Magnum One/Magnum One (Mid-American Digital) (Disc Manufacturing).iso/d10/personae.arc/PERSONAE

Text File | 1991-01-21 | 9KB | 214 lines

Michael
Finley, 646-4642, p.

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Finley,
p.

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STABBING
NOBODY IN PARTICULAR:
Nonfiction Writing and Persona

by
Michael Finley
[c] 1987
612/646/4642

#  #  #

I've
had an idea I've been trying to peddle for a couple of years now,
a nonfiction piece on what it would be like to be George Plimpton
for a day.  Can't you see it?  George going over the Paris
Review
galleys, George getting shot out of a cannon, George taping the Intellevision
commercial, George standing in, white-prepped face and star-crossed
eyes, for Marcel Marceau, George having drinks with the Village paparazzi,
George doing the commercial for Pop Secret.  It's a one-joke idea,
but I laugh whenever I think of it -- sooner or later Esquire's
bound to take it.

The
joke, see, is that Plimpton's made a career out of filling other
people's shoes.  His charm is that he seems to have so terribly little
in common personally with video games, hockey players, or munching
microwave popcorn.  As a nonfiction writer he's managed his persona
with
great
care.

Now that we are talking about nonfiction and persona, some thoughts.
 First, a big difference between creative nonfiction and run of the
mill nonfiction (most journalism, for instance) is the existence
of an identifiable voice behind one and the vapid one-size-fits-all
voice of the other.

In my experience, the question of persona is generally nonexistent
with most commercial nonfiction. An editor says to you, "go write
an article on chimpanzees and language," and you do your research,
sit down and type:

Did
you ever stop to think that maybe apes could talk?  Well, they can,
if you believe the cock and bull story University of Nevada at Reno
researcher Lyle Nelligan and lab assistant Bobo have been spouting
of late.

That
is your basic nonfiction persona, with all the grit one associates
with a talk-show host.  Who is he?  Why, nobody in particular --
an inexplicably cheerful and implacably curious hacketeer, mounting
the steed of his livelihood yet again.  They teach it in journalism
school.  They don't say, "Sound like a talk show host."  That would
be too easy.  But they make you keep trying until you do sound like
a talk show host, and your grades get better.

I'm not saying that's bad.  In fact, given the exigencies of newspaper
and magazine reporting, it's pretty much a necessity.  But as an
artistic premise, the Gosh-what-do-we-have-here-folks gambit has
run its course and then some.

So if you're not that -- thing -- who are you?

Noncommercial nonfiction, which includes the lyric essay, autobiographical
and biographical writing, history, humor, philosophy and other forms,
asks more of you -- it asks that you speak in something like your
own voice.

Speaking in your own voice, of course, is a phrase teachers of writing
hit you over the head with when they have tired of blue-penciling
AWK!
like throat-clearing parrrots in the margins of your latest greatest.

Though
one blanches at the prospect of climbing the nearest cottonwood and
staying up there till one's voice arrives, the teacher has a point.
Someone's got to be saying all these things you're writing, and that's
the writer's persona.

Some people are born to this business -- they sit to paper by candlelight
and, like John-Boy on The
Waltons,
the persona is there for them, a gift from the gods.  Writers with
great natural talents of focus, or utter sublimation to subject matter,
don't get tangled up in those vines.  Persona for them is a seamless
skein of wit and want.

Most of us, however, lack this grace, and begin with a jumble of
ideas and impressions, and a paragraph-to-paragraph approach to routing
them.  Some of us are so uninterested in our subject matter that
we invest the piece with zero personality.  Or the opposite can occur
-- not knowing how to treat a subject squarely, we mug our way through
the piece, hoping persona (the writer as standup, as true believer,
as drunk, as ingenue, etc.) can carry the day.

Charles and Mary Lamb presented the image of two sweet small people
to the world in their criticism and his essays -- lambs, when they
were more like ravening, raving wolves in life.  The unapologetic,
explosive writers of the Romantic era -- Payne, Wollstonecraft, Thoreau,
Nietzsche -- used their "mad" personae as a cloak behind which to
hurl exploratory assertions.

