"In
a way, all writing is essay writing."
I came upon that remark a few weeks ago in an essay in the New
York Times. It wasn't the main point of the article, and I don't think it's
true, but it struck me because I have found myself in recent months enjoying what
little fiction I read less because of the events being depicted, which tend to
be romantic and predictable, than because of the personality of the narrator or
the moods and opinions offered up along the way by the author or the protagonist.
A
few examples: In Shyness and Dignity,
by Dag Solstad, the protagonist Elias Rukla gives us an acute description of
what it's like to teach the Norwegian classics to a room full of teenagers who
take little interest in Ibsen and seem to resent being lectured to by a
late-middle-aged man who lacks charisma or "relevance." Rukla considers
himself a solid, well-informed citizen serving his country by working to develop
the moral character of its youth, but the thought gives him little satisfaction
because he can't convince himself that anyone is actually listening to what
he's saying.
The
portrait Solstad draws of the disintegration of Rukla's character rang true to
me, because it reminded me of English teachers I had in junior high—mild-mannered
men who had obviously been moved by literature at one time or another, and had chosen
to teach it as a means of remaining involved in the field while also passing
the torch to a new generation that, then as now, wasn't terribly interested in
accepting it.
Along
the way Rukla also delivers some interesting insights into The Wild Duck and the pernicious effects of television. He attempts
to explain why he can now find satisfaction only in long novels of the WWI era—Proust,
Mann, Musil, et. al. A large part of the narrative is devoted to Rukla's best
friend, a dynamic and widely-loved student of philosophy with a brilliant
future who marries and then abandons the woman whom Rukla later took as his
wife.
It's
a pathetic story, really, full of lofty ideals besmirched, relationships of
convenience rather than deep affection, and too much aquavit in the evening. It's
interest is sustained far more by Rukla's interior monologues—his ideas,
impressions, anxieties—than by his fate.
Example
two: Hot Milk
You've
got to love a novel set in the AlmerÃa province of southern Spain. A woman has
arrived with her daughter to consult Dr. Gomez, a famous specialist, about her
lameness. It's a fool's errand, in so far as the woman is only lame some of the time. The story is told by
the daughter, Sofia, a young woman with a degree in anthropology and no life to
speak of, other than that of handmaiden to her mother. On the beaches near
where they're staying she falls into the orbit of a young German couple and
also that of a young Spanish man who tends the booth where people stung by the
jellyfish can get treatment. (She gets stung often.) Her big ambition is to
free the feral dog that barks incessantly from a rooftop nearby.
Sofia's
days consist of swimming, trips to the clinic with her mother, and encounters
with her German woman friend and Dr. Gomez's daughter (who works at the clinic)—and
also with the jellyfish (which the Spanish call medusas.) Dr. Gomez is a
remarkable eccentric. Sofia has trouble determining if he's a Zen master or a
quack, and so do we, but he adds a lively element to the drama.
Just
when things threaten to get dull, Sofia travels to Greece to visit her
long-estranged father and meet her half-sister and step-mother, who's only five
years older than her.
It's
a crisp, intelligent, funny, and forlorn narrative that's going nowhere. Is
Sofia's mother using her lameness to keep her daughter nearby, after having
been abandoned by her husband decades earlier?
Or is it the other way around, with Sofie using her mother as an excuse
to avoid growing up? It hardly matters. What makes the book interesting is
Sofie's descriptions of a surreal landscape and the bizarre events, with
obscure but complicated and often interlocking motives, that she becomes
involved in there.
Example
three: Pond
This
collection of "stories" is actually a collection of interior
monologues, and though the speakers, settings, and time frames differ, they all
sound roughly similar in tone—at least to me they do. Absolutely. The narrator
is female, scattered, depressed, equivocal, observant, conversational, and
often funny. She has an earthy perspective on life and an impressive
vocabulary, is prone to occasional flights of metaphysics and paranoia, has
trouble remembering things, obsesses about trivialities, and yet retains our
interest through page after page of seemingly random and repetitive musings by
means of an artfully varied succession of precise images, naked thoughts, and abject
vulnerability.
In
short, we come to like her and wonder where she's going to wander next, whether
she'll ever remember what she was going to tell us about in the first place, and
whether she'll succeed in bringing things to a close with even an iota of logic
or coherence. Invariably, she does.
