Tell Me a Bit (Less) About Yourself

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From The Wall Street Journal:

In the introduction to a recent collection of his essays called “The End of the End of the Earth,” Jonathan Franzen bemoans the possible end of the personal essay, which he finds currently in eclipse. More and more eschewed by general-interest magazines, “the form,” Mr. Franzen writes, “persists mainly in smaller publications that collectively have fewer readers than Margaret Atwood has Twitter followers.” The internet, especially in its social-media aspect, Mr. Franzen believes, swallowed up most of the old autobiographical material of the essay and has been spitting it out in the form of tweets, Facebook entries, Instagram posts, Reddit comments and other vessels favored by those not noted for their lengthy attention spans. But might something else, something deeper, also be undermining the essay?

The essay needs talented practitioners, readers capable of the mental repose required to take pleasure in it, and connoisseurs with an understanding of the rich tradition out of which it derives. What it doesn’t need is an “-ism” attached to it. An “-ism” presupposes a theoretical explanation, á la postmodernism, deconstructionism, structuralism and other dreary ismatics of recent decades. Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as “a long prose fiction with something wrong with it.” So might one declare the essay a short prose nonfiction with something occasionally delightful about it? Need more be said in a general way about this literary form whose aim is never definitude and whose speciality is specificity?

. . . .

Mr. Dillon himself allows that “it’s a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure, or acutest expression.” The standard psychological problems that writing presents—in the form of writer’s block, neglect on the part of the public, rivalrousness and resentment at the (of course) undeserved success of other writers—are one thing; bringing depression to one’s writing, or using writing as a method of curing depression, quite another. Depression is known for using a full-court press: In Mr. Dillon’s case this means that his book turns out to be more about it, his depression, than about the essay.

. . . .

If I were Brian Dillon’s therapist, the first thing I would tell him is that he has to change his reading habits. The majority of his chapters not devoted to his depression feature comments and quotations from essayists he admires. Almost invariably, these are writers who seek the dark or have themselves been notable for breakdown: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Cioran, Walter Benjamin, Cyril Connolly, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Maeve Brennan, Joan Didion, Anita Brookner, W.G. Sebald and others. These influences are reinforced by his reading of such heavy-breathing critics as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault. All have been fashionable in their day, some retain their cachet even now, but are, as Chris Rock remarked after seeing the movie “The Passion of the Christ,” not that funny.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

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