Hello everyone,
It seems to me that both of these two essays are doing something significantly different than the essays we have been reading in Best American Essays 2015. “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Feel Me.” is significantly more expository than the other essays we’ve read (as are most of the essays in Bad Feminist). “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically,” on the other hand, seems to have almost no exposition at all (can we even still call it an essay? The book’s subtitle is “Essays,” but do they defy the genre?).
It seems to me that both of these two essays are doing something significantly different than the essays we have been reading in Best American Essays 2015. “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Feel Me.” is significantly more expository than the other essays we’ve read (as are most of the essays in Bad Feminist). “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically,” on the other hand, seems to have almost no exposition at all (can we even still call it an essay? The book’s subtitle is “Essays,” but do they defy the genre?).
Maybe Gay’s work has a different relationship to audience and purpose than we’ve seen in other essays. Some of her more narrativized writing seems at times maybe more like memoir than essay. At other times (later in Bad Feminist, not our readings for today) her writing seems more like an essayistic form of cultural criticism that relies significantly more on Gay’s analysis and response to the world around her than narrativizing her memories and experiences to explore her ideas.
So, since we have no article discussing essaying paired this week, I’m interested in how these articles relate to our previous readings. I’m particularly interested in structure, the relationship between exposition, narrative, purpose, audience and structure. So, as usual please answer a couple of questions that seem interesting and productive, or, as I tell my students but they never do, come up with your own prompt. Since we are unlikely to have time to have a conversation following this up in class, I’m going to try to respond and engage with people here in this blog post, so feel free to make multiple comments and respond to each other.
So, since we have no article discussing essaying paired this week, I’m interested in how these articles relate to our previous readings. I’m particularly interested in structure, the relationship between exposition, narrative, purpose, audience and structure. So, as usual please answer a couple of questions that seem interesting and productive, or, as I tell my students but they never do, come up with your own prompt. Since we are unlikely to have time to have a conversation following this up in class, I’m going to try to respond and engage with people here in this blog post, so feel free to make multiple comments and respond to each other.
- Describe Roxane Gay’s essays in terms of the structures and forms that we’ve read about in Prof. Ballenger’s “Narrative Nonfiction Macro-Structures” handout, Hertz’s “Where’s the Structure,” or Pollack’s “Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction?”
- How does the balance of exposition and narrative in an essay impact structure or how we perceive structure?
- How might purpose, audience, and focus be influencing the structures or the balance of exposition and narrative in Gay’s essays?
- Do both of these essays have, as Doyle says “an idea to be pushed and prodded and poked and played with?” Is there a question guiding these essays through to the end? And if not, what’s going on with that? Is it just an unfortunately subtitled book?
- I’d like to put Ali’s medical specialist roles to work on this essay. Using the roles listed below from last week, pick 2 or 3 or however many leads to a productive discussion of a suitable length for you and tell us how that aspect of these essays is working.
Proctology/Oncology--Bullshit detector/Tumor removal (let’s cut some shit)
Neurology--intelligence of the persona
Cardiology/Neurology team--balance heart and brain of essay balance of emotion/information
Endocrinology--hormonal balance between now/then narrator
Orthopedics-- architecture of the essay, major muscle function, transitions (joints)
Dermatology--surface/aesthetics of the essay
Plastics--augmenting the essay with mixed mediums and forms
Holistic/alternative medicine--human affect
Therapy--asking the questions you aren’t asking yourself… the right questions…
I really like “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Feel Me.” “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically,” not so much. I wonder if it is because of the lack of exposition, as you point out. The structure of the latter seems to be straight chronology. But I do wonder what the "idea" is. I feel like the last line's idea, "We were no longer adversaries" could have been engaged with more. I'm thinking (thanks to a discussion in Bruce's Essay Tradition class) that this seems to be more of an article than an essay -- at least in the way I'd classify it.
ReplyDelete“Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Feel Me" seems to be a kind of circular structure. It seems to me to have approximately the same sort of structure as a lot of her other essays, and has plenty of exposition (much like her other essays in the collection, as you pointed out). It works for me, maybe partly because I like her thoughts and I'm glad for the exposition to balance the narrative. But I do wonder if it might be a bit safe, now that I'm thinking about it. I really like the line, "Or perhaps I am not looking for an algorithm at all" and I kind of wish she would've played that up more. (I think I'm touching on a few of your questions.)
