Beginning immediately with a discussion of "I" and the ways that people and authors worry or hesitate to use the word and include themselves in any writing, Lopate turns to the ways authors of the personal essay must embrace "I" for themselves and their audiences. He highlights, "The problem with 'I' is not that it is in bad taste, but that fledgling personal essayists may think they've said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that 'I' is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past, and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader, encountering it for the first time in a new piece, sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on" (Lopate 38). This is his launch into the ways that authors can create a character from the "I" in ways that the author is aware of (thus aiming to eliminate the angst and shame that comes with placing oneself in the open on a page by choosing certain aspects of self to highlight or downplay) as well as the audience (by writing about oneself in a way that readers are interested in and amused by enough to continue reading).
The main argument of Lopate's piece is, as indicative by the title, turning oneself into a character. While reading I took notes of the suggestions for thinking and writing (I chose to separate pondering and what seemed like more action-based suggestions as I read, but both lists are similar) a character.
Thinking about characterizing oneself:
- distance from yourself
- see yourself from the ceiling
- take inventory of yourself
- dramatize yourself
- choose a personal conflict
- "mining our quirks" (41)
- explaining identity and background
- finding self-amusement and self-curiosity
- expressing your opinions and thoughts
- showing actions and choices (along with thoughts)
Writing about oneself:
- start with quirks
- properly position oneself
- remove inessentials
- emotional preparedness
- recognize the charm of ordinary and life's mysteries
- create an author-reader relationship
- eliminate self-hatred
- give "I" something to do
For this week's prompts I have several questions about Lopate and Kreider's pieces. Feel free to answer whichever seem most immediate or interesting to you. Even though the readings were short there is a great deal of information, suggestion, opinion, and content to sort through. Because of the density if these questions don't do it for you (or if there was something extremely important to you that isn't touched upon by the below questions) please respond to a self-generated question or quote.
1. Lopate places shame as an enemy of successful personal essay writing, "I," and suggests "outgrowing shame" (44). Shame has come up in class several times, and this essay gives us an opportunity to write about it. Do you agree or disagree with Lopate? Do you feel as though shame holds no place in essay writing, or is shame a somewhat necessary aspect of writing about oneself? How does shame (or lack thereof) play a role for you as both a reader and writer of cnf?
2. "But first must come the urge to entertain the reader. From that impulse everything else follows" (Lopate 43). Surrounded by suggestions about being self-amused and curious, driven by life's mysteries, we find this quote. Do you feel as though reader entertainment fits with Lopate's message or contradicts it? If you were to look at your own writing and purposes of writing and rank purpose and goals, where does reader entertainment fit? How do you reconcile your own experiences, the way your feel and write, and audience when writing? And/or how does reader entertainment function within yourself and your "I"?
3. Do you by into Lopate's suggestions, ideas, and piece as a whole? Why or why not? What makes sense to you? What feels uncomfortable or excessive to you? Complete the sentence and elaborate: As a personal essayist, turning yourself into a character is _________.
4. Choose one or more of the bulleted suggestions. Write about it in terms of cnf, your experiences (writing, reading... living), and your opinions. Why did you choose what you did and what role does it play in your understanding of personal essay writing and cnf? Do you feel that the suggestion holds validity? Why or why not?
5. Kreider launches into his essay immediately with an "I" (as A Man, from the title, assumably) and links this sense of self to His Cat (also from the title and many people's working knowledge of "Cat Ladies," pet enthusiasts, and so on). Does this work for you as a reader either familiar or unfamiliar with him/his work? After finishing the essay does this starting place and framing work?
6. How does Krieder turn himself into a character? What methods does he use? What would his character be, if you had to explain it in a sentence or two? Do you think the character he employs is effective or not?
7. Apply one of the bulleted suggestions from Lopate's piece to Kreider's piece. Analyze his ability or inability to implement the chosen suggestion.