Soren Kierkegaard used whatever persona was at hand to debunk whatever
issue was at hand, running through over forty "voices" in his writing
career, from monk to man about town -- whomever he could use to engage
the reader, win over his or her sympathies, and expose the flaw in
their systems of being.  Jan Morris as transexual travel writer has
one of the most exhilarating personae of all -- these
places must matter, for someone so topsy-turvy to fix so avidly upon
them.

There is a frightful paradox to all writing that catches most of
us either going up or coming down.  Going up it is the problem of
being knowable to readers -- having a writing personality that is
immediately placeable.

William F. Buckley is
his persona, tongue-spearing his strawmen adversaries to left and
right; Joan Didion is
the exhausted, sun-fried California she writes about; Lewis Hyde,
who conducted The Loft's Nonfiction Workshop here last fall, is
the beguiling and disingenuous Hermetic muse he writes about.  E.B.
White's essays about the tug of civilization aren't really about
that -- they are about the fusty, stubborn personality pondering
them.

Coming down is something else again. While writers get into the
business of writing in order to become known, we learn early on that
readers have no particular desire to know a writer, per
se.
  Yet readers are willing to put up with all sorts of writers who
can say interesting, entertaining, true things about the life readers
know and believe.  Beloved writers get that way less by creating
than by confirming.

This paradox is a painful crossing that writers must make if they
are to "get through."  Be
yourself, be everyone.
 It means that verisimilitude -- writing it exactly the way it is,
or was -- goes out the window.  Even autobiographies are really about
their readers.

Along with verisimilitude, it might be well to trash the whole concept
of the essay as it came to be in the days of Montaigne -- the "essay"
or "attempt" or "stab" at understanding something.  One of the most
obvious weaknesses of student work is the laboriousness with which
young writers tackle questions -- first of all to convince themselves,
and only secondly to share those breakthroughs with the reading public.

The
problem is that public behaviors make poor laboratories.  If you
think of yourself writing in order to better your own understanding,
it might be wise to divest yourself now of the thought that what
you are doing is artistic.  Or call it a first draft.  Call it anything
but don't call it done.  As Goofy says, "I'm brave, but I'm careful."

The
truth is that the proper essay is an inherently aristocratic function
in which the writer has to have -- or at least exhibit -- supreme
confidence.  If you're wrestling with the great ideas in public,
you need allies for readers, not the coterie one associates with
police barricades and flaming highway crashes.  During a first draft
you can still be exploring -- by the final you should be in conquistador
mode.

Beware of creating too overwhelming a persona.  You probably won't
want to spend more than a few weeks of your life as Max Headroom
or Wendy O. Williams or Ian Scholes, remarkable though they are.
 A persona should be comfortable and fashion-withstandable, like
Ivy League wash and wear.  Too dashing a persona, such as Allen Ginsberg
or Tom Wolfe or Patti Smith fashioned, makes future development seem
limp, or worse, a copout.

One fashions an ongoing persona much as a designer streamlines an
auto body -- to reduce drag.  We are lovely in our complexity, and
dialectical to a fault.  It's fun to think that every adjective applies
to every one of us, and its antonym as well.  But out of that dazzling
stew of omnieverything we still have the obligation to communicate
in our work.

Of course, one doesn't really "fashion" a persona unless one is
really out to lunch.  But we do need to trim our natural sails a
bit, to be, for the reader at least, a better we than we are.  Clearer.
 Quick to be known.  With a few consistent, reliable issues.

Persona skillfully constructed is a reductio of who we are.  One
way of think of it is: if someone who despises your ideas can't parody
it, you aren't doing your job.

Thoreau
had to say, Simplify,
simplify.
 If George Plimpton had said it, who would have remembered?

#  #  #

"Michael
Finley" is the non de plume for Twin Cities nonfiction writer and
poet Michael Finley.