I don’t have as much experience with the essay genre, but I don’t really understand why this balance of narrative and exposition is so highly valued. In “Feel Me,” I actually don’t think there’s a balance—it’s so heavily expository, which seems to align more with what we expect from an essay. And in “To Scratch,” I agree that the last line could have been explored more, but I think that would have been counterintuitive to what Gay was trying to do. She was telling us a story, and the point was subtextual—part of the pleasure I found in reading “To Scratch” was that I was left to grapple with that line at the end. Each essay works in very different ways, based on whether Gay chose to emphasize story or exposition. “Feel Me” brought me into Gay’s heart and thoughts with her; I think that’s the intimacy and connection that essay readers long for, but if there’s any “downfall” to it, it means that “the point” gets a little bit spoon-fed to readers. “To Scratch” is the opposite. Both work, and both forsake certain things by prioritizing others—it just depends on what the writer is trying to achieve in each essay. As a writer I haven’t yet figured out how to strike a particular balance, but the levels of exposition and narrative in Gay’s essays did feel very intentional to me.
DeleteTo get at June’s question about defying genre, I would say that both of these essays play around with generic convention (especially because, as I mentioned in my response to Jackie’s comment below, Gay isn’t afraid of being super direct in “Feel Me.”). But I don’t think either essay does anything so drastic that it stops being an essay. I’m interested in how you’d define an article, because if I had to say one of these essays is an article, I’d choose “Feel Me” because of the directness. In any case, though, both pieces that we read today share a personal experience, opinion on those experiences is offered in varying degrees, and the author herself called them essays. I’m not sure what else something has to do to be an essay.
I find Roxanne Gay's writing to be confrontational. My first impression was discomfort and dislike. There is a bluster in her tone, perhaps an act of compensation as she suggests in To Scratch, "I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem" (34) and in Feel Me, "At work, I constantly worry, Do they think I'm the affirmative-action hire? I worry, Do I deserve to be here? I worry, Am I doing enough?" (13). I've encountered Roxanne Gay previously, at a Literary Death Match in Minneapolis last year. I had the same reaction to her then. But something shifted for me as I studied these essays closer. I realized that my discomfort stems from her honesty. I think she is owning her complexities to a degree that makes me uncomfortable. She is demonstrating her insecurities on the page, as well as addressing them outright (though the balance is skewed towards demonstration).
ReplyDeleteIn To Scratch I feel Gay grappling with her own competitive default. The language throughout is adversarial. She claims to be a good loser but the writing complicates that idea considerably. The piece feels distorted by disparities, offering insight into the workings of a competitive mindset, or at least Gay's particular version of it. The question centers on adversaries but I can't quite nail it down. Maybe this origin story of her Scrabble adversaries sheds light on the idea of nemeses and what, in the end, seems to be a rather arbitrary distinction among players. My readerly dissatisfaction stems from the How? driving the piece, rather than the introspective Why? I also think the idea of competition teases a much larger issue: judgement in the form of comparison.
The question in Feel Me : Where do I belong? (i.e. with whom)
I've always had a very different reaction to Gay's work. I think it might be because I've spent little time reading and studying essays, and much more time trying to study the concepts that Gay explores in “Feel Me. See Me.” I'm accustomed to hearing race and identity and privilege discussed in much more aggressive ways. I read Gay as honest, but in "Feel Me. See Me," I also felt that she's crafted her honesty into particular forms that are more easily received by audiences. I don't feel like she's confronting me at all; there’s actually a sort of complicated gentleness that I love about her writing--she's giving me a brutally honest walk-through of her particular experiences as a black woman and professor and all the intersections thereof, and the content may shock some, but she’s made efforts to make her experiences accessible to me. The deepness of her intimacy and honesty aren’t confrontational to me—instead, I feel welcomed, honored by how much she’s willing to share.
DeleteThere is, however, something about that essay that feels more direct than what I’m used to with my limited study of the essay genre so far. It’s not that the piece is didactic or dogmatic, but I don’t think Gay was worried about not being those things as she wrote. I’m having trouble totally putting my finger on it, but I would agree that there is something about Gay’s writing that’s more in-your-face than other essayists, and I think that might be my favorite thing about her. She’s fearless and ready to fight someone but so tender all at once.
