Benjamin Wielechowski, "The Mosaic Lyric Essay: Spatial Form in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 13.1)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
13.1

Benjamin Wielechowski

The Mosaic Lyric Essay:
Spatial Form in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction

“Mosaic: A myriad of fragments, each fragment an inspiration.”
-Elaine M. Goodwin

A bistro-bar sits on the canals of east Detroit. On the veranda, there is a porcelain sink and toilet, teal in color and now defunct, with the promise of a future water fountain signed above. The backsplash of the sink is a brilliant and ornate mosaic—a smattering of broken tiles, tiny trinkets and mementos, seashells, jewels, rocks, wood shims, and mirror shards. A white mortar occupies the negative space, and from a distance, the figure of a fish emerges from the fragments, along with a cresting wave and beach, a bridge, and a pond.

The first mosaics were created by Mediterranean peoples during the period of antiquity (L’Orange & Nordenberg 7). Much like the mosaic described above, the original artform consisted of small pieces of colored glass or stone (tesserae) arranged into patterns or images with space left between. These tesserae are first adhered to a base, with the gaps between filled with grout to give the characteristic mosaic look (Goodwin 7). As a fine art form, mosaic is inextricably linked to its contemporary counterpart in creative nonfiction, not only in terms of craft and purpose, but also in terms of the historical and cultural developments that influenced the evolution of both. An understanding of the fine art mosaic form can therefore illuminate the project of the mosaic lyric essay.

During the Roman Imperial period, art in general began to transition from the plastic to the two-dimensional, and from an external, naturalistic style to an internal, more contemplative style of abstraction (L’Orange & Nordenberg 8). Literary Scholar Joseph Frank, in his seminal work, The Idea of Spatial Form, attributes this transition to a distinct cultural shift, where a sense of dissonance between humans and their environment resulted in the appearance of non-naturalistic forms featuring linear or geometric shapes and patterns. This was in direct contrast to the naturalism that had dominated the artforms of preceding years (Frank 56-57). Frank’s theory of spatial form posits that, just as in fine art, literature has responded to contemporary cultural pressures, transforming from natural forms governed by time and narrative to spatial forms governed by atemporal structures and spatial logic. The mosaic form of the lyric essay is one such result of what Frank terms a “spiritual crisis” (58).

Viewing the mosaic lyric essay in the context of its fine art analog allows us to see not only the mechanisms at play but also their effects. When viewed through the lens of Joseph Frank’s idea of spatial form, George Lowenstein’s information-gap perspective on curiosity, and Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein’s principles of film-editing, a newfound understanding of the mosaic lyric essay’s beauty, power, and possibility comes into being. The present analysis evidences the necessity of this transformation in form, and demonstrates how it works to expand the boundaries of current nonfiction aesthetics.

Literature Review

In defining the mosaic literary essay, Karen Babine’s "Taxonomy of Nonfiction" provides grounding. Babine’s taxonomy is first organized by “genre,” then by “subgenre,” “form,” “mode,” and “shape.” The mosaic lyric essay falls under the nonfiction genre, essay form, lyric mode, and mosaic shape. An essay is simply defined as “an attempt,” which captures the breadth of the form though not all that an essay can encapsulate. Now, the lyric mode is more difficult to pin down, though Babine categorizes three modes (i.e. Lyric, Narrative, and Assay) based on their respective driving forces. Lyric mode derives its energy from language, rather than from story (Narrative) or from the writer’s brain or thought process (Assay). Still, this mode is complicated by its overlap with poetry, also driven by the energy of its language. Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, who first defined the lyric essay, note: “The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.” So in the lyric essay, we have a hybrid creature of both poetry and prose. From poetry we take distillation and musicality and shape; from prose we take the engagement with facts, the actual, the “thinking through,” the “attempt.” It is this “thinking on the page” that makes the essay form distinct, whereas prose poetry, in contrast, might simply capture a moment or instill an image in our mind.