Love the lists and the questions. I’d like to answer your first question on Lopate and shame. I agree with Lopate in the need to “outgrow shame,” but only if that shame is synonymous with the “self-hatred” he discusses later on (42). I don’t think discussions of feeling boring or feeling weird should be dismissed, but I do think that “self-hatred” can limit a writer’s discussion of feeling shame, particularly if they’re unwilling to forgive themselves. Along with that, I’m really drawn to Lopate’s suggestion of “being curious about oneself,” as an alternative to “self-hatred” (42). Speaking from my own experience, when I’m mired in my own self-loathing I’m trying to escape myself instead of trying to understand why I feel the way that I do. That said, I can see how “self-curiosity” would actually be less alienating than writing with this sense of “self-hatred” or “shame,” which admittedly goes against Lopate’s suggestion that “self curiosity can only grow out of detachment or distance“ (42).
ReplyDeleteMoving on to your seventh prompt, I saw Kreider playing with “self-curiosity” and “self-amusement.” I think Kreider gestures toward a kind of shame his remembered self might have felt, but Kreider as the “now narrator” no longer feels. For example on page 154, Kreider examines himself in parts, “some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself, It’s just a cat.” What’s interesting about this examination of parts, too, is that each part is still directly connected to himself, particularly as he identifies the other part that “had to acknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing her one chance at being alive, as [he] was” (154). I believe that both of those parts are still with the “now narrator,” but the shame attached to them is gone with the resolution that “a man who is in a room with a cat….is not alone” (Kreider 155).
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ReplyDeleteMy favorite tip offered by Lopate could probably fall under either of Nicole’s lists: “The proper alternative to self-dislike is not being pleased with oneself--a smugness equally distasteful to the reader--but being curious about oneself” (42). As a reader, I’m not immediately turned off by writers who are pleased with themselves, but I think writers who are curious about themselves are simply more interesting to read about. If they’re just pleased, they probably already have things figured out; if they’re curious, they’re still looking for answers, a quality that we’ve consistently talked about as a trademark of truly engaging essays.
ReplyDeleteI read the Lopate article after Kreider’s essay, and when Lopate referenced Montaigne as the father of this curious-about-oneself approach, it was impossible for me to resist comparing Kreider’s style to Montaigne’s. In both cases, the now-narrator is clever and philosophical; the self-character he’s reflecting on his kind of clumsy and the reflection itself is honest yet self-deprecating in the particular details it shares. Kreider builds his character by shining the main focus on the fact that he was a man trying in vain to not be a Cat Guy because Cat Guys are too uncool and emotional (a belief which I absolutely cannot understand, by the way), and I think it worked very well--I kept saying to myself, “stop being a pompous weirdo and just accept that you like your cat already,” but the intervention of the now narrator--the way that Kreider clearly viewed his past self in a somewhat self-effacing light--meant that I couldn’t fault the resistant Cat Guy character. The beginning of the essay had the potential to be kind of abrasive for me as someone who has a service pet and therefore an unusually strong bond with her, but I was never able to get too mad at the past Kreider who thought that people who dote over animals in their house are “insane.”
The characterization of the cat was really charming and relatable throughout, and I think if Kreider had failed to characterize himself, the essay would have just been about the cat, not about him and the cat, or his thoughts and growth as a person who has benefited from living with a cat. I think I tried to answer questions 3 and 6...possibly 7. I’m excited to talk about these pieces more!
I really saw the characterization of Kreider through his voice. It was warm and amenable and smart. Really we don't find out too much about Kreider. We get his lack of partner, his cabin at Chesapeake Bay, his interactions with his cat--but mostly in a non-lineal fashion. On the street I could not point Kreider out. Yet, for me, if only temporarily I understand Kreider and where he coming from and his concerns about loneliness. I could connect and empathize. This was interesting to me--as he hadn't told much of a story, or significantly used narrative devices.
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DeleteTo take up Nicole's question about how Kreider turns himself into a character, I'd begin with the first sentence of the essay: "I lived with the same cat for nineteen years--by far the longest relationship in my adult life." Doesn't this immediately tell us a lot about the I-character here? We sense, to use Lopate's words, the narrator's self-amusement and also his quirks (this guy can't seem to get adult relationships right). Kreider's instinct to begin his essay with such self-characterization also works to immediately counter any initial skepticism I might have about reading a pet essay (a subgenre that is pretty hard to pull off successfully) because it subverts sentiment. A couple of paragraphs later, to cement the deal, Kreider confides that he understand "that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive." In three paragraphs, then, we have an "I-character" who both confesses to this quirkiness and exercises self-awareness. He is not only, in some ways, a pitiful example of someone with an overly full "reservoir of affection" for a pet, but the "medical textbook illustration." What so interesting about this performance is that the narrator both identifies what a turn-off overly involved pet owners can be but then confesses he's a classic case. Therefore, why isn't he pitiful? I think it's because we become so fond of him as a character; we sense, among other things, his "self-amusement," and this wins us over.
