Two Essays
BY Megan Cheong
I
This is not the essay I wanted to write
For a few months, Sally Olds’s People Who Lunch was so omnipresent that a writing friend and I began referring to it simply as ‘The Shoe’.
I’m thinking about going to the salon with the author of The Shoe if you’re interested?
Just went on a date with a man who was also reading The Shoe.
Close to a year later, The Shoe remains firmly wedged in the door of my consciousness. Specifically ‘The Beautiful Piece’, which examines the hybrid essay as a hopeless in-between that is not outside the status quo, a challenge to the institution or labour market, but of it ①, and which I experienced as a highly effective take-down of the only kind of writing I’ve ever been able to commit to.
It is the efficiency with which Olds reduces so-called experimental literary criticism to a formula, neatly packing away the hours I’ve spent crafting review essays, that gets me in the gut:
There is a magazine from Melbourne that publishes book reviews online. It promises that these are innovative and unlike other book reviews. A brief survey reveals a formula: personal experience is fused to analysis of the book, often in a paragraph-by-paragraph oscillation.②
No matter how many times I read this opening, it always makes me freeze as if caught in the middle of some shameful act.
A recent piece, continues Olds, has three components—
A [theory]
B [analysis of book]
C [personal experience]
In her review of The Shoe, Timmah Ball admires the restraint with which Olds utilises component C and quickly decides to avoid the use of C as much as possible in this review, ③ and I think I see the glint of my own shame reflected back at me. As Ball points out, it’s not that Olds herself is explicitly against the use of C—‘For Discussion and Resolution’, in particular, draws on deeply personal experiences of polyamory. Still, the accusation of narcissism pervades ‘The Beautiful Piece’, fed by a selection of insipid quotes from boomer luminaries on the hybrid essay, ④ and a brief history of the form that frames it as a genteel pastime for learned gentlemen.⑤
This is not the essay I wanted to write. I started writing a more lyrical piece about the joy of making connections in my reading and writing. Troubled by the sense that I had already failed to add anything new to the overabundant body of online literature, I removed the fragments about reading and began a new version with the intent of exploring the murky region between the categories of ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’. In every version, I felt a need to engage with ‘The Beautiful Piece’ in some way, and yet each time I approached Olds’s essay, I became stuck. I sent one- and two-page drafts to my writing group, my editor, my husband. I took short breaks to focus on other work only to return and find my drafts incomprehensible. I cut the passages about the nature of autofiction, the quotes from Zambreno and Garner, rooted out anything that didn’t feel essential, didn’t feel true, delete delete delete until all that was left was me and Olds, or rather, me and Olds’s essay. So just me really, alone on the page.
I’ve been wondering lately, writes Olivia Laing, if feminism is subject to a Groundhog Day-style curse in which all previous knowledge is periodically obliterated. ⑥ When I read Laing’s review of Anna Funder’s Wifedom on one of my mini-breaks from this essay, I hear Cixous’s command ringing down through the decades: Woman must write her self. ⑦ Olds’s passing reference to Cixous as an example of a theorist on high rotation ⑧ does nothing to quiet her. And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you.⑨ And yet forty-seven years after the publication of ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, so much shame has accumulated in my system that each time I start a new piece I have to expend an extravagant amount of energy coming to terms with the fact that all I have to offer is myself.
I wanted to write something new. Something that would excite the writing community in the same way People who Lunch did. Instead, I’ve been neglecting my day job, alternately yelling and crying at home, and eating cheesecake for breakfast. Far from the clever riposte to ‘The Beautiful Piece’ that I envisioned, I find myself in unremarkable agreement with the central idea that writing is overdetermined by its conditions of production.⑩
In the middle of one of my crying jags, my husband asks me a question, or rather, makes a statement that immediately cuts off the flow of my tears: For some reason, this piece has been more difficult than the others. This isn’t technically true. I experienced something similar working on the review essays I wrote for the Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics fellowship. I think what Liminal and SRB have in common that is relevant here is the fact that they exist largely online, and the impression they give of being at, or constituting the vanguard of non-fiction writing in Australia.
To be clear, neither Liminal nor SRB make exclusive claims regarding innovation, and in both instances I’ve been gifted the freedom to pursue personal interests. And yet, while writing for both publications I’ve come up against the pressure to do or say something new and/or exciting for the benefit of a relatively small community of readers and writers who may or may not choose to engage with my content. As online entities labouring—among other things—to continue to exist under capitalism, it is inevitable that both Liminal and SRB should participate in a culture of endless innovation of optimised content that Olds pillories in her essay. In each of the three criteria against which arts projects are assessed for funding, Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts) makes some mention of innovation, risk taking and experimentation, a vocabulary that flows discreetly, like currency, from investment body, through grant applications, written by the arts administrators who also commission content, to the artist themselves.
In the second phase of her essay, Olds undertakes a detailed analysis of clickbait headlines in order to demonstrate the ways in which content, a category that encompasses the online essay, is a placeholder and a void, i.e., capacious to the point of emptiness. ⑪ I swallow the postulate that online, words are commodities, with relative ease, but Olds’s repeated attempts to blur the categories of content and literature give this half of the piece an unfocussed quality that makes it altogether less convincing than the opening passages. Even in the early paragraphs, the reduction of personal experience to a single variable assumes a level of equivalence between your C and my C that erases both of us.
But more than anything else, what bothers me about ‘The Beautiful Piece’, is the assumption that the ultimate goal of the essayist is transgression. My favourite moments in People Who Lunch are those that document carefully maintained pockets of freedom inside capitalism. Polyamory, communal living, stretches in the lounge room before going to the club. The relief of writing is the space it affords me to really read a book, to be heard, to exist. It feels necessary—not transgressive, nor radical, or even political—to have this space.
✷
II
Mirror, door
I’ve realised I’m looking for something when I read,
something a bit like a mirror,
but more like a door.
My favourite genre of novel looks like a woman, alone, reading a difficult book. She reads, and sometimes she writes too, but more than anything else, she thinks.
Where does she get the conviction that her thoughts are worth the time she spends on them?
In Drifts, Kate who is and isn’t the author spends the majority of the novel thinking about a novel she is having difficulty writing, the novel we are reading.
The paradoxical make-up of the term ‘autofiction’ rouses a level of suspicion. Is it true or is it made up? Guessing games can be fun, writes Christian Lorentzen, but are in many instances beside the point given works of autofiction are novels, however their readers receive them. It’s just that the artifice is in service of creating the sensation that there’s no artifice. ⑫
The most precise definition I’ve come across is from Teresa Carmody, who writes that the subjectivity portrayed in autofiction can be read as a powerful witness to a particular experience, one that the artist wants the world to know as true. Even as the artist knows: I’m making this up. ⑬
Reading this quote, excised as it is from its original context, it occurs to me that this could be a description of writing, generally.
It’s possible Kate actually spends more time observing her small black terrier, who in one conformation, reminds her of the dog curled at the angel’s feet in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I.
I started reading in Berlin, on exchange and lonely in a way that still makes me feel ashamed. At my first apartment, a flatmate asked me what I was looking for, because in order to experience Berlin, you must know what you want. I wanted to make friends with the other students in the exchange program, and I wanted to write. When I found I was unable to do either, I read.
Melencolia I is believed to be a spiritual self-portrait depicting the artist crowded by the tools of her craft, brow furrowed in thought, or frustration. Kate is preoccupied with this engraving and with Rilke’s only novel, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, returning again and again to Dürer’s angel in her cluttered room and Rilke in the restive solitude brought on by the difficulty he has working on his own manuscript. She begins to see references to Dürer’s works everywhere—a Halloween decoration that looks exactly like the creature bearing the banner in Melencolia I, a golden retriever resembling the smiling lion resting at the bottom of Saint Jerome in His Study. Art is a haunting.
I prefer Shelia Heti’s cheerful interpretation that this kind of vast referentiality ⑭ is a sign that you’ve got it right, ⑮ that the writing is going well. For if the act of creation is, in the simplest terms, the process of combining two or more pre-existing elements, then of course the writing brain carries on, can never stop really, feeling for reverberations and following connections.
I started writing in grade five when, each day for a month, we were given time to write a journal entry. I was severely short-sighted and liked to push my heavy glasses down to the tip of my nose so that I could write with my face millimetres from the page where I saw everything in a level of detail that I long for now I’ve had eye surgery that has reversed my impairment.
The deep grooves of the letters on the page, the stipple on the surface of our grey plastic desks.
Looking back through this first journal, I see that my teacher took the time to read and respond to my entries at least once a week, correcting spelling errors and expressing what reads as genuine concern with the kind of unaccountable devotion I only appreciate a quarter of a century later, as a teacher and a mother.
I started writing again on maternity leave after a class on experimental literary criticism during which I was able to admit to myself that I enjoy reading more than I do writing, by which I mean that whilst I am compelled to write, I desire to read.
When Kate falls pregnant, she feels cut off from the bachelor hermits—Rilke, Walser, Kafka, Sebald—with whom she previously felt a profound connection. Yet before, during and after the pregnancy, she reads and thinks and writes with unwavering devotion; she is a writer. People always say that about art, or any form of keeping time, or collecting, she reflects, that they could do it—but of course they could do it, the thing is, whether they do or not.⑯
I’ve realised I’m looking for something when I write, something a bit like a mirror, but more
like a door.
Maggie Nelson, quoting Jacques Rancière, describes art as a third thing between people whose meaning ‘is owned by no one, but which subsists between [artist and spectator], excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.’ ⑰ Infinitely many doors leading me to you.
Reading and writing as two worlds extending out from either side of a single door.
Reading as writing divided by a door sometimes closed to create the illusion of separateness, but more often flung open to the pleasure of unchecked intermingling, of free association.
Though maybe not ‘unchecked’ so much as the feeling of going unchecked; this feeling of freedom in the privacy of one’s mind.
✷ ✷ ✷
EndNotes
① Sally Olds, ‘The Beautiful Piece’, People Who Lunch, Upswell, p.88.
② Olds, p.83.
③ Timmah Ball, ‘The Reproachable Essay’, Sydney Review of Books.
④ Olds, p.85.
⑤ Olds, p.89.
⑥ Laing, Olivia. ‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder review – inside a troubled marriage’, The Guardian.
⑦ Cixous, Helene. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. (Summer, 1976), (trans. Keith Cohen; Paula Cohen), p.875.
⑧ Olds, p.84.
⑨ Cixous, p.876.
⑩ Olds, p.99.
⑪ Olds, p.98.
⑫ Christian Lorentzen, ‘How ‘Auto’ is ‘Autofiction’, Vulture.
⑬ Teresa Carmody, ‘On Autotheory and Autofiction: Staking Genre’, Los Angeles Review of Books.
⑭ Kate Zambreno. Drifts, Riverhead Books, 2021, p. 117.
⑮ ‘Podcast: Sheila Heti: Pure Colour’, Melbourne Writer’s Festival.
⑯ Zambreno, p. 155.
⑰ Maggie Nelson, On Freedom, Graywolf Press, 2021, p. 21.
Megan Cheong is a teacher, writer and critic living on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Her work has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin and Kill Your Darlings. @readingmotherhood