The Perils and Pitfalls of the Lyrical Essay
The lyrical essay has proliferated in recent years. Its antecedents can be traced back to 1966 when Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, introduced the idea of the “nonfiction novel” in an interview with George Plimpton for The New York Times. Over the years, the burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction, as well as the increased publication of personal essays, led to the development of what has come to be called the lyrical essay. An influential definition of the form, by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, was published in the Seneca Review in 1997:
The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.
Lyrical essays are often viewed as being closer to stream of consciousness or koan-like riddles than traditional essays. They are notably difficult to critique because of their association with poetry and the poetic license they claim as their due. When D’Agata and Tall wrote that the lyrical essay “partakes of the essay in its weight,” they were pointing to the ways it draws from our common understanding of what an essay is. And while a precise definition of “essay” has remained elusive, readers can generally agree that the genre typically presents an author’s thinking about a particular subject; it involves an examination of a topic in the form of an argument. Arguments consist of premises leading to a conclusion. Like a concerto, then, essays generally adhere to a logical form.
But lyrical essays are more like jazz than a concerto. The idea that lyrical essays are more “poetic” than logical has allowed authors to play fast and loose with the truth, as D’Agata did in his 2010 essay “What Happens There,” in which he reported on the suicide of Levi Presley in Las Vegas. The essay was rejected by Harper’s because of factual inaccuracies but was eventually published in The Believer. The ongoing dialogue between D’Agata and the fact-checker Jim Fingal morphed into the book The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), in which they debated the liminal space between fact-based truth and art.
One of the perils lyrical essayists face is that it is all too easy to write statements that are nonsensical, meaningless, or simply false, while the rule of “poetic license” provides them immunity from prosecution. This is obviously an untenable position. Authors of lyrical essays may wish them to inhabit a never-never-land between art and reportage, but it cannot be the case that a creative form of expression is exempt from critique or from the rules that govern the use of language.
While the development of the lyrical essay is recent, the invention of the essay itself, in its modern form, dates back to the French Renissance writer Michel de Montaigne. In England, during the twentieth century, the increase in the number of essays was, according to Virginia Woolf, associated with “the spread of education” and the public’s hunger for fresh amusements. Today, the proliferation of essays, lyrical, personal, and otherwise, has continuted to grow with no small help from the internet and online blogs (including Substack) and ezines. Woolf cast a jaundiced eye at the explosion of essay writers in her time, the majority of whom she felt were writing essays that were “primarily an expression of personal opinion,” and she noted in her short, sharp squib, The Decay of Essay Writing,
The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.
She is saying, in other words, that personal essays are self-indultent displays of the author’s ego. They are nothing more than the writer’s take (hot or otherwise) on cultural matters or “one’s personal peculiarities,” providing entertainment for others — sort of like a selfie in words.
In the mid-2000s, a type of personal essay began to dominate the blogs and ezines. Intimate, like the lyrical essay, they were characterized by sensational personal revelations à la “I Slept with My Husband’s Brother to Save My Marriage.” In an essay in The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino called this type of writing the “commodification of personal experience.” Used as clickbait, writing of this sort generated ad revenue for the websites that published them. So widespread had this genre become that Laura Bennett, writing in Slate, referred to them as “the first-person industrial complex.”
Over the last several years it has become difficult to separate the lyrical essay from the personal essay. Many current lyrical essays are, in fact, nothing more than personal essays sharing many of the same characteristcs, the most important of which is they are both expressions of personal opinion.
A recent instructive example of this kind of writing — a blend of personal and lyrical — is found in The Word Pretty (Black Ocean), a collection of essays (billed as a “roving and curious series of lyrical essays on writing, reading, and living”) by Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist. Gabbert writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times and has published six collections of poetry, as well as essays and criticism. She has described The Word Pretty as “one of those books of random bits and bobs of unrelated prose that only famous people get to do.” The essays have names such as “Dream Logic,” “Impossible Time,” “Variations on Crying”; and they are short — three-to-seven-minute reads. They tend toward shallow rather than deep thinking and offer, as their cute names hint, the promise of pleasure without a lot of effort.
In an earlier work, The Self Unstable, Gabbert presented short takes on a variety of subjects: the self, the body, art, love, and so on. The book is comprised of four-to-eight-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, a poetic presentation of thinking set on a pedestal for our examination and edification. Yet what we actually experience in reading The Self Unstable is a mind free associating, struggling, and failing to come up with something important to say. We are served up pabulum such as: “Information wants to be free, but what about beauty?” “Faux fur is cruel by way of reference to cruelty.” I have not taken these statements out of a context in which they “make sense.” There is no context. Their silliness stands before you here, just as it does in the paragraphs from which they have been extracted. Statements like these seek to dance between poetry and philosophy but have more in common with the vacuous epigrams found inside Hallmark cards. And yes, I know there is an audience for this sort of thing.
