The Essayist as Outlaw // Take One

Long before I discovered the essay, rough-cut gems fascinated me. I suspect this draw began in utero, my mind and body awash in the muffled sounds of outlaw country songs sung by my father — who still sings incessantly and occasionally on-key — along with Waylon, Willie, Merle, Cash, and Kristofferson. Though initially snubbed by Nashville, the rough-hewn sound of the outlaws is seminal. And I tip my hat to them for their bold, raw aesthetic, though I know it’s not theirs alone.

Pick up any of Alan Lomax’s folk song field recordings and you’ll hear that same sound clattering and cutting through living rooms, kitchens, and back porches. You’ll hear it on any Ray Charles record and scattered throughout The Beatles discography. You’ll hear it crane its neck toward heaven on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or croon, gentle and haunting, against war, bigotry and injustice on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It swaggers and stomps in rock and roll’s eternal youth. It waxes sardonic in alternative rock, art rock, post-rock, and indie rock’s obscure yet ironically privileged loft apartments. It shouts, thrashes, and bellows just to be heard in punk’s marginalized corners, and it cries out for a lover or to a lover or after a lover: lonesome, vulnerable, cocksure, embittered, impassioned, and exultant in turn in any musical taxonomy.

Though often obscured beneath a high-gloss commercial finish, this sound rises and falls in throbbing cycles through all musical genres and generations. Wherever and whenever it thumps through, another strained, struggling sound — an electric crackle pressed against the vibration’s skin: a rasp, moan, whine, rattle, or hum — reminds us great music is driven by power and passion bigger than the body it courses through. And yes, this sound courses; it drives; it essays.

If I had it my way, the essays in this thesis would sing the full gamut of human experience in like manner. But time and practicality preclude this ambition. Still, this project attempts to chart, in whatever tonal registers I could reach, what happens when humans attempt to bridge the ontological divide separating one soul from another. Which I suppose means this project examines the liminal state it inhabits. As the essays that follow are preoccupied with theological attempts to transcend alterity, such attempts are often described in terms of atonement.

Of a Thesis // Interview Transcript (Excerpt)

Jake: In the critical introduction I’m working on for my thesis, I quote Phillip Lopate early on: “in its preference for a conversational approach, the personal essay shows its relationship to the dialogue, an ancient form going back to Plato” (xxiv).

Jacob: That’s from his intro to The Art of the Personal Essay, right?

Jake: Right. He also says there that “essayists converse with the reader because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves” (xxiv).

Jacob: You also talk a great deal about your faith in your thesis, and about the Mormon culture in general, right?

Jake: Yeah, I’m pretty preoccupied with that stuff. I always have been. Even back when I was, like, four years old sitting on the carpet watching He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoons on TV with a cardboard sword down the back of my shirt.

Jacob: [laughing] I remember that show. But, really? You were thinking about religion that young?

Jake: Sure. In fact, I remember having this vague idea that He-Man was supposed to be an allegory patterned after Mormonism since, at the time, I thought everyone was Mormon like me.

Jacob: No way.

Jake: No, I’m serious. I mean, He-Man is the alter ego of Adam, “Prince of Eternia.” Eternia sounds a lot like eternity, which is a theologically loaded word, and the only Adam I knew of at the time, I think, was the one in Genesis. I figured that since the Biblical Adam was a child of God, he was a sort of prince. He-Man’s father had a beard like God did in all the paintings I’d seen, so that fit too.

Jacob: [laughs]

Jake: And then there was Orko, He-Man’s ghost/wizard sidekick. He always gave the moral at the end of every episode, so I figured he was the Holy Ghost. And to transform from Prince Adam to He-Man, “the most powerful man in the universe,” he raised his sword straight up in the air and said, “by the Power of Grayskull, I have the POWER!” I thought that sounded a lot like, “by the power of the Melchizedek Priesthood, which I hold,” which you say at the beginning of a Mormon priesthood blessing. So, you know. I figured the creators of He-Man were subtly preaching the good word.

Jacob: [laughing] You’re joking.

Jake: No, that’s really how I remember it. I mean, memory is a slippery thing, and we recreated the past from bits and pieces every time we remember it, so I might not have had all those pieces in place just like that. But I’m sure I thought of He-Man as an allegory at the time. I also thought that line from Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” which was my favorite song at the time, referenced Christ’s atonement. The chorus says, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free, and I won’t forget the men who died to give that right to me,” but I heard, “I won’t forget the man who died.” I remember singing along to it in the back seat of my parents’ car, actually, and my mom asked me if I knew who that line was talking about, and I said “Jesus.”

