1976, 1985. 61-159.

CHAPTER 6

Critiquing and Claiming Memory

Consequently, we can say that self-knowledge turns out to be the key to an essential memory. Or again, the relation between the reflexivity of the self and knowledge of the truth is established in the form of memory. —Michel Foucault (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) Any memory of the past will be somewhat aestheticized; memory of the future is always ethical. —M.M. Bakhtin (“Author and Hero and Aesthetic Activity”) Finding a voice becomes the problem of taking responsibility for memory. —Arthur W. Frank (The Wounded Storyteller)

In the Tenth Book of The Confessions, Augustine begins with an analysis of the act of confession, then he explores memory, and finally he ends with a search for the true mediator between him and God, which is, of course, Christ. Confession begins the journey to God, but memory might seem like a detour, unless we consider its role in comprehending, creating, and transforming one’s identity. Augustine writes: Great is the strength of Memory, great indeed, my God; an inner chamber vast and infinite. Who has ever sounded its depths? This strength belongs to my mind and to my nature, yet I myself cannot comprehend all that I am. Is the mind, then, too narrow to hold itself? And if so, what is the part of itself © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_6

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that it does not contain? Can it be outside itself rather than inside itself? And if so, what is the part of itself that it does not contain? (10.18.15)

Augustine’s discussion seems remarkably current in some ways and antiquated in others. He sees memory as providing the images that lead to reflection on the past, all of which can be shaped into a narrative that unveils or creates an identity. He also sees memory as being, at least at times, unreliable, which resonates with modern readers. Yet, he asks God to help him sort his memories because he wishes to understand his identity within the context of a reality that is, in effect, God in His totality. He wants to recover a memory of the “blessed life” (10.21.31), the Platonic idea of being born with knowledge we then forget. A memory recovered, thus, is a memory of the knowledge taken from us at birth. For Augustine, as for many writers who follow, memory is both crucial and problematic. One of Augustine’s most intriguing points is that memory—by implication, also identity—might exist outside the boundary of the human body. He asks, Is the mind too narrow to hold itself? By this, Augustine probably meant that our memory and our identity can only find completion in God. For us, the question points toward a broader conception of identity, that is, the inclusion of socially constructed memories and memories that are transformed by reframing them or placing them into a new context. Clearly, part of what we consider our most vital memories are constructed, but we need to realize that we construct them for a particular reason in a particular context, most often unconsciously. As we come to terms with our memories, we need to place them back into a context, critique them, sort through what is true and what is false, as well as we can. Traumatic memories are usually more bodily, a bundle of emotions and images. But in terms of healing from trauma, we still need to first understand why and how the memory was shaped. It needs to be analyzed and verified. This means, as has already been discussed, turning inchoate images and feelings into a narration, but it might also mean visiting the site of the memory, talking to relatives and friends about it, or seeking out traces of it in family documents. As we move on from trauma, we need to reshape that memory more consciously, with the goal of creating a healthy self. Memory has its own rhetorical situation. As Thomas Larson points out, memories cannot be separated from those who remember, when they remember, and for what purpose: “To remember . . . requires the memoirist to be as much tale-teller as rememberer, the latter a role that might slow down the tale considerably. Many memoirists, even those with a limited subject, are content to bring their stories to autobiographical

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certainty—the past is over and done with and here it is—rather than push into the risky world of memoir, its Didion-like narrators full of essaying self-­doubt” (61). Larson’s phrase “autobiographical certainty” is apt, for autobiography is more likely to present a finished and unproblematic self that rests on untested memories, which are often presented as pronouncements of the Truth. In current memoir, that is, memoir since around 1990, memory often becomes a character that the author must interrogate, if not engage in battle. Memory, as can be seen in the opening line of Harry Crews’ A Childhood, is sometimes beyond our grasp. “My first memory,” Crews writes, “is of a time ten years before I was born and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew” (1). And memory, even recent memory, is often unreliable. In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr recounts an experiment she ran with one of her writing classes. She staged a fake argument with a friend and then asked students to write about what they had seen. Even with a few minutes between event, memory, and text, the students’ versions were radically different. Thomas De Quincey’s Fragmented I

In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Suspiria de Profundis (1845), De Quincey explores the effects of laudanum, which was legal at the time, on both his conscious life and his dreams. He is also, however, reacting to the emergence of the industrial revolution and “this fierce condition of eternal hurry” (Suspiria 82). In his Confessions, De Quincey presents a narrator who is sometimes incapable of managing his life and often incapable of grasping an altered reality. It is sometimes hard to determine whether De Quincey is writing about an event that actually happened, a dream, or a drug-induced hallucination. One critic wrote of the narrator of Confessions that “whether this character be real or imaginary, we know not” (228). In The Art of Memoir, Karr writes of many kinds of memories: lost memories, episodic memories, autobiographical memories, and semantic memories. They all have their place, and they all have their problems. In the very process of forming memories, we are shaping them: tying them to larger ideas or frameworks or stories, which include inferring what is missing. Once we begin to recall memories, what happened and what we inferred are generally indistinguishable. Karr writes: “For me, fitting an

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episode into words squashes it down a little. Instead of lively sensations, I often wind up with a story containing an idea or opinion I may not even have anymore. These language memories I have to distrust a little” (6). So, memory is essential, but it is also complex. Acknowledging this complexity and sorting through it is part of the writer’s project of self. If memories are unreliable, they need to be critiqued. Some memories need to be constructed, and others need to be transformed. It is important, however, to keep faith in memories as we are in the process of critiquing them. No memory is completely true, and few memories are completely false. When we say a memory is unreliable, what do we mean? Do we mean that the emotional core of the memory is false, especially when the emotional core points to a past trauma? Or, do we mean the story around the memory—which we often begin to construct almost immediately—is false? Or, do we mean the cultural scripts that usually shroud a memory are false? Narrative can be a way of preserving memories, but it can also shape memories and conceal memories. If a narrative is tight (without gaps), it might make sense to ask what it is covering up. If a narrative has gaps, should we try to figure out what is in the gaps? Or, should we embrace a fragmentary narrative as more true? Less normative? Less restrictive? More open to the emergence of lost memories?

Critiquing Memories Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood began as a series of articles in The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. She used a string of essays written over several years to create a memoir by stitching them together with italicized sections that are filler for the gaps between essays and postscript reflections on what had been written before. The first essay was published in 1953 and the memoir in 1957, so only a few years separate the first draft of a memory and McCarthy’s return to it. Yet, in “To the Reader,” the first of the italicized sections, in the first few sentences of the memoir, McCarthy problematizes the boundaries between author and reader, fiction and nonfiction, memory and narration: “These memories of mine have been collected slowly, over a period of years. Some readers, finding them in a magazine, have taken them for stories. The assumption that I have ‘made them up’ is surprisingly prevalent, even among people who know me” (3). Story, here, means fiction, which she seems set against memory, as if it were a synonym for fact or nonfiction. But, as we continue to read, memory itself is questioned until it becomes more uncertain than even fiction. McCarthy seems to vacillate between truth claims (her characters

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are “not composite portraits”) and doubt about our ability to know truth (“there are cases where I am not sure myself whether or not I am making something up”). As we move into the memoir proper, the previously published magazine pieces (in roman) are followed by reflections (in italics) that undercut the narrative: “There are several dubious points in this memoir” (47) and “There are some semi-fictional touches here” (164). It is easy enough, McCarthy seems to say, to construct a story from memories, as long as we don’t think about the memories for too long. Reflecting on memories, however, adds a new dimension to the narrative. Writers of nonfiction, Larson says, bring “the how-I-remember and the what-I-remember face to face” (62). Part of this process is thinking through how we frame our memories. Our memories might seem to come to us fully formed, interpreted for us, but that is only because we have forgotten how we once framed them—perhaps, as a memory of being victimized. Once we realize that our frames—we could also call these mindsets or social scripts—were constructed culturally, in a long and complicated history, that we adopted them far in our past, often unconsciously, we can begin to reframe memories and try on new mindsets to see how they fit. These frames can help us to understand what we feel; they can, just as often, force certain ways of thinking and feeling on us. Yet, they can be critiqued in reflection as we attempt to match them to our own experience and realize that they typically hide as much as they reveal. The questioning of memories has become so common in memoir that some authors devote a chapter to the topic, almost as if they were providing a methodology section to a sociological study. In Black White and Jewish, Rebecca Walker includes a three-and-a-half-page chapter, a little over half way through the book, titled “How Memory Works.” Here is a sample: This is how memory works. It reminds me that no matter how strong I feel in myself, I am still the little girl with the legs that aren’t right. I am still the little girl who is too dark or too light, too rich or too poor to be trusted. Memory works like this: I am always standing outside the gate, wanting to be let in. I am always terrified that this is where I will have to live: forever wanting, never fulfilled, always outside. And so, more often than not, I choose not to remember. (188)

Bakhtin says that we cannot consummate ourselves—that is, construct a finished and apparently complete story of who we are. Others consummate us. They have little trouble summing us up in a few sentences that seem to be a complete story, but they do not seem complete to us. We

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know we are more complicated. So the views come to us as fragments, which are formed by the chance and periodic encounters the other has had with us but which the other has formed into a rather pat—sometimes even smug—judgment. Said differently, we see ourselves as changing and complex, too complex to sum up in a few sentences. Others, who might hardly know us at all but can view us as fully formed and as part of a social context, see us as we could never see ourselves. While others might consummate us on limited biographical information, their view of us often contains important insights. They find it easy to sum us up, assign a value to us, even construct an entire narrative of inner motives, hidden from our conscious awareness—and theirs as well. These fragments that come to us from the outside are part of our memories and form, for better or worse, part of the frame that we use to interpret memories. Right or wrong, they punch holes in who we think we are and who we hope to be. The fragments play an important role in reconceiving the self. What Walker and Bakhtin push us toward is that memories are less about what is factually true and more about values and emotions, and so it is at the core of what we write and how we read. Tom Wolfe says that writers do not “so much ‘create’ images or emotions as jog the reader’s memories” (The New Journalism 47). This is why, he believes, working with scenes is so important: If studies of the brain are correct so far, human memory seems to be made up of sets of meaningful data—as opposed to what the older mechanistic theory presumed: viz., that it is made up of random bits of meaningless or haphazard data that are then combined and given meaning by the mind. These memory sets often combine a complete image and an emotion. . . . The most gifted writers are those who manipulate the memory sets of the reader in such a rich fashion that they create within the mind of the reader an entire world that resonates with the reader’s own real emotion. The events are merely taking place on the page, but the emotions are real. Hence the unique feeling when one is “absorbed” in a certain book, “lost” in it. (48)

It is these “memory sets,” Wolfe believes, that serve as the foundation of scenes. If he is right, then even isolated memories—traces carried in the body or flashes of an image—hold the kernel of a narrative. And scenes become a way of accessing the emotional core of memory—for the sake of aesthetics, more in the reader than the writer. As we expand that emotional core into a story, we start to understand how memories help us to embrace time more fully.

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Future Memories This brings us to the perplexing Bakhtin quote at the beginning of this chapter. He writes, “Any memory of the past will be somewhat aestheticized; memory of the future is always ethical” (“Author and Hero” 153). How is memory of the future even possible? This is like Aristotle’s “future facts.” If we are writing about ourselves, our memories, as a trace of some event we experienced in the past, we would be writing about ourselves as if consummated, as if writing about a hero whose life is complete, almost as if writing about someone else. The life being brought to a narrative is, in essence, without freedom. But, Bakhtin suggests, there is another way to think of bringing our memories into a narrative: I come to know a considerable portion of my own biography from what is said by others, by people close to me, as well as in the emotional tonality of these others: my birth and my descent, the events of family life and national life in my early childhood (that is, everything that could not have been understood or simply could not even have been perceived by a child). All these moments are indispensable for constructing an even minimally intelligible and coherent picture of my life and its world. I—as narrator of my own life—come to know all of them from the lips of others who are its heroes. (“Author and Hero” 154)

If Bakhtin were writing today, he might explain the difference between past memory and future memory as the difference between autobiography and memoir. Bakhtin explains the difference between writing about my memories as a justification for who I think I should be in the eyes of others (an aestheticized approach to memory, a support for the image where I fulfill the narrative possibilities of how I want others to view me, which is more the stuff of autobiography) and writing about my memories as I come to embrace what is on “the lips of others” (a dialogic process that goes beyond telling others who I am to an acceptance of how others can help me understand who I am, which is more the stuff of memoir). It is writing about my life “as a possible story that might be told about it by the other to still others” (153). This kind of story moves beyond memories of the past that are familiar to us, that comfort us, or haunt us, to a projection of ourselves into memories that will shatter our pat and neat stories of the past, that are more about the process of becoming. Whatever similarities autobiography and memoir have, they embody different ontologies.

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Tara Westover’s Educated is about her remarkable journey from a childhood without even much home schooling to an education at Cambridge and Harvard, but it is equally about her escape from a family where everyone knew about the violence perpetuated by her brother Shawn (this name was changed) and the systematic denial of it within her Mormon, survivalist family. It is a memoir that shows memory in all of its complexity. No one seems to remember even extraordinary events in the same ways, such as the moment when her brother Luke was badly burned while working in the family junkyard. In “A Note on the Text,” appended to the end of the memoir, Westover writes: Everyone who was there that day either saw someone who wasn’t there, or failed to see someone who was. Dad saw Luke, and Luke saw Dad. Luke saw me, but I did not see Dad and Dad did not see me. I saw Richard and Richard saw me, but Richard did not see Dad, and neither Dad nor Luke saw Richard. What is one to make of such a carousel of contradictions? After all the turning around and round, when the music finally stops, the only person everyone can agree was actually present that day, is Luke. (353)

Throughout her memoir, Westover includes footnotes “to give voice to memories” that conflict with hers. Her footnotes become a way of preserving different memories, rather than resolving—or dissolving—them into a single narrative. The footnotes make her narrative dialogic. The voices of other members of her family are allowed to speak. Sample of De Quincey’s Fragmented I

For several reasons, I have not been able to compose the notes for this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from memory. Some of them point to their own date; some I have dated; and some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to translate them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy; as the impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task of either recalling, or construction into a regular narrative, the whole burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (61–62)

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Throughout her childhood, Westover kept a series of diaries, a genre that is generally regarded as an aid to memory. Yet, writing in a diary can also be a way of forgetting. After her sister Audrey confronts the family about Shawn’s violence, she asks Tara, as she is leaving for England, to stay: I have no memory of the conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it on my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. … I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I wrote in order to forget. (278)

Her diary erases memories, but it also preserves memories. When Tara begins to doubt her own sanity, when her memories conflict with her family’s narrative, the diaries become a problem. Even though these are contemporaneous documents, she still has to critique them; she still has to determine which inscribed memories are true and which are false. Without them, it would have been easier for her to make sense of her reality, even if that sense were ultimately flawed. Long before beginning her memory, she sensed that the diaries were important. When she leaves her family home for the last time, she packs her diaries in the car and tells her mother she is going for a drive. She never returns. What is most striking about the memories in Educated is how the family systematically erases them. When Audrey, her sister, confronts their parents about Shawn’s abuse toward Tara and herself, the mother admits to Tara, “You were my child. I should have protected you.” When Shawn threatens to kill Audrey, Tara tells her parents, but her father demands proof. Even after Shawn threatens Tara with a bloody knife in front of their parents, her mother says that Shawn didn’t mean it: Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all. (221)

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Different members of the family speak the truth, but they are soon pulled back into the system of denial. Everyone knows the secret; everyone denies it. When even Audrey recants her story of abuse, Tara finds herself rewriting and doubting her own memories, even those written in a diary. The only way she could make logical sense of what happened was to believe that she was insane. Eventually, she calls Erin, one of Shawn’s former girlfriends, and finds an external confirmation of her brother’s abuse: And there is was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people. But that was years away. (196)

In the last sentence of this quote, Westover switches from the past to the future. She has started a process that is not so much about recovering lost memories or reconstructing them (the memories were always present in some form); it is not even primarily about learning to trust her memories, to see them as the truth. The process is more future directed. She is learning to put her memories in service of the self that she had discovered through others, her professors and friends, others who saw a self beyond the strictures of her family and their secrets. The process is not linear and simple. For years, she takes stands and then retreats, but she slowly moves forward toward a new self. We tend to think of memory as focused on the past. It is much more than that. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote: The part played by the body in memory is comprehensible only if memory is, not only the constituting consciousness of the past, but an effort to reopen time on the basis of the implications contained in the present, and if the body, as our permanent means of ‘taking up attitudes’ and thus constructing pseudo-presents, is our medium of communication with time as well as with space. (181)

As we move beyond the limitations of confining memory to thoughts of the past, as we use the body “to reopen time,” as we explore “implications contained in the present,” as we use memories not just to build counternarratives of “pseudo-presents,” but reframe memories into the context of an emerging self, we see new ways of being in an unfolding and undetermined time and place. In other words, we actualized the freedom in our future.

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The process of pushing memories into the future, in service of an emerging self, reframing them into some imagined future, is not easy, as Westover shows. The structure of her family is self-correcting. If threatened with change, someone steps up to restore order. After Tara begins to break with her family, in an attempt to pull her back into its self-­reinforcing reality, her father offers her a blessing that would cleanse her. She refuses, but then she has a mental breakdown. Without her family, she needs to shape a new self. At the moment of her breakdown, the new self is not yet formed. She can eventually write, “I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her” (328). In her memoir, Westover writes about the problems of memory, the denial of memory, and, most importantly, the need to extricate memories from her family structure and move them into a new time and place—into the frame of an imagined new self. A memory of the future is not a memory of an event that has not yet taken place; it is a memory that is being reframed into a new life that is still in the process of emerging.

Being and Time I am not going to recount philosophical discussions about being and time, identity and time, memory and time. If I did, the summary could begin with Heidegger or go back to Augustine or even further back to the Ancient Greeks, who influenced much of Heidegger’s thought. Writers of nonfiction, I want to suggest, also deal with being and time in their own way. In Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, Dani Shapiro writes about reading a series of journals she kept as a young woman. Her experience with writing diaries is similar to Westover’s. Shapiro doesn’t recognize her former self, which is both distant in time and objectified: “I don’t believe the young woman who wrote them has anything to teach me. What does she know? She hasn’t lived my life?” (11). This leads to a reflection on time and identity: How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes? Near the end of her life, Grace Paley once remarked that the decades between fifty and eighty fell not like minutes, but seconds. I don’t know yet if this is the case, but I do know this: the decades that separate that young mother making her lists from the middle-aged woman discovering them feel like the membrane of a giant floating bubble. A pinprick and I’m back there. But is she here? How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?

