Should Essays Be in Novels?

In one sense, the 1960s wave of postmodern writing was about stripping things away. Could one write a novel without coherent plot? What about a book with no rounded characters? Is it possible to write a mystery without narrative resolution? Could one write the start of a novel without the ending? While this is obviously not the only impulse in that first generation of postmodern writing, it is a theme that ties together figures as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. All were conducting simultaneous experiments in writing stories without attributes that seemed key to writing stories. What, in the end, is the plot of Naked Lunch? Is the baroque mystery of The Crying of Lot 49 ever resolved? Is there any Vonnegut character who matters beyond the dialogue he utters? (As an experiment, try finding a great line in Slaughterhouse-Five and dropping it at random into the mouth of a character in Bluebeard. My money says that you won't notice the switch. This is not to insult Vonnegut, but rather to highlight what he is able to accomplish without the traditional mechanics of character.) This experiment in stripping away reached its logical endpoint with the Oulipo school: novels without the letter "e"; novels with only one scene; and, in Oulipo mainstay Italo Calvino's later work If On A Winter's Night a Traveller, a novel with only the first chapter.

If that generation of postmodernism was about stripping away, there is a more recent effort at altering the form of the novel, this one interested in crowding out. Take, for example, the novels of the late W. G. Sebald. In some respects, Austerlitz is postmodern in the 1960s sense--while there is some semblance of a plot, the plot is hardly the point; much of the novel seems to drift in the way a Paul Auster novel drifts. This plotlessness, however, is not the result of stripping away plot. Rather, the plot is crowded out by long expository passages on architectural history and the history of the Nazi ghetto system. At least to me, those are the memorable passages of the novel. Something similar takes place in the two novels thus far published by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole. In Everyday Is for the Thief, long passages are given over to the architectural history of Lagos; in Open City, the most memorable passages come from digressions on art history and the spectacular closing set piece on the history of the Statue of Liberty.

What I would like to suggest is that these expository passages function something like essays and, to the extent that they are essays, the essay form is finding a home within the contemporary novel.

To be sure, there is at least one obvious difference between an essay embedded in an novel and an essay qua essay: The novel-embedded essay comes from the mouth of a fictionalized narrator. Do we know that such an essay presents true information? Why should we think that what Cole's narrator tells us about the history of the Statue of Liberty and ornithology is at all true? Why should we believe Sebald's version of Czech history when it is in the middle of a fictional work?

But, then, that experience of questioning is not terribly different from the essay as we have known it previously. When Annie Dillard tells us about her experience flying with a professional stunt pilot, we have questions about the fidelity of her recollections; we wonder if she can really remember such precise sensory details about an event so far in the past. Those questions are part of the aesthetic complexity of the essay form. Right back to Montaigne, the essay presents us with an interplay between the character of the author and the factual matter being recounted. It is at least arguable that this interplay is what makes an essay an essay in Montaigne's sense of the genre.

When a novel takes on the essay form, this complexity is heightened by a textual layer not overtly present in the traditional essay form: in Cole and Sebald we have 1) a seemingly nonfictional essay, 2) a fictional narrator, and 3) a real author. If we are being precise, those three levels also exist in any nonfictional text. In general, though, nonfiction ignores the middle level, while the novel foregrounds it. In a traditional essay we assume there is a true story recounted by a real writer. But of course in any act of writing there is a narrator--that is as true in a history textbook as in Mrs. Dalloway. However, we tend to ignore the fictionality (or, perhaps, "textuality" is the better word) of nonfictional narrators. We just see the text and the author. In a novel, the fictionality of the narrator is foregrounded, and thus another layer of textual and epistemological complexity is introduced.

If the chronology I laid out at the beginning of this essay is correct, these are early days for the novel-embedded essay; perhaps the aesthetics of foregrounding the essayistic narrator are still to be worked out. If the essay might develop further in the hands of novelists (and Cole's essay for The New Yorker on the    Charlie Hebdo shootings, "Unmournable Bodies," suggests it might), the novel might also benefit from the crowding out effect of embedded essays.

The Old College Try

I originally wrote this essay for Ming Pao Weekly, where it appeared in November, 2014.

I am going to read some terrible essays this month. Of course, as a high school English teacher, that is my job. And, of course, I will also read a few brilliant ones. But what makes this month's terrible essays special is that they will all be written for one purpose: to get into an American university.

