Obviously, this is being posted quite late; I do apologize, reader, for the fact that time management is not—and, indeed, has never been— my forte. Better late than never, I suppose (“and better on time than late” is what my response to that would be).
David Antin’s “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto” is immediately recognizable as a unique piece of work; being devoid of any punctuation and relatively carefree with its spacing, the essay is more a jumble of thoughts and words that reads much more like conversational dialogue than narrative text.
The essay uses many of the same tools and techniques that other essays we’ve read have used—the overlying plot of the mattress-buying that serves as the infrastructure for the more universal concept of accepting one’s own ignorance and forging ahead in spite of it is reminiscent of Lovell’s “invisible cow,” and personality and life are brought to the narrator through the particular manner in which he narrates. However, the essay is somewhat of a phonetic one, in that the text is formatted to imitate the undulations and fluctuations of a person’s voice. The large spaces placed between words are not random; they feel like pauses and breaths being taken by the writer. Oftentimes they sound more like a live-streaming of thought processes—when the man begins doubting himself in the mattress store and says he’s “bailed out,” he doesn’t actually leave his wife, but the reader becomes aware of the narrator’s thoughts in a way even his wife is not aware.
Seeing an essay written with such liberal use of formatting is somewhat liberating in my own essay writing, particularly when I consider having to record myself reading my own essay—I am often keenly aware of the dissimilarity between my written voice and my actual voice.
As a side note, it’s amusingly ironic that the last of Kern’s tips for writing for broadcast is “Check for typos.”
In his essay, Antin takes a perfectly innocent and un-inspirational event and reminds the reader that a philosophical stance can be taken on even the most mundane of things. Antin observes the details of his mattress-purchasing experience, and sees that there are patterns of thought and emotion that are intertwined with everyday life. Just as Antin notes the cyclical nature of his life through his going through different mattresses and seeing no real change, one could seek patterns of thinking and feeling in our own lives. It is this type of writing that answers questions that few people stop and realize they have.