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We might substitute “chronologies” for “lists” and say that sorting our lives out into a sequential past-present-future will also fail to protect us. The connection between our being and time is complicated. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that our “hold on the past and future is precarious” and our understanding of the present is “postponed” until some future moment that never arrives because that moment is “bounded by its horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn further developments in order to be understood” (346–7). In a similar vein, Bakhtin says that a living human can never be consummated. Both would agree that we are always living in multiple forms of time simultaneously. Bakhtin would add that the best way to come to a provisional understanding of how we live in time is through narrative. Detour into Genre: De Quincey, Woolf, and the Emergence of Modern Memoir In the wake of Rousseau’s Confessions, the terms autobiography, memoirs (plural), and confessions were used interchangeably to describe writing about self, but the “self” laid bare was typically a public figure, rarely a common person or even a literary figure. The personal essay was the medium for writing about the quotidian life of a private (as in nonpublic) person. The shift to memoir (singular) began (in form, if not in title) with Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). De Quincey tells a fragment of a life, focusing on his addiction to opium, and the book was widely popular because, in part, the subject matter was a clear breech of social norms and, in part, because De Quincey told a compelling true story, artistically, as readers of the still emerging form of the novel had come to expect. De Quincey writes of his addiction without lapsing into a simple narration of fall and redemption; indeed, for the most part, he is quite at home with his addiction. Early in the narration, he says that he will not “acknowledge” guilt (4). He praises the heightened consciousness experienced with opium as much as he chronicles its horrors. He occasionally addresses his reader, not with the formal “dear reader” of the eighteenth-century novel, but with an intimacy that is more like a letter to a close friend, with whom he has been chatting: “I dally with my subject because, to myself, the remembrance of these times is profoundly interesting. But my reader shall not have any further cause to complain, for I now hasten to its close” (31). As I have suggested, the clear antecedent to De Quincey’s Confessions is more Montaigne’s Essais than Rousseau’s Confessions.

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Virginia Woolf, who felt that De Quincey “was a born autobiographer,” was particularly fond of his Biographical Sketches. She wrote: His enemy, the hard fact, became cloud-like and supple under his hands. He was under no obligation to recite ‘the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s life’. It was his object to record impressions, to render states of mind without particularizing the features of the precise person who had experienced them. (Complete Essays, volume IV, 365)

Woolf called his Confessions “an autobiography of a kind” (366), acknowledging that it breaks with the tradition of a full life rendered in chronological order. Most compelling, in her view, was its stance to the reader: “It is an intimacy with the mind, and not with the body; yet we cannot help figuring to ourselves, as the rush of eloquence flows, the fragile little body, the fluttering hands, the glowing eyes, the alabaster cheeks, the glass of opium on the table” (366). In Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” her own “autobiography of a kind,” we find hints of the influence and significance of De Quincey’s Confessions. Woolf wrote “A Sketch” in diary form from April 18, 1939, to November 17, 1940, when she was struggling to complete a biography of Roger Fry, an artist and associate in the Bloomsbury circle, trying to understand the life of her mother, and worrying about war in Europe. While “A Sketch of the Past” is in diary form, it has the kernel of current memoir: some event in the present triggers a memory and the event in the past triggers a reflection—all of which occurs in fragments that break any attempt of the reader to construct a simple chronology. To understand her work on Fry, she was also reading “memoirs” and thinking about genres of writing about self as well as the complications of exploring identity in narration. The last entry is about four months before her suicide. In the May 15, 1939, entry, she begins, “The drudgery of making a coherent life of Roger has once more become intolerable” (85). After mentioning that artist Mark Gertler had denounced literature as inferior to painting at dinner the night before, she writes, [I]f one could give a sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an artist. . . . For what reality can remain real of a person who died forty-four years ago at the age of forty-nine, without leaving a book, or a picture, or any piece of work—apart from the three children who now survive and the

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memory of her that remains in their minds? There is memory; but there is nothing to check that memory by; nothing to bring it to ground with. (Emphasis added; 85)

The biography that Woolf would publish on Fry is experimental, more like a memoir, a mixture of memories and documents, a fragment of a life, one that strives to establish the situated perspective of the author who reflects to understand herself, her connection to her subject matter, and the very limits of knowing. (If we accept that modern memoir explores the limits of knowledge, does the ultimate origin of the genre lie in phenomenology?) As Woolf explores her struggles with capturing Fry, she comes to understand that the writer must be part of the story, memory cannot be trusted, documents are rhetorical and contextual, and the only knowledge we can uncover is the limits of our own knowing. Of the aftermath of her mother’s death, Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past”: The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-­ conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled. It made one hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow. Many foolish and sentimental ideas came into being. Yet there was a struggle, for soon we revived, and there was a conflict between what we ought to be and what we were. Thoby put this into words. One day before he went back to school, he said: “It’s silly going on like this . . .”, sobbing, sitting shrouded, he meant. I was shocked at his heartlessness; yet he was right, I know; and yet how could we escape? (95)

When conveying a loss of this magnitude, most writers would struggle to create the scene to capture their grief. Woolf questions the very nature of that grief. It was this kind of contingency that had been emerging in the novel since the late nineteenth century and would come, also, to mark the memoir. I do not wish to suggest that Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” or her biography of Fry constitute the moment where this shift occurs. It was a move broader than one work or one author, but Woolf is part of it and documents it. What I do not find in Woolf is an integration of this contingent self into a community, perhaps, in part, because her form is diary, and it ends on November 15, 1940. Reflection is a turn toward self, a detachment from

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everyday being, a period of questioning the very habits of mind (what Woolf calls “nonbeing”) that carry us through days upon days. It can leave us adrift. In the last entry, Woolf goes back to her life in Hyde Park in 1900, after the death of her mother, sister, and brother. She is playing a role that she has already come to see as inauthentic: Very soon after Stella’s death we realized that we must make some standing place for ourselves in this baffling, frustrating whirlpool. Every day we did battle for that which was always being snatched from us, or distorted. The most imminent obstacle, the most oppressive stone laid upon our vitality and its struggle to live was of course father. (143–44)

Her father launches into a pathetic rage every Wednesday, after lunch, when he views his ledger books and is convinced that he is about to be financially ruined. He never shows his rage before other men, only before the young women in the family. Woolf also had to bend to the expectations of her stepbrother George, who was a conventional Victorian: I must obey because he had force—age, wealth, tradition—behind him. But even while I obeyed, I marveled—how could anyone believe what George believed? There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. The spectacle of George, laying down laws in his leather arm chair so instinctively, so unhesitatingly, fascinated me. Upstairs alone in my room I wrote a sketch of his probable career; which his actual career followed almost to the letter. (154)

Woolf was about eighteen in 1900. Her identity had already separated from that of her family and her social circle, but she remained adrift. The following paragraph was the ending of the last entry in an earlier manuscript but omitted from a revised typescript: There they were, on the verge of the drawing room, these great men: while, round the tea table, George and Gerald and Jack talked of the Post Office, the publishing office, and the Law Courts. And I, sitting by the table, was quite unable to make any connection. There were so many different words: but they were distant from me. I could not make them cohere; nor feel myself in touch with them. And I spent many hours of my youth restlessly comparing them. No doubt the distraction and the differences were of use;

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as a means of education; as a way of showing one the contraries. For no sooner had I settled down to my Greek than I would be called off to hear George’s case; then from that I would be told to come up to the study to read German; and then the gay world of Kitty Maxse would impinge. (158–59)

“A Sketch of the Past” seems to end with the 1940 Virginia Woolf as detached from a world in crisis as the 1900 Woolf was from Hyde Park.

Works Cited Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 4–256. Crews, Harry. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Georgia UP, 1995. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Oxford UP, 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. New York: Picador, 2005. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago UP, 1995. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. HarperCollins, 2015. Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Ohio UP, 2007. McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Mariner, 1972. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge and Kegan, 1945. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Trans. J.M. Cohen. Penguin, 1953. Shapiro, Dani. Hourglass: Time, Memory, and Marriage. Anchor, 2018. Walker, Rebecca. Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. Riverhead, 2002. Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. Random House, 2018. Wolfe, Tom. The New Journalism. Picador, 1975. Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry: A Biography. Mariner, 1976. ———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. ———. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Harvest, [1976] 1985. 61–159.

CHAPTER 7

Making Confessions

It is my purpose, in making my confession in my heart, to do what is true before you, and in making my confession in writing, to do what is true before many witnesses. —Augustine (The Confessions, Book Ten) It should not pass us by that Augustine’s Confessions articulates a range of concerns, from the confession of sins, faith, and praise for God to confessions of knowledge and its limits. Since the subject narrating is also the subject narrated, confession, as I see it, is a literary device that is profoundly constitutive of self-identity. Its power is found, for example, in its ability to reappropriate, to reconfigure and reinscribe one’s self-identity and the “absoluteness” of one’s (completed) acts. —Matthew G. Condon (“The Unnamed and the Defaced”) Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they could never have had before. —Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition)

Augustine begins Book Ten of The Confessions with a statement of his purpose. He is confessing human frailties and past sins before God. He is also confessing before witnesses—a revealing of self and identity in writing. The need for confession before God is understood. The confession in writing requires some justification: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_7

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What profit do I have in confessing before men also, in your presence and through this writing, what I still am, and not what I was? I have seen and set down my profit from the latter. But what I still am, even as I write these confessions—there are many who would know that, those who have known me and not known me, and those who have heard something from me or of me, but whose ear cannot hear my heart, where I am whoever I am. They wish, therefore, to hear it from my own confession: what I am within, in the part inaccessible to their eyes and ears and minds. They wish to do so, however, because they will believe me; otherwise, what would they learn? (217)

For Augustine, confession is the way to come before God and remain in his presence. It is also the way to be with other people. It is certainly appropriate to ask, “Why do we write about ourselves?” In the end, there is only one answer, “So we won’t be alone, even from ourselves.” We should also ask, “Why should we confess, that is, reveal our secrets?” The same answer, “So we won’t be alone, even to ourselves.” Augustine confesses “what I am within” before God and others who, he is certain, “will believe” him. As he confesses to God, he witnesses to others. He offers himself with the expectation that he and his truth will be accepted. Why does he have such faith in the goodwill of his auditors and readers?

Confessions and Warmth In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin writes that a “certain degree of warmth” is needed for a confession. He continues, much in the manner of Augustine: “The mere fact that I attach any significance at all to my own determinateness,… the very fact of becoming conscious of myself in being, testifies in itself that I am not alone in my self-accounting, that someone is interested in me, that someone wants me to be good” (italics added, 144). As with Augustine, Bakhtin sees confession as occurring before God and witnesses within a context of believing, warmth, and acceptance. In “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book,” Bakhtin adds that confession is “an attempt at an objective attitude toward oneself irrespective of the forms I and another” (296). A confession can take place in many rhetorical situations (this is, I believe, what Bakhtin means by “irrespective of the forms of I and another”), but not any setting. The setting needs to be supportive (we need someone to want us to be good) and with acceptance (or what Bakhtin calls “warmth”). A genre, if the relationship between the “I and another” is right, if it has built a tradition of warmth and acceptance, can be a setting for confession.

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James Baldwin’s Interpersonal I

While James Baldwin accepted that some aspects of identity “are not invented,” that is, inborn, he focused on the part of our identities that are formed by our interactions with others, with places, and even with ideas, like the idea of America. These interactions are often hegemonic: They are built on some form of oppression. Baldwin spent many of his adult years living as an expatriate in France, Turkey, and Italy, where he had distance from American and could break from its power over him. When he wrote, “I am not your Negro,” he was explaining that the subjective lives of whites needed to create the idea of a “Negro” to deal with their own insecurities and fears. In The Fire Next Time, he wrote, “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves” (44). Part of transforming our identities, even our cultures, is recognizing this dynamic and moving out its hold over us. By saying “I am not your Negro,” Baldwin was breaking the interpersonal bonds between whites and blacks, which objectifies them both. The same rhetorical situation and the same acceptance appear in other confessional settings. In addition to the Catholic confessional, the Oxford Group, an early twentieth-century movement that wanted to recapture the fervor of first-century Christianity, asked members to confess before God and another human being. This practice is the precursor to the fourth and fifth steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the fourth step, members of AA do a “thorough and searching moral inventory” with their sponsor. In the fifth step, they share (confess) what they have discovered about their past before God, “as we understand Him,” and another person, usually their sponsor, a counselor, or a member of the clergy. Members of AA are prepared for their “moral inventory” and confession by attending meeting after meeting, where others talk about their past lives as alcoholics, and their confession is protected within AA’s tradition of anonymity. If personal essays and memoir often include a similar “self-accounting” (to use Bakhtin’s term) and confession, how is it that writers of nonfiction can anticipate the good faith and acceptance of their readers? That trust is embedded within these genres as clearly as it is embedded within the traditions of the Catholic Church or Alcoholics Anonymous.

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This is a very different kind of rhetorical situation than we find in mass media. In Elvis and Me, Priscilla Presley wrote about many of the private moments in her relationship and marriage to Elvis, including some references to unusual sexual acts. She does not go into detail, which accomplishes two effects. First, she does not eroticize the acts, so she does not encourage voyeurism. A confession needs witnesses, not voyeurs. Second, the lack of details is enough to both confess and set a boundary. She says, in effect, I am willing to share this much, not more. Within her memoir, she seems to have felt comfortable sharing these “secrets.” After the memoir’s publication, I remember watching a television interview with Priscilla. A reporter asked her a general question about the unusual sexual acts. My memory of the interview, which I have not been able to locate, is that Priscilla was clearly embarrassed by the question. She turned red and stuttered as she attempted an answer. The question asked in an interview on television is a different rhetorical situation; it is without the tradition of “warmth” that stretches back at least as far as Augustine, a warmth that is reaffirmed with each published personal essay and memoir. Brenda Miller says that form can provide cover for confession and the expression of the authentic self (109). Part of this is related to the tradition established in the genre. The personal essay and memoir have become protected places where confession is expected and accepted. This is certainly not true of social media. If we understand the genres of memoir and personal essay, we should also recognize that each of us needs to practice trust as writers and acceptance as readers. The tradition of warmth in these discourse communities will continue only if we practice it. But why is confession important? Confession is an important step toward authenticity, a willingness to embrace the complete self. It teaches us the value of living honestly, the importance of releasing guilt and shame, and the value of accepting ourselves as others see us. Even when I am looking in the mirror, Bakhtin says, I do not see my image as others see me: “I am not alone when I look at myself in the mirror. I am possessed by someone else’s soul. More than that. At times, this other soul may gain body to the point where it attains a self-certainty.” This other, which we seem to carry with us, shapes who we are: “Vexation and a certain resentment, with which our dissatisfaction about our own exterior may combine, give body to this other—the possible author of our own exterior” (“Author and Hero” 33). If a confession needs to be made—not just before God but also before those other people who play a role in shaping

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our identity—then confession does more than shape the identity of the person confessing. It also shapes the identity of the audience. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault summarizes a passage from Plato’s Alcibiades thus: “To care for the self, one must know oneself; to know oneself one must look at oneself in an element that is the same as the self; in this element one must look at that which is the very course of thought and knowledge; this source is the divine element” (70–71). Is it overreaching to say that a genre can be a divine space? If we tie Bakhtin and Foucault into what Augustine says about confession, we recognize that the act of confession is triadic. Augustine confesses to God and before another human. Or, as members of the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous explain it, we share our searching moral inventory with another human being who is a representative of the divine Other. We could say that this third “element” (to use Foucault’s term for it) is God or the divine, but we need not think of it as supernatural. It could be the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Lacan might call it the Symbolic Other. Some might call it culture or history or community. Bakhtin writes about “transgredient values,” which form a background, a landscape, a horizon, for the creation of identity and ethical action. Whatever we call it, this third “element” must be there to give confession its context and significance and to offer acceptance by some force outside the individual. What is most important is not the exact nature of the third “element.” More significant is the author’s stance toward it. The author displays what Paul Woodruff, a classicist and ethicist, calls “reverence” toward something greater than an individual: To forget that you are only human, to think you can act like a god—that is the opposite of reverence.… An irreverent soul is arrogant and shameless, unable to feel awe in the face of things higher than itself. As a result, an irreverent soul is unable to feel respect for people it sees as lower than itself—ordinary people, prisoners, children. (4)

It would not be accurate to say that “reverence” is simply a form of humility. More broadly, it is a different state of mind that is a way of being in the world. When people are reverent toward something greater than themselves, they are capable of embracing a number of character traits like humility and compassion. Reverence toward something greater than one’s own ego reframes everything. Montaigne shows his reverence toward the quotations that are scattered throughout his essays; he is, in effect, showing respect to the authors who have come before him, to a tradition that far exceeds his own knowledge and project.

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Confession and Communion We could argue that what separates autobiography, memoir, and the personal essay from other kinds of nonfiction is the act of confession. What is the role of confession in these genres? It is less, I would argue, about bringing a former self out into the open as preparation for a transformation of self, which we see in memoir, and about creating the ethos of an unfinished self, a position that is not based on authority or power but rather on communion. In “Being Presumptuous,” Montaigne spends little time critiquing those who are pleased with themselves. After a few observations of others, he launches into an exhaustive catalog of his own personal failings. It is as if he is demonstrating for his readers how to deal with resentment of others. If we find ourselves being annoyed by the arrogance of others, then move to a reflection on self and explore our own feelings. Montaigne is also broadening the nature of confession. We can confess more than sins; we can also confess odd habits or slight failings. In “Being Presumptuous,” Montaigne admits to lacking agility, having a bad memory, and poorly managing his farm with a peaceful—or, peace-filled— acceptance. In other essays, he writes openly about sexuality, without framing it as a sin, without claiming much skill with it, and without eroticizing it. He sometimes refers to feeling guilt, but he also seems to accept this emotion as part of who he is, yet another personal failing, accepted without any gnashing of teeth. In other words, he doesn’t feel guilty about feeling guilt. His project is to speak as he is, and so he invites us to do the same: From the details of my confession, others can be imagined at my expense. But whatever I reveal about myself, as long as I show myself as I am, I achieve my aim. And so I make no excuses for daring to write down such lowly, frivolous words as these. My subject’s lowliness requires me to. You may condemn my project if you wish; but not the way I carry it out. The fact is that without anyone pointing it out I see well enough just how little weight and value all this has, and how foolish my project is. It is enough that my judgment, which these writings put to the test, does not lose it edge … (Atkinson and Sices trans. 165–66)

He does not write as a repentant sinner, filled with angst about his acts of fornication and his separation from God, as Augustine often does in The

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Confessions. He does, however, admit failings and embrace his struggles as if to say, “We are more alike in our humanness than you might think.”

False Confessions vs. Authentic Confessions Certainly, not all confessions are like those of Montaigne. When discussing Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” Bakhtin says, we witness, as we read, a confession with “a sideway glance” or a “loophole”: “A loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one’s own words. If a word retains such a loophole this must inevitably be reflected in its structure.… The hero who repents and condemns himself actually wants only to provoke praise and acceptance by the other” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 233). The “sideward glance” or “loophole” is recognized, Bakhtin says, largely by its exaggerated tone; it seems like a parody of a confession. It is filled with “cynicism and holy-­ foolishment.” As an example, Bakhtin quotes the following passage from “Notes”: “Is it nasty for you to hear my foul moans? Well, let it be nasty. Here I will let you have an even nastier flourish in a minute” (qtd. in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 232). We could say the apologies that often accompany confessions, especially in oral communication, in daily conversation, can likewise be insincere, even a form of manipulation. In either case, the confessor expects a negative response. In conversations on social media, rhetorical situations are without “warmth,” without an accepting other, without reverence, true confession cannot occur. It is less common in current autobiography where the authors are often attempting to solidify their position in history. The confession there is more like a justification or a rationalization. As a generalization, we could say that readers are typically more skeptical about the motives of authors who write autobiographies than those who write memoirs. With fiction, readers rarely question the author’s intention because there is an ironic stance between the author and the work’s hero. Social media is, perhaps, the genre with the least warmth. In a medium where we cannot expect warmth, where others do not have to bodily stand behind their words, many of us are understandably cautious about confessing. We present an idealized self, build a happy narrative, day by day, post by post, tweet by tweet.

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Example of Baldwin’s Interpersonal I

America proves, certainly, if any nation ever has, that men cannot live by bread alone; on the other hand, men can scarcely begin to react to this principle until they—and, still more, their children—have enough bread to eat. Hunger has no principles, it simply makes men, at worse, wretched, and, at best, dangerous. Also, it must be remembered—it cannot be overstated—that those centuries of oppression are also the history of a system of thought, so that both the ex-man who considers himself master and the ex-man who is treated like a mule suffer from a particular species of schizophrenia, in which each contains the other, in which each longs to be the other. “What connects a slave to his master,” observes David Caute, in his novel, Decline of the West, “is more tragic than that which separates them.” James Baldwin (No Name in the Street, p. 87) We need to confess, but we do not need to confess in every setting. That does not mean the effects of confessing in a place of warmth only remain in that setting. Confession resets our identity, and this radiates into other areas of our lives. Confessions address what Robert Pippen calls “unknowingness” and “the struggle for mutual interpretability.” In The Philosophical Hitchcock, as he interprets Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film about a series of deceptions, he writes about the complexity of knowing ourselves and knowing others. Sounding like Bakthin, he says there is a “large swatch of reality that we cannot see or experience ourselves,” and so we must rely on “testimony from others, others with whom we are sometimes in competition, and many others who, we know, have their own agendas and frailties” (13). Part of learning to live with others is knowing ourselves better and interpreting the statements and actions of others: “So there is some evolving, mutual, functional, interdependence among my understanding of another, my understanding of his or her understanding of me, and my self understanding, as well as mutual assumptions about what could or could not be possible, given the other and given terms in which he or she matters to me” (24). In the complex dynamics of quotidian life, we often experience deception, which can push us away from acknowledging our interdependence. A true confession does more than foster self-­ knowledge and self-acceptance. Sincere confession can break through the complexity of “unknowingness” by building trust. It evokes community.

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If “a sideward glance” is embedded in the structure of a false confession, what is embedded within the structure of a true confession? Bakhtin does not say. I have looked for markers in Montaigne that signal authenticity and have not found them. This is, perhaps, because the acceptance of one’s failings that comes out in a true confession permeates the emotional connection between the author and the audience. It is true because it reflects an entire attitude toward life that emerges from how the author lives. Seneca did not develop this kind of ethos by writing one letter to Lucilius; Montaigne did not embody this kind of ethos by confessing once in only one essay. This ethos comes from years of writing and answering to one’s writing. We learn from Montaigne because he embraces his struggles, and we are willing to learn from him because we can identify with his struggles. An overt confession may not happen in each of Montaigne’s essays; it does not need to. The ethos that he creates through confessions in one essay carries over into other essays without overt confessions, shown in its emotional tone and his established ethos. If we think of confession even more broadly, we can think of this act as simply sharing a side of one’s self that is not commonly shared in everyday life. The confession might be as simple as the author inviting a reader into his or her thought process, as if to say, “These are my observations of some quotidian things, like bumble bees, and these are my thoughts, my ramblings, my attempts to make sense of my place in this world.” Even such mundane revelations become acts of vulnerability, which build trust between author and reader. The very act of confession moves the author out of time, out of our movement toward some vague future—from the normal course of daily events to an accounting of the past in this present moment. It is a mark of difference, an act of communion, that looks toward the future as a commitment to engage others authentically and with reverence. Detour into Genre: The Personal Essay In books X through XII of the Confessions, the books that read like personal essays, Augustine invites the reader into his thought process as he seems to ramble through a series of associations, thinking on paper (actually, in his case, dictating to a scribe), with the openness and freedom of a Montaigne essay. His thoughts, however, are more philosophical as he reflects on confession, memory, time, and interpretation. While his form is like a personal essay, his thoughts are less situated and grounded in his

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concrete experience and his daily life. It is this grounding that Montaigne will add to the personal essay. In “The Singular First Person,” Scott Russell Sanders writes that the personal essay is “a record of the individual mind at work and play” (2). The topic of the essay might range from the threat of nuclear war to the nature of the human thumb. If we view this as a continuum of possible topics, the personal essay most often gravitates toward the human thumb end, that is, toward the quotidian. In “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things,” Patrick Madden writes: “During my first extended encounters with the essay, I was struck (dumbstruck, moonstruck) by those authors who wrote from seemingly insignificant, overlooked, transient things, experiences, and ideas, who were able to find within their everyday, unexceptional lives inspiration for essaying” (2). It is not the topic that matters so much as how the author reflects on it. While it might seem a contradiction, this process both entails maintaining the I-position, the view of a particular person in a particular place at a particular time, keeping the “I” personal, and reflecting on that position, which objectifies it. As I have tried to illustrate with the text-boxes in this book, the “I” can take many forms. Some of these forms, such as the “I” of Descartes, becomes scientific, detached, and universalized. This is not the “I” of the personal essay. But how is the subject related to the search for and embodiment of knowledge in the personal essay, the epistemology of the personal essay, and how is this relationship embodied in form? Now, let us step back into history. Here is how Montaigne begins “Solitude”: Let us put aside lengthy comparison between the active and the solitary life, and as for that fine saying behind which ambition and greed are hidden— that is, that we were born not for private but rather for public affairs—we may as well leave it to those caught up in the dance. Let them beat their consciences as to whether rank, office, and all that worldly annoyance might not rather, on the contrary, be sought out in order to derive personal gain from public affairs. The evil means that this is sought out by, in our time, shows clearly that the end scarcely justifies it. (Atkinson and Sides translation 100)

The passage resonates. Interestingly, it sounds as if it could have come from one of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius—or, from a magazine published yesterday. Its roots are ancient, and its message seems even more true in our own times.

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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago UP, 1958. Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 4–256. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1963, 1992. ———. No Name in the Street. Knopf, 1972, 2007. Condon, Matthew G. “The Unnamed and the Defaced: The Limits of Rhetoric in Augustine’s Confessions.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69:1 (March 2001): 43–63. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Notes from the Underground.” Vintage, 1864, 1994. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. New York: Picador, 2005. Madden, Patrick. “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things.” Quotidiana: Essays. Nebraska UP, 2010. 1–10. Miller, Brenda. “‘Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh, My!’: Courage and Creative Nonfiction.” In Bending Genres. 2nd ed. Eds. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 103–10. Montaigne, Michel de. Selected Essays. Trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012. Pippin, Robert B. The Philosophical Hitchcock. Chicago UP, 2017. Presley, Priscilla with Sandra Harmon. Elvis and Me. Berkeley, 1986. Sanders, Scott Russell. “The Singular First Person.” Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. 1–11. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND. Woodruff, Paul. Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. Oxford UP, 2001.

CHAPTER 8

Reflecting on Self as Other

Most of our acts are taken care of by habit. Just as many of our everyday judgments are taken care of by prejudices. —Hannah Arendt (The Life of the Mind, Volume 2) If people complain that I talk too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves. —Michel Montaigne (“Repenting”) Practical reasoning … is a reasoning in transitions. It aims to establish, not that some position is correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other. This form of argument has its source in biographical narrative. We are convinced that a certain view is superior because we have lived a transition which we understand as error-reducing and hence as epistemic gain. —Charles Taylor (Sources of Self)

In The Confessions, Augustine rarely creates anything like a fully mimetic scene. He comes closest to a scene—the kind of scene we expect in current memoir—in his description of stealing pears with some of his friends when he was an adolescent. Even there, though, he spends only half of a paragraph describing the event, without fully setting the scene, without even mentioning the names of his friends, and then he spends eight and a half paragraphs reflecting on it. The reflections begins:

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Such was my heart, O God; such was my heart, on which you showed your pity in the depths of the abyss. Let my heart now tell you what its purpose was; why I was gratuitously evil, and why there was no reason for evil but evil itself. My evil was loathsome, and I loved it; I was in love with my own ruin and rebellion. I did not love what I hoped to gain by rebellion; it was rebellion itself I loved. Depraved in soul, I had leapt away from my firm foothold in you and cast myself to my destruction, seeking to gain nothing through my disgrace but disgrace itself. (2.4.9)

The beginning of his extended reflection reads like a summation or a conclusion. What more needs to be said? He was evil for the sake of being evil. He was rebellious for the sake of rebelling. If we consider the tone he associates with the event, he also seems at the end point of his reflection. He is filled with shame and self-loathing. All of this is typical of adolescent ways of making meaning, a point that will be developed later in this chapter. Augustine is clearly trying to create a younger version of himself and how that younger self thought. Entering another person’s mind, even Augustine attempting to replay the mind of a younger version of himself, is limited, but it is nonetheless critical to the development of self. When Augustine wrote this, in his early forties, he was reflecting on an event that happened decades earlier. In this initial response, he seems to be recounting what he thought and felt close to the event—the stealing of pears—maybe in the days that followed, if not what he began to think and feel as soon as he separated from his friends, returned to his home, and was in the presence of his pious mother. This beginning, which has the rawness of an immediate response, might have the form of reflection, but would we find this section of The Confessions interesting if Augustine had stopped here? Would we believe that Augustine had completely processed this event? Walt Whitman’s Pluralistic I

In “Song of Myself,” which could be considered a lyric personal essay, Whitman says that he contains the cosmos. He catalogs long lists of diverse Americans—the mechanic and the woodsman, the young plowboy and the fisherman, the mother and the prostitute, the president and the runaway slave—and then he says, “All these I feel or am.”

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To modern readers, the theft seems fairly harmless, an adolescent prank, and the emotions of Augustine’s reflections seem overwrought. We can place his deep remorse over his sexual affairs—confessions that come later—into the framework of his era, the period of early Christianity. These feelings within context, seems reasonable, but feeling the same degree of remorse for stealing pears seems exaggerated, unless we view it as a symbolic reenactment of original sin—Adam and Eve eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. As with original sin, Augustine views the senseless act of stealing pears as emblematic of his separation from God. The qualitative nature of the sin is less important than its effect on the soul and his relationship with God. Stealing or fornication, any sin, separates him from God. In this perspective, all sins have a significant consequence. As Augustine returns to the event, again and again, for pages, viewing it from different perspectives, he is close to the kind of reflection that we will later see in Montaigne. This reflection or “practical reason,” thought that lays a foundation for future action, is grounded in “biographical narrative” and focuses on lived “transitions.” It could be argued, however, that Augustine’s reflections are not yet fully dialectic. Augustine moves through a series of thoughts, proposing possible explanations, exploring them, and eventually rejecting them. Did he steal the pears for their beauty? Was he seeking freedom? Was he being prideful? Did he desire friendship? After exploring several motives for his sin beyond his starting point, beyond sinning for the sake of sin, he settles for his inability to separate himself from his relationships, his friendship with a group of peers: It was a joke to us; it tickled our fancy to think of the people we were tricking—the parents, teachers, the owner of the fruit—who had no idea what we were doing, and would have been most displeased if they had known. Why, then, did I enjoy the fact that I was not doing it by myself? It is because no one laughs when they are alone? No one, that is, laughs readily on their own; though it is possible for some individuals to be overcome with laughter, if they see or think of something eminently laughable, even though there is no one else present. But I would never have stolen those pears had I been on my own. (2.9.17)

I will return to the adolescent focus on relationships as a developmental phase later. Here are a few comments on Augustine’s use of reflection. In this passage, which Augustine moves toward over pages, the mature man

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shows a deep understanding of adolescent motivation. At the beginning of the reflection, Augustine is more judgmental. He expresses what could be interpreted as socially normative values within an early Christian frame, but later he moves beyond judgment to a sophisticated analysis of motives. Augustine’s approach to reflection was certainly revolutionary. In Sources of the Self, Taylor views Augustine’s Confessions as a “turn to radical reflexivity,” which includes an examination of the “particularized” and the adoption of “the first-person standpoint” (130–31). For Taylor, Augustine represents a new epistemology as well as a new ontology: “The world as I know it is there for me.” This is not the “view from nowhere”; rationalism, Modernism, science, all are stated in an “objective” language. It is situated in how we live: “In our normal dealings with things, we disregard this dimension of experience and focus on the things experienced. But we can turn and make this our object of attention, become aware of our awareness, try to experience our experiencing, focus on the way the world is for us.” This, the shift toward self, is an epistemology Augustine gathers from the ancient world and passes on to modernity. The dialectic of Plato and Aristotle (whose early, lost works were also in the form of dialogues between mentor and students) moves inward and onto the page, not as a simulated dialogue but as interior thought. An important moment in this development appears to have been when Augustine observed Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, a public figure, reading: “When he read, his eyes ran over the page and his heart sought out the sense, while his voice and tongue were resting.… I would sit in silence for a long time— for who would venture to impose himself on one so intent on his reading?—then go away, trying to guess why he read in this way” (6.3.3). To modern audiences, Augustine’s astonishment at witnessing silent reading is hard to fathom unless we realize it represents a moment in the slow historical shift from orality to literacy, from public disputation to contemplation. For Augustine, it was also a shift from his early study of rhetoric, his admiration for public speakers like Faustus, to communion with God. This move will influence Montaigne and the tradition of the personal essay; it will also later influence the development of phenomenology. It is thought in the world and yet apart or above the world. Charles Taylor calls Augustine’s inward move “radical reflexivity” because we “become aware of our awareness, try to experience our experiencing, focus on the way the world is for us” (130). He says that this is a move beyond what Foucault calls “care of the self,” which is the precursor to radical reflexivity in the ancient world:

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Radical reflexivity brings to the fore a kind of presence to oneself which is inseparable from one’s being the agent of experience, something to which access by its very nature is asymmetrical: there is a crucial difference between the way I experience my activity, thought, and feeling, and the way that you or anyone else does. That is what makes me a being that can speak of itself in the first person. (130–31)

Augustine, Taylor argues, is the first writer who makes this move to “that space where I am present to myself” (131). After Augustine, Taylor sees a branch in the tradition of writing from the perspective of the “I.” One branch goes to Descartes, who employs a kind of reflexivity that is detached and skeptical; his is a reflection that moves away from the personal engagement between subject and object. Descartes writes meditations and uses the “I” to move through long reflections, but the self and the self’s emotional connection to the immediate world are not engaged. He is moving toward a world of logic and mathematics and science. Arendt calls this “Cartesian world alienation” (Human Condition 306). The other branch, as established as Montaigne, moves toward subjective engagement. Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Montaigne does not know that resting place, that self-possession, which Cartesian understanding is to be. The world is not for him a system of objects the idea of which he has in his possession; the self is not for him the purity of an intellectual consciousness” (“Reading” 199). Augustine’s reflection is like that of Montaigne because he reanimates the former self; he moves a self that is fixed in a particular point in the past back into the flow of time as we witness an individual’s thought process. It is not, however, like Montaigne because Augustine remains within the frame of early Christianity. He has an end point in view, and the tone—the values—is institutional, coming to him from outside. He considers possible explanations, then rejects them. Montaigne will not feel the need to reject an alternative before moving to another perspective and another and another. Each view that emerges from Montaigne’s reflections seems to have its own validity, as I will explain later in this chapter. It is a perspective that opens us to ambiguity rather than habitual response. Sample of Whitman’s Pluralistic I

Think of the United States to-day—the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires solder’d in one—these incalculable, modern, American, seething multitudes around us, of which we are inseparable parts! “A Backward Glance”

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Toward the end of Augustine’s reflection, he expresses discomfort with the turmoil he felt when he stole the pears, even with the turmoil he feels as he tries to understand his younger self: “Who can unravel this twisted bundle of knots and tangles?” Who, but God: “In you there is rest and life untroubled” (2.10.18). Montaigne’s reflections will be more secular and varied; he will move through time, through a series of thoughts, without a need to end with resolution. In Montaigne, we always sense that his reflections have not so much ended; he simply pauses, takes a breath, and starts off again in a new direction. He keeps us in the here and now. The seemingly lack of an overarching structure helps with this process. We, as readers, tend to process a Montaigne essay one small chunk at a time, maybe even just a sentence or phrase at a time. As Montaigne meanders through a string of thoughts, we remain in the moment.

Tarrying with the Negative Just as we could say there is true confession and false confession, we could say that there is deep reflection and shallow reflection. Is deep reflection simply a matter of being willing to criticize the self and question the values that contribute to who we are and where we stand in the world? In part, as long as the criticism doesn’t turn into self-loathing. We have to learn how to live in a liminal space where we seem to become someone else viewing our self or a former self. Reflection is looking into a mirror. The mirror is other people, the world, and objects in the world, including the texts we read. The image reflected back to us is a stranger we must come to know and befriend. This other is constantly changing, so the process never ends. In Hiking with Nietzsche, John Kaag writes about Nietzsche’s aphorism “become who you are”: As it turns out, to ‘become who you are’ is not about finding a ‘who’ you have always been looking for. It is not about separating ‘you’ off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly ‘are’ for all time.… The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else.… What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less. (220)

When writing an essay critical of the National Audubon Society, Jonathan Franzen began to have panic attacks in the middle of the night. Reflecting on this experience in “The Essay in Dark Times,” he wrote: “For the writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was seeing in this one” (17).

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This feeling of not liking what the world is showing us about ourselves is uncomfortable. We want to retreat. This is one of the reasons why deep reflection is so difficult for adolescents. They are in the process of trying to establish an identity. To consider all of their faults with detachment, with a feeling of acceptance, which is not the same as resignation, runs counter to their current developmental task. Montaigne’s ability to reflect on his shortcomings—it doesn’t seem appropriate to call them faults— represents a way of thinking rarely found in the young. They have not yet learned how to linger with the negative self. It remains a struggle for all of us.

