the situation, the story · Sep 21, 05:54 PM · late afternoon

There is a project to finish. Reading, and everything, scrabbles for new purchase.

Recently to that end, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative, one of the frequently cited go-to guides to which one is sent when wanting to know what an essay is and how, or why, would one write about the self. What Gornick does well: close reading of the kind that takes the measure of a sentence or a passage and gleans what makes it tick. She excels at conveying the experience of reading, both the sensuous pleasure she finds as well as the process of creating meaning. Most appealing to her is prose that is cumulative, calibrated, that presents the writing mind behind it as certain both in syntax [not surprising] and assessments [more frustrating] that in their cumulative, calibrated effect tap truth. That strikes me not as certainty necessarily, but life held at a controlled, observable distance, far enough to make the lived feel artful. She sees this as part of the craft of persona, but it’s the type of persona that leaves me weary, that I distrust.

Gornick for her part is unabashed about truth, or at least the truth of a particular moment. While some of the best fiction is told by unreliable narrators, she argues, personal narrative is never, can never be. Writers of nonfiction are “truth speakers”; accordingly, the best essays depend upon a writer who “knows who they are at the moment of writing” [her emphasis]. That knowledge, she says, will arise from the writer examining directly or indirectly a tension within. More interesting is this question of knowing who you are at the moment of writing, the degree to which that is feigned, in what ways the crafted dissemblance that you, the writer, possess such knowledge is core to the persona of the essayist for better, ill, and how many writers at the moment of writing believe in truth that they know much of anything.

Less interesting is the section on memoir, though I find most memoir less in general, but reassuring to me, strangely, is her declaration that Sebald writes not novels but memoir—because I adore Sebald, because I want to wander endlessly the paths of his brain. She saves her most provocative claim for last:

It is, I think, a measure of the bankruptcy of fiction that The Rings of Saturn is repeatedly called a novel. Sebald is doing an old-fashioned thing here, entering into the narrating self in a way that ignores modernism and postmodernism alike and is as far from gargantuan, language-besotted, mythical abstractions of contemporary fiction writers like Pynchon, Powers, and DeLillo as literature will allow itself to go.

”[A]s far…as literature will allow itself to go” is persona, “the banckruptcy of fiction,” tension. How I wish she would write more about the latter.

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Excerpt: After Nature, W. G. Sebald

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