Finally, the mosaic shape. While the mosaic form goes by other names, (collage, fragmentation, etc.), I choose the specific descriptor of mosaic due to the precision, form, and effects of its fine art analog, as well as what that analogy elucidates about the literary form. The most important aspects of this analogy reside in the materials (or tesserae in fine art mosaics), and the principles of its design (i.e. pattern, positive/negative space, contrast/juxtaposition, and context/perspective). By situating the mosaic lyric essay within Joseph Frank’s theory of spatial form, where “aesthetic form is not an external arrangement provided by a set of traditional rules” but instead “the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perception” (9), we can appreciate the mosaic lyric essay outside of the rules of classic narrative tradition, which allows for untold possibilities:

In part this is because of what [psychologist] George Loewenstein calls information gaps: […] the information-gap theory views curiosity as arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation. (87)

While the narrative tradition relies on information gaps to create suspense and surprise, the mosaic lyric essay, not bound by linear chronology, can activate the “curiosity drive” in more subtle and complex ways due to the mechanisms of positive/negative space and contrast/juxtaposition.

Positive space describes the subject of an image, while negative space describes the space around and between that positive space. Both are required to establish boundaries and to bring balance to the overall piece of art. This concept applies to nonfiction prose as well, as described by Dinty W. Moore in his essay “Positively Negative.” The white space surrounding text has a role to play in how we engage with a piece of writing, as all poets will know. The importance of this mechanism in a mosaic lyric essay is two-fold: those white spaces, the breaks, invite the reader to be an active participant in making connections and filling in the information-gaps, and according to Peter Elbow, there is “more energy in unconnected sentences. More drama” (Moore 245). The space creates an opening, but what that opening evokes depends on what resides on either side. This is where juxtaposition and contrast come into play.

Two Russian filmmakers from the early 1900s, Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, realized the principle of juxtaposition and revolutionized filmmaking. Lev Kuleshov is best known for the Kuleshov Effect (essentially montage), where he filmed an actor’s facial expression, then spliced in three different shots: one of food, one of a funeral, and one of a woman in revealing clothing. The shot of the actor’s expression alternated with the other three shots, and even though the clip of the actor was the same each time, the audience interpreted his reaction differently due to the juxtaposition. The main takeaway was that arrangement matters as much as content. Further, this concept can be operationalized to heighten the audience’s experience of the work of art. Bachelard, in his book, The Poetics of Space, explains the mechanism at work in juxtaposition:

[…] the poetic instant is a “harmonic relation between opposites.” Confronted by successive antitheses of ordinary time, the poet refuses to comply, resisting the habit of chronological sequencing by transmuting opposition into instantaneous “ambivalence” (where contraries coexist). The poetic imagination thus substitutes simultaneity for succession. (Kearney xxii-xxiii)

Bachelard refers to the effect as “rapture” or “ecstasy,” something akin to the divine rather than simply words on a page. Herein lies the power of the spatial form, and source of the mosaic lyric essay’s potential as a vehicle.

Fragmentation/Tesserae and Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments

“The urge to collect, gather, re-use and decorate is fundamental to the nature of mosaics.”
-Helen Miles

Mosaic fine art is constructed from tesserae or individual tiles or fragments. Historically, the tessera material consisted of smalto (handmade glass) and marble, but nowadays, other materials are used as well. Natural materials like pebbles, shell, and mother-of-pearl, and manufactured or recycled materials like china and tile, are also used. What the tesserae is made of (i.e. smalti or stone or tile) and the unique color, size, form, finish, etc., of each unit when joined one after the other is what “create[s] a living image unique in time and place” (Goodwin 49). This intentional choice of materials based upon their innate qualities is equally important to the mosaic lyric essay.

Instead of tesserae in mosaic fine art, or stanzas in poetry, the functional building blocks of the mosaic essay are paragraphs or vignettes, where they serve a spatial function in addition to an organizational and topical one. The composition of each unit might be expository or narrative or reflection, but perhaps the most important “material” that a lyric essayist utilizes is the “image.” According to Bachelard, “the temporality of the image […] is that of an instant,” and “every true poetic image breaks with linear clock time, introducing a dimension of verticality in depth and height” (Kearney xxii – xxiii). So functions the image in a lyric essay.