Reflection as Maturation Radical reflection, so central to genres of personal writing, might be superficially viewed as a retreat from the world, even solipsistic and self-absorbed. However, if we wish to pursue an ethics of “practical reasoning,” an ethics that emerges from the significant transitions in our lives, an ethics of “biographical narrative,” then reflection becomes a means of making sense of our place in the world, even of developing ethical character. Robert Kegan, the developmental psychologist, makes a similar point about Piaget: Although it seems counterintuitive to describe internalization as a process by which something becomes less subjective, or moves from subject to object, it is just this recognition that processes of internalization are intrinsically related to the movement of adaptation which makes a Piagetian perspective so promising for a more articulated lifespan approach to basic psychodynamic categories. In fact, something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitution of reality. (31)

Kegan’s Piaget is not what we might call the textbook Piaget, a synopsis of his development model in a few paragraphs. Kegan has closely read Piaget from a Hegelian frame, which allows him to see more fluidity in the process of development. He also, in this passage, points to an important idea that will be repeated in this book: We are embedded not only in a time and place, a habitus; we are also embedded in a development stage. If we fail to recognize, investigate, and move beyond this embeddedness, a particular form of our subjectivity, we will project it “onto the world in our

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constitution of reality.” In other words, we will project our own subjectivity onto the Other, which harms the Other and ourselves. It is through reflection, Kegan says, that we emerge from embeddedness in a life that had become a constricting habit; it is how we understand the self we used to be, and it is how we move toward a new self and a new way of relating to others. Reflection is always a developmental move for the self; it can also be part of a developmental move for an entire culture. To better understand the complexity of radical reflexivity, we need to return to the starting point of Augustine’s reflection about stealing pears. He begins: “Such was my heart, O God; such was my heart, on which you showed your pity in the depths of the abyss.” What might at first appear to be a separation from others, a move toward isolation, is actually the initiation of a dialogue with God. Even though God does not speak to Augustine, the text becomes dialogic. Equally important, Augustine’s present self is reflecting on his adolescent self. Kegan writes: “Emergence from embeddedness involves a kind of repudiation, an evolutionary re-­ cognition that what before was me is not-me” (82). In other words, the self emerges from embeddedness in a certain way of being in the world, what Kegan would describe as a way of making meaning of one’s place in the world, by reflecting on the former self, the self of an earlier developmental stage, viewing that self as an object, as if that former self were another person. There is a duality to this move. The person both identifies with the former self and separates from it as a new identity is being formed. This reflection between developmental stages, what Taylor calls “transitions,” is actually an act of decentering, and the movement toward the position of the “I” is actually a move toward dialogue and engagement with others. The “I” of reflection is actually a complex of voices. In both memoir and the personal essay, we can see this kind of development unfold. Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles” begins as a coming-of-age essay, and it represents Kegan’s model of development as the “I” moves through phases of making meaning. The second paragraph takes us from Hoagland at ten years old to early adulthood, pairing the loss of innocence with a loss of environment for the turtles around his boyhood home. As Hoagland matures, the lakes and woods—an environmental Other—disappear. Lawtoo says in Conrad’s Shadow, “It is becoming increasing clear that we are being decentered by nonhuman forces in a more fundamental way than ever before” (xxxi). Almost as an expression of nostalgia for his childhood, he decides that turtles were “the particular

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animal” he “wanted to stay in touch with,” which ultimately means extricating them from their environment. Hoagland is a keen observer of turtles, both those he encounters in the wild and those he keeps as pets. This is behavior associated with Stage 2 in Kegan’s model, a need to possess the objects in one’s world. As the narrator matures, moral ambivalence emerges about the turtles he keeps in “a kidney-shaped bowl.” One pet turtle has “a swollen face like a napalm victim’s” (32). We learn that these cute turtles do not fare well in their bowl: “Their mouths fill up with a white fungus and their lungs with pneumonia. Their organs clog from the rust in the water, or diet troubles, and, like a dying man’s, their eyes and heads become too prominent” (32). Even after this, Hoagland includes a long description of his relationship with a female adult wood turtle, which is charming, almost a romance, and he is sure that she’s better off with him than “at Mud Pond,” the now-dry lake near his childhood home. This inability to separate from the object of love is more characteristic of Kegan’s Stage 3, the Interpersonal Balance. This is the younger self that Augustine wants to understand, a self that finds meaning and identity in relationships with peers. What was an ambivalent relationship with turtles takes a dark turn when Hoagland asks the manager of a “penny arcade,” on Broadway in New York City, which sells “baby terrapins that were scrawled with bon mots in enamel paint, such as KISS ME BABY.” After Hoagland asks the manager if he has adult turtles, the manager takes him upstairs “to a loft room devoted to the turtle business” (33). There, Hoagland encounters a level of cruelty that breaks the ambivalence: They were aquatic turtles, but here they went without water, presumably for weeks, lurching about in those dry bins like handicapped citizens, living on gumption. An easel where the artist worked stood in the middle of the floor. She had a palette and a clip attachment for fastening the babies in place. She wore a smock and a beret, and was homely, short, and eccentric looking, with funny black hair, like some of the ladies who show their paintings in Washington Square in May. She had a cold, she was smoking, and her hand wasn’t very steady, although she worked quickly enough. The smile that she produced for me would have looked giddy if she had been happier or drunk. Of course the turtles’ doom was sealed when she painted them, because their bodies inside would continue to grow but their shells would not. Gradually, invisibly, they would be crushed. Around us their bellies—two thousand belly shells—rubbed on the bins with mournful, momentous hiss. (34)

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In this scene, Hoagland presents a more intimate view of the urbanization and industrialization that destroyed habitat and harmed turtles around his boyhood home. The harm to the turtles is clear, as is the dehumanization of those who turn turtles into a business. They are embedded in a social organization, indicative of Kegan’s Stage 4, the Institutional Balance, but they do not have the ability to separate from that organization or realize that the very organization is corrupt. The narrator, clearly in Stage 5, can see what they cannot. The essay could have ended here. Hoagland could have launched into a self-righteous rant against capitalism, ignorant tourists who buy cute baby turtles with KISS ME BABY painted on their shells, or unprincipled businesses that exploit animals for profit. Instead, the narrator separates from all of this and circles around to himself, acknowledging his own complicity in these horrors, which is characteristic of Kegan’s Stage 5. In the last paragraph of the essay, he describes buying what he thought was a wood turtle as a pet. Upon closer examination, he realizes it is a diamondback terrapin that must live in saltwater. He takes the turtle across town and drops him into the Hudson River: He looked afraid as he bobbed about on top of the water, looking up at me from ten feet below. Though we were both accustomed to his resistance and rigidity, seeing him still pitiful, I recognized that I must have done the wrong thing. At least the river was salty, but it was also bottomless; the waves were too rough for him, and the tide was coming in, bumping him against the pilings underneath the pier. Too late, I realized that he wouldn’t be able to swim to a peaceful inlet in New Jersey, even if he could figure out which way to swim. But since, short of diving in after him, there was nothing I could do, I walked away. (345)

Hoagland does not place himself in a morally superior position to those who paint turtle shells without any apparent knowledge of their cruelty. Throughout he identifies with turtles; now, he identifies with those who have harmed them. While he might love turtles and have good intentions, he is, in the end, among those who are doing harm. Here, at this moment of reflection, the narrator opens an ethical horizon. For memoir and the personal essay, if we are to place ourselves within the story, we must explore our connection to others and our responsibility for our actions, even when we might not seem directly involved. In Narrative and Freedom, Morson writes about this kind of moral responsibility in The Brothers Karamazov:

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To focus only on the proximate cause of a crime would be to overlook the fact that it might just as well have come about in a different way, and probably would have, because the field of possibilities is rife with criminality. And that is because we all harbor criminal wishes .… Therefore, we must try to change everyone’s, not just the criminal’s, habits of thought if we are truly to prevent evil. As Zosima explains, everyone contributes to evil, and so all bear responsibility. (141)

This does not mean that we must wallow in guilt; it does mean that we need to strive to view the self—our thoughts and actions—as less simple and pure, as more complex and ambiguous. Those full of certainty are the ones who have no trouble acting and no awareness they might be acting badly. The recognition of responsibility is not the same as guilt, the one emotion that Montaigne seems reluctant to give free reign. The guilt-ridden may understand their responsibility, but they often have trouble acting at all. Slavoj Žižek ends Violence by arguing against a proposition made by Alain Badiou in “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”: “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.” Žižek responds: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do” (216). We need to create an identity that can both see responsibility, even complicity, and yet be willing to act. We cannot become lost in our reflection.

Varieties of Reflection If this discussion of reflection has seemed a bit scattered or episodic, a series of comments that pick at a few key features of reflection without capturing its essence, that is, perhaps, because reflection is not so easy to capture. One of its key features is that it surprises us. Even within the work of a single author, it can take many forms. Some of these forms might be hidden within the genre itself and the process of writing. Unlike Augustine and Montaigne, some writers might revise out earlier views rather than save them as part of the reflective process, traces of their thought process, typically a series of weak associations rather than a linear progression. Fundamentally, the very act of writing about self is an act of reflection, a move toward objectification of self. As Lopate has pointed out, the act of writing about the self means we must create a character on the page (“Writing Personal Essays” 38-39). Some authors take this a step further by writing about the self in third person, as in Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry

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Adams or Kevin Brockmeier’s A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein wrote about herself by writing in the persona of her friend. Ricardo Piglia spent about sixty years writing The Dairies of Emilio Renzi, switching back and forth from first person to third. Revision can be an additional kind of reflection. As we revise, we rethink the character on the page. Or, said differently, we revise the self as we reflect and come to a fuller understanding of who we have been and who we might become. Some authors choose to make this kind of revision visible in their writing, archive the development of thought as the text evolves, but many allow the revision to disappear under layers of sediment. Kenneth Burke believed that all forms of thought are limited. As he wrote in Permanence and Change, “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (49). This notion, in and of itself, might not be a concern, until we realize that individuals and groups tend to become habituated to a particular perspective. As Burke writes: An orientation is largely a self-perpetuating system, in which each part tends to corroborate the other parts. Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its own dissolution.… The ultimate result is the need of a reorientation, a direct attempt to force the critical structure by shifts of perspective. (169)

A “shift in perspective” can be “forced” in a number of ways—by understanding the complexity of motives, by shifting from one “terministic screen” to another (switching from Freudian terms to Marxist terms), and by consciously and systematically looking for what has been neglected. We can see some of this in a section of Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” but we should keep in mind that this section will not rise to the level of an example. What this example illustrates is that reflection puts thought into motion by switching perspectives. Each perspective shifts the position of the subject, including moving the “I” through an array of emotions. Arendt writes that thinking is “two-in-one,” a duality, a dialog with oneself (“Some Questions” 96). Actually, it is, as we will see in the example from Montaigne, a plurality. It is not “two” but “many.” Early in “Of Experience,” Montaigne begins a discussion of law: “Since the ethical laws, which concern the individual duty of each man in himself, are so hard to frame, as we see they are, it is no wonder if those that govern

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so many individuals are more so” (Frame trans. 998). Justice, he says, “is a true testament of human imbecility.” From here, Montaigne begins to reflect. In the following discussion, I will cover this section of reflection a paragraph at a time (one caveat here, the paragraphs were created by editors, not Montaigne), identifying each by a portion of its opening line: • “Some peasants have just informed me…” Montaigne shares an anecdote about “peasants” who encountered a man stabbed “in a hundred places” in the woods. The man begs for help, but the “peasants” flee. They were afraid they would be blamed for the crime, and they could not afford to defend themselves. With the anecdote, a form of experience, Montaigne provides the perspective of the poor, which is quite different than the perspective of a person with his social status. Montaigne, thus, steps out of his own perspective to view the limitations of the law from a perspective quite foreign to his own. • “How many innocent people… ?” Montaigne pulls back to a broad view of the legal system to state that many people have been found guilty in a court of law only to have someone in a nearby town later confess to the same crime. If statistics had been created and bureaucracies had begun to study social trends, Montaigne might have cited specific numbers. • “Philip, or some other, took care of a similar problem …” Montaigne cites an example of a judge who realized he had made a mistake in a civil case; the judge let the decision stand but repaid the man who lost money in the case. This paragraph shifts the perspective to the inside of the judicial system. As a counterexample, Montaigne adds that this kind of fix will not work when a man is hanged. • “All this reminds me of those ancient notions …” Montaigne runs through a series of ideas about justice from schools of philosophy, including the Stoics, Cyrenaics, and Theodorians. He moves into a perspective from the tradition of thought on justice and suggests that schools of philosophy have been as inconsistent in theory as the courts have been in practice. He cites tradition and then he rejects it. • “There is no remedy. My position, like Alcibiades …” Montaigne says he would not want to trust his fate to a lawyer. The paragraph offers a complement to the paragraph about the “peasants” who were afraid of the legal system. Even Montaigne, like Alcibiades, a man of wealth and social position, a man who could afford a lawyer, fears the legal system. Montaigne also satirizes himself: “I would risk

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a kind of justice that would take into account my good deeds as well as my bad, from which I would have as much to hope as to fear. Lack of punishment is not sufficient pay for a man who does better than not doing harm.” • “In China, a kingdom whose government and arts …” Citing China as a historical counterexample, a form of justice that is different than that of his time and place, Montaigne says that they not only punish corrupt officials but also reward those who have acted “better than the requirements of their duty.” He has moved into the perspective of another culture and historical period. • “No judge as yet, thank God, …” Montaigne says that he has never had to appear in court or been imprisoned. He reflects on how much he values his freedom. • “Now laws remain in credit …” In a concise critique of common thought, Montaigne says the reason we follow laws, their “mystic foundation,” is simply because they are laws and we assume they must be just. Actually, laws are made by “vain and irresolute authors.” He is reflecting on habit and how it should be critiqued. • “There is nothing so grossly …” Without providing specific examples, Montaigne says that French laws are so bad that they actually encourage disorder and disobedience. This is the dialectic. He takes what we consider to be a common truth (laws are rational and consistent and they produce order) and he inverts it. • “Then whatever may be the fruit …” Montaigne says that we will never benefit from the study of foreign examples or education if we are incapable of learning from our experience, which is “sufficient to inform us of what we need.” • I will quote the last paragraph in this section in full: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.” If we see this entire section as an argument, even if not linear, not a sequence of logical steps, it is not so much about laws being unjust. Rather, Montaigne is making a point about epistemology. His foundation is reflection on himself. He obviously studies others and other topics as well: history, philosophy, and literature. All of his studies come to bear in reflection. (998–1000) What is less obvious even to a close reading of this section is that this reflection evolved in a series of revisions from about 1580 to 1592. For example, the paragraph about China was added after the 1588 edition,

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which Frame uses as the foundation of his translation. In his “Translator’s Note,” Frame wrote about his rationale for trying to indicate when passages were written: “The Essays are intended to be a record of change, and the strata indicators help to make this change clear” (xxviii). He also notes, however, that many of Montaigne’s revisions are at the level of phrases and a complete description of “the strata” is impossible. I mention Montaigne’s revisions to reinforce a point made earlier: reflection is thought in motion that occurs over time. It attempts to capture the evolution and change of thought. It creates options to the kind of thought that comes easy, our habitual evaluations. While Montaigne, in this short passage from a long essay, argues that his experience serves as the foundation of his epistemology, it is also clear that he is drawing from his reading, his Bildung, his ability to switch perspectives, even modes of thought. Moving through Montaigne’s reflections is similar to reading the genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault—our patterns of thought are disrupted, the familiar becomes foreign, certainty dissolves. This analysis of one section of one Montaigne essay is not meant to serve as a model of reflection. Reflection has no set method, but it could be described as a form of Kritik. A statement is made and it is undone— not so much refuted as shifted to a new context or a series of contexts. It often serves developmental ends as the author reflects on a former self when in the process of creating a new self. Self here is used in the broadest sense, as Jung uses it, to mean not just the ego, unconscious, collective unconscious, and persona but also one’s culture and history, one’s relationships to others (Jensen, Identities 49). It can be a form of Hegel’s approach to Bildung, which Smith says is ultimately “the struggle to overcome fixed positions” (164), or what Arendt calls “frozen thought” (“Thinking and Moral Considerations” 160, 176). It might assume the spirit of carnival or parody, with the self or former self as its object. Reflection is not necessarily the same as the dialectic, dialogic discourse, or social critique, but it can draw from all of these. Foremost, it is about time, the movement of thought, an attempt to capture the fluidity of a mind in process, a mind striving to become more fully human. Reflection puts thought into motion and releases it, giving it freedom to find its own path.