Maybe due to my essay naivety (that rhymed?) I enjoyed both pieces greatly and for different reasons. In brief response to Jackie I didn’t find her language confrontational, just honest. To me her mention of being a good loser and then also giving us her internal dialogue made me think she is simply good at being quietly polite (angry with herself on the inside and composed on the outside)—which is much more than I imagine others do at this tournament. I agree with the threads of honesty. Regardless of her structures—which seem vastly different in the two available pieces—it is the honesty that guides me through, interested to keep reading. It is the openness with the reader that seems to drive the works and, then, is what seems more confessional than confrontational. But I am a novice to her and her work so this is my initial reaction only. Even if this reading is silly, I enjoyed her treatment of two very different topics: scrabble and human interaction vs. internal self (“To Scratch”) and belonging and race (“Feel Me”). “To Scratch” was hilarious to me, even with all of the tender moments—“serious fanny packs bulging with mystery” (30) really got me. And then “Feel Me” hit home, reminding me how much I miss the family I was a part of during my undergrad at the OMSS.
ReplyDeleteBoth of these essays seem to have “an idea to be pushed and prodded and poked and played with.” Again, regardless of highly expository or not, Gay seems to always be getting at something. Her work feels perpetually driven by some force, even if I as the reader do not yet know what it is. I am unable to name or identify if this exists, how, or where, but just feel as though I am very aware that an idea is being grappled with. Among other things, both pieces seemed to be (most loosely) about navigating internal and external worlds knowing that you and your surroundings may not be in sync for any number of reasons. Dissonance is an acute feeling that I empathize with and I suppose reading about it from others is interesting to me. Gay’s work seemed to expose this dissonance for herself in both remembered and remembering selves.
I audibly snorted at your "essay naivete" rhyme...
DeleteIt's interesting to read all of your takes so far on these essays. I found them both perplexing, though of the two, "To Scratch" seems most so. For the life of me, I can't figure out what this essay is about, and when I look in all the usual places for clues, there are none. In the 3-Act structure we talked about in class last week, the first signals the reason for the telling, and nowhere in the first five or six paragraphs do I detect her motive. The closest we come is that isolated second paragraph: "Scrabble players love to talk, at length, with some repetition, about their vocabulary triumphs." Okay. Now why is this interesting? As the narrative unfolds, there are a few reflective turns: "I approach things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem" and "there's something to be said for the delusion of confidence," and "when you succeed early at an endeavor, you convince yourself you will easily replicate that success." All of these imply that the essay is meant to examine confidence--how we deploy it, and when it gets us into trouble--but I'm not sure what it is telling me. The last line about adversaries, which several of you wrote about, didn't seem to me to be particularly weighty since little in the work that preceded it seems to suggest that that was a relevant theme. There are, of course, many things to like--her voice, her honesty, her peculiar interest in Scrabble of all things. But it all seemed weirdly pointless. Madison, Nicole, June, what am I missing?
ReplyDeleteWhile I wasn't moved by "Feel Me," Gay's motives seemed clearer: "I think constantly about connection and loneliness and community and belonging...of how my writing evidences me working through the intersections of these things." From there, the essay takes the meanders that essays often do--from a commentary on representation of African-Americans on cable TV, to Gay's struggles as an advisor to the Black student group, to her own sad experience with fellow students undermining her credentials as a grad student. In the end, Gay writes "I am still writing my way toward a place where I fit in..." and then she returns to the alogrithms. As Emery said, perhaps this is a circular structure. It a three act structure in only the crudest sense.
The balance between narrative and exposition is an interesting one to track in essays. Generally speaking, those that are largely narrative read like short stories, and those that are largely expository approach the treatise. Essays are all over that continuum. But what seems key from a writer's standpoint is the principle that exposition tends to slow things down for the reader, unless it's well executed. "Feel Me" has well executed exposition, I think: it's voicey, it's anchored to particular places and times (in that sense, it has narrative qualities), and it has a chain of reasoning that makes sense, mostly. Maybe most of all, is that the persona is the nucleus of this work, the thing that gives it energy. Gay's persona, like it or not, is a force.
I’ve never read Roxane Gay’s work before, but also felt very “welcomed” by them as Madison mentioned earlier. Though, I don’t feel comfortable posing a driving question for either I think both suit the genre by grappling, playing, pushing, prodding with not one idea but many. Particularly with “To Scratch” I think I can pin-point some concerns the essay is contending with. Even if I don’t know how they connect, I trust that they do.
