Personal Impersonation

Oh, if I could only possess the magisterial knowledge of the essay form that Carl Klaus possesses!

The central assertion of the book is that the "self" in the essay is a constructed one. Once a reader has finished reading the book, there can be no resisting that claim because of the powerful and irresistible array of evidence Klaus musters in the service of his assertion.

He begins, reasonably enough, with Michel de Montaigne, often referred to as "the father of the modern essay." Klaus writes,

Montaigne's project was so complicated by his idea of the self, which he equated with his thoughts more than with any other dimension of his being, that in twenty-six of his 107 essays he digressed from the subject at hand to ruminate on the problems of reflecting his thoughts in writing.... Montaigne's digressions collectively embody the most detailed and substantial concern with the evocation of consciousness in the history of the personal essay. Such a venturesome concern with the rendering of interiority that it might well be seen as prefiguring modernist evocations of consciousness in the fiction of Woolf and Joyce.

Having laid out the skeleton of his argument about Montaigne's use of his self, Klaus goes on to demonstrate the ways Montaigne exploited the changes of his written representation: "Montaigne endowed the personal essay with an intense commitment to tracking and tracing one's inner life—to a consciousness of consciousness that has been, perhaps, its most enduring and definitive quality."

From Montaigne, Klaus goes on to meditate and elaborate on the discontinuous essay; the essay marking difference—of gender, race, ability, colonialism; and on the essays of George Orwell in a brilliantly titled section, "Orwell's 'A Hanging': Politics and the First Person Singular/Plural." In that section, he demonstrates Orwell's multiple selves, both narrating personal experience in the present but also recalling it at a later date.

Klaus's argument becomes most pointed in his chapter "Voices on Voice: The Singular 'I' and the Chameleon 'I.'" In that chapter, he quotes the now famous and frequently taught passage from E. B. White about the essayist's ability to "pull on any sort of shirt" in choosing a posture for narrating his essays. He quotes too from Nancy Mairs's "prelude to Voice Lessons" about her practice of creating a voice that is "a construction...[which] I continually make up as I go along out of whatever materials come to hand." He goes on to claim that "Voice, according to these essayists, is both an authentic and a fictionalized projection of personality, a resonance that is indisputably related to its author's sense of self but that is also a complex illusion of self." There, in a nutshell, is the book's argument, and a persuasive one it is.

There are yet more delights Klaus has in store for readers, among them a definitive reading of Charles Lamb's essays published under the pseudonym "Elia." Klaus's commentary inspires a longing to re-read Elia's "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" in anticipation of a delightful, succulent literary feast. As Klaus writes,

Lamb thought of Elia as having such a different style and temperament from his other nonfiction writing that he sought to preserve the distinction not only by using different signatures for each but also by inventing an adjective, "Eliacal," to highlight the difference. Lamb's insistence on the difference suggests that in writing the essays of Elia, he considered himself to be impersonating someone other than himself.

Klaus also captured my interest in reading another Elia essay, "Modern Gallantry" (1821), in which he exclaims against the practice of "the sham of 'deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females as females.'" Klaus goes on to claim that "Elia stridently enunciated the abuses of women that then prevailed—so fierce in his attack that he should be considered an early feminist." And in concluding that chapter, "Elia: Pseudonymous Self Extraordinaire," Klaus writes "that...