this week

Very personal posturing

Personal writing can seem self-absorbed and insular, and it’s under attack from some commentators who disdain post-modern art’s obsession with the self. Victor Paul Borg defends the personal essay and memoir for its attitude and versatility

There is a body of readers that find this column distasteful, not for its worldview (that’s another matter), but for its very personal posturing: I write personally, hanging out my inner world on the page. Those readers might have read the sentence that precedes this one and, wry with scorn, might utter, Here we go again. But hang on; first I have to express my sympathy with the said readers’ assessment of triteness. Dancing round a story; creating personal drama to engage a topic is a method, whether staged or natural, that attracts attention to itself. It’s mostly an image problem, an intellectual and philosophical sneer of its trickery, perhaps; or its narcissism and exhibitionism. How much of personal posturing is ego ranting? I’ll try to explain.

All writing is self-indulgent in its presentation of an alter ego, the written voice with its gung-ho and wheedling manner, its subtle penetration. Many writers of essays and columns dress this alter ego in third-person commentary – and conceal themselves behind this mantra of social or political commentary with an authoritative, disembodied voice pronouncing itself on the issue of the week. Commentary purports a public purpose in its moral righteousness. I also find it suspect and removed. You’re up there on the pulpit barking down in a visible and intolerant sermon, pretentiously burdening the audience with overbearing generalisations. You’re concerned with the outer world, with public life, with society, and your realm is the public theatre – in a film, these type of columnists would be the interrupting and annoying voice-over that has to instruct us what we should be thinking about what we’re watching. What could be more paternalistic? If you want a pulpit, you might as well become a priest. Writing is at its best when it bridges our personal selves and our public selves, and it does so with a slick style, and it’s in this spirit that I invoke my story personas in these columns. It’s an excursion of discovery where ideas are implied in its layers of meaning and nuance of voice; the subtlest writing informs in its attitude instead of in its statements.

This view is debatable; some would say it’s post-modern pseudo-creation, repackaging a rehash of ideas in a more fanciful affectation, then proclaiming originality. In an essay on the American magazine The Atlantic Monthly of July/August, BJ Myers accused some of the most critically-acclaimed writers of our time of prose that stylistically attracts attention to itself, and in its cadences and wordplay and sheer musical qualities hides the obvious truth: that the writer doesn’t have anything to say at all, or nothing new to say, anyway. What’s happened to the ability to write a plain story? The ability to make a statement in translucent, straightforward language? Literary writing, including creative nonfiction, is supposed to advance concepts or simply demands to be read given the sheer vision of the author’s voice. In the quest to don the costume of storytelling, to frame the concepts in a story – create a little storm for theatrics, if you will – you fiddle with persona and style, but the form is insular in its preoccupation with the inner world and its fussiness with metaphors of the personal. It’s I versus the world, and that world sucks because it’s too personal: the popularity of the personal essay and memoir has stirred a backlash that these forms are self-indulgent and elitist. Why can’t we just have the facts?

Some of the best ‘literary’ writers of our time put themselves on the page with unashamed pomp. John Updike used the comparison of two of his ex-wives’ pubic hair as the basis for a story once. Rick Moody wrote about his sister’s early death from the pit of personal anguish in his latest short story collection titled Demonology. Martin Amiss, in a piece about the making of the film Robocop II, wrote: ‘And here’s cold proof of how hip and classy this outfit is: nearly everyone had read my stuff.’ Few statements can surpass that one in terms of drawing attention to oneself; Amiss is reminding us, by proximity, of his status as a literary beacon of intellectualism. I can mention dozens of other current writers who are thus writing personally. I have the same manner, and I worry about this thing called ego-triumphalism and also about what Myers called ‘the cult of the sentence.’

Writers, however, can’t be singled out for blame; writers are the product of their generation. If writers are too concerned with the inner world and personal landscape, that’s a reflection of our society. In other words, we live in societies that promote the notions of individual self-gratification, self-growth, self-reliance. Self-this, self-that, self-everything. The individual has superseded the public good; politics, these days, are politics of the self, not public loss and gains. The main reason for this development is our fondness of psychology, which asserts that with a working knowledge of the logic of psychology we can re-engineer the self; we can have the life that we want. Much of today’s writing is self-absorbed because we live in self-absorbed times, and writing – like other arts – is an alter reality of reality.

At the same time, I know about self-absorption, its selfishness and inhumanity, its keenness of perpetration. And it’s dead boring. Picture this. An Australian friend came round the other day and she clutched four bundles of pictures she had taken on her holiday in Australia, her home country. She was eager to show me the pictures. But the camera did not venture further than her parent’s driveway, and I was confronted with 144 photos of her childhood home. Her ex-bedroom, the kitchen table, the bathroom light, every plant in the garden, a dog, a four-wheel car, a portrait of every person in the extended family, the view outside every window, the tree-lined streets… A parrot on the lawn – ‘That’s my mum’s parrot Max.’ A woman on a windowsill – ‘That’s my mum. Don’t you think we look alike?’ A table in a garden – ‘When I was twelve I fell and cut my head open on that garden table.’ Yawn, yawn, yawn. For every photo she had a story, but I was thinking, What makes you think I’m interested in this?

‘To know oneself is to know the universe,’ wrote a friend recently (she’s actually a PhD level psychologist) in an email correspondence about the topic of stepping out of one’s shell. I’m not so sure; people I met who were too sucked and lost in their little world seemed childish and pitiful, as well as being recklessly inconsiderate and ungrateful.

But I defend using one’s persona in art when it serves a purpose – if it helps carry the piece, for example, or it presents ideas through its attitude or demeanour, or its vision of a given situation. I don’t like personal posturing when it’s a romp in a prankish thrill, with its silly mischief (I’ve probably been responsible for these occasionally) and its panting of self-importance. But when done well, personal posturing is revelatory and humble. Even in a column, political commentary is scholarly elusive and elitist, the privilege of the political class. For everyone else, it’s personal politics that matter: we are interested by people who are similar enough to engage us with a rapport of recognition and yet different enough to provoke our personal worldview and values. If originality is worldview and voice, that’s the flourish and delight of personal writing. Autobiographical writing is emancipating in its freedom of diversity – from this personal point, even though your view is just one view of many, you can make little universal soundings that are free of philosophical baggage. It’s also emancipating in the way it posits ideas by implication and example, and in its individuality; its meanings are found in its contradictions, in its individual stance, in its layers of persona. It’s versatile and volatile on interpretation, perhaps the reasons why many literary critics agree that, at the present time, memoir is our most promising literary form.

Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly