Reality Hunger (45 page)

The opening sentence of Nabokov’s autobiography,
Speak, Memory
, is communal, contemplative: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” By contrast, the first line of his first English-language novel,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
—“Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December 1899, in the former capital of my country”—is concerned with the names, dates, and places of the world. Although
Speak, Memory
is chronological, it is in a sense unplotted, shifting from one character or one city to another not on the basis of narrative but the associations of memory. In
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, the transition from place to place is accomplished according to the demands of, especially, temporal progression; most chapters open with a jump forward in time. No matter how traditional or experimental a novel may be, the reader is meant to be struck by its fulfillment or frustration of story; we expect autobiography, on the other hand, to be an examination of the process by which it, and its author, came to be. It’s easier for autobiography to be about itself than it is for fiction, because by its very definition, autobiography is concerned with the consciousness of its creator
in the process of creating himself. If the novelist can deflect through invention the fact that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” the autobiographer is allowed and even expected to surrender to the unfathomable phenomenon that is his own life.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The essayist gives you his thoughts and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them.

The glory of the essayist is to tell, once and for all, everything that he or she thinks, knows, and understands.

Serious writing actually tries to get somewhere—to make intellectual, emotional, psychic, and philosophical “progress.” (This progress could, of course, also be regress.) Obviously, with some very accomplished novelists one feels this via magisterial storytelling (actually, I can think of very few at the moment), but in the work of my favorite writers, the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.

Somebody wrote that what I was doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the question. That’s what I think telling a story is: resolving a thought.

—not what happens, but what we’re thinking about while nothing, or very little, is happening. The sound of a person sitting alone in the dark, thinking. Hawthorne, “Custom-House.” Borges,
Other Inquisitions
. Stendhal,
Maxims on Love
. Baldwin, the early essays. The sound of one hand clapping.

The essential tension of serious essay is the ambivalence of the author-narrator toward a given subject. I find this a more compelling way to talk about being alive than through the surrogate selves of fiction. I remember in college telling my girlfriend that I wanted to forge a form that would house only epiphanies—such presumption!—but now, thirty-plus years later, I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto something approximating that. I want the overt meditation that yields understanding, as opposed to a lengthy narrative that yields—what?—I suppose a sort of extended readerly interest in what happens next.

When Nicholson Baker lived in Berkeley for several years (he now lives in Maine), I contrived to think of him as being related to a group of West Coast writers whose interestingness derives for me principally from the ways in which they process information and write about how they process information (to name but a few, Douglas Coupland, Sallie Tisdale, Bernard Cooper, the late David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Raban, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann). The West Coast seems somehow to give people the freedom to focus on information and its conduits, its messengers; the East Coast, by contrast, is still to me so much about the old-fashioned minutiae of social strata.

What the lyric essay gives you—what fiction doesn’t, usually—is the freedom to emphasize its aboutness, its metaphysical meaningfulness. There’s plenty of drama, but it’s subservient to the larger drama of mind.