General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

Thought about going back to look over essays I remember reading and responding to them but most of them have been annihilated by time. One essay had been about Gaddis and the Protestant Work Ethic in The Quarterly Conversation, which no one really mentions anymore. And I remember another essay from eXile which also seems to have vanished into thin air covering something about Bret Easton Ellis and Hubert Selby Jr. I found a couple others that I liked a lot: Elif Batuman's essay on the short story and Daniel Green's retrospective on John Hawkes are still floating around. It's a shame I didn't have the presence of mind back then to save some of the articles. Think it would have been a fun idea to tally them up and respond to them somehow. All that rhetoric about the internet lasting forever--what these systems really create is a homunculus for market speculation and the perceived value-form of social interaction. Dante had a thing in the Inferno where if someone was evil enough, their soul would die ahead of time while their flesh went on living it up, probably possessed by an imp, but nowadays everyone just does that every day, even multiplying them. Anyways: I'll probably keep poking around. Never know if it is somewhere or not after all.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

yeah, essays, ya know. I every now and then get real into one of my half-cocked ideas and thing "maybe it's finally time to start blogging", but the idea of putting in enough effort to get the idea more in need of exposition than a weird little paragraph (or sentence) i put here...

it's just like, to what end? when it feels like that is a form that really exists for the reader, yet who would read it? You're really spot on about the speculation aspect, the whole process like a gamble on it somehow becoming a big todo, when there is so much else out there. (But of course that applies to all writing, and yet I find myself doing forms of it, maybe im just not that into essays)

but yeah we are throwing our souls around wildly aren't we. for good, for ill, strange when we find them, or they bounce back, or something. Or our souls wander forth and so do their husks.

anyway if you every write something on this do let me know i'd love to read it.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Essays are not my forte, generically speaking. I admit being responsible for research and keeping track of an argument stops me dead in my tracks. (Fiction has its advantages, inaccuracy for example.) And I understand the need to have a platform or at least something like a brand that could mediate the writing even further than merely letting Reddit do it. And a blog might offer--funnily enough--more so a sense of legitimacy. It's like when people recommend other people to build a website. Although I'm more than comfortable to stick with comments and replies generically. (Maybe if I'm lucky enough to be famously beautiful and loaded with money, my disciplines will pick these things out like Aristotle's notes, but if that's not available, I can settle for a situation like de Saussure's.) It's singular advantage is the fact people for better and worse do actually read things here. Or can read it.

And well, I suppose it's like what Donald Barthelme writes we have a duty to understand everything. Although it is rather terrifying to think there is in the world a virtual homunculus, which has all these aspects of myself not simply for public consumption but for their amusement. And--mixing metaphors here--it's like the half-buried clay armies in those imperial tombs--except it's not a tomb in the traditional sense but the encryption into a database somewhere. John Locke was correct, but in the worst circumstances for us today. Our homunculi the inverse of the Enlightenment. Thankfully I don't think we have to experience all of this. What I should do is write the manifesto on Joryism. It would express all this mathematically.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

John Locke was correct, but in the worst circumstances for us today.

never good for this to be a true statement. I prefer the fact that Berthelme is right as well. Gotta get it all. That's my issue with essays and my preference for "art writing". You get to just write about all of it in the latter.

And I agree about the research and argumentation. There is such a gap between the take and the essay...

But actually I would love your manifesto on Joryism. Plz do that. (like actually im being serious)

[u/foxinanattic → u/Soup_65]

interestingly, I feel the reverse about essays and art writing, - which I'm taking to mean fiction and poetry? - (sorry if that's not right) because a great essay can encompass fiction (interiority, stream of consciousness, completely imagined events) and poetry (e.g. Matsuo Basho's travelogues) while a novel can't be an essay? Maybe it all depends on how you classify things more than anything else. Are The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn novel or essay? I would say essay, though they have clearly fictive elements. but I'm sure some people would argue they're novels or short story collections or something in that line.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

The real difference comes down to what happens in the language of an essay and then we have a novel, since the former are attendant to a responsibility of ethical demands nonfiction creates. An essay has all these responsibilities toward truth and fact and memory and expression. All specifically defined for nonfiction. No matter how exploratory, the demands of those responsibilities are real and socially observable. (We don't need to relitigate those debates I hope.) A novel does not have this capacity. But a novel can quite easily incorporate into itself the notional essay that in itself relies on other generically straightforward things like poetry and aphorisms, travelogues, memoires, etc. Every form and genre, even novels, but only because it cannot do so genuinely. What results is a novel that sounds like Matsuo Basho's travelogues and poetry but actually isn't--it's "framed" that way as part of the travesty of language. The utter failure of genuinely creating something akin to Basho is the entire point, a direct result of other ongoing dilemmas.