Sarah Manguso’s book, 300 Arguments, is a peculiar collection due to its complete fragmentation. It consists of three hundred short vignettes, each separated from the next by a short horizontal divider. Some of these vignettes are a single sentence and others are complete paragraphs. Manguso’s structure is notable, but it is the content within, namely the use of the “image” and how its use suspends time, along with the moments of synecdoche, that unite the collection as a functional whole.

The concept of “flash” prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is instructive here. For flash pieces, as in poetry, the depth and gravity often come in what is unsaid, in what remains in the margins or silences. For mosaics, the risk of leaving gaps is disunity or obscurity, and in a book composed of three hundred “flash” pieces as Manguso’s is, this is a legitimate concern. Where Manguso’s genius really shines, however, is her use of synecdoche throughout the collection. Even as the reader experiences each individual vignette and the entire collection simultaneously, it is the use of the “image” that brings meaning into focus, though perhaps unrecognizable at first. References to “fragments” and “ruins” and “stones” serve as the “image,” symbols of the collection and its overall meaning. The first indication of this occurs on page 27: “To call a piece a fragment, or to say it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer.”

In a collection of fragments, this indicates the “wholeness” of the collection (and is perhaps even reflective of the writer herself). This “image” develops further when she references Rome: “For me the greatest thrill of Rome was walking into the Forum, picking up a piece of ancient stone where it lay, and dropping it somewhere else” (52). Though not explicit, Manguso activates the image of fragments once again, parts of a whole, and the collaborative nature of its arrangement.

On the following page, she returns to the image of fragments: “The word fragment is often misused to describe anything smaller than a bread box, but an eight-hundred-page book is no more complete or unbroken than a ten-line poem. That’s confusing size with integrity. An ant is not a fragment of an elephant except orthographically” (53). Finally, Manguso reveals the power of synecdoche: “On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here” (81). Again, she returns to the image of a ruin, a fragment, a sense of wholeness—regardless of time and weather, or size and integrity. This collection is a life distilled, a memoir of sorts, and yet the reader sifts through the pieces, participating in her story, in our own story. Manguso constructs this mosaic out of the aforementioned “materials” accessible to writers--exposition, reflection, narrative, etc.—but it is the image that unifies the collection, and in doing so, linear time is suspended.

Materials in art, both visual and literary, remain purely functional, devoid of meaning. Meaning is communicated through the principles of design, and in the lyric essay, as in mosaic fine art, there is pattern, space, contrast and juxtaposition, context—the environment in which the art is appreciated (literal or metaphorical), and perspective—how the audience engages with that art in that environment.

Pattern and Sabrina Orah Mark’s
Happily: A Personal History–with Fairy Tales

“… pattern is a crucial, uniting factor in many ancient designs. The reliance on pattern in ancient mosaics to hold the design together and keep; it visually interesting is instructive. Many mosaic artists use pattern, in other words repeated elements, as the core of their work.”
-Helen Miles

Pattern has a central role in mosaic art and the mosaic form of the lyric essay. Mosaic fine art always follows some pattern, whether concrete imagery or abstraction, and it is the pattern that provides unity and emotional gravity. The same applies to mosaic lyric essays. Pattern involves the arrangement of materials in a particular shape (in this case a mosaic), but it also has to do with the relationship of the parts to the whole, and of course what happens within the spaces for the reader. In this way, pattern incorporates the entirety of design principles.

Sabrina Orah Mark’s book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, illustrates this design principle. Most of the essays in Orah Mark’s collection weave together personal narrative and folklore, and if that were the extent of it, these essays might be considered a more traditional braided shape rather than mosaic. But Orah Mark doesn’t stop there. In fact, at times it feels like every sentence is a new line of thought, a break from the previous, a montage of tiny vignettes that have been stitched into the broader piece.