DeleteI really like Lopate’s piece overall, but I am a little stumped on the questions of shame. He says, “There is something off-putting about a nonfiction story in which the ‘I’ character is right and all the others are wrong” (43). This, to me, seems often to be borne of shame. From shame often comes humility, and I think that’s the element Lopate is talking about in that quote—it’s more than self-awareness, I think. I know many of the things I write about have some element of shame associated. But I also know that there are some things I am too ashamed to write about. The activity we did last week brought up all those feelings of shame—that particular version of me I can’t quite own up to, the one I’m not interested in exploring. So I guess shame plays a big part in writing, at least for me. I am wondering as I write this if I’m confusing shame and self-hatred. I wonder if self-hatred is shame amplified, and that’s what causes a roadblock in writing. Lopate also says that “remorse is often the starting point for good personal essays” and can allow the writer to “outgrow shame” (43), but I’m not convinced that we have to outgrow shame in order to write well. I think shame, for some, is a constant, and writing helps examine that shame, but it doesn’t eliminate it. And I think that’s okay.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to dislike Kreider’s piece based on the first few pages. His discussion of pet owners felt too snarky, kind of holier-than-thou. By the end, I decided that he was using that to turn himself into a character, even though I don’t know that he needed to do that to get his point across. I did like the narrator by the end, and a lot of that had to do with the way he mined his quirks and was able to be curious and amused by his actions and feelings.
I agree with Emery. Despite my not wanting to, I ended up really liking the narrator by the end of the essay and it most certainly comes from that ceiling view he has of himself as a character in his apartment with the cat. He really hones in on those specific voices, actions, and often times embarrassing things we do when alone. I think that made the most sense to me from the Lopate piece and something I'd never really thought about, the mining of quirks as a way to carry the character you are becoming. It reminds me a lot of a conversation we had in fiction tonight discussing how when writing a lot of dialogue physical action and mannerisms can step in and be the subtext of the scene. The way we behave becomes a subtext of the self.
ReplyDeleteI understand Lopate's message in the fact that the reader doesn't know you so fill in the blanks race culture age whatever else. I think my hard time is knowing when and what to clue in. How do I find the balance between the "I" I know I am and the one the reader needs to know for the essay. At what point does certain information become essential and when is it just decoration? I think in regards to all of it, I know I leave too much or most of it out, and rely on voice to do that character making for me. Like, if you can hear her you can see her. But I'm thinking now, maybe that's not enough.
Lopate speaks of the impulse to entertain and I see that impulse play out consistently in Kreider's essay, mostly in the form of humor but also in the form of statements that push his ideas into unexpected territory. As far as surprises go, I'm thinking specifically of his line "I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people" (154). I did not see that coming. My appreciation for Kreider as a narrator grew throughout the piece, in part, due to his successful bid to entertain me. He seems to exemplify the objective distance, the 'roundness' that Forster suggests and Lopate recounts.
ReplyDeleteI think that, like Emery, I want to keep room for shame in my writing, maybe even “self-hatred” “self-disgust” as Lopate says. In response to Nicole’s first question, I don’t overall disagree with Lopate, because I don’t think he is saying that this sort of negative self-recognition has no place in cnf, but rather that it can lead to a hesitance in the writer, either a total writing block, or “a form of stuttering, of never being able to get past the initial, superficial self-presentation and diving into the wreck of one’s personality with gusto.” In other words, self-loathing has a place here as long as it doesn’t completely hamper the writer. I do worry that this creates a sort of prescribed cnf attitude, a normative cnf writers persona, another addition to Doyle’s list of don’ts.
