Literature for Narcissists
You almost applied to a creative nonfiction MFA!
nonfiction
a new prevalence of first-person narrative in fiction
a supervalence of memoir in the literary marketplace
the personal-essay boom
proliferating realisms
a swelling of the abject
the prose-poetry upsurge
and its Rubin vase companion, the twittering archipelagization of prose
There are multiple ways to read this list. The first degree of interpretation: expository. Examples given to prove a point made by author Anna Kornbluh, in her book Immediacy or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. It exhibits the kinds of writing most propagated in contemporary literature, what’s most likely to fly off the shelves.
The second degree of interpretation: a condemnation. For Kornbluh, these ways of writing emerge out of a general atmosphere of “immediacy,” an economic and subsequently aesthetic state of being, where the modern subject is “drowning in a deluge of images without context, words without meaning, information without distinction.” It is clear that this immediacy, this urgency, spurred by the increased circulation of capital, is a threat to aesthetics.
Aesthetic beauty, as posited by many classical philosophers (Kant, Levinas, Weil), is at its core a mediation between the self and alterity. Emanuel Levinas writes, “Art, like ethics, is interested in the other. The beautiful is that which resists possession.”
In a writing born of immediacy, the mediation required of speculative fiction becomes too cumbersome. We forgo a conflict between the “I” of the reader and the “I” of the writer. Kornbluh writes:
Autofiction, first-person fiction, memoir, social media, and the personal essay comprise a continuum of auto-emission, indicating how much of literary production follows the human capital ideology that makes of quotidian well-being a mandate to optimize one’s inner material and to actualize the self, and how much contemporary literature is constituted by its rejection of mediation. Streaming content free flowing from free-lancers, auto-writing without ‘the distance between writer, reader, and critic'… content creators wield their only asset: expression of their inner life. Your story is something you own.
A third interpretation: a personal offense. Kornbluh’s just mapped out your writerly hopes and dreams onto the project of late capitalism. You write the personal essay and prose-poetry she speaks of! You almost applied to a creative nonfiction MFA! She’s right! You have no technical qualifications aside from your Proustian mimesis. Oh, what a plight! Your only asset the expression of your inner life! It’s both heartening and disheartening to know that this way of writing is not unique to you. That your problem is everyone’s problem (perhaps you are also a white woman on substack).
Given your third-order interpretation, you’re primed to understand that the subsequent analysis will be biased. Regardless, you hope to weigh these very compelling arguments with the honesty of youthful ignorance.
In an attempt to mount a defense for yourself, you re-read confusing passages several times to understand Kornbluh’s ultimate philosophical position. To do this, you need to understand her invocation of the Lacanian imaginary, real, and symbolic.
The Lacanian real is the elusive thing we call “love.” Love, in all its uninterpretability, has been the center of representative pressure since the dawn of time. The symbolic and the imaginary arise from that representative attempt. The imaginary correlate of this real love might be Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a representative attempt to distill the complicated nature of love. This novel is narrated by Lily Bloom in the first-person perspective, minimizing audience barriers, amplifying her voice, and ultimately making for a frictionless read. Tied neatly in a bow.
Now, think of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. In this symbolic book, Wharton explores the same opaque nature of love less directly and immediately. Written from the third person perspective of Newland Archer (a male character written by a female author), the reader is applied with more pressure to extract symbolic value. There is more mediation involved, more symbols and signs to interpret. One experiences alterity more profoundly because of the heightened demands of reader interpretation, deriving more aesthetic and personal satisfaction from the exertion.
Like any encounter with the symbolic, you are given a way to tackle the alterity hidden in the realm of the real (the real being ineffable, unknowable, and unrepresentable.) The symbolic, exemplified in non-immediate art, provides this confrontation: an exploration into the real while acknowledging the impossibility of that feat.
Symbolic art and writing directly contrast to that of immediacy. Immediacy is connected to the realm of the imaginary. Think of the art of Jeff Koons. An art of easy payoff — you understand exactly what it is trying to represent — like a fairytale concerned with a palatable and accessible moral. We see ourselves in the shiny and glittering surface of the immediate imaginary.
On this basic philosophical level, you agree with Kornbluh. Art and writing should not be concerned with efficiency and immediacy. A good concept makes you wait and linger. You also agree with the causation she delineates between our age of immediacy (created by increased circulation of capital) and the type of writing that emerges from it. But you’re left to wonder: can the content of a piece negate its formalistic elements? Can there be confrontation and mediation with otherness in a structure that privileges the “me?”
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan would say no. To him, the medium is the message; the form given to the content has the first say in dictating the received meaning and usage. If the medium is the message, then a literature of immediacy is irredeemably bound to the narcissism of the present day.
Yet you cannot help but question: are there ways we can correct the narcissism embedded in self-reflexive writing? Turn autofiction and personal essays on their head by changing the structure and language used?
You believe good prose and narrative eclipse the anti-mediative impulse embedded in autofiction and personal writing. You garnered this stance after immersing yourself in the world of Simone de Beauvoir. When reflecting on her writing method, Beauvoir wrote:
By referring to myself in the third person, I attempted to transform my subjective experience into something objective, almost fictional. It was an act of creating distance, a way of controlling my own story.
A testament to her existentialism, Beauvoir often preferred writing about herself in the third person. An exercise in recognition through anti-recognition, this stylistic choice helped her practice the theory she pioneered: the self as an ever-evolving thing, unfixed, there to be shaped through reflection and reinvention.
In recognizing the fundamentally variant nature of the self, what alternatives to immediacy arise in our linguistic choices? Can we lift personal writing into the realm of the symbolic instead of the imaginary? Creating something generative out of the medium’s embedded tension?
I think, she thinks, we think, you think there’s a remedy, some sort of hidden escape chute, to unwed self-reflective prose from imaginary immediacy. There are alternative universes that exist inside me, them, you, and us, so what if, following Simone de Beauvoir’s lead, the author views themselves as a malleable phenomenon? Can new collectives emerge from the plasticity (ficticity) of identity? After all, the more personal we get in our writing, the less we actually find a person.