Reading the opening sentences of Cynthia Ozick’s “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” in regard to the genuine essay, the first thing that came to my mind was David Antin’s “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto.” Ozick says, “like a poem, a genuine essay is made of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance” (152), which can’t apply better elsewhere but Antin’s essay.
In “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto,” in a way, the essay has disappeared; its first sentence reads “about two years ago ellie and I decided we needed a new mattress or maybe ellie decided it because i didn’t pay much attention to the problem (113). The essay is preoccupied with form, but Antin’s essay doesn’t follow any form. It contains no capitalization almost no punctuation nevertheless holds loaded of long weird gaps. There’s only one rationale for its appearance in D’Agata’s anthology: Antin’s piece conveys the trues sense of the essay being about itself. The essay itself is an individual, as Ozick notes, “she may have recognizable contours, but she is highly colored and individuated; she is not a type, she is too fluid, too elusive, to be a category” (158). Every single gap in Antin’s essay has its own color and character, some represent the time between spoken sentences and words, some reflects the pauses in speech while thinking about what next to say. We as readers can tell visually how Antin struggles both physically and mentally to purchase a new mattress with his wife, “so elly keeps on testing and ive bailed out because i’m not really into this ive been doing it sort of but…” (119)
Ozick’s piece also points out the power of an essay, “the capacity to do what force always does: coerce assent.” In other word, an ideal essay may not make its the audience agree with whatever its author put on the paper, instead, it makes us believe in them, just as how I believe in Antin’s wife back problems and their postmodernism situation.