            While we hear a lot about the failings of America's schools, America remains home to most of the world's best universities, and this fall thousands of Hong Kong students will try to win a place in one of them. As the Wall Street Journal reported in September, their parents will do what they can to ensure their success; Hong Kong donates more money to American universities than any other foreign country.

            Applying to an American college can be a byzantine process. Of all its odd elements, the most opaque is the "college essay." In its most common form, this essay is a 650-word personal statement answering one of five very broad prompts. This year they include recounting an experience of failure and describing a place where you are "perfectly content." The goal of the essay is, as a guide from the College Board suggests, to provide "a clear sense of who the writer is and what he cares and thinks about."

            You do not have to be an analytical philosopher to see some troubling assumptions here, and this is the first reason students struggle with this task. Why does a university want to look into my soul? Don't you just need to know if I am a good student or not? If the university is judging me as a person, which aspect of my personality should I put forward? And, wait a second, how am I supposed to accomplish this act of soul bearing in 650 words? Virginia Woolf may have done that once or twice but this is hardly a reasonable goal for the average 17 year old.

            These difficulties are multiplied for Hong Kong applicants. How is someone raised here supposed to figure out which qualities an American college wants to see? That is a big cultural gap to navigate. For those without perfectly fluent English, the risks get even higher. Is one awkward adjective going to signal an English-as-a-Second-Language learner and doom the application to perdition? Given the tiny numbers of students admitted to top American schools, you can imagine the pressure created by these sorts of guessing games. You can almost hear Hong Kong students shouting, "Just look at my high school transcript! That will tell you what kind of student I am!"

            The second reason students struggle with the college essay has to do with the word "essay" itself. Hong Kong students are, in general, great at writing essays in the sense that we use that word today: using evidence and analysis to support a thesis. Unfortunately (and this is the part nobody tells you) that is not what "essay" means in this case. Here, essay is used in its much older, French form meaning "to attempt" or "to try." We still have a version of this word in English (to assay), though it is rarely used.

This version of the essay falls somewhere closer to what we today mean by "memoir": A writer takes some small observation or recollection from her own life and builds a philosophical idea upon it. It is not meant to be a closely reasoned argument, but rather an idea or theory the writer is trying out: hence "to assay." 

            These kinds of essays are still around. David Sedaris, who was in Hong Kong in September for Story Worthy Week, writes comic versions of them, and the best of stand up comedy gets close to them. Podcasts like This American Life and Radio Lab do audio versions of the essay. While the genre can still be found here and there, however, it is far from the poems, plays, and novels that form the vast majority of a high school student's literary education.

Thus the college essay asks students to write a thing they have probably never studied, like asking devoted classical violin students to write a country song on the final exam.  And, I think it is fair to say, the Hong Kong student is asked to write in a self-revelatory mode much closer to the American cultural mainstream than to our own.

This essay you are reading isn't the kind of essay that ends with a clear solution to that problem. But you have a better shot at success if you know what you are aiming for. So, America-bound students, download This American Life and double-check your adjectives. It won't get you into Harvard, but it might make for a better essay.

What Do We Mean by "Informational Text," Exactly?

Much of the controversy surrounding the Common Core has been both nakedly political and embarrassingly provincial, the kind of "how dare those fat cats in Washington shove this down our throats" talk that gives the rest of the world an excuse to laugh at America. Within the language of the standards, though, is an odd inconsistency that speaks to a real dilemma about the purpose of language arts education and the ideology of literary analysis. From kindergarten through grade 5, reading standard 10 calls for students to read an appropriate range and complexity of "informational texts." Beginning in grade 6, however, the standards shift terminology without explanation; now students are asked to read an appropriate range and complexity of "literary nonfiction." Why the shift?

The Common Core declares its mission to be "preparing America's students for college and career." (This phrase is built right into the logo.) In terms of career readiness, the phrase "informational text," the phrase used only until 5th grade, is probably the better term. If informational text denotes a text meant to be processed for its content rather than its formal complexity, then surely the vast majority of workers read much more informational text than they do, say, poetry. Indeed, outside of language arts teachers and humanities professors themselves, it is difficult to think of a profession in which reading for formal complexity rather than information is at all common. I would prefer my airline pilot to have gleaned the key steps of the landing procedure from the manual before she proceeds to analyze the manual's sophisticated imagery.

