Monthly Archives: September 2015

In “The Self on the Shield”, Levine discuses how an essay is a gateway into a person, that you should leave the essay “feeling as if you have met someone” and that “the worst thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression” (159). It should feel as if you are confronting a person when reading an essay, that someone is standing before you and they have imprinted something within you. An essay is something personal, something that takes facts or abstracts and turns it into something only the author of the essay can share. They want to say something, even if they don’t know what that something quite is–and that’s what makes an essay and essay.

And in “The Empathy Exams”, that’s exactly what Jamison does. The essay combines fiction and fact, Jamison playing a medical actor. She plays a fictional role, and students see her as that fictional role, even though she’s a completely different person outside of all of that. She writes the essay a bit scattered, the format effective and interesting with using “Case Summary” and a section that has crossed out bits, “Patient is here for an abortion for a surgery to burn the bad parts of her heart for a medication to fix her heart because the surgery failed” (23). This writing style shows her inner thoughts throughout the official medical statement without even having to state her medical thoughts, the strikes showing what she would want omitted or what she can’t say.

Using both the case summaries and the medical listings of her actual medical history back to back show the contrast between fiction and reality, showing what she pretends to have and what she actually has, an interesting combo that really lets the reader get inside of Jamison’s head. When I read this essay, I feel like I met Jamison, like Jamison had left some kind of mark, like she had something to say based on everything she had been through.

An essay can be everything and anything–as the preface to the Collected Essays puts it, “The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best of one, not two, but of all three worlds in which it’s possible for the essay to exist” (90). These three worlds are “the personal and the autobiographical”, “the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular”, and “the abstract universal” (88). In Delft, Albert Goldbarth certainly does not slack in covering all three of these poles.

First is “the personal and autobiographical”. Albert keeps referring to a woman named Cynthia, saying lines such as, “So, here: Cynthia and myself” (256). Although the story talks little of Cynthia compared to what else it covers, it’s there, and Albert uses fleas in a way to relate it back to himself and to Cynthia.

Second is “the objective, the factual, and the concrete-particular”. One section of the essay that caught my particular interest was when it switched from the abstract and mess of metaphors to sudden hard facts, changing the writing style of the essay. Albert goes into telling us facts about the flea, such as, “Fact: It’s not the piercing that causes the itch, but the enzymes in the flea’s saliva, which enters the wound in a forceful injection and keeps the blood from coagulating” (266) and begins to say at the end of many facts, “And they still scratched” (266).

And last is “the abstract universe”, which is what most of the essay consists of, starting the essay with, “He commeth unto his kingdom now. Yea, he commeth unto the greased posed-open body of his beloved, Cornelia nee Sawlmius, where she beckons from the alcove-bed” (253). Albert uses this different writing style to describe something that seems completely unrelated to anything, but in reality is just about sex, possibly his own sex.

And Albert was able to use all of these styles and connect them together that made his whole essay work. He used abstract imagery, analogies, and facts to relate to his own sex life and to the general topic of it. By using different writing styles, he can more effectively bring together a larger topic while still being specific, and capturing the interest of readers by using variety.

From “The Art of the Essayist”, Benson describes what he thinks the true purpose of an essay is–for it not to be informative or factual but for it to be something personal, something people can relate to in their everyday lives that can be provocative. To acknowledge differences in people, why those differences might exist, and to simply get the reader to relate and ponder. He says the author of an essay must, “care more about the inconsistency of humanity than about its dignity; and he must study more what people actually think about rather than what they ought to think about” (41).

In “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, she uses her essay to do just that. The essay has the interesting choice of starting with the description of a clown painting, despite the essay being about a total eclipse. She writes, “It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget… I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember–but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel” (97). Instead of making some kind of thesis or main point to start out the essay, the author instead hones in on a single moment in her memory. She provokes the thought of memory, and why one would remember a clown paining better than most things despite its meaning being absolutely insignificant to you. As Benson said this is “what people actually think about rather than what they ought to think about” (41).

Dillard ends her essay with, “From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home” (109). After an entire essay conveying a short story of the total eclipse and the horrific impact it had in that one moment, the essay doesn’t end with anything profound or deep, the character in the story hasn’t changed at all in the end. Despite the impact of the moment, she goes home as if it never happened, forgotten, the way any reader can relate to. As a reader, it provokes thought in the impact of such moments, and why we simply let them go, and why instead we remember clown paintings.

In “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay,” the author attempts to pin down the definition of what a true essay is while debunking myths and negativity around the subject. When reading “On Keeping a Notebook,” my first thought was that this didn’t sound like an essay at all. When I think essay, I think 5 sentence paragraphs, opening and closing sentences, a thesis and an argument. I think of school and head aches and literature and word count. “On Keeping a Notebook” wasn’t that at all–it was something much more personal, something much more loose and free. I read it as smoothly as a short story you couldn’t put down.

“Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay” shot my perception of the essay right between the eyes. There were some essayists who were even against the idea of a school essay being called as such. In the reading, the author wrote, “There are experiences, then, which cannot be expressed by any gesture and which long for expression. From all that has been said you will know what experiences I mean and what kind they are, as an immediate reality, as spontaneous principle for existence” (Didion 12). 

And that’s exactly what “On Keeping a Notebook” was to me. It wasn’t an argument, it wasn’t making any real point or trying to say something particularly incredible. It was just a lazy momentum of someone’s life, of random pieces that could be remembered but could never be used. This is what an essay truly is: something personal, something that’s written because someone feels that they have something to say, something that cannot be expressed or said in any other way. An essay is the only place you could drone on, a place to put down your thoughts, a place to remember, a place to discover. 

My perception of the essay has been broken, and replaced and born as something new and limitless.