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One Out of Many After Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she wrote about the “banality of evil.” We might think, as she explained in the introduction to The Life of the Mind, that those who commit horrendously evil acts are monsters, aberrations of the norm, but she didn’t see this in Eichmann: “I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.” She continued: “There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: not stupidity but thoughtlessness” (4). As Arendt is concluding Thinking, the first volume of The Life of the Mind, she cites two positive propositions made by Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias: The first: “It is better to be wronged than to do wrong” … The second: “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and the multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.” (181)

The emphasis on “being one” is Arendt’s, and she says that the phrase is rarely included in translations. In an elaborate analysis that cannot be adequately summarized, she explains that Socrates is pointing to the duality within our thinking, its dialectic nature, and the importance of “being one” within this multiplicity of diverse perspectives. The oneness, which we could call authenticity, comes from being friends with the other within, the “other fellow,” the voices in our own internal dialog: “Even Socrates, so much in love with the marketplace, has to go home, where he will be alone, in solitude, in order to meet the other fellow” (190). All of this happens in time: “Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-­materialized quintessence of being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts” (191). The “actual thinking process” is laid bare in most genres of nonfiction. For example, in “Questions and Answers,” Azwinaki Tshipala, a first-century African, uses a series of questions and answers to demonstrate and provoke thinking. Thinking as a process is a good

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description of reflection as it operates in the genres of the personal essay and memoir. While thinking or reflecting might not seem necessarily tied to ethics, Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, sees a connection: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby a kind of action” (192). In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Arendt says that the ordinary Germans who acted as ordered during the Holocaust acted “automatically.” Those who refused to participate, risking their lives, thought about how their actions would not only harm others and also affect the quality of their own lives. They decided that “they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves” (44). Reflection can train us to think, to become the kind of individuals who do not act automatically. Detour into Genre: The Personal Essay before and after Montaigne David Lazar and Patrick Madden begin the introduction to After Montaigne, a twenty-first century collection of essays that riff on themes from Montaigne’s sixteenth century Essais, with a mashup of quotes from Alexander Smith, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt—all three of whom are nineteenth-century essayists: Montaigne … to whom, down even to our own day, even in point of subject-­ matter, every essayist has been more or less indebted … /… is an immense treasure-house of observation, anticipating all the discoveries of succeeding essayists. / He has left little for his successors to achieve in the way of just and original speculations on human life. Nearly all of the thinking of the [succeeding] centuries, of that kind … is to be found in Montaigne’s Essays. (1)

In the Introduction to the volume, Lazar and Madden comment: “For 350 years, almost every essayist paid homage to the creator of the essay form: Michel de Montaigne” (1). With their mashup, Lazar and Madden amplify the influence of Montaigne by moving historically forward from Montaigne, through Smith, Lamb, and Hazlitt, and finally to their own collection. To better understand the ethos of the personal essay, I will move in the other direction, but not to explain the “roots” of the genre. I will argue that Montaigne, while strikingly original, did not emerge fully formed from a historical vacuum. He drew, in particular, from Seneca and Augustine. But even this is not my central point. I want to argue that the

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personal essay emerges from the “core” of human experience, what Foucault called “care of the self.” While Montaigne created what is generally regarded as the most significant tradition of the modern personal essay, defining the meditative or nonnarrative essay from his day to the present, the ethos embedded in that form dates to the origins of literacy because humans have a need to understand themselves and their place in the world (see D’Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay). We can find this same concern for the ethical self in Seneca’s letters, written in the first century, long before Montaigne wrote his Essais. In Letter 75, which Foucault cites often, Seneca is responding to Lucilius’ complaint that he needs to craft his letters more carefully: You have been complaining that my letters to you are rather carelessly written. Now who talks carefully unless he also desires to talk affectedly? I prefer that my letters should be just what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting in one another’s company or taking walks together, spontaneous and easy; for my letters have nothing strained or artificial about them. If it were possible, I should prefer to show, rather than speak, my feelings. Even if I were arguing a point, I should not stamp my foot, or toss my arms about, or raise my voice; but I should leave that sort of thing to the orator, and should be content to have conveyed my feelings to you without having either embellished them or lowered their dignity. I should like to convince you entirely of this one fact,—that I feel whatever I say, that I not only feel it, but am wedded to it. (232)

Foucault, perhaps playing off the contrast with “orators,” argues that this kind of informal, spontaneous way of writing (parresia, speaking the truth) is in opposition to rhetoric. Foucault is not entirely consistent on his view of rhetoric, but he generally has a limited post-Ramus view of rhetoric as embellishment and manipulation (The Government of Self 229, 236, 266, 304, 320, 334). Most current rhetoricians would argue that parresia and this style of letter writing have their own rhetoric, he nonetheless points to the importance of authenticity to the care of self and, by extension, to what will later emerge as the personal essay: the connection between self and knowledge about living. In The Government of Self and Others, he also ties parresia to the maintenance of democracy (152–55). As Gullestad wrote, “A published life story can be seen as a way to take part in civil society, to exercise citizenship and democratic participation” (239). There is more at stake in writing about the self than just the self.

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To explain the significance of what we might call Montaigne’s countermodernism, I am going to jump ahead to Nietzsche, relying heavily on Pippin’s Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Pippin states “the problem of value” is at the “heart of Nietzsche’s interests” (1), that he was concerned with “how we should understand what happens when people appeal to normative considerations, or try to live well, how those norms have come to matter to people, how even they could or could not come to matter” (8). In terms of rethinking values and the effect of values on how we live, Pippin sees Nietzsche as working within the tradition of the “French moralists”: Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and Pascal. When we are faced with the loss of traditional values in the wake of the Enlightenment, which Nietzsche presents as the death of God, how do we react? Do we become like the madman in The Gay Science who searches for God in the middle of the day with a lantern in his hand (§ 125)? Or, do we accept boredom or nihilism? Do we simply shutdown due to what Pippin calls “a failure of desire.” Pippin writes: “The failure of desire and its experiential manifestations in everyday life—boredom, loneliness, and fatigue—are very hard to diagnose and extremely hard to respond to” (64). Without God or a metanarrative, where does suffering leave us? For Nietzsche, the role of values in our lives is complex. He believed that traditional values, like God, are no longer worthy of our belief, and he actively questions these values in his genealogies, arguing that the values are not absolute but historical and contingent. As we discard staid, fossilized values, embedded in tired metaphors, we open ourselves to freedom. But what do we do with that freedom? Nietzsche wanted to find a way to act within this freedom, taking life on its own terms, accepting “the burden of the question of the meaning of suffering,” to find, in other words, a way to be the kind of individual who engages in the struggle of life. Pippin writes: The somewhat mythic picture here is straightforward: the natural world is a world without genuine individuality (just mere particularity, in Hegel’s language), is formless, brutal, chaotic, and indifferent, and to live a human life is (and essentially is only) to resist this, to make oneself something other than this, all because, at least up till now, we have not accepted it and have found a way to provoke such dissatisfaction in others and for posterity. This resistance amounts to achievement of what Nietzsche calls ‘the sovereign individual,’ in which individuality is understood as always a kind of fragile, unstable, threatened achievement, not an original state of being. (67)

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Let me tease out some implications of Pippin’s connection of Nietzsche to the “French moralists.” The personal essay, once Montaigne established it as a genre, is a historical project that includes an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethic. The project, which Pippin calls a “fragile collective historical achievement,” is concerned with continually creating the ethical individual who both questions values, including the seemingly insignificant habits of the quotidian, and establishes values through engaging in the world in a way that leads to a robust life. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault writes about ethopoiein, a Greek term used by Plutarch and Denys of Halicarnassus: “Ethnopoiein means making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence. Ethopoios is something that possesses the quality of transforming an individual’s mode of being” (237). It is by living an ethical life that we can write with authenticity, but it is also through authentically exploring our connection to life in our writing that we can transform ourselves into more fully ethical beings. Again, this is what Bakhtin means by answerability.

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Modern Library, 1907, 1999. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin, 1963, 2006. ———. The Human Condition. Chicago UP, 1958. ———. The Life of the Mind. Harvest, 1971, 1978. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken, 1948, 2004. ———. “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” In Responsibility and Judgment. 17-48. ———. Responsibility and Judgment. Ed. Jerome Kohn. Schocken, 2003. ———. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment. 49-146. ———. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment. 159-89. Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Philip Burton. Everyman’s Library, 2001. Bakhtin, M.M. “Art and Answerability.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 1-3. Brockmeier, Kevin. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade. Vintage, 2014.

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Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. California UP, 1954. D’Agata, John D., ed. The Lost Origins of the Essay. Greywold, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collége de France 1982-1983. Ed. Frederic Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982. New York: Picador, 2005. Franzen, Jonathan. “The Essay in Dark Times.” The End of the End of the Earth: Essays. Picador, 2018. Gullestad, Marianne. “Tales of Consent and Descent: Life Writing as a Fight against an Imposed Self-Image.” In Eakin The Ethics of Life Writing. Cornell UP, 2004. 216-43. Hoagland, Edward. “The Courage of Turtles.” Heart’s Desire: Essays from Twenty Years. Summit, 1988. 29-35. Jensen, George H. Identities Across Texts. Hampton, 2002. Kaag, John. Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018. Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. Harvard UP, 1982. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. Michigan State UP, 2016. Lazar, David and Patrick Madden. After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover The “Essays.” Georgia UP, 2015. Lopate, Phillip. “Writing Personal Essays.” In Writing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard. Writer’s Digest, 2001. 38-44. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge and Kegan, 1945. ———. “Reading Montaigne.” Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Northwestern UP, 1964. 198-210. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadow of Time. Yale UP, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Thomas Common. New York: Barnes and Nobles, 2008. Piglia, Ricardo. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years. Restless, 2017. Pippin, Robert B. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Important, 1932, 2018. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: Thinking of the Modern Identity. Harvard UP, 1989.

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Tshipala, Azwinaki. “Questions and Answers.” In The Lost Origins of the Essay. Ed. John D’Agata. 39-40. Whitman, Walt. “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.” In Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. 443-54. ———. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E.  Miller, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 455-501. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Picado, 2008.

CHAPTER 9

Situating Scenes

A man must see his vice and study it to tell about it. Those who hide it from others ordinarily hide it from themselves. —Michel de Montaigne (“On Some Verses of Virgil”) I think that Montaigne should be reread in this perspective, as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self. —Michel Foucault (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) Self-understanding for Montaigne is dialogue with self. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“Reading Montaigne”) Neither the flow of the moment or the eternal norms are responsible, but I am responsible. To understand responsibility, one must recognize a unique self-acting at a unique time and place. Ethical action is born of a sense that each act is unrepeatable and responsibility is nontransferable. —Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)

In To Show and To Tell, Phillip Lopate writes that “the still-evolving pedagogy of nonfiction” often lapses into “fiction envy.” Instructors, adopting the advice they learned in fiction classes, say, “Put everything into scenes” (4–5). In other words, “show, don’t tell.” Lopate argues that, while creative nonfiction does use some of the techniques of fiction, we should also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_9

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recognize that personal essays are different than short stories and that memoir is different than the novel. Yet, how can we teach complex structure in a way that helps students to see options in their own work? If we are going to move beyond simply adopting the pedagogy of fiction in nonfiction instruction and practice, we will need an expanded terminology more suited to the kind of moves that writers of nonfiction make and a theory that helps students to explain where such moves might take them. To explore these issues, I will analyze the structure of Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life,” published in The Sun in 2002, before she wrote either Torch (2006), a novel, or Wild (2012), a memoir, all on the subject of her mother’s early death. As should become apparent, Strayed is doing more than scenes. She moves through multiple kinds of narration (scenes, recurrent time, backstories, fast narration, counternarrative, and metanarrative) as well multiple kinds of reflection (reflection on scenes, reflection on recurrent time, and reflection on historical/cultural norms). As I map Strayed’s moves within this essay, I will refer to the sections by paragraph numbers, which readers will need to add to the original text if they wish to follow the analysis section by section. I will also use “Strayed” to refer to the author/narrator and “Cheryl” to refer to the author/hero, the character on the page.

Scenes Strayed begins “The Love of My Life” with a scene, which can be defined as the narration and crafting of a once-occurrent event (¶s 1–13). The scene begins: The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything. “Yes,” I said. “I thought so,” he said slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I rolled the rings around on my fingers. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother’s. I’d taken hers off her hand after she died. It was nothing fancy: sterling silver, thick and braided. “You look like the kind of girl who has a cat.”

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The opening scene—fully mimetic, with description, action, characters, and dialogue—makes for an effective opening. The unveiling in the first line—a confession—draws the reader in with a hint of eroticism, but that is soon dispelled. Within a few lines, readers become concerned for Cheryl’s safety, almost pleading with her to stay in the café, but she doesn’t, as if moving without volition. The man and Cheryl kiss, the man bites her lip, she screams, he pushes her away, and he says, “You’re not mature.” He leaves. The action in the scene is singular, occurring only once in this precise way; it is also narrated as being a unique event. Strayed’s treatment of her affairs that follow, as we will see, are not narrated as unique, but strung together in a blurry series of a repeated action. Dinesen’s Engaged I

In an essay about Dinesen, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the chief trap in life is one’s identity” (Men in Dark Times 96). Dinesen believed that, if “no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?” (105). In other words, it is possible to write about one’s life to find meaning or possibilities that change how one lives. It is also possible to live in a way that is more like a story—that is, a life that has meaning. The important task is to develop an identity that brings us to life. As Judith Thurman, Dinesen’s biographer, wrote: “The art of the story may well seem ‘hard and cruel’ and yet, [Dinesen] asserts, for its human characters ‘there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. For within the whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that one cry of the heart … Who am I?’” The nature of this connection between Cheryl’s grief and her affairs deserves some comment. It does not meet cultural norms. If Cheryl cried incessantly or spent all day in bed, she would be grieving appropriately, at least, according to most cultural assumptions of her time and place. Having affairs, not so much. Also, the connection between emotion and action is fuzzy and will take Strayed herself a while to understand. We could even say that it wasn’t a connection at all, but a portal, the ending of one phase of a life, the opening of another. At the end of the scene, Strayed says she

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has entered her “life as a slut,” which both sums up the scene and prepares readers for what follows. At the end of the scene, it is Strayed (the narrator, now further along in her healing, having completed her hike in 1995) who reflects on the actions of Cheryl (the character and former self, as she existed between her mother’s death and the hike). This creates a double-­ voiced narration that might be mimicked in fiction, but not fully captured. In fiction, these become separate voices rather than states of the same consciousness. Readers are already thinking beyond Cheryl (the character) to the real person she represents and are fearful about what lies ahead for her. When Strayed (the narrator) ends the scene with “My life as a slut,” we know the embodied Cheryl Strayed is going to come through this— our concern for Cheryl is allayed. To say her “life as a slut” began, an overlapping of the “now” of narrating the story with the “then” that began a pattern of behavior in the past, implies an end point, and lets readers know she is already past it. We hear Strayed’s recovery in her narrative voice. This move, a subtle hint that the author has come through what the reader will experience as the narration unfolds, frames the narration. It alters how we read the entire essay. We don’t read to see if Cheryl will survive; we read to see how the events in the narration and reflections on the events create the person who tells the story. In addition to this opening scene, Strayed includes five more scenes in the essay: a description of two acquaintances who died about the same time as her mother, which some might consider to be more anecdotes than scenes (¶s 31–33); her confession about having affairs to Mark, her husband, about two years after her mother’s death (¶s 42–45); undergoing an abortion, about three years after her mother’s death (¶s 52–57); not being able to write a paper in a college class and graduate on time, a few months after her mother’s death (¶ 59); and losing her mother’s diamond ring while swimming in a river, as she is on her way to begin her hike (¶s 64–69). In total, only thirty-two of the seventy-two paragraphs in the essay are devoted to scenes. As should be already clear, Strayed does “telling” as well as “showing.” The scenes are constantly reframed by what surrounds them. Shortly past Cheryl’s confession about her affairs to Mark is another kind of confession: His sex life temporarily cured me of mine. I didn’t fuck anyone, and I got crabs from a pair of used jeans I’d bought at a thrift store. I spent several days eradicating the translucent bugs from my person and my apartment.

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We expect that Cheryl will, at some point, confess that she had affairs after her mother’s death. We don’t expect that Strayed will follow this momentous confession to her husband with a seemingly trivial confession, not a transgression against her husband but an accident, an embarrassing event that is apparently without moral consequence. This confession could be interpreted in a number of ways. Strayed might want to say that, while she cannot share everything, she is willing to do so. This confession, unlike the confession to Mark that we, as readers, witness, is directed toward the reader. In a way, Strayed is saying that she is even more transparent with the reader than she is even with Mark or close friends. In both kinds of confession, the emotions of an event—whether that be shame or simply embarrassment—are purged as a secret moves into a public space.

Fast Narration Fast narration relates a string of once-occurring events but without creating scenes. In her essay, Strayed includes two sections of fast narration. The first covers the year after her confession about her affairs to Mark, her husband (¶s 47–51); the second covers about six months between her abortion and starting to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (¶s 62–63). The second section begins: Mark and I had filed the papers for our divorce. My stepfather was going to marry the woman he’d started dating immediately after my mother died. I wanted to get out of Minnesota. I needed a new life and, unoriginally, I was going west to find it. I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail — a wilderness trail that runs along the backbone of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains, from Mexico to Canada. Rather, I decided to hike a large portion of it — from the Mojave Desert in California to the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. It would take me four months. I’d grown up in the country, done a good amount of camping, and taken a few weekend backpacking trips, but I had a lot to learn: how, for example, to read a topographical map, ford a river, handle an ice ax, navigate using a compass, and avoid being struck by lightning. Everyone who knew me thought that I was nuts. I proceeded anyway, researching, reading maps, dehydrating food and packing it into plastic bags and then into boxes that would be mailed at roughly two-week intervals to the ranger stations and post offices I’d occasionally pass near.

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While the sections of fast narration relate once-current events (such as Strayed’s divorce), the events are not fully mimetic; they do not include detailed description and dialogue. In the opening scene to the essay, Strayed spends thirteen paragraphs narrating one event that probably spanned less than five minutes. In the above section, Strayed narrates a series of events that covered about six months in a single paragraph. Novice writers rarely shift speed like this. Their narratives tend to be one-­ speed, every event in the sequence is narrated, and every event seems to have equal importance. We might assume that fast narration is simply a technique for shifting narrative speed, covering more ground, and creating a bridge between scenes, but fast narration is more like montage in film. A montage captures an important transition, like a couple falling in love, and builds emotion, through both images and music. In this paragraph, Cheryl is moving from her old life (her family of origin and her marriage) toward a period of transition (her extended hike). As with montage, this section of fast narration builds emotion, largely captured in the key sentence: “Everyone who knew me thought I was nuts.” After years of acting unconsciously, Strayed has begun to take control of her recovery. She is still breaking norms, but now she does so more consciously. She has literally and metaphorically begun a journey.

Recurrent Time Recurrent time, as explained earlier in relation to Sanders’ “Under the Influence,” is sometimes signaled with the modal “would.” It narrates patterns of behavior that occur over an extended period, often relating behavior that is habitual, driven by social norms, or “non-being.” Strayed includes four sections of recurrent time: the effects of her mother’s diagnosis (¶s 14–16), her affairs (¶s 19–21), dreams after her mother’s death (¶s 28–29), and thoughts she experienced during her mourning, such as “I cannot continue to live” (¶ 60). The following quote conveys, in recurrent time, Cheryl’s string of affairs: I did not deny. I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief. The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Formerly Gay Organic

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Farmer, the Quietly Perverse Poet, the Failing but Still Trying Massage Therapist, the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard, the Actually Pretty Famous Drummer Guy. Most of these people were men; some were women. With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed. I didn’t care about them or have orgasms. We didn’t have heart-to-heart talks. I asked them questions about their lives, and they told me everything and asked few questions in return; they knew nothing about me. Because of this, most of them believed they were falling instantly, madly in love with me. (¶ 16)

All of the modes of time, the components of a narrative, can be used for different ends and need to be interpreted in context. Here, recurrent time is used to summarize a habitual pattern that is not so much unconscious as it is unexamined. The men do not have names; they are only referenced with Homeric epithets, which further emphasizes Cheryl’s need to numb herself. Several effects emerge from Strayed’s use of recurrent time here. First, she is marking patterns of behavior that were enacted almost automatically and that need to be understood as part of her healing. Second, with her double-voiced narration, she is both identifying with this behavior and distancing herself from it. Finally, she is confessing to the reader and, at the same time, creating a boundary. As Strayed confesses her affairs to her readers, she does not go into detail. Fully mimetic scenes about one affair after another might be too intrusive, transforming confession into voyeurism.