ReplyDeleteOddly this lack of knowing what’s going on makes me feel more “welcomed.” I don’t feel like I’m being directed to look at something the way the writer insists that I do, or come to the same conclusion the writer did in their final line. At least from my perspective, I felt like there was an instructive nature to the closing words of most of the essays we’ve read so far. I love the final line of “To Scratch,” because it’s not offering me an answer, or even telling me what the question was to begin with.
I might have a totally warped idea of what “circular structure” is, but I actually thought “To Scratch” followed one. It begins with Gay at the scrabble tournament she lost, and ends with her leaving the same tournament. The middle appears to move through past events prior to the end of the essay. Because, this appears to be so much about Scrabble, I found weighted significance in the brief mention of her life leading up to Scrabble, “being lonely in a new town,” and the tournament director, Tom, mentioning his wife’s recent death. In both cases, Scrabble appeared to be working as some sort of distraction, escape, maybe? Not sure.
Also, just want to put this out there. Why did Henry’s role as “nemesis” continue after the tournament, whereas her “new nemesis” lost that status after only a day? I think there’s something to that.
Madison brought up a question of “why this balance of narrative and exposition is so highly valued,” and I think that that is a pretty interesting question. When I think about Roxane Gay's writing, I can't say that I'm put off by her use of narrative or exposition, but I have a bit of difficulty connecting it to the essay tradition that we've been working from. Not that it is intrinsically a problem, but maybe a problem of how to address these texts from the context of our class. Most of the essays in the book lack a narrative string that seems to be a defining part of what we're looking at in this class, so while some of my favorite works are later in the book, thinking about fitting her cultural criticism into this essayistic tradition is a bit perplexing. So maybe it is just a lexical thing. Maybe there are some essays in this book of essays, and maybe some of these essays might be better classified as something else (maybe articles as Emery points out). I'm not sure that I have an answer to Bruce's question about where we see the point of “To Scratch.” I enjoyed it as a story, but it doesn't go anywhere for me as an essay.
ReplyDeleteThere is also the question of how we read her persona. I agree with Jackie's more recent reading of these texts, and maybe it's just from listening to her speak, or from some of her other essays, but I have a hard time reading bluster from her at all, at times frustratingly so. I think that Madison is correct this it is a rhetorical choice that enables her to reach a wider audience and welcome, rather than recruit people into feminism, but to me it also seems like what Madison refers to as her “complicated gentleness” is a sort of moderation that I'm at times uncomfortable with, and might reject if it weren't for the way that she directs it in on herself as a sort of heartfelt ambivalence and self-censorship.
As I read “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.”, I found myself both interested in Gay’s thoughts and a bit unsure about how exactly everything was going to connect, especially when she started discussing graduate school even though I knew the essay was about the “connection and loneliness and community and belonging” (3). I don’t think this was because of the lack of narration, though. I often enjoy reading essays that are primarily or entirely exposition. What I found myself wondering was whether or not Gay was using the best structure for the essay. It seemed like there should be stronger transitions or even spaces between sections. It wasn’t until I got to the end and read Gay’s closing comments about algorithms that I felt maybe this was the best structure (everything kind of blending together in a way that can be confusing) for an essay about fitting in, and especially for an essay about maybe being OK with things being messy and complex. This makes me wonder if we have become a bit spoiled by the usual essay structures and clear breaks between ideas and do become too impatient—both as readers and as writers—for an essay to follow a more familiar structure.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the lack of balance between narration and exposition is more significant in “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically.” Without more exposition, I felt unsure about why I had read the essay or what meaning I was supposed to be able to take from it. If the essay collection is ultimately about how identities fit together, this essay might make the most sense within that collection (the Scrabble playing being a piece of Gay’s complex identity), but as a stand-alone essay, I think readers’ enjoyment of the essay may depend on how much they like Scrabble and/or how interested they are in reading about Scrabble tournaments.
The heavy exposition in one and heavy reliance on personal narrative in the other reminds me of something that Aldus Huxley talks about in regard to essay writing. He proposes that we consider what he calls a "3-poled frame of reference"--the personal, the objective, and the universal. From this, I see Gay's differing approaches as new ways in--sure Huxley says that the 'perfect essay' is one that seamlessly integrates all three perspectives. But, perhaps these were the ways in that helped Gay find meaning for herself...
