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Phillip Lopate

On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character

 

 

 

In personal essays, nothmg is more commonly met than the letter I. I think it a perfectly good word. The problem with "l" is nor that it is in bad taste, but that fledg­ ling personal essayists may think they've said or conveyed more than they actually rove with that one syllable. in their minds, that "I" is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past. and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader, encountering it for the first time in a new piece. sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to In truth, even the barest "1" What it doesn't do. however, is give us a clear picture of who is speaking.

 

To do that, the writer needs to And I use the word character E.M. Forster, m Aspects oj the Novel, drew a famous dis­ tinction between "fiat" and "round" characters-between those fictional personages seen from the outside who acted v.ith the predicable consistency of caricatures, and those whose complexities or

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In this respect, bUilding a character is a peda­ gogIc model, because you are teaching the reader what to expect.

 

So how do you tum you.rself First of all, you need to have-or acquire-some distance from yourself. If You need to be able to see yourself from the ceiling: to know, for instance, how you are coming across in social situations, and to The pOint is to begin to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a speCific, legible character.

 

The mistake many beginning essayists make is to try so hard to be likable and nice. to fit in, Literature IS The skills of the kaffeeklatsch­ restrainmg one's express1veness, rounding out one's edges, sparing everyone's feelings-will not work as well on the page.

 

The irony is that most of us suspect-no. we know-that underneath it all we are But we may still need to maximize that pitiful set of quirks, those small differences that seem to set us apart from others, and project them theatrically, the way actors work with singularities in In order to tum ourselves into characters, we need to dramatize I don't mean inventing or adding colorful traits that aren't troe; I mean posi­ It's a sub­ tractive process: you need to cut away the inessentials, and highlight just those features in your personality that lead to the most intense contradictions or ambivalence.

 

Fortunately, human beings are conflicted animals. so there IS Good essayists know how to select a topiC in advance that will generate enough spark in itself, and how to frame the topic so that it \Vill neither be too ambitiOUS nor toO slight-so that its scale will be appropriate for satisfying exploration, If you are serenely unconflicted when you first sit down to If you take on a problem that is toO philosophlcally large or historically convoluted, you may choke on the details and give up.

 

Still. these are technical issues, and 1 am inclined to think that what stands in the way of most personal essays is not technique but psychology: The emotional preparedness. if you ""ill, to be hones: and open to exposure.

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r	Lopate / On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character	71
I
I	The student essa}is't is tom between twO contrasting extremes:
	A. "1 am so weird that 1 could never tell on the page what is really, secretly going on in
	my mind."
	B. "1 am so bOring, nothing ever happens to   me out of the ordinary,  so who would
	want to read about me?"
	The first response
:-r am so weird") exaggerates how isolated one is in one's "wicked" thoughts, instead of recognizing
The second response ("My life is so boring
a.-lIi	I'm so boring") requires a reeducation so that the student essayists can be brought to acknowl­

 

e:ige Just those moments in the day, in their loves and friendships, in their family dynamics, in :.~eir historical moments, in their interactions with the natural world, that remain genUinely per­ They must also be taught to recognize t.he charm of the ordinary: that daily life that has nourished some of the most enduring essays.

 

It is useful to remind students, enamored of David Lynch or Quentin Taramino movies, that some of that bizarre sensibility can find a place in their essays-that "outlaw" culture does not have to be At the same time, it is necessary to introduce them to the sane, thoughtful, considered, responsible essayists like George Orwell or E.B. White, From both sets of models we can then choose how reasonable or hysterical we want to come across at any time: in one pIece, seem the soul of reason; in another, a step away from the loony bin.

