Reading Lyric: Essay and Archive

With regard to the lyric essay, nonfiction suffers from a serious theory deficiency. This is ironic, since we borrowed the term from poetry, and poetry has been thinking about the status of the lyric for at least a couple of centuries. We could chart the critical genealogy in English-speaking literature from roughly John Stuart Mill's double essay "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," published in its final form in 1867, to Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric, published in 2015. But we could go back even further, to the ways the Greeks read Sappho or the medieval rabbis (or monks or nuns) read the Psalms.

Of course, every critical genealogy is also a history of reading, an insight that also happens to be the most recent innovation in lyric theory, dubbed "the new lyric studies." Virginia Jackson insists, as codified in her book Dickinson's Misery, that the use of the term "lyric" has more to do with how texts are read than how they are written. Her subtitle more or less says it all: A Theory of Lyric Reading, emphasis on "reading." Jackson's case study is the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and she turns Dickinson studies on its head by problematizing the ways Dickinson's texts have been received, as opposed to producing her own close readings of what Dickinson wrote. Jackson reiterates her rhetorical question time and again:

But what if Emily Dickinson's texts aren't "poems"?How would we "read" them differently?

Dickinson provides a good case study to ask these questions because she so vehemently resisted publication. Thus, how her texts have appeared in print has been the result of editors' decisions rather than Dickinson's own writerly choices. We assume they are poems because of the way an editor has arranged them on the page, but can we really be so sure?

This is a too brief summary of Jackson's work, especially as she has subsequently extended it beyond Dickinson, but we could borrow her insight across genres into nonfiction. If we were to do that, we could ask her question this way:

What if essays are lyric only because John D'Agata has been reading them that way?

This would be a question worth pursuing, especially given D'Agata's own editorial work anthologizing a trilogy of essay collections, but the field of nonfiction has been pursuing it more or less for a while now, with mixed results, most often devolving into a somewhat trite distinction—circulated by D'Agata himself—between "art" and "fact." I find it more interesting to see how Jackson's insights into lyric theory open up a more generative way to extend the possibilities of whatever we mean by "lyric" in whatever we mean by "essay." She shifts our thinking about the lyric away from writerly assumptions (upon which a distinction like "art" and "fact" depends) and toward reader expectations. If the term "lyric" can be understood as a way to read texts poetically (whatever we mean by that term too), then what possibilities does the essay hold to invite readers into a creative collaboration of meaning?

Rather than digress any further down this theoretical rabbit hole, allow me to cite three works of nonfiction that I think extend just such an invitation. All three of them in some way create space—physically, literally—within their textual form, structure, or composition for a readerly collaboration.

First, Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay. Boully's book-length essay unfolds as a series of footnotes to an absent body copy, on an otherwise blank page. The blank pages indicate all the lost points of reference to the footnotes' origins, but as they accrue, meaning takes shape through their absence. More than just a coy trick, as such, the footnotes inevitably invite the reader to write the body of the essay. As a matter of fact, I wonder what it would feel like—physically, literally—to write the body of the essay onto the blank space of the page. So much so that I think I will make it a writing exercise in my...