Jacob: That’s funny.

Jake: Yeah, I think they sort of chuckled and tried to explain what it really is about. But my interpretation fit, in a weird way. Mormons describe the war in heaven as a battle over agency, or freedom, and since all of us, except Jesus, would inevitably use our freedom to sin, the only way we could have both moral agency and salvation was through Jesus’s death. That parallel breaks down a bit when you consider the nationalistic element of “God Bless the USA,” but I was hardly conscious of any world beyond my home at the time, so that disjunction wouldn’t have occurred to me. I just knew that whatever freedom I had was centered in Christ’s atonement.

Jacob: That’s another theme in your thesis, right? Atonement?

Jake: Yeah, but I often talk about it in Levinasian terms: rites of atonement become attempts to transcend alterity, to reach out beyond the self and connect with the other. Of course, Levinas would say that alterity itself transcends, if I remember rightly. Which I guess means the one thing we all have in common is our immutable otherness?

Jacob: Is that your way of making it palatable to a broader audience?

Jake: Sort of. I am trying to write in an inclusive way. But I don’t really see the world in those sorts of sacred/secular, religious/academic binaries. Or I try not to, anyway. Those distinctions deconstruct pretty easily, I think; it’s all just culture. Beyond that, I’m interested in the way Levinas’s thinking helps to highlight elements of the atonement, as I currently understand it. Whatever transcendence atonement offers, alterity persists through eternity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost are three distinct persons, in Mormon theology, and Jesus prayed that we’d be one in purpose as they are, not that we would become literally one entity. Plus, the at-oneness God cultivates with man seems to allow, and even encourage, cooperative sovereignty; scripture reports instances where God seems to be in dialogue with man, allowing his prophets to negotiate like Abraham did before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, inviting Mahonri Moriancomer, a prophet in the Book of Mormon, to fill in a gap left in an otherwise very detailed emigration plan, and allowing another Book of Mormon prophet to seal the heavens, so to speak, preventing rain from falling so the people would be chastised by famine instead of war.

Jacob: Wait, so your thesis explores faith, philosophy —

Jake: Assuming they’re separate to begin with.

Jacob: — right, and deconstruction?

Jake: Well, something like deconstruction. I’m not sure my thesis measures up to the expectations that term imposes.

Jacob: But you do take a poststructuralist approach to these topics, right?

Jake: Right. I’m also trying to deconstruct myselves, plurally speaking, by picking apart all these ideas in various literary tones and voices. And I’m also trying to deconstruct the barriers we imagine between the sacred and secular, the religious and academic, the sanctified and the commonplace, the ancient and the contemporary. Which is why my thesis knocks rock and roll against religion, and formal, archaic language against street talk as I work my way through everything.

Jacob: That makes sense. I’m not sure I caught that until now, but that fits.

Jake: Yeah. The one thing I’m trying not to do is write apologetics or sermons or anything like that. I probably slip into that a bit, but I try not to.

D’Agata’s Ratatouille (Alternate Take)

According to American poet Joanna Klink, John D’Agata calls anything he likes an essay: poems, sunsets, meals, whatever. This may be comedic hyperbole on Klink’s part, but when she said so in an interview with D’Agata, he went along with it:

True. I’ve called some poems essays, because some of them frankly are. As are some films. And what else is a really good class but a single mind’s attempt to seduce an audience onto a journey?

I object to D’Agata using “essay” in its noun form so loosely. Some poems, films, or songs essay in the verb sense, being propelled on a journey by their own internal essays. But we do not call a car an engine, so why should we call a painting an essay? Moreover, I object because saying a really great bowl of curry is an essay will only confuse and drive the layman away and leave aspiring essayists like me with only academics for readers.

Okay, okay. So I’m catastrophizing. But that’s beside the point. I’ve actually quoted D’Agata because I more or less agree with him: an essay is not merely a literary genre bound by a particular form. And I quoted him because his definition underscores a problem at the etymological root of the genre’s name: we could translate Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne as The Attempts of Michel de Montaigne, which means Montaigne defined his work by what it did, not what it was, leaving the door wide open for us to call anything else that attempts something an essay. So I suppose we might adopt a literalist reading of Alexander Smith’s claim that “the world is everywhere whispering essays.” But D’Agata’s definition, ironically, begins to close that door a bit. He claims an essay is a specific kind of attempt; it’s “a single mind’s attempt to seduce an audience onto a journey.” Which is what I’m attempting with my own essays, fundamentally. I want to ramble irresistibly.