One
"story" deals with a dinner party during which the hostess becomes
obsessed with who will sit on the ottoman. Another deals with a sickly woman
who goes out for an evening walk wearing only a raincoat over her nightgown,
sees a man approaching, fears that she's going to be raped, but in a slightly
bemused and detached way, then gets distracted by the movement of a herd of cows
in a nearby field.
Here's
a description of a young woman taking down Christmas decorations. A little
long, I'm afraid, but I can't think of a way to convey the flavor of the
language and the mercurial shifts in focus in a shorter excerpt.
Hard to tell this time of year how long
anything is going on for and for that reason I took it upon myself to intervene
now and then, such as when, just two days after Christmas, I avouched enough
was enough and promptly took down the decorations. I didn’t have a tree, just
some things arranged along the mantel, holly and so on, but since it’s a large
mantel it is something of a feature and therefore very noticeable and I’d made
it particularly resplendent and was first of all very pleased with how it all turned
out. Even so, it quickly became oppressive actually and the holly itself almost
sort of evil, poking at the room like that with its creepy way of making
contact with the air, no I didn’t like it one bit so a week went by and then it
was all got rid of in a flash. The holly I flung directly into the fire
beneath, and it was a young fire because this happened even before breakfast
and as such the impatient stripling flames went crazy with the holly, consuming
it so well, so pleasingly—I was enormously pleased in fact and shoved in branch
after branch even though the flames were becoming really tall and very bright
and the holly gasped and crackled so loudly. That’s right, suffer, I thought,
damn you to hell—and the flames sprouted upwards even taller and brighter and
made the most splendid gleeful racket. Burn to death and damn you to hell and
let every twisted noxious thing you pervaded the room with go along with you,
and in fact as it went on burning I could feel the atmosphere brightening. I
won’t do it again, I thought, I won’t have it in the house again. And I
recalled the sluggish misgivings I’d felt when the man took the money out of my
hand and held up a tethered bundle of muricated sprigs for me to somehow take
hold of in return. Standing there, with this dreadful trident, while his young
son maneuvered a small hand around a grim bag of change. The whole thing was
sullied and I remember at the time feeling faintly that I should just leave it
but then I located the cause of that regrettably irresolute sensation to an
area in me where snobbery and superstition overlap most abominably and I chided
myself for being so affected and fey—what are you some sort of overstrung
contessa, I thought—certainly not, then wish them well and get going. And off
down the Street I bobbed, yet, anachronistic feelings of pity and repulsion
notwithstanding, I had a very clear sense of having succumbed to something I
was not entirely at ease with...
Example
four: So Long. See You Tomorrow, by
William Maxwell.
This
classic story of infidelity and murder in the Ohio farm country isn't nearly as
grisly or erotic as the opening phrase of this sentence might suggest. The
story is told mostly from the point of view of one of the farmers' sons, and
the great event that lies at the heart of it isn't the murder or the
infidelity. Rather, it's the fact that the narrator, years later, passed his
childhood friend in the hall of an urban school and didn't say hello. And most
of the novel's interest, at least for me, lies not in the pathos of how
domestic relationships in hardscrabble rural lives unravel, but in the evocative
youthful descriptions of what it's like to grow up on a farm.
So.
Have I proved my point? Is all writing essay writing? Not really. Essays tend
to be driven by a point or a purpose that's more or less explicit. Once we've
discounted the twist and turns of the plot, the appeal of fiction lies in its
flavor and incidental detail—elements that the typical essay contains only to a
degree at best.
I've
been reading a set of brilliant essays by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa
called The Language of Passion, and
I'd like to go into it a bit, but I'm afraid this entry is getting a little
long.
The
larger statement from which my introductory quotation was lifted is beautiful,
and it takes us beyond the conventional essay form, I think:
In a way, all writing is essay writing, an
endless attempt at finding beauty in horror, nobility in want — an effort to
punish, reward and love all things human that naturally resist punishments,
rewards and love. It is an arduous and thankless exercise, not unlike faith in
God. Sometimes, when you are in the act of writing, you feel part of a
preordained plan, someone else’s design. That someone else might as well be
God. And then one day you rear back and survey everything you have done, and
think, Is this all God had in mind? But it’s all you got.
Here
Roger Rosenblatt is exploring the inadequacy that even accomplished writers
feel when they take a backward glance at their "body" of work. It's
an interesting theme, well handled, and it makes me mildly curious to read something
else he's written. Checking the library catalog on line, I see he's published
several collections of essays, and also a few novels.
Hmmm.