Backstories Strayed includes only one long backstory in the essay (¶s 33–39). The narration of backstories can be slow, more like scenes, which might also be called flashbacks, or fast, more like fast narration. In her essay, Strayed covers her mother’s past rather quickly. This is the second paragraph in the section: My mother had become pregnant when she was nineteen and immediately married my father, a steelworker in western Pennsylvania when the steel plants were shutting down; a coal miner’s son born about the time that the coal was running out. After three children and nine years of misery, my mother left him. My father had recently moved us to a small town near

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Minneapolis in pursuit of a job prospect. When they divorced, he went back to Pennsylvania, but my mother stayed. She worked as a waitress and in a factory that made small plastic containers that would eventually hold toxic liquids. We lived in apartment complexes full of single mothers whose children sat on the edges of grocery-store parking lots. We received free government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and welfare checks.

The different kinds of elements that make up a complex narrative serve some general function in and of themselves (if a story begins in media res, with a scene, then backstories are needed to provide exposition), but we also need to attend to how elements might complement each other and where they occur in the plot or the emotional arc of a story. The backstory about Strayed’s mother—actually a backstory about Strayed’s relationship with her mother—is positioned about half way through the essay, after the opening scene when Cheryl leaves the restaurant with a nameless man, after she lists in recurrent time a string of affairs with men identified by epithets, and after she feels estranged from her husband. Until this point, we don’t even know much about Cheryl. We have understood the depth of Cheryl’s grief, and some readers might blame her for the affairs. We don’t yet understand why Cheryl’s grief is so intense. In seven paragraphs, Strayed narrates her mother’s struggles and Cheryl’s dependence on her, which contextualizes and grounds Cheryl’s grief.

Counternarrative In counternarrative, the author imagines how life might have taken a different route. In the following paragraph, which occurs when Cheryl is at her emotional nadir (¶ 58), she thinks of a poster she stared at while having her abortion and mourns a lost life: My mother had been dead for three years. I was twenty-five. I had intended, by this point in my life, to have a title of my own: The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. I had planned to be the kind of woman whose miniature photographed face was placed artfully into a poster of a Victorian mansion that future generations of women would concentrate on while their cervixes were forcefully dilated by the tip of a plastic tube about the size of a drinking straw and the beginnings of babies were sucked out of them. I wasn’t anywhere close. I was a pile of shit.

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This counternarrative, which is a kind of reflection, contrasts Cheryl’s dreams to her reality in the wake of her mother’s death. It explores loss, not only the loss of her mother and a pregnancy but also the loss of what might have been. As we hear the narrative voice of Strayed over the voice of Cheryl, who fantasizes about being a writer, parody emerges. Not the belly laugh kind of parody, but the kind of parody that emerges as a mature Strayed views the dreams of the young Cheryl. Within this narrative of transformation, parody allows Strayed to both identify with and distance herself from her former self. Example of Dinesen’s Engaged I

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them. Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without the aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly.… Those who have been through such events can, in a way, say that they have been through death—a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience. Out of Africa The self-loathing that has been building, but not directly narrated, since the beginning of the essay, the culmination of three years of destructive behavior—nonbeing, inauthenticity—is covered in a short paragraph. For readers who were bothered by Strayed reducing the men of her affairs to stereotypes, she here parodically applies the same kind of epithet to herself: The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. At this point, readers realize that all the epithets that substitute for names are also condensed narrations that say something about cultural norms. They are what Steve Almond might call “bad stories.” As we view “bad stories” backward, as tableaux that must play out, they seem predetermined. Counternarratives, in contrast, can reframe the past or explore alternative lives. They create freedom. They don’t so much

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change the present as make the present contingent. If the past can be reframed and if the present is contingent, the future becomes ripe with possibilities. The self-loathing in this paragraph, in strict chronological time, occurs three years after her mother’s death, when Cheryl is at her emotional nadir. Within the text, within narrative time, it is positioned toward the end of the essay, as Cheryl moves toward a turning point. Strayed has already presented glimpses of a later and more settled self, if only in the narrative voice, which makes it easier for readers to absorb this low point without having it control their entire view of Cheryl. Even with the knowledge that Cheryl’s life will improve, it would be difficult to read an entire essay in this emotional register. Strayed hits the mark, then quickly moves on. Parts of this passage (especially, “I was a pile of shit”) seem to come from early in her grieving process; this sentence might have been written in an early draft or even pulled from a journal. Much of the healing that comes from writing about trauma and loss comes with writing more than one work about the same trauma (Strayed’s essay, novel, and memoir) or revisions within a particular work, especially when the author layers the new emerging self (the self that is gaining some distance and perspective on the event) over the former self (who has not yet been able to separate from the immediate effects of the event), as Strayed does here. Healing begins when the author can both identify with the former self and her reflection on it, decentering, almost as if viewing another person (Jensen Identities 94–102).

Reflection On first read, “The Love of My Life” might seem to be more condensed memoir than personal essay. It conveys a broad story; indeed, an outline of the backstory for Wild is there, that is, the events that happen before Strayed’s hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. Once, however, the sections of reflection are considered, we begin to see more affinities with the structure of a personal essay. Strayed includes one section that reflects on a pervious scene (¶ 46), one section that reflects on events told in recurrent time (¶ 17), and one section that reflects on her turning point (¶ 61). Five additional sections of reflection are more global, focused on tying Cheryl’s mourning to cultural norms, including gender roles (¶s 18, 22, 25–27, 30, 40–41). We can see the interplay of events, reflection on events, and global reflection on cultural norms in a sequence that begins with

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recurrent time, as Strayed explains the effect of her mother’s death on her relationship with her husband: When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my husband Mark and I took an unspoken sexual hiatus. When she died seven weeks later, I couldn’t bear for Mark to touch me .… He wanted to make me feel good, better. He loved me, and he had loved my mother. Mark and I were an insanely young, insanely happy, insanely in-love married couple. He wanted to help. No, no, no, I said, but then sometimes I relented. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I breathed deep and attempted to fake it. I rolled over on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to look at him. He fucked me and I sobbed uncontrollably. “Keep going,” I said to him. “Just finish.” But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He loved me. Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem. (¶ 14–15)

While I have been sorting sections of the essay into a taxonomy, the sections are typically mixed. The last line of the above quote (“Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem”) is reflective and begins the move toward the reflection that will occur in the next section, a reflection on this extended pattern of behavior: We aren’t supposed to want our mothers that way, with the pining intensity of sexual love, but I did, and if I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t have anything. Most of all I couldn’t have pleasure, not even for a moment. I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over her death. To experience sexual joy, it seemed, would have been to negate that reality. And more, it would have been to betray my mother, to be disloyal to the person she had been to me: my hero, a single mother after she bravely left an unhealthy relationship with my father when I was five. (¶ 17)

This reflection is more specific, directed at the events told in recurrent time, and personal, tied to Cheryl and her family. The section of reflection that follows is more global as it critiques social norms: We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-­ intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people

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knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time. (¶ 18)

In this sequence, Strayed moves from Cheryl’s behavior, to reflection on that behavior, to a critique of the values of her time and place. As Strayed steps out of the chronology of events, largely constructed in the reader’s mind, she critiques normative scripts, the stages of grief and phrases like “let go of” and “move on from,” which are dialectically set against her experience, both as presented in scenes and as recurrent time.

Metanarrative Strayed closes her essay with three paragraphs of metanarration, where the author emerges from behind the narrative voice to comment on how the story is being written. Strayed’s metanarration can be viewed as a kind of reflection that recontextualizes the entire essay. The section begins after Cheryl has swum in a river and lost her mother’s ring: If this were fiction, what would happen next is that the woman would stand up and get into her truck and drive away. It wouldn’t matter that the woman had lost her mother’s wedding ring, even though it was gone to her forever, because the loss would mean something else entirely: that what was gone now was actually her sorrow and the shackles of grief that had held her down. And in this loss she would see, and the reader would know, that the woman had been in error all along. That, indeed, the love she’d had for her mother was too much love, really; too much love and also too much sorrow. She would realize this and get on with her life. There would be what happened in the story and also everything it stood for: the river, representing life’s constant changing; the tiny blue flowers, beauty; the spring air, rebirth. All of these symbols would collide and mean that the woman was actually lucky to have lost the ring, and not just to have lost it, but to have loved it, to have ached for it, and to have had it taken from her forever.

Strayed begins the metanarrative section: “If this were fiction …” This essay was published in 2002, seven years after her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, but, within the timeline of the essay, before she began the hike. Strayed would later write Torch, a novel about grieving, published in 2006, and then Wild, a memoir about grieving, published in 2012. These three paragraphs seem to map the next decade of Strayed’s life as a writer as well as map some of the differences between fiction and nonfiction, between

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personal essay and memoir. In the novel Torch, the narrator possesses what Bakhtin calls an excess of seeing (“Author and Hero” 22–27). The narrator can “see” the entire story, even parts of it that are not directly narrated. In a new preface written for the 2012 paperback edition, Strayed wrote: “I don’t know precisely what it meant for my stepfather to lose his wife or for my siblings to lose their mother, but in Torch I tried very hard to know” (xv–xvi). Typical of third-person omniscient narration, Strayed moves into the minds of characters, as in the following passage about Bruce, whose wife, Teresa, is dying of cancer: He imagined her dying next month, in February, and then he pushed the idea immediately from his mind, scorched by it. He imagined her dying a year from now—a whole year, an entire blessed year—and it seemed so very far and it seemed that if he knew it were true, that she would live for one more year, he could bear it. (49)

The author of nonfiction does not possess this kind of vision. In contrast, the focus on “The Love of My Life” is clearly on Strayed’s interior. We learn nothing about the interior of other characters, even Cheryl’s mother. In Wild, Strayed’s focus is on plot and scenes. She does not pull back to critique rituals of mourning or gender roles. Rather, Strayed, as narrator, evaluates Cheryl’s experiences, but she stays close to the action. For example, after she loses both her boots and her Bob Marley T-shirt, she writes: “Losing my boots was bad. But losing my Bob Marley T-shirt was worse. That shirt wasn’t just any shirt. It was, at least according to Pace [a fellow hiker], a sacred shirt that meant I walked with the spirits of animals, earth, and sky” (216). This is, arguably, a form of reflection, an interpretation of the significance of Cheryl’s experience, but Strayed doesn’t step out of narration to deal with abstract ideas. While this chapter does not allow for a detailed discussion of each work, Strayed’s three works on the loss of her mother provide a means of understanding how each genre offers different paths for processing trauma.

Image to Narration While the advice “show, don’t tell,” might be sound for beginning writers, teachers of nonfiction should soon move beyond the simple dichotomy to provide their students with a wider array of options. Of the seventy-two paragraphs in Strayed’s essay, only thirty-two can be classified as devoted to scenes. I think most readers would agree that “The Love of My Life” is

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an exceptional essay. So, the forty paragraphs that are doing something other than presenting scenes must be doing something that contributes to the essay. They build stories around the scenes to create a broader context. They also critique cultural scripts. The healing, the growth in understanding, the transformation of self, actually happens around the scenes, and those sections represent a variety of narrative times, a variety of perspectives, actually a variety of ontologies. This chapter is not an argument against the importance of scenes. As discussed earlier, MacCurdy says that traumatic memory takes the form of fragmented images. Part of writing to heal is taking the images and building them into a narration, that is, transforming fragmented images into scenes and using scenes to build a broader narrative. What I am arguing is that, in nonfiction, this is only the first step. The author must then process the scenes through reflection and critique. Said another way, the author must find a personal meaning in the scenes and use them to construct a new identity, one that has agency. The dialectic interplay between event and scene, event and social norms, event and cultural metanarratives, connects the singular experience of an individual with something larger: a search for meaning. The essay is certainly much more than a linear narrative in chronological order, that is, a fixed and set story. By jumbling chronology, jumbling also linear thought, looking at herself—actually, multiple selves—from multiple perspectives, Strayed is opening herself to freedom, to the possibility of change. She owns, embraces, the singular, once-occurring events that she presents in scenes and critiques the norms that surround the scenes, which reframes her experience. She writes herself into a new self. Detour to Genre: Ethics through the Lens of Genre In her seminal “Genre as Social Action,” Carolyn Miller defined genre as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (159). Miller’s article has been frequently cited because it points us toward the ultimate ground of a genre—the practice of writers and the expectations of readers within a particular social context, which might range from writing memoranda within in specific company to writing an op-ed for the New York Times. All genres are complex. While they might have overtly specified expectations, such as a style manual, they also operate under what Foucault called “tacit rules,” that is, expectations that even the most seasoned member of that discourse community knows but is unable to articulate

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(“Truth and Power” 51–75). In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Bakhtin also discussed the importance of the social structures, which he calls “spheres,” that ground and modify genre: “Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given sphere” (80). While I have been suggesting that a number of perspectives on genre are useful to the writer in terms of seeing options within a genre, I agree with Miller and Bakhtin that the ultimate ground for the most comprehensive understanding of a genre is gained from an immersion into the “typified rhetorical actions” within a “recurrent situation” or “sphere.” This is why ethical issues often arise as an author moves from one genre to another, from one sphere to another. The controversy surrounding Gay Talese’s The Voyeur’s Hotel involves this move from one “recurrent situation” to another, as explored in the documentary Voyeur. Talese is a veteran reporter for the New York Times, and it is clear that he operates from the ethics of the field: His primary concern is getting the story right. In The Voyeur’s Hotel, he writes about Gerald Foos, owner of a small hotel in Colorado, who modifies the hotel’s attic so he can watch his patrons, without their knowledge, and write meticulous notes on their behaviors, as if he were a sociologist. Foos claims to operate within the norms of a discipline, but he is clearly an outsider. (His methodology would almost certainly be condemned by an Institution Review Board.) Even before Talese’s book was published, Paul Farhi, a reporter for the Washington Post, investigated the story and found many of Foos’ notes on observations happened after he had sold the hotel. Thinking that Foos had lied to him, Talese decided, in effect, to denounce his own book. Later, Foos explained that the new owner allowed him to continue to view patrons after he sold the hotel. And so, Talese felt ethically justified to start promoting his book again. This is an interesting story of how murky ethics can become as one shifts venue or sphere. If Talese were investigating a story of political corruption and publishing that story in the Times, it makes sense that his ethical focus should be to get the story right. He would also follow other norms of journalism and the Times, such as, fact-checking, allowing the subject of the story an opportunity to respond, and so on. And he would be ethically bound to publish what he had found. As he moved from writing for the Times to writing books for the popular press, do the same norms apply? Is The Voyeur’s Hotel more like a memoir, oral history, or

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social history? Is it enough that Talese carried his role as a reporter and the ethics of writing for the Times into writing about a hotel owner who spies on his patrons? Or, should he have considered an entirely new frame of ethical questions? Is it acceptable to objectively report on a hotel owner whose actions are clearly unethical? Foos himself demonstrates an odd ethical judgment—or rationale— about his viewing. No one knew they were being viewed, so no harm was done. Talese quotes him as saying: “A guest is entitled to his or her privacy and must never know it has been invaded” (26). Talese’s ethics seem no better. During his first encounter with Foos, Talese accompanies him on one of his nightly visits to the attic and watches a couple engaged in fellatio. Viewing from the attic, Talese did not realize that his necktie had slipped through the vent and into the hotel room below: The wide-eyed facial expression of Gerald Foos reflected considerable anxiety and irritation, and, though he said nothing, I felt chastened and embarrassed. If my wayward necktie had betrayed his hideaway, he could have been sued and imprisoned, and the fault would have been entirely mine. My next thought was: Why was I worried about protecting Gerald Foos? What was I doing up there, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project? When he motioned that we leave the attic, I immediately obliged, following him down the ladder into the utility room, and then the parking area. (33–34)

Talese seems a bit out of his element in terms of knowing how to assess his situation, as out-of-place as his wardrobe is for crawling through an attic. I am unaware of anything in the ethics of journalism that addresses an issue like this, probably because it is not a “recurrent situation.” While Talese here seems to be on the verge of coming to an understanding of how he is involved in a sleazy situation, he cuts his reflection short and continues with the project. Talese’s primary concern seems to relate to his reputation as a journalist: Is my source lying to me? Should I have done more to fact-check my story? Although it would be interesting to discuss these issues from the perspective of journalism, it might be more interesting to explore a hypothetical question: How might Talese have written differently if he were consciously working in a different genre? If he were writing a personal essay about meeting Foos and going with him to view a couple in the privacy of their room, would he have pushed his reflection further? Would he have seen the entire project through a different lens?