The Essay as Outtake (Alternate Take & Studio Chatter)

The Beatles Anthology double disk albums were released just as I began listening beyond my parents’ collection at age twelve. I checked them out via my local library and soaked them in deep, listening to each disk on repeat and scribbling about them in my journal. But somehow it escaped my attention that these albums were composed entirely of auditions, demos, live performances, and outtakes; it never occurred to me that all the false starts, rough cuts, sputtering finishes, and studio chatter weren’t part of the original Beatles aesthetic. Not until a friend, who grew up with the original Beatles discography, pointed out how strange it was to hear it all unpolished. I just assumed part of what made The Beatles The Beatles was this underproduced, disjunctive sound; this behind-the-music sound of four guys from Liverpool at work and play. If my parents had suckled me on Montaigne, I might have recognized these recordings for what they are: essays.

Of course, I’ve now fallen into the same laissez-faire habit I’ve censured D’Agata for while opening his definition wider, suggesting an essay isn’t merely “a single mind’s attempt” but also an attempt made collectively by musical artists, sound engineers, et al. But I find the idea of several souls banding together to attempt transcendence, diversely defined, completely irresistible. Maybe I’ve been too exacting?

Kill the Messenger (Kiss the Essayist) // Take Three

At any rate, I prefer to define (and pursue) the essay as a mode — a way of traveling creatively or critically — rather than as a form. This is in keeping with Hardison’s “Binding Proteus,” assuming we read method as synonymous with form:

The essay is the opposite of an oration: it is a literary trial balloon, an informal stringing together of ideas to see what happens. From the point of view of the oration, the essay is feckless. It doesn’t want to do anything, and it has no standard method even for standing around doing nothing.” (614)

Hardison, I should also note, begins with the premise that the essay is a shape-shifter like the mythical Proteus; the forms it takes are maddeningly divergent. But the essay does have a unifying mode: playful experimentation (I here use “play” in the Derridian sense, and an essay can be playful in this sense even when it is sober or somber). This mode diametrically opposes the prescriptive, outcome-obsessed oration: where an orator attempts to eliminate uncertainty, the essayist celebrates it.

And celebrate is the right word for an essayist’s treatment of uncertainty. Hardison further notes, as many others have, that essayists deliberately include what orators would exclude as error; an essay’s slovenly appearance is often the fruit of assiduity. Or, in Hardison’s words, “the formula for this kind of style is ars celare artem — art that conceals art… the lack of artifice is the product of years of effort” (616).

On the surface, this may suggest that the essay moves like a Disneyland celebration: as the product of exacting choreography and hours of rehearsal. This is always a hazard for those who make a serious study of leisure and spontaneity, I suppose, but the relationship between art and artifice remains complex. In my experience, it’s more like a Stephen Malkmus album. In an NPR interview I spent far too long unsuccessfully Googling but swear actually exists, Malkmus said that sometimes, if his lyrics roll a bit too smoothly through a song, he’ll shove in an extra word or three to make the lyrics feel more stilted. Which makes sense for a guy who, according to Chuck Klosterman, believes his breakthrough album with Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted, is great because it’s flawed.

I share Malkmus’s belief, as well as his intent. And I defend this approach by invoking the authority of Montaigne himself: whether or not he deliberately marred his essays I can’t say, but he clearly maintains interest and disorder with a similar strategy: “my style and my mind alike go roaming… if I cannot arrest the attention of a reader by weight, it is all to the good if I can arrest it by my embroilment” (Klaus 5).

Contractual Uncertainty // Interview Transcript (Excerpt)

Jacob: So what’s your take on truth? Is an essayist required to be truthful?

Jake: Of course. Whenever you call a piece an essay, I think you’re signing a contract with your reader, one that invites them to assume you’re telling the truth.

Jacob: What about dialogue? Robin Hemley once argued that if Virginia Woolf often included forty-year old conversations in her essays, she couldn’t possibly have remembered accurately (Graham). Was she breaking the essayist’s contract?

Jake: Well… we’re talking about essays, not memoir, right? In a memoir, the main point of interest for the reader rests in knowing they’re reading someone’s memories: their experience of factual events. With an essay, the main point of interest is in following “an individual mind at work and at play” as Scott Russell Sanders said (Klaus and Stuckey-French 21). Because we’re interested in the mind’s play, and I use that word to suggest both leisurely amusement and the business of deconstruction, we expect an essayist to experiment between the facts: we expect an essayist to veer across the lines into uncertainty, not to walk the line.