For example, in the book’s second essay, “The Nightmare of Horses,” Orah Mark begins with a personal narrative about visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. This is the narrative framework of the essay, but as the narrative progresses, we learn about the Polish writer who painted fairy tales on a boy’s nursery during Nazi occupation. This leads us into more fairy tales, which in turn leads to memories with her mother, and then we’re back to the present narrative once again. The impact of the layering, of these images arranged alongside one another, takes us beyond a personal story. Here we can feel the power of the mosaic lyric essay, due to its pattern. As Tom Bascom notes, “A lyric essay is a series of waves on the shore, cresting one after the other. It is one impression after another, unified by tone.”

Within all of these “waves cresting,” Orah Mark dreams and imagines and reflects in fresh and illuminating ways that lead us in what feels like a dozen directions at once. Somehow, by the end of the essay, all the disparate threads come together into a unified whole, far greater than the sum of their parts. This happens in one essay after another, a consistent pattern as she weaves together memoir and fairy tales.

Space and Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else

“As part of their mission to control the world, brains need to properly understand it. [….] Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers
everything about them.”
-Will Storr

As important as pattern is to unity in a mosaic, the pattern cannot hold without the spaces between the “tesserae.” This “space” can be categorized as either positive space or negative space. In fine art mosaics, the gaps between tesserae are filled with grout or mortar, and they serve a function of separating the individual pieces of tile or smalti. Those spaces also help to define the overall shape of the pattern, though this might not be evident until you step back, until you can see the whole picture.

The positive space in the mosaic lyric essay is comprised of paragraphs, the anecdotes, the fragments of image or feeling or narrative. The negative space is the space between those fragments, like a paragraph break or a dinkus, where curiosity is activated. Randon Billings Noble explains: “These spaces—white space, blank space—allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest each segment before moving on to the next. Each section may contain something new, but all still belong cogently to the whole.” But it is more than just thought and digestion taking place, because the mind will also seek out answers in those spaces, will try to form new connections as a means of understanding the whole.

The mechanism of positive and negative space can be seen in Chelsea Hodson’s collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else. In “The End of Longing” and “Halfway Out the Door,” Hodson employs a similar structure and approach to Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, with short sentences or paragraphs separated by text structures—centered diamonds in this case.

“The End of Longing” begins with “I met a woman who drew illustrations of the products she wanted instead of buying them,” which sets the tone and content for the mosaic—one of longing. Each additional fragment Hodson includes builds from this. The negative space between the fragments allows for the reader to forge their own connections and create something new, something collaborative between author and reader, though solely within the mind of the reader. For example, the essay ends with these two final vignettes: “You look like you’re suffering, a man I’d just met said, and I said, I’m the human embodiment of the opposite of suffering.” ** “A cloud came to cover the moon in the final stages of eclipse. I didn’t see the ending, but I still understood the story.”

These vignettes are unrelated, and yet, since they are put beside one another, and since a clear break separates them, the mind fills in the connections and the meaning. Both paint vivid images, and both are mysterious, full of layered meaning. In the first, we have an exchange between two people and opposing forces at play, a stark division between perception of someone and that someone. In the second, we have the something majestic and rare, obscured by something transient. There are ripples of meaning between the two, a shared vibration, in addition to everything that came prior. But I, the reader, am the one imbuing this shared meaning. Otherwise, each vignette stands alone in its respective location.

While the space alone activates the curiosity drive as the reader seeks understanding, the use of juxtaposition and contrast can heighten that effect.

Contrast/Juxtaposition and Chelsea Hodson’s
Tonight I’m Someone Else

“Ancient mosaics rely heavily on contrast to achieve visual clarity. This is similar to the concept of space, but it also includes thinking about the tones and colours that you are planning to use.”
-Helen Miles

In mosaic fine art, color is one of the most important aspects. Mosaic tiles, for example, have a certain depth and intensity unmatched by other mediums of fine art. Color theory is important here, as colors adjacent to one another on the color wheel are harmonious when used together, while those on opposite sides (known as “complementaries”) will react to and separate from one another when used together (Mills 25). The use of contrast and juxtaposition is one of the most important principles of design in mosaic fine art. Helen Miles explains that some of the best designs use simple contrasts like light and dark, bright and dull, textured and smooth, tight and open, large and small (42). These same contrasts, metaphorically, can be used in the mosaic form of the lyric essay to create texture and complexity and meaning.