The essays in The Word Pretty cover more or less the same as those in The Self Unstable, but the pieces are longer: each essay is approximately two to eight pages. “On the Pleasures of Front Matter” is one of the more successful pieces in the collection, moving — in the stream-of-consciousness fashion that lyrical essays often employ — through a discussion that touches on the Tao Te Ching, an anecdote by Elizabeth Anscombe concerning Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom Gabbert hasn’t read), Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary (a book she has read), to the epigraph of E. M. Forster’s Howards End: “Only connect…” You can follow the thread of her thinking as it weaves its way through these disparate topics, delivering a meditation on a category of writing glossed over by most readers. It is, perhaps, everything a lyrical essay should be.
When Gabbert is simply connecting thoughts or images, her chatty tone — which, unfortunately, all too often descends into snark — is easy to digest. There are many statements that raise an eyebrow, but you’re likely to grant them a pass in order to keep reading. As there is no formal argument in her style of writing, you float along the narrative stream. But when Gabbert moves into the more treacherous waters of analysis, she flounders and following her thinking becomes problematic.
This is immediately apparent in “Meditation on the Word Pretty.” The essay begins with an uninspired discussion of the word pretty in contradistinction to the word beautiful, provides commentary on a cropped photograph of Debbie Harry’s face, touches on the idea of sublimity (via Terry Eagleton’s analysis of Edmund Burke), then goes on to speculate about the aestheticization of war (name-dropping Immanuel Kant on the sublime). Next, we are told about Gabbert’s failed attempt to watch Apocalypse Now (she was horrified and bored). Following this revelation, she delivers her pronouncement on war films: “Impossible, maybe, to critique war in film without also glorifying it.”
And here we land upon a pitfall. For this statement, despite the hedge (“maybe”) is untrue; it is not impossible to critique war in film without also glorifying it. There are many obvious counterexamples to rebut this cavalier proposition, first and foremost being the sad and tragic 1930 film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
Gabbert further opines about war: “The horrors of war are what make war necessary.” This has the ring of aphorism, but it doesn’t require much analysis to see that the statement is illogical. The “horrors of war” — which we can safely assume include, at a minimum, destruction, bloodshed, and mass death — are not “what make war necessary.” These things are, in fact, the result of war. “The horrors of war are what make war necessary” is not some kind of aphoristic revelation; it is simply a false statement.
The essays in this collection are riddled with this kind of confused thinking — in which the author reaches for categorical pronouncements only to deliver frivolous if not meaningless sound bites about her personal interaction with her reading. Here is another example, also from “Meditation on the Word Pretty”:
Supposedly, the mere exposure effect explains why we prefer a mirror image to a photograph — familiarity alone breeds appreciation. And yet: the familiar is pretty, the unfamiliar beautiful. (But if beauty is rare, it would have to be unfamiliar; aesthetics can be circular.)
Again, we find an obvious attempt to aphorize (“familiarity alone breeds appreciation”; “the familiar is pretty, the unfamiliar beautiful”). But familiarity alone breeds appreciation is part and parcel of the definition of the exposure effect, and, the familiar is not necessarily pretty, nor the unfamiliar beautiful. This type of writing is what the critic John Simon says occurs when an author’s language use exceeds his or her grasp of their subject matter: “When gratuitous paradox and arbitrary pseudo-equivalence become the units of discourse, neither comprehension nor refutation is possible.” We’ll leave it at that.
In the promising-sounding essay “The Self-Destruct Button, on the Literary Death Drive,” Gabbert tells us she is fascinated by characters who “ruin their own lives.” One might think of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or any number of other figures who die tragically (since “death” does appear in the essay title). However, the author draws her primary example from Jane Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies. There are many things with which Bowles’s brilliant modern classic concerns itself, but the “death drive” is not one of them. The characters don’t die at the conclusion of the story; rather, the novel traces the adventures of two women who, to escape their stifling bourgeois milieu, set out on voyages of self-discovery. Miss Goering takes up with a series of disreputable men, while Mrs. Copperfield, the more radical of the two, takes up with a woman (Pacifica), a prostitute no less.
