In Douglas Hesse’s article, “Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy,” he seeks to “wrestle back the ‘essay’ from its history” in answer to some academics who seek to define a new kind of literacy in the computer age against the confines of the scholastic essay. Hess points to a contradiction, namely, that the logos driven academic essay with its well-defined topic and methods of documentation and perspicuity has moved far a field from the kinds of things the father of the genre, Montaigne, had actually written. Montaigne’s essays are not the articulation of airtight logical relationships in a linear development, but rather a series of overtly biased disjointed explorations steeped in rhetorical patterns more commonly found now in journalistic writing and yes, on the internet. The logical thread is there, but it is not the industrial thread of the machine age that nosily stitches along prefab patterns, rather it is more like a single strand darning a pair of well-worn wool socks with a cat and a fire and glass of good port--spectacles if you need them. It is as if the mind-stuff itself, those bits of refection, repose, and memory mix with the coinage of novel discoveries and armchair philosophy: The collection of the mind and the collection of things of the world.
In order to address some logical relationship, I am compelled to include some forms of scientific travel writing in the category of the self-conscious pathos and ethos-driven essay of the kind Montaingne and the early English essayist like Addison and Steele wrote. Unashamedly biased, subjective, and determined to make even the most specious or neglected subject matter a worthy good read. The early essayists used pity, humor, emotion, juxtaposition, irony, and biting satire. And if all these bells and whistles of weaving a narrative become too forceful (a cudgel when a hand trowel will do), understatement could darn a sock quite nicely.
My thread finds me thinking now about “collections and narratives” (the ostensible subject of this essay) and the kinds of writing seen in scientific travel literature. Thankfully, Hesse makes a connection for me: “It is telling that the essay’s rise paralleled the rise of the scientific method in the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment and that Francis Bacon, that author of “ The Advancement of Learning,” should its first prominent English practitioner. It is as if Bacon himself recognized the limitations of the single method and sought to establish a counter method, one that later essayists would call anti-methodical” (37). Well then, the history of collecting the world’s novelties and the history of the essayist’s narrative find common footing.
In “Collecting: Body and Soul,” Susan M. Pearce connects the notion of narrative to the collection, noting that “[c]ollections are a significant element in our attempt to construct the world, and so the effort to understand them is one way of exploring our relationship to the world” (37). I like Pearce’s willingness to see collecting as something everyone does. I am not the collector Susan Stewart describes in On Longing, in which the true collection “supercedes the individual narratives that ‘lie behind it’ (153).
I am the anti-collector, the lunatic hobbyist, pack rack, hoarder, or keeper of camp and kitsch, and everything I keep carries an aura of narrative kinetic energy. My old 1975 Volvo is the car I left Salt Lake City in twenty years ago (I can and do recount the various collections of parts I have replaced), but it is losing its use value, and so it is too burdensome to carry around like I do other things of no real use, such as my horrible and maudlin (some passable) poetry I’ve kept since the age of twelve. But the Volvo will be a bitter (and liberating) goodbye. I lament the loss of this huge orange leaking hulk, the tangible connection to my bachelor past through 16 years of marriage, the kids, the places it’s been (the time it broke down in Wells Nevada, we had to go to Salt Lake to have a customized piece made; Malibu, Triple A was pissed at how far they had to drag it away from the glamour; that overpass 70 miles from Burley when that nice old guy stopped to show the kids a mammoth tooth; drag racing bikers in Huntington Beach until oil spewed; Reno, Huntington Beach, Portland , the Olympic Peninsula, . . .)
The stories connected to my stuff that I drag around are unstable, because memory is, and they are hallucinatory, mundane, exalting, fleeting, and sometimes bitter. I must confess (confession being a long tradition of the essay genre) that my collections will not survive my death intact like the collections donated to museums and such. However, I take solace in the equanimity of a common narrative: The natural ending to the story of collecting is losing and liberation, whether by choice, circumstance, or death. Go not easy into that.
1 comment:
"The natural ending to the story of collecting is losing and liberation, whether by choice, circumstance, or death."
Thanks for that, Jerry. I think you and Julie have convinced me that I may be a collector after all. I was thinking about how I am a prolific letter writer - I have letters from my fifth grade pen pal (whom I still write and have visited once, to this day) - and how Julie described the personal effects of Muir as souvenirs, and I began thinking...I think letters could be collections regardless of their wholeness, etc. because they are an exchange (just as scientific travel/collecting is an exchange) that tells me something about myself and tells you something about yourself. It is a way of looking at myself from the point of the "other," someone outside of my brain. It is also a way of preserving my memories of who I am and who my friends and family are at a specific point in time. A way of preserving the voice of my friend who died alone on a mountain - of remembering what his voice sounded like, how he made me feel. And these may be souvenirs too, but I think they could also be a collection in the way that we have talked about travel narratives and collections and the missing pieces they fill in. You cannot know all of me, but you can know more of me from reading what others have written to me about themselves and me and our relationships. And all this will mean something entirely different when I die, and perhaps someday someone like Hillary will find my letters and keep them for their own reasons and I will not live on as me through the letters, but as a new creation, a part of someone else's identity. (Or in the less presumptuous version, letters will be burned/thrown out/destroyed, in which case the collection will be dead, or in Jerry's lovely terms "liberated").
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