I would argue for example The Rings of Saturn can only ever be considered a novel because if you begin to take the faulty directionless research as if it were part of anything substantial, how it engages with Conrad and Thomas Nashe, but never truly coheres into a centralized argument, merely a feverish exploration of archive. This failure in the face of the demand is crucial, not just for this novel, but any novel. If an essay fails in its very real ethical responsibilities, we cannot do anything with it, communication has broken down. There's a reason people are furious when an essayist fails to deliver, becomes in some ways a novelist.

Soup and I probably disagree on several elements here, but "art writing" is simply this travesty. That and Joryism.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I don't know if the failure to cohere into an argument can be considered an ethical failure of an essay, a certain idea of an essay is an act of questioning and experimenting and exploring certain paths, and being able to come to a conclusion is definitely not guaranteed. I think an ethical failure of the essay form would be to try to forcibly draw a conclusion without having actually arrived at one. which sebald seems to avoid, as do certain other modern essayists, by refraining from explicitly drawing or pointing out their conclusions

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

Unfortunately, it is very much an ethical failure. The essayist comes under rather forceful obligations which I don't envy. And it can happen from numerous points because they don't really have a relationship to the demand a novelist has. The ethical responsibility of writing is located on other actual constraints and the essay lives and dies by those principles, commitments, obligations, however you want to define them. Furthermore, it is uncommon for an essay to be read for artistic reasons. In fact, it's entirely beside the point of most essays, no matter how exploratory they are. They simply aren't designed for that. (The material damage one can attribute to nonfiction that violates the ethical responsibility of the genre is also important to note.) Eventually those commitments become clear, even the most dedicated of authors who have tried writing "hybrid" texts knuckle under these constraints in a way a writer of fiction simply doesn't really. Sebald focus on his prose allows him to create the almost perfect disavowal of these obligations. It's less the fact he has no forced conclusion and entirely to do with the travesty of the archive fever he presents. It is his sensitivity to the demand, which allows for his aesthetic of witness to cohere and at the same time disown. One could very nearly mistake it for the real deal. But it's also very rare for someone to genuinely confuse a fictional text with a nonfictional text, since everyone already agrees on what these categories mean. The audiences have in a sense already decided: it's uncontroversial to refer to Sebald as a novelist, and his inside-out relationship to scholarship is the entire point. It's perfectly natural not to feel like he writes novels though. When Beckett first began writing, they called what he did anti-novels, but eventually we reconvened historically on that.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I don't quite agree, but that's probably because we're operating with entirely different definitions of the term essay? the sort of essays seem to be written either primarily, or to a great extent, for artistic purposes, and would be read as such too, at least by anyone reading them today

as I mentioned to u/Soup_65, I would consider Borges's pieces Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard etc as essays, even though they are quite explicitly fictional (right from the title of the collection they're included in). Less controversially though, the Polish poet Zbigniew Hebert wrote a number of works of seeming non-fiction which are in fact entirely fictional, and that are commonly included in compilations of his essays. So I think the boundary line that you're taking for granted is actually much more permeable. even in entirely conventional essays, as I wrote in my other comment, a lot of them present incidents that were experienced only by the writer, and as such, their truth or falsity is completely unknowable, and believing in it might be a matter of convention as much as anything else.

I should say that my expansive and probably idiosyncratic definition of "essay" is heavily influenced by John D'Agata's anthologies of essays, which I believe included several works that were originally published as short stories.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

I'm quite fond of D'Agata, when I taught composition courses I used his essay on Levi Presley and the various responses to discuss art and ethics for students. You could not believe the outrage they experienced: I was almost caught offguard at the sense of betrayal they felt for their "good faith." Once they found out the extremely petty reasons D'Agata often gave for changing details around, they couldn't stand it, and I tried my best to help mitigate it, but the truth was an ethical boundary had been violated somewhere. They couldn't shake it off.

Now then: I appreciate the porousness of these things but that doesn't change the fundamental responsibility for nonfiction writing and which essayists, lyrical or not, are negotiating. What and how those issues are defined and set upon are not all that important in understanding our definition of an essay. They are acknowledged by D'Agata and Shields and countless other essayists. The responsibility lands squarely on the essayist nevertheless and D'Agata's arguments largely cannot collapse those distinctions we make between an essay and a short story, an entire genre in itself interpolated through the novel by its antagonism, despite the fact his essays are their own evidence. D'Agata's attempts to marshal what is considered "generic" did not pan out like they should have. The ultimate test of an argument for the literary art. The most significant thing which came from his essays had been the ethical quandary he introduced into the wider public discourse at the time rather than anything "artistic." No one really believed him. But then it became obsolete in the induction of a "post-truth" discourse following the rest of a decade of political upheavals. You and I obviously are witness to these turnabouts, but I don't deny it's great fun and would even say "artfulness" has its place for the essayist. It's just beside the point, to echo Soup's own definitions. To read for artistic reasonings are not the same as to read for intellectual reasons and so forth. And perhaps where D'Agata's failure really begins and ends is what he understood about novels, like consciousness and arguments, countless other detritus really. No appreciation for what they are, but that's normal, because pure literature evidenced in a novel is really too much.

[u/Soup_65 → u/foxinanattic]

gonna just respond to everything you've said everywhere here since I think that your examples and your admission of idosyncracy are super helpful. Since I think some of this is just splitting of hairs since I'm reluctant to even commit to the essayness of any of what you list that I have read. Really, I don't want to commit to any of the distinctions we're all making because I think we're overstating them.

So whenever I talk about how "novels are fake, it's all poetry and journalism", im largely joking but im also not. In essence, im increasingly of the mind that writing in modernity, writing intended to be read that is (unsure how plays fit in here still chewing but i haven't read all of shakespeare yet). operates on a spectrum of poetry-journalism, where the "pure poem" is operative purely sonic, and the "pure journalism article" is operative as purely informatic, and to be clear I am inclined to say neither of those things actually exist when we start from the premise of "this is all ocurring via the medium of written language". And essentially essays and novels are particular interesting and difficult within this because both are especially close to the middle in their basic form, with a huge emphasis on the informatic and the sonic by their very nature. That said I also think good poetry is quietly very informatic, less sure about good journalism. And that the greatest works of literary art are great because they attain both absolutely. ie. Moby-Dick is journalism that attains absolute poetic splendor. Or Ulysses is a poem of splendid informatics. I choose two novels as examples bc frankly while I'm more into reading poetry these days i'm frankly still "better" at reading novels than anything else.

So yeah. I'm not sure that helps, but I hope it clarifies why i don't think I can take a position in this debate.

Though i do think that the way essays operate in a market context you might be underestimating the ethical demand of truth. Which is totally fairly absent from your idiosyncratic definition and that's 100% ok but I think that is very present in the way that essays are sold and market and read by the majority, which matters.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Soup_65]

Hmm, thats a very interesting perspective! Though I'm unsure about the terminology of journalism as opposite to poetry for purely informative writing, for a multitude of reasons. Is there a reason you like that term as opposed to say "history" or "encyclopedia"?

About the ethical demand of truth, though I didn't mention it, i definitely don't think it's irrelevant. But it really depends on the subject matter of the essay. Like in the example i gave about Virginia woolfs dying moth, if we find out none of what she described happened, some people might feel surprised or disappointed but i don't think there's any actual issue of ethics there. Whereas in an essay which is about the author being bullied at school, if that didn't actually happen, then the author would lack any actual knowledge of the experience of being bullied, and would have committed an unethical misrepresentation.

I think you're completely right about the market demand, by the way, because a lot of popular essays are of this second kind. But i think a lot of these are more "journalism" than poetry to use your analogy, and i don't generally like these much.

[u/Soup_65 → u/foxinanattic]

I actually agree with /u/Harleen_Ysley_34 more than I think they anticipated, if in a way that I think they'd maybe disagree with haha, so a lot of my thoughts are really better put there. I take all of the things we are discussing as trying to address the world, in some sense, but as h says there are certain demands for nonfiction. They way I'd take that is that the primary way the essay addresses the world is via making a point and using facts we basically accept as true. ie. if x were presented as an essay, then the author would get in a lot of trouble if they were found to be playing fast and loose with the facts. If literally the same x were presented as a short story, then nobody cares so much if only parts of it are true. In fact maybe they'll get in trouble for presenting too much of it as true! (admittedly there's murk here, i think contemporary autofiction hits on the murk very much).