Russian filmmakers Kuleshov and Eisenstein applied this idea to film editing, resulting in the art of montage. They discovered that editing is more than just a way to tell a continuous story, but rather, “by suitable juxtaposition, shots could be given meanings which they had hitherto not possessed” (Reisz and Millar 30). This same effect is present in the mosaic lyric essay; as Eisenstein believed, the arrangement of the parts is, in fact, an entirely new creation.

In many of Chelsea Hodson’s essays in Tonight I’m Someone Else, narrative chronology is present, and yet, through braiding and juxtaposition, the total becomes more than the sum of its parts. The opening essay, “Red Letters from a Red Planet,” juxtaposes her relationship with a partner, someone who she loved but could not know, and her time working at the operations center for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. In this juxtaposition and braiding of the two narratives, we experience both differently—more fully—due to their relationship to the other. Her relationship with Cody is complex and dangerous and exciting and possibly heading for disaster, and her experience following the Mars Rover is predictable but full of mystery and the potential for discovery. By design, the Mars Rover mission had a knowable ending, but it was one of termination, while the future of her relationship was unknowable, but also one of inevitable end. The dissimilar experiences used to highlight the other is what produces the emotional depth.

As important as the artist’s purpose and authorial intent is, the final design principle concerns the context and perspective—the external world that the art exists in, and those who decide to engage with it.

Context/Perspective,
Lydia Yuknavitch’s “Woven,” & Nick Flynn’s Ticking Is the Bomb

“…the ancients planned their mosaics carefully according to the context in which they would be seen [….] This attention to context is an important consideration when planning a mosaic.”
-Helen Miles

Context can mean many things and is entirely dependent on the subject matter. For mosaic fine art, the context equates to the physical space where the art will be viewed (location, lighting, etc.) but also perspective of the viewer (angle, distance from art, etc.). For the mosaic form of the lyric essay, context matters most as it relates to perspective and what the reader brings to the piece. The lyric essay is by design a collaboration:

[…] the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.” So here, also, there is an element of perspective required to fully appreciate both forms, and there is an endless back and forth between the artist and the audience. (Tall and D’Agata)

Two mosaics that illustrate this design principle of context and perspective are “Woven,” by Lydia Yuknavitch, and Nick Flynn’s book, Ticking Is the Bomb.

At first glance, Lydia Yuknavitch’s “Woven” appears to be grounded in personal narrative, but closer analysis reveals that the central focal point, the ‘image,’ is instead Laume, the water spirit from Lithuanian folklore. The thread of Laume recurs throughout, but the essay begins with the personal, which is used to pull us in. Only in relationship to Laume do all the other pieces fit together. The story of Laume is one of warning and one of violence, as is Yuknavitch’s story. The repeated and revised retelling of the opening story is a unique and clever device, as mystery and suspense are maintained from the outset, and it only grows in the space left open by the tales and exposition of Laume. The reader is welcome to make their own connections and conclusions. When it all comes together, it is a collision and a crescendo, and it is visceral. In a way, this essay has two shapes: it follows the traditional inverted checkmark narrative arc while also taking the shape of a mosaic. We have the inciting incident, the rising action, the climax, and the resolution, which is, essentially, how to live and make sense of a cruel and violent world in moments of kindness, moments of humanity. The true power comes in what is not said, or in what is hardly said, or in what the reader decides is said.