Jacob: So that’s the —

Jake: That’s the contract. Or, to appropriate a phrase from Paul Gauguin: in the essay “one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary” (Ratcliffe 20). We don’t like plagiarists. We expect revolution in an essay, and we expect it to reflect the essayist’s own thinking. That’s it.

Jacob: Wait, it sounds like you’re saying the essayist’s contract only requires that the text represent original thought; that, to be truthful, an essay must be novel. Under that definition, what’s the difference between being novel and being a novel? How is what you’re describing any different from good fiction?

Jake: Sometimes an essay is good fiction. Like Charles Lamb’s “Dream Children,” or Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling.” I mean, I’m not sure I’d say those essays are “good fiction,” per se, but they are fictitious and they are quite good. Lamb may or may not have had a dream that matches in its particulars the one described in the essay, and there’s no way Addison was giving a strictly factual account of his particular shilling’s progress through history. But there’s no secret to any of that; they’re not trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or something stupid like that.

Jacob: You mean, like D’Agata does?

Jake: Well, everyone knows D’Agata’s making stuff up in his essays. I haven’t gotten around to reading The Lifespan of a Fact yet, but the fact that the book overtly blurs and explores the line between —

Jacob: Have you seen the play?

Jake: The play?

Jacob: Yeah, on The Lifespan of a Fact. With Daniel Radcliff.

Jake: Harry Potter? Huh. Cool. Anyway, the book openly messes with the line between fact and fiction means that no one will ever read anything by John D’Agata without thinking, “I wonder if that part’s true.” You know? He wants his readers to read him with suspicion, I think. But the problem is that some writers assume the whole genre should be wrapped in the same suspicion and therefore write from a reader-beware literary framework. The fact is, the average reader operates with only a rudimentary hermeneutic of suspicion. And if you’re an essayist who wants to accomodate the average reader, rather than writing exclusively to an esoteric, academic audience, or if your essays often accommodate memoir, as Lopate says essays often do (Klaus and Stuckey-French 132), then those who expect or attempt to cast D’Agata-level suspicion over an entire genre are a problem for you. Frankly, I want my readers to assume I’m doing my best to tell them the truth. I mean, I think everyone should always be a little skeptical about everything, but… you know?

Jacob: So, wait, I’m not sure you answered my original question. What’s the difference between a fiction novel a novel essay? You made it sound like an essay can be a fiction?

Jake: Oh, right. I guess what I meant was that an essay can accommodatefiction just as it can accommodate memoir, or nonfiction, or whatever. Which, I guess, is what makes the essay sort of a meta-genre: it’s a reflective, discursive, auto-critical form that can contain or wrap itself in other forms. And, since we’ve been talking about the essayist’s contract as if it’s a real document, I imagine it would say something like this: “In the event Essay speaks in the capacity of Nonfiction or Memoir, Essay must furnish its audience with a disclaimer indicating Essay is either (a) not in possession of all relevant facts, (b) is incapable of purely objective, rational discourse, or (c) speaking under the authority of an unreliable narrator (i.e. via stylized persona, overt lyricism, disjunctive formulations, other literary devices and conventions, etc.) in accordance with People v Frey.”

All Dressed Up (Nowhere Going Everywhere) // Takes Four and Five

So far, I’ve both agreed and disagreed with D’Agata’s habit of calling whatever he likes an essay; I’ve defined the essay by its raw, undigested aesthetic; and I’ve argued that essays are defined by their creative/critical mode (playful experimentation) rather than by any specific form. I stand by these assertions. But I envy this praise Sieur de Montaigne offered Plutarch:

How variously does he discourse on the same topic? How many times does he present us with two or three contradictory explanations of the same subject, without making a choice and telling us which we must embrace? (qtd. in Klink)

And, desiring to emulate Plutarch’s irresolution, I’ll offer yet another definition of the essay: an essay is whatever an essayist creates. Reversing the customary hierarchy in this matter requires us to define what an essayist is without merely saying, “one who writes essays.” Phillip Lopate provides us with a variety of personas worn by essayists “from the classical era down to the present” as The Art of the Personal Essay proclaims on its cover, including the familiar conversationalist (xxix), the contrarian (xxx), the egotist (xxxi), the cheeky ironist (xxxii), the idler (xxxiv), the melancholic lover of nostalgic and quotidian curiosities (xxxv), Lopate likewise cautions that such personae may distort our view of the essayist, representing expansions or contractions of the essayist’s true self (xxviii). To make matters worse, the essayist we discover reflecting on paper may not reflect the essayist at all, if the sentiments Carl Klaus quotes in The Made-Up Self are at all representative: “the artful ‘I’ of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction,” says Edward Hoagland, and E. B. White confesses that “writing is a form of imposture: I’m not at all sure I am anything like the person I seem to a reader” (2).