We are distin­

 

gt;lShed one from another as much by our pasts, the set of circumstances we are born into, as by the ~:-tailenges we have encountered along the way, and how we choose to resolve them, given our ini­

 

It means something very different to have been born the second-oldest boy in an uPDer-middle-class Korean family that emigrated from Seoul to Los Angeles than to have been born

th~ vounoest female in a poor Southern Baptist household of nine,

, 0

Ethnicity, gender, religion, class, geography, politiCS:  these are all strong determinants in the

 

But we must be bold in working with these categories as staning points: be

 

not afraid to meditate on our membership in this or that community, and the degree to which It has or n:lS not formed us.

 

When you are writing a memoir, you can set up these categories and assess their imponance one ::,y So you must become deft at insening that information swiftly :mc c:asually-"l was born in Brooklyn, New York, of working-class parents"-and not worry aDo:,:: the fact that it may be redundant to your regular readers, if you're lucky enough to have any.

. ~ J:;e essay. you may decide to make a big thing of your religi.ous training and very little of your

 

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72 Pan I Portraits

 

 

family background: in another, just the opposite; but in each new essay, it would be a good idea to tell the reader both. simply because this son of information will help to build you into a character.

 

In thiS sense. the personal essayist must be like a Journalist. who respects the obligation to get in the basic orienting faccs-the who, what, where, when, and why-as close to the top of every story as possible.

 

So now you have sketched yourself to Maybe not: not until you have soldered your relationship "With the reader, by springing vividly into his mind, so that everything your 'T Whether you are writing this time on world peace or a bar of soap, readers must sense qUickly from the first para­ graph that you are gomg to And here we come to one of the main stumbling blocks placed before the writing of personal essays: self-hatred.

 

Why thlS self-dislike should be so prevalent is a matter that would require the best sociological and psychoanalytic minds to They exhibit a form of stuttenng, of never being able to get past the lTIltiaL superficial self-presentation and dlving into the wreck of one's personaliry with gusto.

 

The proper alternative to self-dlSlike is not being pleased with oneself-a smugness equally distasteful to the reader-but being curious about Such self-curiosity (of which Montaigne, the father of the essay. was the greatest exemplar) can only grow OUt of that detachment or distance from oneself about which I spoke earlier.

 

I may be tired of myself in everyday life, but once I stan narrating a situation or set of ideas on the page, I begin to I am \\illing to let my "I" take his pratfalls; maintaining one's dignity should not be a paramount issue in From that lmpulse everything else follows.

 

There is also considerable character development in expressing your opinions, prejudices, half­ baked ideas, etc., etc., pro'vlded you are willing to analyze the flaws m your thinking and to enter­ tain arguments against your hobbyhorses and not be toO I wrote my essay "Against Joie de Vivre," Ilmew on some level that it was an indeferlSible position, but I wanted to see how far I could get in taking a curmudgeonly stance against the pursuit of happiness And indeed, it struck a chord of recognuion in many reac.ers. because lots of us are "so glad to be unhappy," at least as rr.uch as we "want to (To quote twO old songs.)

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Give

 

It's fine to be privy to all of "I"'s ruminations and cerebral nuances, but ~onsciousness Panicularly if you are writ­

 

ing a memoir essay, with chronology and narrative, it is often liberating to have the "I~ By showing our complicity in the world's stock of sorrow, we convince the reader of our reality and even gain his sympathy.

 

How much more complicated and alive is George Orwell's younger self, the "1" in "Such, Such Were the Joys,~ for having admitted he snitched on his classmates, or James Baldwin's "I~ So it is that remorse is often the staning point for good personal essays, whose working-out brings the necessary self­ forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) to outgrow shame.

 

Yet even when "I~ plays no pan in the language of an essay, a firm When we read Dr. Johnson and Edmund Wilson and wonel Trilling, for instance, we feel that we know them as fully developed characters in their own essays, regardless of their not referring personally to themselves.

 

1would funner maintain that this process of turning oneself intO a character is It means you have achieved sufficient distance to begin to see yourself in the round: a necessary precondition to tran­ scending the ego--<)r at least writing personal essays that can touch other people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---",..._----'",.<._­