Nick Flynn uses a complex blend of braiding and mosaic styles in his book, Ticking Is the Bomb. There is a clear framework of prominent threads, his “tesserae,” which include the upcoming birth of his daughter, the stories of his parents, and the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and their torture. These narrative threads, complex and spanning many years, all ebb and flow into one another as they build throughout the text. They provide the framework, but there are other threads and fragments that appear and reappear throughout the text as well. Sometimes they are thematic, sometimes content-driven, but all hold meaning, often implicit, and this imbues everything else around it with more meaning. One recurring but disparate thread is that of literature and pop culture references. Flynn introduces and summarizes plotlines or characters from past stories told. We learn about Proteus, we learn about Plato’s allegory of the cave, we learn about The Book of Daniel, about zombie movies, about the Story of O, and it is all symbolic, allegorical, the “other” activated to bring us, to bring Nick Flynn, closer to the events of his life, to the horror and paradox that is human existence.

While the references are interesting and at times educational, the value in them is that they deepen our understanding of Flynn and his journey, about how he thinks and rationalizes his experiences. This is as much about character development as it is about context, but again, this is all determined by the reader, as nothing is told in a straightforward manner. Flynn also uses time cleverly and in a way that is reflective of the mosaic form in lyric essays. The progression of the text is contrasted by the chronology of time as it is presented. In using this juxtaposition, we have a fragmented movement through time, rather than linear progression. This underscores the importance and meaning of the big picture that takes shape throughout the book. Each chapter, each section is another piece of the puzzle, and the meaning and our understanding grows and
This effect sets this form of nonfiction prose apart from more traditional narrative structures, and the implications are vast. Engaging with the mosaic form of the lyric essay is both individualized and communal, personal and political. The form allows for readers to contend with a fractured, unpredictable world and future. And yet even in this fragmentation, we can still find meaning.

Conclusions

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
-Albert Einstein

Taken all together, the mosaic lyric essay is a form full of possibility, taking the creative nonfiction aesthetic into places hitherto unknown. “What has occurred,” writes Joseph Frank, “at least so far as literature is concerned, may be described as the transformation of the historical imagination into myth—an imagination for which historical time does not exist [….]” (63). Or, as Bachelard puts it: “A genuine poetics of space explodes the continuum of the world’s time, as happens in the reading or dreaming of a great fantasy” (Kearney xxii-xxiii).

But it is more than just the prominence of space versus time that makes the mosaic so impactful and necessary for our time. It has to do with the principles of design in mosaic fine art transposed onto this specific art of nonfiction prose and the medium in which it is presented. It is the use of pattern, of repeating elements and images, that “thicken” our sense of space-time. And it is the positive and negative space created by the weaving of fragments of prose together, along with the exclusion of explicit connective tissue, that evoke the curiosity drive according to the information-gap theory. It is the use of contrast and juxtaposition that results in a product that equals more than the sum of its parts. And it is the context in which the audience comes to the mosaic lyric essay, one that is collaborative and mysterious and fresh and new, that brings the creation fully into being. All combined it takes us into the world of myth, and according to Frank, “[…] it is this timeless world of myth, forming the content of so much of modern literature, that finds its appropriate aesthetic expression in spatial form.” (63-64).

In the final essay of Sabrina Orah Mark’s book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, titled “Epilogue: After Ever,” the essay takes the shape of a fairy tale grounded in the real. This is in contrast to her other essays, which are formed from personal narratives explored through fairy tales. This inverse is remarkable, and while there are references to concrete personal details and narrative, there is no point in the Epilogue where we believe that the essay is anything but a fairy tale. This exemplifies both Frank’s and Bachelard’s concepts—this nonfiction fairy tale transforms the real into the whimsical, the magical, and sometimes the sinister, where we cannot distinguish between the real and imaginary. It doesn’t really matter, as we are suspended in space-time, all these images and memories and experiences crashing down on us at once. Like a child experiences the world or like the stories they read, Orah Mark’s final essay takes us back to that state of mind. Like mosaic fine art, the effect of the mosaic lyric essay is transportive; whether experienced through individual fragments or through the grandeur of the greater design, the mosaic form is at work on us in strange and wonderful ways.

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Ben Wielechowski is a writer and lecturer living in Michigan. He holds a MFA from New England College and teaches at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His work has appeared in Post Road, Passages North, The Huron River Review, The Detroit News, and The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader. He is currently working on a collection of essays titled The Museum of What Remains.

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