In short, Hardison may as well have said the essayist is as protean as his essay; neither the art nor the artist has an irreducible center. In my own work, however, I aim to do as Montaigne claims to have done when he said, “painting my self for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than the original ones” (Klaus 1). Which is to say, I attempt to transliterate my muddy, mumbling thoughts into clean, articulate prose.

Being shifty characters themselves, essayists are also often masters of disguise. By which I mean they clothe themselves, or their thoughts anyway, in literary styles that are not inherently their own. Take this confession, from E.B. White, for example:

I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor. (Klaus and Stuckey-French 105)

Ironically, while White seems most at ease wearing Montaigne’s shirt, Montaigne seems anxious to get out of it, wishing he could present himself fully “and quite naked” to his reader (Montaigne 2) and sighing at the necessity that “one must spruce up… if one would go out in public” (Klaus and Stuckey-French 2). At the same time, however uncomfortable his ruffled collar must have been, Montaigne preferred it to all others. He was “conscious of how deeply influenced he was by his extensive reading” Klaus says, citing a line from Montaigne’s essay on Virgil, and didn’t want to wear their words: “I prefer to [write] without the company and remembrance of books, for fear they may interfere with my style” (Klaus 9).

Perhaps I should be so guarded. In writing this essay, I find myself putting on words and phrases I’d never use in conversation: thusly, moreover, which is to say. But as I sit with several more or less musty volumes before me, including Montaigne’s, such language is too convenient to avoid. And truthfully, I’m not sure I could see some thoughts at all without their literary costume. This brings to mind The Emperor’s New Clothes, except I now imagine myself writing as an invisible essayist who can only discover his own form by draping it in borrowed language.

Montaigne likewise sees himself dressed in words. “I am constantly adorning myself, for I am constantly describing myself,” he writes (Klaus and Stuckey-French 2). Note that as Montaigne is “constantly adorning” by “constantly describing” his inner self, it is never quite adorned or described; he is chasing a reflecting pool in a mirage by which he hopes to paint his own soul’s portrait, painting while panting and sweating, his ruffled collar bouncing and his silk stockings drooping, his fluttering mustache perched atop a wry smile. Perhaps I’ve let this metaphor get away from me in my pursuit of Montaigne? Then I’ll revert to the famous Emperor I mentioned a moment ago, though only to allow Montaigne to invert that image:

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our minds, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it… it is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. (Montaigne 273)

Where I saw inky words and an invisible essayist, Montaigne sees transparent signs wrapped around his impenetrable mind. Regardless, we are agreed that the inner workings of both the signifier and the signified remain an invisible mystery.

Consequently, the spirit of both the essay and the essayist bloweth where it listeth. “I cannot keep my subject still,” laments Montaigne (Klaus and Stuckey-French 3). “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness” (3). So, judiciously, and as a premodern poststructuralist (as I read him) more interested in play than ontology, Montaigne reports his subject as it streaks by: “I do not portray being, I portray passing” (Klaus and Stuckey-French 3). If neither the essay nor the essayist can be seen as having a stationary, stable center, if both are in a constant state of flux, or play, then it’s as valid to place either of these non-centers (being the artist and his art) at the heart of one another. In other words, we may define an essayist as one who essays, or we may define the essay as what the essayist does, but neither definition offers the sort of structure a writer might use to prop up their own work or bludgeon that of another. So let’s just sit back and let bygones be bygones, eh?

Readymades and Relativity // Interview Transcript (Excerpt)

Jacob: You once claimed that an essay is anything an essayist creates. This reminds me of the Dada art movement… I’m trying to remember who said it. Maybe it was Warhol, though he was a pop artist I guess. Anyway, the idea was the same: that art is whatever an artist creates.