DeleteI liked both of these essays for different reasons. "To Scratch" was a diverting look at Scrabble and how when we play games rivals emerge in an almost arbitrary fashion. Overall, the essay felt slight, but entertaining. As Ariel noted, the use of the same tournament at the beginning and end was a fruitful narrative device. The in between gave us her first two tournaments and her initiation into this world. Sure, we glimpses at identity formation and personality types and distractions from life. To me, it was mostly a peering into this interesting microcosm--much like the crossword documentary "Wordplay."
ReplyDeleteIn a way, Christopher, you're saying that "Scratch" is a kind of ethnography. But is it an essay? The question matters to me some because I bring certain expectations to my reading of genres, and when they ignore them, I'm often frustrated because the usual handholds for understanding the writers' motives are missing. I can't get a grip on much.
DeleteHi, Bruce,
DeleteYes, perhaps. Or some type of personal documentary-style essay. To me, I saw it as an essay, but one without many insights. Perhaps, then, essays need insights to be essays?
BTW: I've heard that the reading could/is canceled because of flight issues. Anyone have any follow-up?
The other essay "Feel Me" was pretty interesting, if in a meandering sort of way. We get in order: online dating--loneliness--dating--BET, TV--fame--graduate school and and advising blacks students--work ethic and academia--own childhood and reading, learning--back to her students--last year of school--becoming a faculty member--students--one particular student--work ethic and being liked--graduate school--affirmative action--work ethic examples--finding people in unexpected places--Internet/social network--algorithm/math--intersections--we can make sense of complex problems. Quite a lot and a long train of though that eventually comes around to her thinking about her presence in the world and online world and how she can think through and have the potential to understand and help with some of America's issues.
Deleteconfirmed, the reading has been postponed. The Gender Equity Center will keep us updated regarding the new time/date...
DeleteWhat is interesting to me is the title of the Scrabble narrative. Rather than simply title it “Scrabble” Gay opts to use the definition for her title “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically.” I believe that the intent is in the title. Recall that in the second assigned essay for this week that Gay admits that she tells “some of the same stories over and over because certain experiences have affected [her] profoundly. Sometimes, [she] hope[s] that by telling these stories again and again, [she] will have a better understanding of how the world works” (3-4). Perhaps in retelling her Scrabble narrative she is, in effect, mining this memory for fresh insights. While this may have been less clear to us as the audience, this essay is about meaning making for the writer. Isn’t this what we’ve been told is the function of the essay?
ReplyDeleteMontaigne famously asserts that his essais are him writing for himself, not of being, but of becoming. And as a reader, I feel that in Gay’s texts, we are witnesses of her processing of becoming. Each center on specific aspects of identity by using language that scratches, claws, gropes clumsily, and frantically. In this process of retelling these tournament experiences we may not see the critical reflection more transparent in other cnf writers’ works, but I feel that in that final sentence, “we were no longer adversaries” we get a sense that Gay has evolved from labeling tricky opponents as nemeses. Perhaps the writer isn’t at a point that she seeks significant transformative change, but she does seem to make a little more sense of this world by retelling it in this collection. It will certainly be interesting to get her take on writing essays in her talk.
You write, "Perhaps in retelling her Scrabble narrative she is, in effect, mining this memory for fresh insights. While this may have been less clear to us as the audience, this essay is about meaning making for the writer. Isn’t this what we’ve been told is the function of the essay?" It is the function of the essay to be a vessel for the writer's exploration, but I think in the absence of some small insights it seems like the meaning-making machinery isn't working very well. I guess I'm interested in witnessing the process of exploration, but I always expect that something will come of it. I think I'd be reluctant to publish anything that hadn't yielded much insight.
DeleteLike most everyone else, I had trouble identifying a central question that guided either of these essays. "To Scratch" felt particularly aimless. Gay is definitely engaging and funny, and she showcases that in "To Scratch", but I didn't sense that the essay was really going anywhere. If I had to describe it as any one thing, I suppose I would say it's a meditation on competition, and particularly competition within small communities. But mostly, like June says, it's a good story, but not effective as an essay.
ReplyDelete"Feel Me" of course seemed clearer - the central question is one of identity and belonging. I also agree with Madison's analysis of the essay's tone. While I think Gay is unapologetic about what she's presenting here, it's not aggressive or alienating. I do feel welcomed in. But I think the question of balance is an interesting one, because I agree that "Feel Me" is kind of exposition-heavy. It's not exactly off-putting to me, but I didn't feel as connected to it as I did to "To Scratch".