Published in Seneca Review 37.2 (Fall 2007): 65-70.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Lyric as Negation
Brian Lennon

I associate the essay with an intellectual dynamic that has always seemed fundamentally at odds, to me, with "lyric" song. Perhaps that reflects the distance of the classical studies in the background of several prominent lyric essayists from my own background in philosophy---which to me is European Romantic prosaic philosophy, beginning with Kant and ending, for now at least, with Derrida. Of course, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian revolutionary commissar and founder of Western Marxism, wrote a still highly influential essay on the essay in his pre-Communist youth, assessing Plato as the original and greatest essayist of all---but he meant this as a mark of Plato's famous hostility to poetry more than anything else.

The essay is negative, as "nonfiction," its genus, is negative: not a fourth genre, but the negation of genre. Where drama promises public spectacle, and poetry retains its cachet as the origin of the language arts, "nonfiction" offers only not fiction, the refusal or denial of fiction. Nonfiction refuses that with which we associate rapture and transport, the pleasures of the imagination in a world of regimented time. The very idea of it strikes one sometimes as boring and pitiable, like the figure of Bartelby the Scrivener, whose complete introversion is a monument to the death in meaningless work. Even the Encyclopaedia Brittanica concedes that "nonfictional prose seldom gives the reader a sense of its being inevitable, as does the best poetry or fiction." Nonfiction cannot answer the question, "Would I die if I were prevented from writing?"

This thoroughly prosaic nature of the debased modern essay is, I take it, what the prefix "lyric" is intended to countermand. But the negative, the "non-," of "nonfiction" gives us something of Bartleby's quiet violence, the almost satanic calm with which he prefers not to obey and refuses to be budged in his preference. This negative force, this violence, is what enables nonfiction to oppose coercion even as it also serves it, and in a way that debates about truth and fiction often only hint at, offer us the ethical experience of writing, of the writing of power and the power of writing. To negate fiction is, in a sense, to create truth---a gesture whose burden of conscience is greater than craft-based scenarios of trust and readerly expectations allow. To experience writing ethically is to understand that writing is never harmless, never just a song.

The "lyric" in "lyric essay," then, like the "creative" in "creative nonfiction," positivizes the negative. But the negative remains, which is one reason that the question What is it? seems to follow the nonfiction-plus generic hybrid more lasciviously than it does, say, the fiction-minus of "documentary fiction." There are two issues here. One is taxonomy: in 2007, the third centennial of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus, we are more than ever beholden to the idea that our ideas are things, that our ordering forms are in the world itself, rather than in our talk about the world. The question "Why are we talking about the essay?"---what function does it serve in our talking---yields to the question "What is it?"

The other is the culture industry and the market, in which classified "things" are exchanged as products. (Lukács, in his signature contribution to Marxist ideology critique, called this Verdinglichung---a literal translation might be "thingification"---and it is adumbrated clearly in the pre-Marxist work: "The essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago---the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics and art.") New genres are new products, of course, for consumers of creative writing: above all, the captive, self-captivating market of alienated pre-professionals---Bartlebys---seeking its advanced degrees.

On the one hand, then, the "lyric essay" is a university problem---the problem of how to describe divisions, departments, fields, practices, artifacts of knowledge. We cannot talk about anything without, so to speak, making it a thing. But all of us must, also, sometimes, sell those things, to "make a living": and so here it is an arts community problem, a problem of art practice and art careers as well. And making it, marketing it, in our culture, means personalizing it.

Historically, nonfiction prose genres include religious and secular didactic and polemical writing, autobiographical writing of many kinds, including writing never intended for publication, and philosophical writings, including the aphorism and the imagined dialogue. "Personal" writing in the sense now familiar to us is either a new formation or a venerable tradition, depending on whether the Renaissance strikes one as a very long time ago. The appearance or disappearance of the ego, as in often abused notions of the death of the author, is hardly a determinant of genre in any case, and it goes without saying that egoistic self-assertion is in and of itself neither good nor bad, neither progressive nor regressive. Still, the "land rush toward the personal essay," as Douglas Hesse put it in "The Recent Rise of Literary Nonfiction: A Cautionary Assay," was hardly innocent of the competition for prestige, or merely for justification, in the disciplinary university. "To put it crassly," Hesse wrote (not crassly at all), "in a landscape crowded with scholars, one way to gain Schreibensraum is to declare new territories open for colonization. Suddenly there are not only virgin texts to explore but a virgin genre, not only countries but continents. And like early priests or prospectors, scholars who first stake claims will not only publish more richly but also largely determine future citizenship in the territory... Naming this territory by asserting the literariness"---or, we might say, the "lyricity"---"of the essay is a gesture with corporate as well as individual payoffs."