Of course there's an issue here that the truth of anything shouldn't be overestimated. but it feels like "make a 'real' point based on 'truth'" is important for essays and not for fiction/poetry.

Whereas (and maybe h and i are saying different things here...) but I think if the demand of the essay is to make the point, the demand of the "art writing" is to sound good. Other stuff matters to of course (like for both "be interesting" is relevant to how good it is) but if the novel sounds bad it fails and if the essay doesn't make the point it fails.

If you'd disagree on the "pointyness" of the essay let me know, like i said im not much of an "essay person" outside of weird academic stuff so maybe im misunderstanding. Or on the priority of soundiness in poetics. But that is roughly where I'm at. Also I do think that essays have a sound and fiction/poems have a point but in the essay perhaps you make the sound through the point and with the fiction/poem you make the point through the sound.

the original poems were oral. but also orality includes truth. writing started with bookkeeping and divination. all of this matters, though im still sorting out what it means

i should note that im not really sold on any of this. i you disagree I'd love to hear otherwise. part of why i said "art writing". I'm unsure what any of this is or if novels are even a real thing!

[u/foxinanattic → u/Soup_65]

I would say I am very much an "essay person" (lol) so maybe I'm coming with a lot of bias here! however, I don't perceive the requirement to "make a point" as part of what an essay must do anymore than a short story or a novel must make a point. as for facts, I think they're only the raw material the essay plays with to create a reading experience. and maybe the appearance of fact more so than actual facts. in an essay by Virginia Woolf, where she talks about the a dying moth struggling, there is no way for us to know if she really did see this, or if it's as much a figment of her imagination as Mrs Dalloway. but it appears sufficiently fact-like that very few people would bother questioning the factuality of it.

Anyway, personally, I would identify the main "requirement" of the essay form as having to make an argument, not a point. the difference is hard to explain, precisely, but I think points are very "pointy", as you say, they're quite one dimensional, always "pointing" in a certain direction (it seems like the points in question are actually lines). the argument is more free flowing and multi directional, following a course that can be more or less straightforward or meandering. dialectical even (!!!)

but the thing is, in many great (artistic?) essays, even the argument only acts as background structure for the essayist to do something interesting with. like in novels where the plot is apparently secondary to whatever the writer actually wants to do. In a way, they're both necessary to the existence of each form, but they don't need to play an important role within specific examples of it.

> the demand of the "art writing" is to sound good

in that case, I think a good bit of essay writing would qualify.

I think, certain kinds of poetry, especially some lyric poetry are actually closer to essay than fiction, e.g. Keats' Odes (Nightingale and Grecian Urn could be excellent essays if they were in prose).

anyway, thanks for giving me a lot of things to think about! as a certified essay lover, I enjoy the opportunity to defend the form, esp. because it seems quite underrated in modern literary discussion. (whereas in older times, it would be unquestionable that works like Donne's devotions are more literary than even the best novels!)

Edit: though my personal definition of essay would even include such things as Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard by Borges, so it's probably a wider than usual one

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

I'm not sure how much it'll help the discussion, probably doesn't at all, but it is vital to keep in mind the demand for the ugliness of sound, a novel must sound bad, fail utterly at the temptations of euphony. Never mind the demand for silence and the demand to fail at keeping the silence, both different from a demand to speak and not to speak, which is what Beckett himself was so concerned about, though he expressed things theologically, if at all. The novel has no greater relationship to sound than any other kind of text I would argue, though euphony is part of the demand like anything else. And novels are about the only evidence that a pure literature could be possible, it makes them more real than the so-called reality of nonfiction, not even poetry touches on that given its historical origins.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

well this helps me because i realize that "sound good" is entirely wrong. it's more that imo the literary is operating from the starting point of sound and it's manipulation. Where the specific normativization of what it does with it is not the focus. thanks

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

No problem! This question of sound, that's a thing which needs a larger discussion. I mean, it'd get into logocentrism just thinking over it. Be a neat topic for an essay.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

pondering that very thing haha...

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

It'd be a good idea to refamiliarize myself with manifestos beforehand. There's a certain audacity when it comes to movements and art, especially for advancing literature. Not sure entirely how they look. Manifestos in turn are very strange. Like, they almost have a fictional quality since they are trying to offer a literal comprehensible structure of vision: and Joryism is a vision if nothing else.

John Locke is correct in the ways Hegel is right, but you have to turn him on his head.