ReplyDeleteWhile it isn’t a hard and fast rule, I think it relates to Nicole’s second question about entertainment. I think that self-amusement is definitely part of my process, but part of my willingness to indulge in that is the expectation that what amuses me is not universally amusing, and similarly, other writers’ playfulness can annoy the crap out of me. When I think of some abstract reader when I write, usually I’m fairly contemptuous toward them. I might later have a more positive feeling about audience, but in order to short circuit self-censorship, I can’t concern myself about what I think an audience might want from me. That is, at most, secondary to my purposes in writing whatever. If I do indulge some imagined reader, then I suspect that my writing would be hampered, not by Lopate’s “self-disgust” but by a sense of privacy, but instead because whatever I make of my self, is not for others amusement, and so I’d hold back.
I also think that there are lots of times when writers should be more conscious in their navigating between honesty and shamelessness. There have been a lot of cnf writers that haven’t been ashamed of themselves when I think they ought to be, and I find it very off-putting; not just smugness or being pleased with oneself, but lacking self awareness (particularly rich or abusive people).
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ReplyDeleteWhile on the whole I agree with Lopate's essay, I take issue with his assertion that "remorse is often the starting point for good personal essays" (43). While I think that shame certainly plays a large role in many works, I wouldn't say that's it's the starting point for most. I think instead a starting point would have to be the self-amusement and curiosity Lopate talks about earlier in the essay. Starting with shame seems, so me, self-defeating - if you're already ashamed/regretful of some past event, what do you hope to discover by writing about it?
ReplyDeleteThat being said, it's easy to see how shame plays into writing, rather than defining it, and I think this is evident in the Kreider piece, particularly when he talks about his past self's reaction to suddenly owning a cat. It's when he starts to wonder about this shame and how owning a cat has come to shape his life that we get an interesting and self-aware essay.
I was really interested in Lopate’s discussion of shame and all of the comments on shame in the blog so far. I think Lopate’s right in one sense because shame can hold us back from opening up in our writing or from becoming characters in our essays. But I agree with Emery and June’s comments, and I feel like once we become more self-aware and curious about the sources of our shame, it could work for us and even be an aspect of our characters. I also think this depends on the writer, though, and how much shame has shaped them. To touch on something else Emery said, though, I agree that we may need to at least get beyond self-hatred. It’s difficult to create any distance between yourself as the writer and yourself as the person if you hate yourself. I think we have to be able to empathize with ourselves (or maybe just better understand ourselves?) at least a little bit to be able to write with any honesty and self-awareness. Or maybe we sometimes write through shame and self-hatred to try to find that empathy and forgiveness, and maybe we just get moments of clarity before it comes back at us from another direction.
ReplyDeleteI also thought Lopate’s discussion of quirks was interesting, but I don’t know if there are always two extremes between our feelings about our quirks and our ordinariness. Entertainment often focuses on extreme quirks, so I think many of us (myself included) may just feel like our quirks are boring. I do like the solution Lopate proposes, though: “to recognize the charm of the ordinary: that daily life that has nourished some of the most enduring essays” (40). This is what I see happening in Kreider's essay, and it is the self-amusement he brings to the essay that makes it interesting.
I found much to chew (muse?) on in Lopate's essay. There was a lot of good advice of how to frame your personal essay and how to interrogate notions of character. In particular, I liked:
ReplyDelete"There is also considerable character development in expressing your opinions, prejudices, half-baked ideas, etc., etc., provided you are willing to analyze the flaws in your thinking and to entertain arguments against your hobbyhorses and not be too solemn about it all. The essay thrives on daring, darting flights of thought. You must get in the habit of inviting, not censoring, your most far-fetched, mischievous notions, because even if they prove cockeyed, they may point to an element of truth that would otherwise be inaccessible."
For me this goes along with risking something for yourself--and your persona/character--in the essay. Without this they tend to be humdrum, or at least less engaging. For me Gay's Scrabble essay did not pursue (to a great extent) this vein of penetrating self-analysis or put very much at risk for her a character. As people have noted, her other essays do do that more.
"As people have noted, her other essays do do that more." Heh heh. "do do."
DeleteAh, I so wish I could have been part of the conversation this week! The focus on shame as a rhetorical device is so interesting to me. And I wonder if its because of differed perspectives on what 'shame' connotes. From one perspective shame is a precursor to feelings of regret, which warrant a change in behavior. However, I feel that there are 2 types of regret--1. regret for having been caught doing something 'shameful' or 2. regret for failing to make the right decision.
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