What is perhaps more surprising is that "informational text" is the better term for college readiness as well. One of the biggest shifts from high school to university English is a shift from reading obviously literary texts (meaning, primarily, novels, poetry, and drama) to reading theory and criticism. It is not impossible (probably not uncommon) for a student to graduate high school never having read a word of literary theory, and then be faced on Day 1 of English 101 with Jacques Derrida (or, at least, Terry Eagleton). In English programs that work in the rhetoric or professional writing traditions, this bias toward informational text is even more pronounced. At Carnegie Mellon (where I taught for 2 years), the English 101 program is built around 8 weeks of argumentative and historical writing before the first introduction of a literary text. And the most common complaint is that incoming students have no idea how to approach criticism; they are used to John Steinbeck, not John Stuart Mill.

So, if informational texts will make up most reading for most people in college and in their careers, why does the Common Core switch to the narrower term "literary nonfiction" after the 5th grade? And why do they insist on it so strongly? Corestandards.org states directly in its "Key Design Considerations" for English Language Arts, that "Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional." The Common Core is, in general, leery of directly mandating how its outcomes are to be achieved, so this comes as close to a direct order as anything in the Common Core Standards.

One possible reason is that literary nonfiction allows language arts teachers to appear to address the concerns of colleges and workplaces (that students do not know how to read difficult informational text) without really changing much. After all, if literary nonfiction is taken to denote primarily long-form journalism and historical writing, it is still narrative text. You can use all the usual techniques for studying a novel and simply add that these events really did happen. I'm not sure that a student essay on In Cold Blood would be much different if the class had been told the book was entirely fictional. If the goal is really to get students ready for college-level reading, shouldn't we be dropping the New Journalism and pushing students to read criticism and philosophy instead? (And there are ways to do just that. See Tim Gillespie's Doing Literary Criticism.)

But that is maybe too cynical an answer. Teachers wanting to push students toward informational texts need a path to get there, and literary nonfiction may be it. Literary nonfiction, as hybrid a genre as its name suggests, allows students to push into the world of informational text without suddenly losing all of the genre markers they are used to. In Tom Wolfe, we still have characters, settings, and plots; but we also have some actual historical events. In this sense, literary nonfiction may be the ultimate value-added teaching tool: you get everything you get with a novel plus it's true! (Or, at least, it claims to be true.)

Here, though, is where the ideological stakes get a bit higher. High school English programs are grounded in the formalist approaches of the New Criticism, and a bedrock assumption of the New Criticism is that it is the form of the text that matters. For the New Critics, we are not supposed to care whether MacBeth was a real king who did all of that stuff. We are supposed to care whether the pattern of clothing imagery holds together in an aesthetically pleasing way. To put it another way, truth claims are largely irrelevant to New Criticism. (The only truth claims that do matter are the very generic, "human nature ones"--truths about love and redemption and suffering.) If high school English abandons that position, it will be abandoning one of the key tenets of its own founding philosophy. 

This might be a great thing. An adherence to New Critical principles has certainly foreclosed a million interesting questions in high school classrooms over the years. Why not let students ask what Keats knew about the astronomy of that bright star or whether Upton Sinclair got the meatpacking details right? We might find some interesting answers to those kinds of historical, contextual questions, questions that go unexplored when teachers direct students to analyze metaphors and character development instead.

Those are interesting questions. But once you go down that road, you have a new set of problems. Because if we are no longer reading for form--if we are reading for history or philosophy or science--then what is the point of reading fiction at all? Why not just read great nonfiction? Because you can always analyze its form it you want to. Unless language arts teachers can answer those questions in a convincing way, the Common Core's slippery use of "literary nonfiction" may open up a path (at least a theoretical path) to the end of high school literature as we know it. And, in a world with far more great works of nonfiction than any of us will ever have time to read, maybe that's okay. If students graduated high school having read the essays of James Baldwin rather than Harper Lee's novelization of some of those same issues, would the world be a worse place? I am not sure it would.





References

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 6. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved  from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/6/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014).  English Language Arts >> Introduction > Key  Design Consideration. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-  Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved      from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Gillespie, Tim (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts.  Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.