Reality Hunger (41 page)

The roominess of the term
nonfiction:
an entire dresser labeled
nonsocks
.

“Essay” is a verb, not just a noun; “essaying” is a process.

Essay: theater of the brain.

Emotion evolves into analysis.

Public life spills over into personal anecdote.

Sensations are felt as argument.

Argument is conveyed as sensation.

Opinions erupt into ideas.

In essays, ideas are the protagonists.

The reader of biography and autobiography (and history and journalism) is always and everywhere dogged by epistemological insecurity. In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what’s going on in his imagination. When James reports in
The Golden Bowl
that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is “overreacting” to what she’s seeing. James’s report is a true report. The facts of imaginative literature are as hard as the rock that Samuel Johnson kicked when, asked how he would refute Bishop Berkeley’s notion that matter doesn’t exist, he struck “his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, and said, ‘I refute it thus.’ ” We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we’re almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we’re always constrained from considering alternative scenarios; there are none. This is the way it
is
. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.

True essayists rarely write novels. Essayists are a species of metaphysician: they’re inquisitive and analytic about the least grain of being. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea or to Africa or at least out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. Only inner space—interesting, active, significant—can conceive the contemplative essay. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies: the novelist can inhabit not only a sex not his own but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads and beasts. The essay is personal.

A conversational dynamic—the desire for contact—is ingrained in the form.

It is Sir Thomas Browne’s introspection that shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric to the inner world of mystery and wonder.

My picturing will, by definition, distort its subject; it’s a record and an embodiment of a process of knowing; it’s about the making of knowledge, which is a much larger and more unstable thing than the marshaling of facts.

The memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over the questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the “facts” and “truth.”

What does it matter if Frey actually spent the few nights in prison he writes about in his book? Fake jail time was merely a device to get a point across, a plausible situation in which to frame his suffering.