Or is it? An editor’s note suggests that something else may be at work. “When we received this anonymous nonfiction submission,” it reads, “it caused quite a stir. One staff member insisted we call the New Haven, Ct., police immediately to report the twentieth-century crime it recounts. But first, we figured out by the mailing address that the author was someone whose work had been solicited for TriQuarterly. Other questions remained. What animal was this? A memoir? Essay? Craft essay? Fictional autobiography? Should we publish it with an introduction, a warning -- and what should we say? The author later labeled it ‘meta-nonfiction.’ We thought it was worth publishing for the issues it raises.”
And what issues are those? First, I think, is anonymity, which puts a barrier between writer and reader that belies the intentions of the form. A key faith of the personal essay, after all, is its intimacy, the idea that we are in the presence of a writer, working under his or her own name and in his or her own voice, as something profound is explored.
That exploration doesn’t have to be dramatic -- I think of Bernard Cooper’s meditation on sighing orJoan Didion’s riff on migraines -- but at its heart is authorial identity. And the first building block of identity is a name. This is one of the key ways we position ourselves, as readers, in an essay: to know who is speaking, and why. For that reason, the anonymity here makes me immediately suspicious, as if the essay were a kind of con.
And yet, what essay -- or for that matter, what novel, story, film, song, painting -- isn’t a con at the most basic level, a manipulation of memory and experience, a shaping of the chaos of the world? This is the paradox of art, that it is both utterly necessary and utterly invented, and it is the paradox of this post, as well.
As the anonymous author notes: “Would it matter to know my name, my race, or hers, or is a piece of nonfiction more potent for not knowing who I am, for not being able to make this personal, singular, my problem, not yours? Is it discretion not to reveal more of the facts, protecting her identity, or am I merely protecting my own? How much telling is a factual tale, and how much telling is too much? (Does it matter that I’ve never told anyone this?)”
by David L. Ulin, LA Times | Read more:
