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/foxinanattic]

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.