The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay (review)

This past year, I taught a workshop exploring the significant role of persona in the personal essay. Some weeks went better than others, of course, because teaching is just that way, but I'm thinking now that my students would have learned far more if I had merely shuffled into the room the first day and tossed copies of Carl H. Klaus's The Made-Up Self onto the seminar table.

Luckily for me, Klaus's book had not yet been released, so I needn't list this shortcoming on my annual report to the Dean. But next year? Well, that's another story.

Envision the gentlest, wittiest, hardest-working teacher of your imagination. Make him an uncommonly thorough reader. Give him extraordinary wisdom and persuasiveness. And then, just for good measure, saddle him with an addiction to the personal essay form, both classic and contemporary.

That's Klaus.

Or at the very least, that's his persona in The Made-Up Self, which is all that really matters here, because I'm not reviewing the man, am I?

This distinction—between what seems so patently true about the essayist when reading the assembled sentences and paragraphs, and what may or may not actually be true—forms the heart of Klaus's splendid book, a thorough and engaging discussion of the essayistic "I" and that near-palpable "sense of a human presence" that arises from a good essay.

"A personal essay does, after all, put one more directly in contact with the thought and feeling of its author than do other forms of literature," Klaus reminds us in his prologue, "if only because personal essayists speak in their own name rather than through the fictive characters that inhabit the work of novelists and playwrights."

Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and coeditor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction, is himself an engaging essayist, specializing in the diary-as-essay and letter-as-essay forms.

He is at his best in The Made-Up Self when carefully unpacking the ways in which an essay endeavors to resemble "real thought," and how any such resemblance is more appearance than actuality. Likewise, while the "person" on the page is not inherently false, the "persona" is often assembled (some would say contrived) to create a certain effect.

Klaus tells us:

The "person" in a personal essay is a written construct, a fabricated thing, a character of sorts—the sound of its voice a byproduct of carefully chosen words, its recollection of experience, its run of thought and feeling, much tidier than the mess of memories, thoughts, and feelings arising in one's consciousness.

Or as William Gass once wrote, "Real thought is gawky and ungracious."

Klaus, not surprisingly, opens the first section of his book with a close look at Montaigne, the creator of the mold, a writer who defied sixteenth-century conventions and wrote not just about the self, but about self-absorption:

By pitting himself so clearly and persistently against Aristotle, Cicero, and the medieval scholastics, Montaigne established the new conventional posture of the personal essayist as an independent, often skeptical, mind, exploring ideas and experiences outside the confines of received or prevailing intellectual structures.

Montaigne could seem in his work as if merely engaged in a discussion between friends, but Klaus, through lucid examples and analysis, makes clear how Montaigne's easy digressions were anything but casual or off-hand, but rather quite deliberate and studied, a form of "artful artlessness."

In another terrific chapter, "The Mind and the Mind's Idiosyncrasy," Klaus breaks down the essay's attempt to capture the peculiar movement of the human mind, and how this seeming mimesis is illusory as well. "Even if one could get inside of the head of another human being," he posits, "I have a hunch that its workings would turn out to be far messier than anything in...