Jake: Yeah, I actually pulled that whole defining-a-work-or-genre-by-its-author thing from some art history classes I took as an undergrad. Noah Strycker offers a similar definition in The Thing with Feathers. I don’t think he was the first to phrase it this way, but he said “art is whatever an artist says it is” (218). That’s sort of a slanted variation of the same idea; Strycker is still defining art by the artist, but his phrasing gives the artist (or author, or essayist, or whatever) more authority than saying “art is whatever an artist creates,” which sounds like an artist can’t help but create art, or that he’s always creating art. Strycker’s phrasing suggests art is the fruit of some deliberate artistry.

Jacob: Right. It’s kind of circuitous, but…

Jake: Yeah, it is, but I think most things are. Or, at least, most arguments form a sort of spiral: they may not double back on themselves directly, but like Montaigne explained in his wheel argument (Montaigne 552) or the skeptics did in their “no criterion” argument (qtd. in Rescher 22), whatever standard or method you use to judge an argument (which itself represents some standard or method) must, in turn, be judged by some other standard or method…

Jacob: Wait… I’m confused.

Jake: Yeah, I’m not sure I’m explaining it well. I’ve got a quote from Sextus Empiricus here, maybe he’ll be easier to follow. “In order to decide the dispute which has arisen about the criterion, we must possess an accepted criterion by which we shall be able to judge the dispute…”

Jacob: Okay…

Jake: “…and in order to possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the criterion must first be decided.” See? “And when the argument thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning (diallelus), the discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we do not allow them to adopt a criterion by assumption” (qtd. in Rescher 22). Montaigne’s answer to this argument, which I agree with, is that all epistemology and all knowledge ultimately rests on faith or grace. That’s what I get from his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” anyway. I mean, I haven’t actually read that essay (it’s ridiculously long) but I read once that Raymond Sebond was one of these guys who thought nature proved God existed, and that Montaigne’s essay claims what we see as natural is really just cultural, though I think “custom” is how it’s generally translated in the essay. But I’m retranslating it to match the terminology of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” (Richter 963). Anyway, in the end of his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which is not really an apologetic text at all, Montaigne says, “whatsoever we attempt without [God’s] assistance, whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly” (Montaigne 504).

Jacob: So, the point is, all our legal, critical, or philosophical arguments ultimately default to the arbitrary arbiters of cultural precedent and authority?

Jake: I think so. Which is a problem for logicians, since an argument from authority is a logical fallacy. But if every argument ultimately rests on someauthority, then why not on God’s authority? Right? Anyway… how did we get here?

Jacob: …Andy Warhol.

Jake: Oh, right. What I was going to say is: I think the idea that “art is whatever an artist says it is” is better demonstrated by Marcel Duchamps’ readymades. How else do you explain the way he could turn a urinal on its side, sign it R. Mutt, and call it art? And that piece has a quotidian, contrarian charm to it as well, which is very essayistic.

Jacob: So Duchamp was an essayist?

Jake: Yeah, I guess. He was also a bricoleur, like Levi-Strauss and Derrida described, who used, abused, and transformed whatever he found close at hand. I mean, conceptual art like his revolves around the idea that art is more about what happens in your head: in the head of the artist and in the head of the audience. The concept — not the object — is the art. And literary essays, like all essayistic artworks, really live as intention and interpretation: as concepts. Whether it’s a lyric essay or not, what we value (or, at least, what I value) in an essay is not that it creates something new, like a work of fiction, or that it remembers something remarkable, like a memoir, but that it thinks something remarkable. Good essays explore concepts, old and new (if anything is truly new), in remarkable ways. Good essays pick up whatever they find lying about, turn it upside down, and sign it in whatever persona pleases them best in that moment.

[End of Tape]

Works Cited

Graham, Philip. “The Ant in the Water Droplet: Locating the Mystery within Memory.” Brevity (2013): n. pag. Web.

Hardison, O. B. “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay.” The Sewanee Review96.4 (1988): 610–632. Print.

Klaus, Carl H. The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay. University of Iowa Press, 2010. Print.

Klaus, Carl H., and Ned Stuckey-French. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. 1 edition. Iowa City: University Of Iowa Press, 2012. Print.

Klink, Joanna. “Advice to Newlyweds: An Interview with John D’Agata | Tin House.” N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Klosterman, Chuck. “Greatest. Indie-Est. Band. Ever.” GQ. N.p., 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. 1st edition. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003.

Ratcliffe, Susan. Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rescher, Nicholas. Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. SUNY Press, 2012.

Richter, David H. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Smith, Alexander. “On the writing of essays.” Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 27 Oct. 2006. 14 Apr 2015. Web.

Strycker, Noah. The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human. First Edition edition. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. Print.