The essay as form, lyric or no, is not indigenous to the literary culture of the United States - though we do have our own inheritance and our own culturally specific modifications of the form. Nonexhaustively, these include the foundational writings of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay; the humorist and romantic traditions of Twain and Poe; American Transcendentalism; a vast wealth of twentieth century social and literary criticism; and the literature of philosophical pragmatism. Etymologically, the essay is French, and while "creative nonfiction" as practiced in our own context today reflects the secular self-interest and the ruminative nonchalance of the "idle" Montaigne, it seems little influenced by the polemical skeptic who defended cannibals. Writing in 1991, Hesse suggested that this was part of a backlash against what he called "postmodern theory." By 2005, it seemed to me that the scales had tipped, and that while my own work continued (then) to be dismissed in some quarters as overly intellective, there was clearly a kind of delirium out there, a backlash against the backlash, if you will, for the new experimental "lyric" essay. (In 2007, I am no longer so sure---or so aware.)

It is, of course, Verdinglichung once more to suggest that anything that flouts any convention at all is a capital-E Essay. Misguided as it may be, however, this approach is the better one, in so far as it opens the door further than it shuts it. And in truth, the door opens itself. Though I admire the tradition of "essayism" in my own country---a tradition beginning with the Federalist Papers and ending, for the time being, with the New Journalism and the American reception of deconstruction---the Essay with which I feel the keenest kinship lived once upon a time in German-language modernism, to which I have no biographical or other natural connection, a purely elective affinity. The attraction for me lies in the fact that in the writings of Robert Musil, Siegfried Kracauer, the young Lukács, and others one can read the theory of the essay next to its practice, as well as an anti-academic tendency refreshingly different from our native variety here in the United States, which tends to be more broadly anti-intellectual. For if the academic study of literature and the pedagogy of creative writing subordinate appreciation to analysis and inspiration to method, a notion of "pure writing" preserves the injustice while merely changing its direction. This is the head-heart dilemma that a pragmatic and utilitarian, if paradoxically wasteful national culture must resolve by valorizing one of its terms. We all know which one. Hesse observes simply, and correctly, that "the ideologies of literary nonfiction mirror the culture in which it is taught and read." The "creative" in our "creative writing" stands for the natural, the real, the organic, the pure, in implicit contrast with the artifice of mere writing. Must we say the same of the lyric essay?

But the "lyric" in lyric essay is perhaps less a claim than a demand for form, in Lukács's own extended sense of that term: at least, this is how I still find it useful. If the lyric essay "manifesto" that launched Seneca Review's publishing program in the new genre was more factive and descriptive than rhetorical and polemical, as I would have preferred---announcing, rather than demanding a change in the way things are done---it also hesitated, meaningfully, in that positivization. This hesitation, this doubt, I think now, was and remains something more---potentially, at least---than the alienated, self-effacing modesty of the materially comfortable middle-class individualist, as it is so often read---theorized---by impresarios of the personalized essay. Essayismus, the term that Musil used for his own union of art and science, of aesthetics and ethics, and of form and content in composition, is the bad conscience of "creative writing," we might say, in the same way that Canada is the bad conscience of the United States. When Theodor Adorno, writing in German, used the phrase "creative writing," he wrote it in English: to mark it as an American invention, to be sure, but also as a performance of his own understanding of writing and the experience of the foreign. This writer, who spent part of his productive life in exile in the United States and who learned to write as ferociously well in English as in his mother tongue, understood the essay as a traveler. "The way the essay appropriates the concept," he wrote in "The Essay as Form,"

is comparable to the conduct of someone stuck in a foreign country speaking its language, instead of assembling it from elements as is done in school. He will read without a dictionary... As certainly as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it pays for its affinity with open intellectual [geistigen] experience with a lack of any security, which the norm of established thought fears as death.

Adorno's essay as form rejects academic bureacracy, but it also resists easy anti-intellectualism; it insists on the carnivalesque, on the aspect of play in writing, without exalting play as somehow closer to nature. The essay aspires to the condition of music in thought, not in dismissing thought; it pursues unreason with and through reason. It is a permanent failure that keeps trying. In the end, the essay turns against even itself. Most importantly, for Adorno, the essay is a form of "negative dialectics," the self-critique of the socially privileged: a way of grappling with, as he put it, "the guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life," and the coldness which made Auschwitz possible, as well as the coldness required to live after Auschwitz.

If this ethical dimension is missed in the theory of the lyric essay, it is not, perhaps, absent from its practice. For the Montaigne who wrote Que sais-je? (What do I know?), which appeals so to the personal essayist, is the same Montaigne who wrote, "We may well call [cannibals] barbarians in regard to the rules of reason, but not in regard to ourselves, who surpass them in every sort of barbarity." Montaigne as critic of modernity: can the lyric essay do that?

But if lyric is the "unhappy" song of the self not contentedly, but anxiously alone among (its) others---claiming, in its declassifying division, a place in a world of shared meaning, rather than seceding---then lyrikos can be polemos. Today, we need it to be.

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