Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

Facing the Monolith

68 ander monson I facing the monolith 69 Did I forget to mention it? It’s submerged in every sentence, diphthong without which it’s hard to go for long (ask the Oulipo).It,a tic, a blip, the Goodyear blimp, an exclamation point without a dot, you can’t avoid it, those I ’s, somehow American, always thinking, being, wanting to find our way to something biggie-sized and tasty, always gerund, processing , grinding up an us into component bits of light, but at the bottom of the can of us there is just us. Us as selves displayed via memoir, via reality everything, via the move to the more real. The world is filled with them, jutting, jousting, rutting, roasting them on television cooking and other shows. Sometimes it’s easy to believe that without I there would be no world. As you may know, the word Internet should be capitalized. The Internet is not the world, though some days it seems like it; it is another space in which we can separate our I ’s from our bodies, let them erect themselves, let them do their thing. I, receiving sexts from senior citizens concerned about our eroding communications standards,our sagging breasts,the proliferation of poetry, and the increasing use of the emoticon and the word like,which is unstoppable , but which I like. I may lament dropped apostrophes in e-mails, television ads, possessives repossessed by teens who think of everything as theirs, including memoir, including technology, the world’s best worlds, including individual experiences that may seem idiosyncratic but are not. ANDER MONSON “Yes, what’s most important is the art, is the artifice, but finally we live in a world that demands that art come from an artist, and who that artist is, for worse or for better, matters to a whole lot of people, which means it probably ought to factor into our thinking on the subject.” Facing the Monolith 70 ander monson I facing the monolith 71 What makes an I ? What makes us display our I ’s? Why can we sometimes not believe our eyes? And what good are eyes, are I ’s, if we can’t believe them? Is the self an atom, indivisible without catastrophe? Or a conglomeration of unlike parts, a rebuilt Hardy Boys jalopy? (The Hardy Boys novels were not written by an I: their “author,” Franklin W. Dixon, like Carolyn Keene and plenty of other “writers,” is a construct, a convenience , a conglomeration of nameless ghosts.) Is it a bunch of flowered turn-ons, measure-ments, and pet peeves? Is it a wiki? A palimpsest? A set of Russian nesting dolls? Obviously we believe in I.We have to believe in I.We decide to believe in I in this culture. But I can’t shake the feeling that I is only a shared and useful assumption. And well, yes, part of my interest in memoirs, in YouTube, in personae, in the public display of I is that I envy them, unrepentant, unashamed displaying themselves—live! nude! girls! real! wild! hot! authentic! living! life!—for you. I can’t imagine a life in which I was not too self-conscious to try to tell my story unmediated. I’ve tried to be a good midwesterner, raised sort of Protestant (which is to say Protestant) and filled enough with shame (and thereby its opposite, pride, and its accompanying exhibitionism, that sudden panty flash, that taboo zest, that rush of yes and more than yes), that I just cannot imagine myself into that kind of consciousness at all. That self-consciousness is a big part of what separates the celebrity from the noncelebrity, studies show. Like any other neurotic, I become necrotic with time. The half-life of I is such that it decays into dandruff serif flakes, skin cells, yesterday’s brains, who we used to think we’d be. 72 ander monson I facing the monolith 73 Talking about I is an undertaking, meaning talking about decay, the inevitable end of each I back into the flatness and underneath of the caverned earth. It is talking about shame. It is talking about voice. It is more than that, sure. It’s also about eye and pathways of brain, and where the brain directs the eye to look, and then what the eye filters to the brain: the raw optical data of seeing becomes processed...