Creating the Self: Personal Nonfiction

“How does the writer of personal narrative pull from his or her own boring, agitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told?” This is the fundamental question that essayist and critic Vivian Gornick sets out to answer in her new book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Inspired by 15 years of teaching personal nonfiction writing in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs, Gornick skillfully combines her own insight and experience from 30 years as a writer with models of nonfiction writing from some of the best writers of the modern essay.

Gornick begins with the story of a funeral she attended in which one eulogist stood out from the rest: She was able to bring the deceased to vivid life while others had evoked only passing sentiments. Gornick wondered why this particular speaker, who held no special knowledge of the deceased, had been so much more effective than the other speakers. The next morning she awoke and realized the difference: The eulogy had been composed.

The act of composing the eulogy had helped the speaker clarify the subject of her speech and her own relation to it. By doing this, the writer constructed a narrative persona who was set apart from the subject and even from the writer. To Gornick this persona is a necessary aspect of personal nonfiction. In fiction and poetry, characters provide “surrogates” to whom the writer can ascribe the unacceptable yearnings or embarrassing character flaws they seek to express, while in nonfiction the narrator must reveal these flaws within herself. The flaws cannot be once removed as they are in poetry and fiction.

“It’s like lying down on the couch in public—and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work,” she writes. That is because of the self-aggrandizing, whining and self-pity that often cloud the story that needs to be told. “The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”

Gornick’s contention that for personal nonfiction to work, the narrator must adopt a persona that must not fall “into the pit of confessionalism or therapy on the page or naked self-absorption,” is an accurate and important observation. By creating a narrator separate from herself, the writer is able to transform the uniquely personal into something that can be felt and understood by others. The narrator becomes the link between writer and reader, allowing the latter to feel the truths that the writer tries to express through the story, without the self-righteous whining or high-mindedness of the writer interfering. Gornick uses George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” as an example of the importance of narrative voice. In life, Orwell was often an ugly and brutish man, falling prey to his own bitter insecurities, sexism, rabid anti-communism and other flaws. But in “Shooting an Elephant” Orwell adopts the persona of “the involuntary truth speaker, the one who implicates himself not because he wants to but because he has no choice.” He tells the story as the man torn between his own hatred of imperialism, his job as a police officer in Lower Burma and the hateful, often vicious locals who constantly baited and harassed him. Orwell creates a persona which proves utterly believable and almost endearing to the reader, and in doing so is able to impart his story to the reader.

In just the first 10 pages Gornick is able to lucidly illustrate the importance of the complex relationship between subject and narrator and lay the groundwork to delve into how to understand and express this relationship. But in some ways Gornick misses this golden opportunity. As a premier essayist with a large body of work to her name, Gornick has a vast supply of personal essays which she could draw upon to explain how she searches for this narrative persona in her own life. Who better to explain where she triumphed and where she fell short than the writer herself?

There are times when Gornick appears to be doing just that. Early in the book she describes a book she wrote about Egypt early in her career which her lack of understanding of herself and her situation hurt the story. “Who was I? Who were they? Where was I, and what was it all about? The problem was I didn’t really want the answers to these questions.” There is promise in her recollections, but they seem to stop there. Gornick never provides any quotes or passages from her book, and without a grounding in the text, her descriptions sound too theoretical and abstract. Gornick later describes a more successful attempt at personal narration—a memoir about herself as a child, her mother and a woman who lived next door to them. This attempt was more successful because she had begun to realize the importance of understanding just who was telling the story.

“To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with would not do at all: it whined it grated, it accused, above all it accused.” Yet once again, Gornick does not show any of the work that flowed from this newfound understanding, and her insight remains theoretical.

While Gornick does have trouble turning the critic’s eye inward, she makes up for it with in-depth, critical analysis of some of the most important personal nonfiction of the twentieth century. She splits the writings into two categories: essays, in which the narrator explores a subject through his own relation with it, and memoirs in which the narrator explores herself through some external topic. Her discussion of the writings of Oscar Wilde, Edward Hoagland, Natalia Ginzburg, James Baldwin Orwell and Lynn Darling, among others, is done with the deft hand of an experienced teacher, and an effective use of quotes and passages make it possible to follow her arguments without having read the essay she is discussing in its entirety.

At times the second section of the book, “The Essay,” feels a bit removed from her theories about the connection between narrator and subject as she focuses so intensely on the works she is analyzing, but Gornick’s perceptive criticism and explication is fascinating nonetheless. In the memoir section, Gornick introduces more of her philosophy on the memoir, its definition and value. “Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of…movement away from the murk of being told who you are…toward the clarity of that identifies accurately the impulses of the self.” What follows this definition is some of the finest criticism in the book, in large part because she remains true to the goal of identifying that movement towards clarity and supporting her definition of the memoir. She finishes the section by discussing W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and defends her and Sebald’s field of writing by decrying the book’s occasional classification as a novel and not nonfiction. “[T]he critics cannot believe that the power to make us feel this, our one and only life, as very few novels actually do these days, is coming from a memoirist.”

Gornick’s vindication of her craft comes not only through explicit statements such as this, but through the depth and clarity of her criticism and The Situation and The Story itself. Though she could perhaps have used more examples from her own writings to explain and illustrate the importance of narrative persona, and at times she did seem to lose focus while looking at and discussing many of the works she loves. Yet The Situation and the Story remains a uniquely lucid and entertaining little book that shows a passion for and depth of understanding of personal narration which few could muster.

In the brief but wonderful conclusion to the book Gornick explains her impetus for writing the book after 15 years of MFA programs, her frustration at the overemphasis put on how to write and not why to write. The conclusion even explains her seeming abandonment of her theories on writing for the criticism of other works declaring that “I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write…all that is inborn, cannot be taught-but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others.” That idea is what separates Gornick’s book from the myriad of texts for would be writers and allows it to become an important tool for all readers looking for greater understanding of the craft of reading and writing personal nonfiction.

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

by Vivian Gornick

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

128 pp., $21