At the conclusion of the novel, Mrs. Copperfield tells Miss Goering that she has fallen in love with Pacifica: “I can’t live without her.” Mrs. Copperfield goes on to say that, in fact, she has “gone to pieces,” “a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.” By leaving her husband for Pacifica Mrs. Copperfield has re-created herself. Her voyage of self-discovery and salvation has allowed her to come into her own, discovering the self she was repressing throughout her married life. Miss Goering does sleep with men she meets in bars. She realizes that she is interested in doing so “in order to attain her own salvation.” These are acts of self-transformation, part of Bowles’s depiction of female desire and rebellion — not of “self-destruction,” as Gabbert writes. Nor were the two women “attracted to spiritual debauchery,” nor did they “destroy themselves in pursuit of it.” This is a misread of the text. In fact, in the end, as Claire Messud points out, “One pursues a path of asceticism, the other of a more intangible but no less dramatic renunciation.”
In “Aphorisms Are Essays” Gabbert tells us that an aphorism is “something more like an essay, an attempt to define. An aphorism is an essay, an essay in its smallest possible form.” She goes on to say that “an aphorism is not a truth but a kind of test (an assay), a statement you are meant to run up against to decide if you agree.” This definition seems wrongheaded since aphorisms are thought of as truths, truths that are generally grasped immediately, almost intuitively: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” “Art is long, life is short.” Aphorisms, as one of the greatest practitioners of the form, Friedrich Nietzsche, put it, are “a form of eternity.”
Gabbert’s attempt to present her aphorisms as “tests” harkens back to D’Agata and Tall’s definition of the lyrical essay. To help shore up its conceptual legitimacy versus the traditional essay, they claimed that the lyrical essay remained loyal to the “original sense of essay” in so far as it can be conceived “as a test or a quest.” The problem with their definition is that, while the traditional essay has an exploratory function, it is not a “test”; it is an expository piece of writing in which a point of view is argued. A test is what you take after reading an essay to ascertain your level of understanding.
To be generous, Gabbert may be expressing a poetic or lyrical point of view about aphorisms, but her notion is not supported by everyday language or by common sense. Moreover, she complicates her tenuous position by going on to say, without providing examples, that the “best” aphorisms are “not the most true but the most undecidable” and that aphorisms are “worth endlessly testing.” It is hard to comprehend what she means by saying aphorisms are “worth endlessly testing.” What would we test them for? To “decide if you agree” with them? But if we recognize a statement as an aphorism, then by definition we know it’s true, since by definition an aphorism is a terse, pithy proposition expressing a truth or general principle. There is nothing to test. Moreover, a proposition is either true or not; it can’t be “most true.”
In her essay “The Professor of Parody,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum critiqued the writing of feminist theorist Judith Butler for being overly convoluted and confusing. The same critique Nussbaum leveled against Butler can be applied here. Gabbert’s idiosyncratic choice of topics “creates an aura of importance” that she manipulates through her breezy, patronizing tone — as Nussbaum puts it, she
bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.
What rankles about Gabbert’s work is its faux mindfullness. This kind of writing produces, as Merve Emre has noted, an ill feeling because:
More than the lack of conviction or the preciousness of prose, it is the peacocking of the author that chafes. What should we make of writing that serves primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to present the author as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others?
One of the things one looks for in a personal or lyrical essay is a reflection of the complexity of the author’s inner world as they cover topics outside themselves. A good counter example (and there are many, including the work of Sontag, Didion, Gaitskill, Saunders, et al) to The Word Pretty is Zadie Smith’s collection of essays Feel Free. The last section, which bears the same title as the book, contains what might be considered a blend of personal and lyrical essays. In “Man vs. Corpse,” Smith — under the guise of examining what it’s like to be dead — deftly moves through art history, providing insightful commentary on artists ranging from Luca Signorelli to Mark Rothko to Andy Warhol; she then moves on, by association of ideas, to Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose novel series My Struggle she ties into her thematic discussion, beautifully summing up his oeuvre in a sentence:
It’s a book that recognizes the tedious struggle of our daily lives and yet considers it nothing less than a tragedy that these lives, filled as they are not only with boredom but with fjords and cigarettes and works by Dürer, must all end in total annihilation.
Smith’s collection contains beautiful, sustained pieces of thinking from beginning to end. Gabbert’s collection does not.
Gabbert has a gift for producing all-embracing, pseudoaphoristic statements, but her aesthetic sophistry detracts from and undermines her work. Because her ego is more on display than her intelligence, she falls prey to the pitfalls of sacrificing reason to lyricism and drawing invalid conclusions from ill-formed propositions. She is sufficiently skilled to weave together her statements in a manner that sounds pretty when you skim lightly over the surface, but it all falls apart when analysis is applied. The Word Pretty leaves one with a lingering feeling of disappointment. There is so much less here when there should be so much more.
This piece, in a different form, first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.