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Works Cited Almond, Steve. Bad Stories: What the Hell Happened to Our Country. Red Hen, 2018. Arendt, Hannah. “Isak Dinesen.” In Men in Dark Times. Harvest, 1968. 95–109. Bakhtin, M.M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapnov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. 4–256. ———. “The Problem with Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Texas UP, 1986. 60–102. Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. Modern Library, 1937, 1992. Farhi, Paul. “Author Gay Talese Disavows His Latest Book Amid Credibility Questions.” The Washington Post, 30 June 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/author-­gay-­talese-­disavows-­his-­latest-­book-­amid-­ credibility-­questions/2016/06/30/1fede2b8-­3e22-­11e6-­84e8-­1580c7db52 75_story.html Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Ed., Paul Robinow. Pantheon, 1984. 51–75. Jensen, George H. Identities Across Texts. Hampton, 2002. Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. Free Press, 2013. MacCurdy, Marian M. “From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use.” In Writing and Healing. Ed. Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy. NCTE, 2000. 158–200. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Reading Montaigne.” Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Northwestern UP, 1964. 198–210. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Sanders, Scott Russell. “Under the Influence.” In Earth Works: Selected Essays. Indiana UP, 2012. 56–68. Strayed, Cheryl. “The Love of My Life.” The Sun Magazine (September 2002). Web. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/321/the-­love-­of-­my-­life ———. Torch: A Novel. Vintage, 2005, 2012a. ———. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Knopf, 2012b. Talese, Gay. The Voyeur’s Hotel. Grove, 2016.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

If my mind could take a stand, I would not be “essaying” myself, I would be coming to a resolution; but it is forever being trained and tested. —Michel de Montaigne (“Repenting”) Giving one’s word shows that human speech, not content merely to indicate value, can itself become a value. One’s word of honor is a fixed point amidst all our vicissitudes: it is through the promise that we pass from personal time to personal eternity. It raises up life, a domain of habit and desire, to the rule of the norm, the consciousness of value by means of which the person makes up his mind to become what he is. —Georges Gusdorf (Speaking) The more the “self” wants to be full, well rounded, and complete, the less it can defend itself against transformations. If there is anything guaranteed to produce insanity, it is an autonomous “self” without attachments and without an owner; it will be left without care, without defense against attacks; it will encounter the beings of metamorphosis as entities that threaten or betray it. —Bruno Latour (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence)

In the opening to volume six of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard, the character on the page, is waiting for the publication of volume one, which readers worked through in some distant and extended past, or 2448 pages ago. My Struggle is a work Knausgaard calls a “novel” of “day-to-day life.” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6_10

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He has also called it autobiography, which he wrote relying entirely on his memory without any supplementary research. Now, as publication of the first volume looms, he has sent it to some of the relatives and friends who are “characters” on its pages, and he is nervously awaiting their reactions. It is unclear whether he sent a draft or proofs, but it is clear that the work is already in production. There might be time to fictionalize the names of some “characters” and maybe cut or revise some sections, but momentum is building. Knausgaard has invested much in the project. He wants to see it published. Now, the time of the “novel” and the time of the reader seem to merge. Volume six is like a serpent that has begun to eat its own tail, and, as his uncle accuses Knausgaard of distorting the truth, the author is shaken. The first five volumes, a memory dump, an essentially monologic inscription of Knausgaard’s emerging identity, begins to shift toward the dialogic. In the forthcoming volume one, Knausgaard wrote about the death of his father who had been drinking too much and living with his mother in squalor. After reading it, Gunnar, Knausgaard’s uncle, begins to send the author emails. He accuses him of “verbal rape,” threatens a lawsuit, points out what he feels are errors and distortions. The threats send Knausgaard into a downward emotional spiral. In one of his many phases of trying to analyze and justify what he has written, he imagines, as he is in the process of doing laundry, what it would be like to defend himself in a court of law: Why not fight back? I straightened my shoulders, and there, in the midst of all of the journalists and inquisitive onlookers, perhaps a hundred in total, I began to speak, vividly and full of insight, about the relationship between truth and the subject, literature’s relationship to reality, delving into the nature of social structures, the way a novel of this kind exposed the boundaries to which society adhered but which remained unwritten and were thus invisible insofar as they were melded into us and our self-understanding, and how they for this reason had to be breached before they could be seen. But why did they have to be seen, my defense lawyer asked. There is something all of us experience, which is the same for all human beings, I replied, but which nonetheless is seldom conveyed apart from in the private sphere. All of us encounter difficulties at some point in our lives, all of us know someone with a drinking problem, mental issues, or some other kind of life-­ threatening affliction, at least this is the case in my experience; every time I meet a new person and get to know them, some narrative like this will eventually come to the surface, a tale of sickness, decline, or sudden death. These things are not represented and thereby seem not to exist, or else to exist as a burden each of us must bear on our own. (184–85)

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This is a small sample of Knausgaard’s reflection on why he wrote in such detail about his life; this self-analysis of his project takes many forms and extends across the 1152 pages of the English translation of volume six. What we have in volume six might very well be the most extensive reflection of an author on the ethics of his own work. In fact, I know of no other work that covers such an expanse of time that it begins to comment on the reception and impact of the work’s publication. At one point, he extensively analyzes the ethics of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow beyond Dreams, a short novel about the death of Handke’s mother, and he seems to conclude that his book is different. Bakhtin would agree. He would say events are singular, and so are books and their contexts. The ethical decisions of the author of one book are not easily transferred to another. Bakhtin, I believe, would also say that in writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, authors are exploring how to live with others, so it makes sense that they would bring others into their process (Morson and Emerson 15–36). In volume six, even when Knausgaard is not directly addressing the impact of his writing on his life, the lives of those around him, including the potential impact on his children, the action seems to take the controversy, which soon became front-page news, and place it in a new perspective. Shortly after the imagined courtroom scene, Geir, his lifelong friend, visits. Geir shares a story about how his downstairs neighbor had complained about Geir’s loud footsteps so often and so irrationally that he decides to go to “war” with him. He buys a pair of clogs and starts stomping around in his apartment. Is Geir suggesting that Knausgaard needs to quit trying to appease his uncle and go to war? Knausgaard does not offer simple answers to Geir or himself, and I suspect that readers of My Struggle will never tire of arguing about the ethics of the project. Should he have shown earlier drafts to relatives and friends and invited them into his process much sooner? Should he have done research and checked facts? Should he have changed names? Knausgaard explores all of these issues and more, but what seems central to his reflections in volume six is that he should tell the truth about himself and the world he lives in, which also means telling the truth about others—at least, the truth about his own subjective view of them. Yet, he seems to have been entirely unprepared for their reactions. When Knausgaard is discussing Uncle Gunnar’s emails with Christina, Geir’s wife, she asks, “Weren’t you expecting it?” He answers:

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“No,” I said. “Not even close. I thought maybe he might be a bit peeved, but I hadn’t anticipated anything like this, I’ve been really naïve, as it turns out. I thought I was writing about stuff that happened, and I hadn’t imagined people could object. I realized it might annoy a few people, I was prepared for that, and maybe they’d want their name taken out, but I never envisaged anyone would want to stop it. Or get so ridiculously worked up.” (287)

It is interesting that Knausgaard starts to reflect on self and his project once others enter into his process. Certainly, one of the reasons for writing about others is so that they can challenge our view of self, our memories, our constructed stories, that is, if we choose to bring them into our writing as early readers. As discussed earlier, Bakhtin says that it is others who consummate us and give us, in fragments, an objective—alternative—view of ourselves. They can become partners in our project of self. It would make sense to include their reactions in our process, but Knausgaard did not even share drafts with his wife. As mentioned earlier, he set up rules for writing the “novel” and then he wrote rapidly, including all his memories, without research, fact-checking, or judgment. This might be true for volumes one through five, but volume six is different. In the middle of volume six, sandwiched between Part I and Part II, is a 439-page personal essay titled “The Name and the Number.” It is hard to know what to make of the extended essay, which covers a wide range of topics. It almost seems as if Knausgaard took all of the contextualizing comments one finds in a typical novel and the reflection found in memoir, cut them from the rest of the book, and then stitched them together into a single place. Or, perhaps, he is giving the reader a survey of the intellectual work behind his book. Knausgaard begins the essay with a long discussion about the ramifications of changing names in nonfiction. Even though his uncle wanted him to change the names of all Knausgaards in the work, including that of Knausgaard’s father, he decides he cannot change his father’s name; instead, he leaves his father unnamed. Then, he begins a discussion of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in part, to explain why he borrowed the title of his work from a book that set the Holocaust in motion. Except for a single sentence where he notes, almost as a throw away, that Hitler’s father had changed the family name, the analysis of Mein Kampf appears to be a long digression. But, then, there are moments when Knausgaard seems to be fearing an identification with Hitler, where he strives to make a distinction.

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Knausgaard writes that Hitler “turns his problematic social background to his advantage, at the same time as he keeps private that which would ruin his trajectory” (511). In his work, Knausgaard does not seem to keep anything private. Knausgaard writes: “Hitler’s I is constrained by its feeble mastery of form, inability to mold the language into any true expression of the I and the emotions by which it is pervaded, all he can do is seek to copy the formal qualities of others, in the simplest of ways, a cliché” (630). In his work, Knausgaard breaks with the restrictions of form, writing a work that cannot neatly be placed in a standard genre. Knausgaard critiques the language of the Nazis: “It did not first arise in Mein Kampf, but was gathered and concentrated there and through the author of that book disseminated into an entire society with the aim of turning it completely on its head” (634). In his book, Knausgaard executes an extended analysis of Paul Celan’s “The Straightening,” a poem that he believes counters the language of Nazis. And so on. We come to realize that Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are doppelgängers, the product of mimesis, or counter-mimesis. Much of Knausgaard’s reflection in this extended personal essay, which breaks into the narration, jarring the reader, comes from the willingness to explore an identification with Hitler and the effort of crafting distinctions. After writing about the “I” and the “we,” Cain and Able, and Rene Girard’s theory of violence within a community, he writes: But repetition is also tabooed, the emulative and the echoic, imitation, mimesis being likewise associated with peril, and according to Girard this is quite fundamental. In some primitive cultures twins are killed at birth. Mirrors too are often associated with danger; some cultures forbid the imitation of others, whether by gesture or the repetition of utterances, the doppelgänger has always put fear into people; many religions prohibit the depiction of their deity. (688)

Much of culture and rituals are a form of mimesis, as discussed earlier. Hegel says our identity is tied to others. Lacan says we develop an identity as we recognize ourselves in a mirror. Jung says we develop our conscious identity by suppressing the other we do not wish to become, which forms a shadow self. The more we run from our opposite, the more that evil

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other controls us. And so we write. As we write about self, Knausgaard seems to say, we unavoidably encounter our doppelgänger. One of the lessons we can learn from witnessing Knausgaard’s reflection is that the ethical impact of a work of nonfiction is so complex that it can be paralyzing. Knausgaard does more than worry about the present impact on his relationship with his uncle, wife, brother, and friends; he also worries about the future impact on his children. As publication nears, he seems surprisingly vulnerable. Did he so lose himself in his project that he is now unprepared to defend it? Writing honestly about the self, if we provisionally accept that is possible, involves a dissolution of self. This was, perhaps, even more profound for Knausgaard, who avoided established forms like memoir. Should he have done more to put himself back together, in some way return to form, before he began to share volume one? From Bakhtin, we have learned that form cannot be separated from values. Form is a way of testing and reaffirming values, a way of connecting with tradition and exploring a place in the world that is changing at an accelerating rate. Form might provide order, but the writer also needs to find ways to break from order. Knausgaard does that quite well. What he might have missed is the way that narrative can provide solid ground and a path—or a series of paths. Form constricts, but it is also generative. It helps us to see in new ways. We should think of order and disorder as part of the same process, as a dialectic. We should recognize our connection to others and our independence, as dialogic. In “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book,” Bakhtin wrote: Not merging with another, but preserving one’s own position of extralocality and the surplus of vision and understanding connected with it. But the real question is Dostoevsky’s use of this surplus. Not for materialization and finalization. The most important aspect of this surplus is love (one cannot love oneself, love is a coordinate relationship), and then, confession, forgiveness . . . finally simply an active (not duplicating) understanding, a willingness to listen. This surplus is never used as an ambush, as a chance to sneak up and attack from behind. This is an open and honest surplus, dialogically revealed to the other person, a surplus expressed by the addressed and not by the secondhand word. Everything essential is dissolved in dialogue, positioned face to face. (Italics added, 299)

Understanding another without “merging with another” means listening, offering our surplus, what we understand about the other, with love, in dialogue. It is the process of learning to live with others and the process of

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building community through writing and in writing. In “The Essay in Dark Times,” Jonathan Franzen wrote: One of the mysteries of literature is that personal substance, as perceived by both the writer and the reader, is situated outside the body of either of them, on some kind of page. How can I feel realer to myself in a thing I’m writing than I do inside my body? How can I feel closer to another person when I’m reading her words than I do when I’m sitting next to her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness. But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible only on the page. (7)

For some reason, we feel more open to ourselves and others in genres like the personal essay and memoir where we have the opportunity to reshape our relationship with others. In an interview with Joshua Rothman, Knausgaard said, Well, you can never read an authentic ‘I,’ an authentic self. I think it’s impossible to free yourself from the social being you are. I remember seeing an interview with Ian McEwan where he used the word ‘selflessness,’ and I really understood what he meant: that’s the dream for a writer. That’s a precious place to be—and if you are there then you are authentic.” If being authentic means being free “from the social being” and being “selfless,” then authenticity is nowhere. How is it possible to be authentic in isolation? Seneca and the Stoics wanted to explore the role of the self within a society. Hegel understood that our identity is always tied to others. Bakhtin founded his ethics on polyphony, the interplay of independent voices. Authenticity and ethics are about learning to live with others within a community. We need to “know the self,” but we can only come to self-­knowledge among others. This is how we should view authenticity, as something like the process of Bildung, exploring the potential of the self, not in isolation, but within a community.

Late in My Struggle, Knausgaard asks, “What good would all of these feelings and musings do?” (1052). He seems to be asking, “What is the value of care of self?” I will let James Baldwin provide an answer: I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always

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had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-­ white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem.” (I Am Not Your Negro 56)

If we fail to come to terms with our own subjectivity, how can we relate to others? How can we teach? How can we even raise our children? As Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, which was published in 1962 but is even more resonant as I am drafting this in 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, murdered by a police officer who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds: “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and clarity not to teach your children to hate” (99–100). Authenticity is not about achieving absolute knowledge of the self. It is about realizing that what we hold inside—guilt, shame, anger, trauma—affects how we live among others. Authenticity is more important than feeling at peace with oneself. It is realizing that our subjectivity affects others, and we have a responsibility to clean our own house. Reflection and confession are part of our journey. Writing imperfect stories, full of gaps, fissures, and uncertainty, moves us past stories that become self-imposed borders. Self-knowledge is our journey, but we do not travel alone. We find ourselves among others as we begin to understand how they have played a role in shaping us, and that self-knowledge is the foundation of a healthy, pluralistic community. Much is at stake.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. M. “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book.” In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. 283-302. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1963, 1992. Franzen, Jonathan. “The Essay in Dark Times.” The End of the End of the Earth: Essays. Picador, 2018. Gusdorf, George. Speaking. Northwestern UP, 1979. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. I Am Not Your Negro. Film script. Directed by Raoul Peck. From texts by James Baldwin. Vintage, 2016. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Volumes 1-5, trans. Don Bartlett. Volume 6, trans. Don Barlett and Martin Aitkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013-2018.

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Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 2013. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Rothman, Joshua. “Knausgaard’s Selflessness.” Interview. New Yorker, 20 April 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-­turner/knausgaards-­selflessness Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Complete Classics, ND.

Index

A Achebe, Chinua, 101, 102 Adams, Henry, 159 Adderall Diary, The (Elliott), 35 Afropessimism (Wilderson), 92, 93, 95 After Montaigne (Lazar and Madden), 165 Alcibiades (Plato), 1, 141 Alcoholics Anonymous(AA), 3, 110, 111, 139, 141 Alcoholism, 84 Alieva, Olga, 3 Almond, Steve, 179 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 152 Anderson, Charles W, 81, 82 Anderson, Sherwood, vii, viii, 35 Answerability, 5, 51, 71, 115 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Gauttari), 60 Archetypes, 101, 102 Arendt, Hannah, 6–7, 95, 102, 114, 115, 153, 160, 163–165, 173 “Arguing with Life Stories” (Lauritzen), 5

Aristotle, x, 3, 5, 15, 16, 58, 95, 127, 152 “Art and Answerability” (Bakhtin), 71 Art of Memoir, The (Karr), 123 Art of the Personal Essay, The (Lopate), 105 Audience, vii, 8, 15, 21, 50, 59, 72, 141, 145, 152 Augustine, Saint, 1–3, 21–23, 63, 97, 121, 122, 131, 137, 138, 140–142, 145, 149–154, 156, 157, 159, 165 Aursland, Tonje, 36 Author-creator, 43, 105, 107, 108, 114 “Author and Hero” (Bakhtin), 10, 73, 98, 127, 140, 183 Author-hero, 105, 107, 108 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), 23, 45, 52, 160 Autofiction, 16, 39 B Backstory, 172, 177–178, 180 “Backward Glance, A” (Whitman), 153

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. H. Jensen, The Ethics of Nonfiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39186-6

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200 

INDEX

Bakhtin, M. M., 4, 5, 10, 13, 15, 27, 35, 37, 42, 43, 47, 52, 71–73, 78, 86, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 105, 109, 110, 114, 116, 117, 125–127, 132, 138–141, 143, 145, 168, 183, 185, 191, 192, 194, 195 Baldwin, James, 139, 144, 195, 196 Barthes, Roland, 16, 94 Baudrillard, Jean, 51 Baumlin, James, 5, 72 “Being Presumptuous” (Montaigne), 142 Bending Genres (Singer and Walker), 38 Benjamin, Walter, 13 Bergson, Henri, 57, 58 Between the World and Me (Coates), 69, 71 Bialostosky, Don, 94 Bildung, 8–10, 47, 163, 195 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 67 Black White and Jewish (R. Walker), 125 Bloom, Lynn Z., 29, 33, 34, 65 Body, 6, 10, 22, 26, 27, 33, 40, 50, 51, 60, 61, 64–67, 69–71, 73, 80, 85, 96, 101, 107, 122, 126, 130, 133, 140, 195 Bourdieu, Pierre, 58, 59, 62 Bracketing, 40–42 Brockmeier, Kevin, 160 Bureaucracy, 61, 114, 161 Burke, Kenneth, 14, 160 C Capital Is Dead (Wark), 61 Capote, Truman, 38 Care of self, 1–3, 5–13, 49, 166, 195 Carnival, 7, 8, 49, 110–112, 114–118, 163 Cartesian, 10, 14, 153

“Case for Reparations, The” (Coates), 71 Chains of reference, 46 Charon, Rita, vii Childhood, A (Crews), 123 Christman, Jill, 40–44 Chronology, 30, 83, 93, 94, 96, 117, 132, 133, 182, 184 Cicero, 72 Coates, T-Nehisi, 69–71 Commonplace book, 2, 9, 17–18 Community, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 22, 33, 44, 61, 72, 95, 134, 140, 141, 144, 184, 193, 195, 196 Condon, Matthew G., 137 Confession false, 143–146, 154 triadic structure, 141 warmth, 138–141 Confessions, The (Augustine), 1, 3, 21–23, 63, 97, 121, 143, 145, 149, 150, 152 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 97, 132 Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey), 123, 128, 132 Conrad, Joseph, 101–103, 112, 113 Conrad’s Shadow (Lawtoo), 101, 156 Consummation, 40, 41, 78, 125–127, 132, 192 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty), 66, 111 Contract, see Nonfiction contract Core self, 25, 26, 46, 47, 58, 67, 108 “Corn Maze” (Houston), 21 Counter-narratives, 87–90, 130, 172, 178–180 “Courage of Turtles, The” (Hoagland), 156 “Crack-Up, The” (Fitzgerald), 79, 80, 83 Crews, Harry, 123 Crouser, G. Thomas, 30

 INDEX 

D D’Agata, John, 2, 32–34, 44, 45, 48, 51, 64, 166 Darkroom (Christman), 40, 41 Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow), 7, 49, 61, 115, 116 Day, Cathy, 42–44 De Quincey, Thomas, 123, 128, 132–136 Debord, Guy, 13 Decentering, 14, 90, 103, 156, 180 Deleuze, Giles, 60, 61, 66, 102 Demasio, Antonio, 25, 47 Descartes, René, 6, 10, 146, 153 “Decent and Indecent” (Freadman), 4 Dialectic, 5, 7, 8, 24, 25, 118, 151, 152, 162–164, 184, 194 Diaries of Emilio Renzi, The (Piglia), 52 Diary, 37, 52, 72, 97, 129, 130, 133, 134 Didion, Joan, 29, 85–88, 95, 111, 123 Dillard, Annie, 83, 84 Dinesen, Isak, 173, 179 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 64 Discourse Networks (Kittler), 11 Dispatches (Herr), 31 Doppelgänger, 101, 103, 193 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 92, 143, 194 Double-voiced, 52, 98, 174, 177 Dunne, Gregory, 85 E Eakin, John Paul, ix, 15, 23 Educated (Westover), 128, 129 Education of Henry Adams (Adams), 16, 160 Eggers, Dave, 30, 31 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 7 Elliott, Stephen, 35, 36 Elvis and Me (P. Presley), 140 Emerson, Caryl, 4, 15, 35, 71, 72, 86, 95, 191

201

Empathy, 9, 10, 49, 104 Environment, 3, 58, 60, 72, 106, 156, 157 Epicureans, 4 Epistemology, 5, 9–11, 22, 146, 152, 162, 163, 168 Essais (Montaigne), 3, 72, 86, 132, 165, 166 “Essay in Dark Times” (Franzen), 154, 195 Ethics of Authenticity, The (Taylor), 25, 28, 49 Ethos, 5, 72, 73, 105, 142, 145, 165, 166 Evolving Self (Kegan), 155–159 Excess of seeing, 43, 52, 183 Experience, vii, ix, xi, 4–11, 13, 15, 25–27, 35, 40, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69–71, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 102, 108, 117, 125, 131, 144, 146, 152–154, 161–163, 166, 174, 179, 181–184, 190 F Fact, 159 Fact-checking, 32, 33, 51, 192 Facts, xi, 4, 23, 29, 30, 32–36, 38–40, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 51, 67, 89, 124, 133, 138, 142, 151, 153, 166, 191 Fake news, 39 Fanon, Frantz, 67 Fast narration, 95, 172, 175–177 Febos, Melissa, 65, 66 Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, The (Brockmeier), 160 Fiction, x, xi, 6, 16, 17, 29–31, 33–36, 38–45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 62, 65, 88, 89, 105, 107, 114, 117, 124, 143, 171, 172, 174, 182, 191

202 

INDEX

Fictive memoir, 38 Fingal, Jim, 32–34, 44, 51 Fire Next Time (Baldwin), 139, 196 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 35, 79, 80 Flashback, 177 See also Backstory Flash cuts, 85, 86 Floyd, George, 196 “Forms of Time” (Bakhtin), 116 Foucault, Michel, 1–6, 8, 9, 17, 18, 59, 64, 68, 72–74, 107, 115, 117, 141, 152, 163, 166, 168, 184 Frank, Arthur W., 89, 93, 95 Franzen, Jonathan, 154, 195 Fraser, Sylvia, 40 Freadman, Richard, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 39 “From Trauma to Writing” (MacCurdy), 81 Fry, James, 30, 31 G Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 68, 167 Genealogy, 67–71 “Genesis” (Day), 42 Genre, ix–xi, 2, 3, 5, 8–18, 29, 32–34, 36–39, 42, 43, 45–47, 51, 52, 64, 68, 72–74, 86, 97–98, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 114, 116–118, 129, 132–136, 138–143, 145–146, 155, 159, 164–168, 183–186, 193, 195 blurred, 36 “Genre as Social Action” (Miller), 184 Girard, René, 193 Glascott, Brenda, 74 Gorgias (Plato), 164 Gornick, Vivian, xi, 39, 63 Government of Self and Others (Foucault), 8, 166

Graeber, David, 7, 8, 13, 14, 24, 49, 61, 62, 115, 116 Guattari, Félix, 60, 61, 66, 102 Gullestad, Marianne, 82, 166 Gusdorf, George, 189 H Habits, 7, 9, 11, 18, 28, 57–74, 108, 115, 135, 142, 156, 159, 162, 168, 189 Habitus, 57–74, 115, 155 Hacking, Ian, 27, 49, 61 Hadot, Pierre, 3 Handke, Peter, 191 Harris, Wendell V., 39 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 101, 102 Hegel, G.W.F., 8, 9, 25, 47, 62, 68, 103, 163, 167, 193, 195 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 131 Heller, Nathan, 85 Hemingway, Ernest, 16, 34, 35 Herman, Judith, 80 Hermeneutics of the Subject, The (Foucault), 1, 4, 5, 8, 68, 117, 141, 168 Herr, Michael, 31 Hiking with Nietzsche (Kaag), 154 Historical Ontology (Hacking), 61 History, viii, ix, xi, 1, 2, 9, 12, 14, 17, 23–25, 29, 31, 39, 40, 45, 49, 52, 59, 61, 67, 69–71, 96, 97, 102, 109, 115, 116, 125, 141, 143, 144, 146, 162, 163, 185, 186 Hoagland, Edward, 156–158 Holloway, Travis, 90 Holocaust, 91, 165, 192 Homeric epithet, 177 Hourglass (Shapiro), 131 Houston, Pam, 31

 INDEX 

How to Live at the End of the World (Holloway), 90 How to Revise a True War Story (Young), 80 Hsu, Huan, 29 Human, All Too Human (Neitzsche), 58–59 I Identities Across Texts (Jensen), 27, 96, 103, 163 Identity, viii, ix, 3, 16, 22–29, 35, 47–51, 60, 61, 64, 66, 78, 81, 88, 94, 95, 101–103, 105, 108–111, 117, 118, 121, 122, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 144, 155–157, 159, 173, 184, 190, 193, 195 Ideology, 12, 28, 33, 49, 59, 60, 83 Imagination, 10, 14, 34, 40–43, 61, 78, 89, 90, 104, 116, 179 Inadvertent (Knausgaard), 37 In Cold Blood (Capote), 38 Individual, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 18, 24, 27, 28, 44, 46, 47, 49, 60, 68, 69, 71, 81–83, 102, 103, 107, 113–115, 118, 141, 146, 151, 153, 160, 161, 165, 167, 168, 184 “Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things” (Madden), 63, 146 In Our Time (Hemingway), 34 Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Latour), 62, 189 Internet, 13, 51, 60, 61, 106, 112, 114 I-position, 16, 109, 146 Isak Dinesen (Thurman), 173 Isocrates, 5

203

J Jamison, Leslie, 6, 14, 111 Jensen, George H., 3, 27, 72, 82, 96, 103, 110, 163, 180 Journal, 33, 52, 72, 97, 129, 131, 180 Jung, C.G., 102, 103, 163, 193 K Kaag, John, 154 Karr, Mary, 107, 123 Kegan, Robert, 48, 155–158 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 29 Kittler, Friedrich A., 6, 11, 12 Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 36–39, 45, 189–195 Knausgaard, Linda Boström, 36 Kotzé, Annemaré, 3 L Lakoff, George, 58 Larson, Thomas, 122, 123, 125 Last Street before Cleveland (Mackall), 112 Latour, Bruno, 13, 46, 58, 62, 63, 189 Lauritzen, Paul, 5 Lawtoo, Nidesh, 101, 112, 156 Lazar, David, 165 Lejeune, Philippe, 16, 29, 32, 50, 105, 109 Letters, 2, 18, 38, 40, 42, 63, 69, 72–74, 97, 132, 135, 145, 146, 166 Letter to Editor (De Quincey), 21 Lies, 3, 6, 12, 30, 50, 97, 102, 107, 112, 116, 128, 134, 164, 174 Life of the Mind, The (Arendt), 95, 164 Lifespan of a Fact, The (D’Agata and Fingal), 32, 33 “Life Writing” (Parker), 11

204 

INDEX

“Living to Tell the Tale” (Bloom), 29 Looping, 40 Lopate, Phillip, 35, 64, 65, 105, 107, 159, 171 Lost, The (Mendelsohn), 92 Lost Origins of the Essay, The (D’Agata), 2, 64, 166 Love In the Western World (Rougemont), 96 “Love of My Life, The” (Strayed), xi, 172, 180, 183 Lying (Slater), 38 M MacCurdy, Marian M., vii, 81, 184 Mackall, Joe, 112–114 Maclean, Norman, 16, 39, 82, 87 Madden, Patrick, 63, 146, 165 Mansfield, Nick, 48 McCarthy, Mary, 88, 89, 124, 125 Melville, Herman, 44 Memoir, viii–x, 2, 13, 16, 22, 24, 30, 35–37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 52, 72, 87, 88, 91–98, 102, 106, 112–114, 116–118, 123–125, 127, 128, 131–136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 149, 156, 158, 165, 172, 180, 182, 183, 185, 192, 194, 195 Memoir (Crouser), 30 Memoir (Yagoda), 97 Memoir and the Memoirist (Larson), 123 Memories of a Catholic Schoolgirl (McCarthy), 88–89, 124–125 Memory erased, 129 false, 122, 124, 129 future, 23, 127–131 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 90–92, 94

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 26, 40, 46, 47, 69, 96, 130, 132, 153 Metanarrative, 40, 42, 44, 52, 68, 93, 96, 167, 172, 182–184 Mikhail Bakhtin (Morson and Emerson), 4, 71 Million Little Pieces (Fry), 30, 38 Mimesis, 193 Mindfulness, 11, 63 Modernism, 5, 12, 24, 60, 61, 64, 102, 152 Montaigne, Michel, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 18, 63–65, 67–69, 72, 74, 78, 79, 83, 86, 95, 98, 132, 141–143, 145, 146, 151–155, 159–163, 165–168, 189 “Moral Non-Fiction” (Frank), 89 Morson, Gary Saul, 4, 15, 35, 71, 72, 86, 92, 95, 158, 191 “Mountain Music” (Sanders), 104 Muecke, Stephen, 63 My Father’s House (Fraser), 40 My Struggle (Knausgaard), 36, 37, 39, 45, 78, 189, 191, 193, 195 N Narrative, vii, viii, 4, 27, 31, 34, 38–40, 43, 46, 52, 66, 78–98, 111, 115, 117, 122, 124–129, 132, 143, 174, 176–180, 182, 184, 190, 194 Narrative Freedom (Morson), 92 Narrator, vii, 16, 37, 42, 43, 46, 52, 95, 98, 105, 116, 123, 127, 157, 158, 172, 174, 183 New Journalism, The (Wolfe), 126 New Media, 60, 61 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 58–60, 67–71, 95, 115, 154, 163, 167, 168

 INDEX 

Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Pippen), 67, 167 Nobel, Randon Billings, 17 No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 144 Non-being, 57, 58, 62, 176 Nonfiction contract, 23, 29–39, 42, 45, 50, 51 NonfictionNow conference, ix Nonfictive novel, 38, 39 “Notes from the Underground” (Dostoevsky), 143 Novel, x, xi, 31, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 52, 80, 88, 91–93, 97, 98, 105, 109, 116, 117, 132, 134, 144, 172, 180, 182, 183, 189–192 O “Of Experience” (Montaigne), 64, 160 OK Computer (Radiohead), 12 On Autobiography (Lejeune), 16, 29 “On the Genealogy of Ethics” (Foucault), 57 Ontology, 9–11, 13, 21, 22, 58, 95, 127, 152, 168, 184 On Violence and On Violence Against Women (Rose), 66 Other, the, 72, 103–104, 141, 149–168 “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (Jamison), 6 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 58–59 Out of Africa (Dinesen), 179 Oxford Group, 139, 141 P Pandemic, 112 Parker, David, 7, 11, 15, 25, 94

205

Parresia, 8, 166 Pedagogy, 11, 12, 17, 171, 172 Peirce, C.S., 27 Permanence and Change (Burke), 160 Perry, Imani, 115 Persona, x, 23, 46, 102, 105, 109, 110, 160, 163 Persona essay, 64, 68, 72, 74, 86–87, 95, 105, 145–146, 165–168, 180–181, 192 “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (Arendt), 165 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-­ Ponty), 26, 40, 46, 69, 96, 130, 132 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 8, 62 Philosophical Hitchcock, The (Pippen), 144 Philosophy as a Way of Life (Hadot), 3 Piglia, Richardo, 52, 160 Pippen, Robert B., 144 Place, vii, x, 2–4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 22, 24–26, 41, 43, 47, 50, 51, 60–64, 70, 72, 81–83, 85, 90, 92, 95, 96, 102, 109, 114–116, 118, 122, 123, 126, 130, 131, 135, 138–140, 144–146, 151, 153, 155–158, 161, 162, 166, 173, 179, 182, 191, 192, 194, 195 Plato, 1, 24, 141, 152, 164 Poetics (Aristotle), 15, 16, 95 Polyphony, 92, 109, 195 “Portrait of My Body” (Lopate), 64, 65 Postmodernism, 24, 48 Presley, Priscilla, 140 Private sphere, 190 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin), 102, 109, 143

206 

INDEX

Project of self, 15, 26–28, 47, 124, 192 Prosaics, 4, 27 Proto-self, 25 Protreptic, 3 Public sphere, 113–115 Q Quotidian, 11, 63, 64, 84, 132, 144–146, 168 R Radiohead, 12 Reason, 10, 28, 38, 43, 62, 84, 93, 102, 106, 122, 128, 150, 155, 162, 190, 192, 195 “Recomposing the Humanities” (Muecke), 63 Recovering, The (Jamison), 6, 111 Recurrent time, 84, 85, 172, 176–178, 180–182 Reflection developmental, 156 radical, 155 “Reflections on the Personal Status of the Personal Essay” (Harris), 38–39 “Repenting” (Montaigne), 189 Representing and Intervening (Hacking), 27 Reverence (Woodruff), 141 “Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space” (Glascott), 74 Rewriting the Soul (Hacking), 27 Rhetoric, 15, 16, 71, 152, 166 Rhetoric (Aristotle), x, 3, 16 Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality (Bialostosky), 94 Rituals, viii, 7, 8, 49, 101–103, 111, 116, 183, 193

“River Runs through It, A” (Maclean), 16, 39, 82 Roland Barthes (Barthes), 16, 94 Roles, viii, ix, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 24, 48, 59, 67, 68, 73, 121, 122, 126, 135, 140, 142, 167, 180, 183, 186, 195, 196 See also Persona Romantic self, 7–8, 25 Rorty, Richard, 62, 66, 67, 111 Rose, Jacqueline, 66 Rougemont, Denis de, 96 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 97, 115, 132 S Sanders, Scott Russell, 30, 31, 48, 67, 84, 85, 104, 105, 107–110, 146, 176 Scene, 6, 30, 42, 43, 52, 78, 80, 84–86, 94, 95, 97, 98, 126, 134, 149, 158, 191 “Seeing” (Dillard), 83 Self, vii, ix, xi, 1–4, 13, 15–18, 22–28, 37, 44, 46–48, 52, 58, 59, 61, 71–74, 79, 82, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101–105, 108–111, 113, 122–124, 126, 130–134, 137, 140–145, 149–168, 174, 179, 180, 184, 189, 192–196 Self in Moral Space (Parker), 7, 15, 25, 94 Self-knowledge, viii, 2, 8, 9, 38, 39, 144, 195, 196 “Self-Writing” (Foucault), 17, 73 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 18, 63, 69, 74, 145, 146, 165, 166, 195 Sense of self, 26, 46 Shadow, 11, 58, 103, 193 See also Doppelgänger Shadow-Line, The (Conrad), 112

 INDEX 

Shame, 110, 114, 140, 150, 175, 196 Shapiro, Dani, 131 Singer, Margot, 38 “Singular First Person, The” (Sanders), 30, 146 Situation and the Story (Gornick), xi “Sketch of the Past, A” (Woolf), 106, 133, 134, 136 Slater, Lauren, 38 Smith, John H., 9, 47, 163 Social-constructionism, 24, 26, 27 Social Construction of What? (Hacking), 27, 49 Social media, 13, 58, 61, 83, 114, 140, 143 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord), 13 Socrates, 164 “Solitude” (Montaigne), 146 “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (Arendt), 7 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 39, 150 Sorrow beyond Dreams, The (Hanke), 191 Sources of Self (Taylor), 24 South to America (Perry), 115 Speaking (Gusdorf), 189 Spirit and the Letter (Smith), 9, 47 Stein, Gertrude, 23, 45, 52, 160 Stoics, 3, 4, 161, 195 Stones of Ibarra (Charon), vii Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous (Jensen), 3 Strawson, Galen, 77–79, 82, 83, 85 Strayed, Cheryl, xi, 172–184 Studies in Hysteria (Breuer and Freud), 39 Subjectivity (Mansfield), 1 Subjectivity and Truth (Foucault), 3, 5 Sympathetic co-experiencing, 10

207

T Talbot, Jill, 87, 88, 94 Talese, Gay, 185, 186 “Tales of Consent and Descent” (Gullestad), 82 Taylor, Charles, 24, 25, 28, 49, 152, 153, 156 Techné, 3, 14, 72, 74 Terministic screen, 14, 160 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 102 “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (Arendt), 163 Thurman, Judith, 173 Tillman, Lynn, 52 Time, viii, ix, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11–15, 21–23, 26–28, 31–33, 37, 40, 47–51, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74, 80, 82, 84–98, 108–110, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123, 126, 128–136, 142, 145, 146, 152–155, 161–164, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182, 184, 189–191 Torch (Strayed), 172, 182, 183 To Show and To Tell (Lopate), 35, 171 Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin), 71, 110 “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” (Bakhtin), 102, 138, 194 Trauma, vii, 11–13, 17, 40, 79–83, 93, 96, 122, 124, 180, 183, 196 Trauma and Recovery (Herrman), 80 True self, 25, 26, 28 Truth claims, x, 124 Twelve-step programs, 81, 89 U Unconscious, 25, 59, 163, 177 “Under the Influence” (Sanders), 84, 176

208 

INDEX

“Unnamed and the Defaced, The” (Condron), 137 “Unstoried Life, The” (Strawson), 77 V Verification, 51 Violence (Žižek), 159 Voice, x, 6, 12, 23, 34, 46, 52, 63, 86, 98, 107–110, 112, 128, 152, 156, 164, 166, 174, 179, 180, 182, 195 Voyeur’s Hotel, The (Talese), 185 W Walker, Nicole, 38 Walker, Rebecca, 125, 126 Wark, Mckenzie, 61 Way We Weren’t, The (Talbot), 87, 94 Wengrow, David, 7, 8, 13, 14, 24, 49, 61, 62, 115, 116 Westover, Tara, 128–131 What Is the What (Eggers), 30 “White Album, The” (Didion), 86–88, 95, 111 Whitman, Walt, 39, 150, 153 Wild (Strayed), 172, 180, 182, 183

“Wild America” (Febos), 65 Wilderson, Frank B., III, 92, 93, 95 Wolfe, Tom, 126 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 29 Woodruff, Paul, 141 Woolf, Virginia, 57, 62, 106, 112, 132–136 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 13 Wounded Storyteller, The (Frank), 95 Writing and healing, 180 Writing and Healing (Anderson and MacCurdy), vii “Writing Personal Essays” (Lopate), 159 Y Yagoda, Ben, 23, 97 Yorke, Thom, 12 Young, John K., 80, 82 Z Zeitoun (Eggers), 30 Žižek, Slavoj, 159