Reality Hunger (63 page)

One would like to think that the personal essay represents basic research on the self, in ways that are allied with science and philosophy.

The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they’re both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems—
The Dream Songs
, the long prologue to
Slaughterhouse-Five
, pretty much all of Philip Larkin and Anne Carson, Annie Dillard’s
For the Time Being
. Maybe these works succeed, maybe they fail, but at least they all attempt to clarify the problem at hand. They’re journeys, pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it’s a form of entertainment. I think that, at the very least, essays and poems more directly and more urgently attempt to figure out something about the world. Which is why I can’t read novels anymore,
with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays. David Markson’s
This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel
. Coetzee’s
Elizabeth Costello
. Kundera’s
Immortality
. Most of Houellebecq. Doctorow’s
The Book of Daniel
. Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe
. Lydia Davis, everything.

The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels.

Only the suspect artist starts from art; the true artist draws his material elsewhere: from himself. There’s only one thing worse than boredom—the fear of boredom—and it’s this fear I experience every time I open a novel. I have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it. The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object. The character is dying out; the plot, too. It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens—e.g.,
Tristram Shandy, Notes from Underground
, Camus’s
The Fall
, Thomas Bernhard’s
Correction
, Duras’s
The Lover
, Barry Hannah’s
Boomerang
.

What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay it takes a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. Lyric essays seek answers yet seldom seem to find them. They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case, may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet “the other,” may start out as travelogues
that forget where they are or as prose poems that refuse quick conclusions, may originate as lines that resist being broken or full-bodied paragraphs that start slimming down. They’re hybrids that perch on the fence between the willed and the felt. A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out.

An essay that becomes a lyric is an essay that has killed itself.

There are no facts, only art.

What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters.

Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and its formal originality.

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.

coda