NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical and the Creative

Joanna Eleftheriou’s essays, poems and translations appear in journals including The Crab Orchard Review, Chautauqua and Apalachee Review. She teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Her first book, This Way Back, will be a collection of essays drawing on her experience as a Greek-Cypriot-American.

Introduction to "Theorizing Creative Nonfiction"

Travis Scholl

Corinna Cook

Beth Peterson

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Joanna Eleftheriou
Theorizing Creative Nonfiction: The Essay Was Always in Between

One who wants the truth will become a scholar; one who wants to give free
play to his subjectivity will perhaps become a writer; but what should one do
who wants something that lies in between?
                                                                        -- Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
 
 
I didn’t know it at first, but I was one of the ones Robert Musil would say “wants something that lies in between.” The last time a serious reader reviewed my manuscript, what impressed her most was the role of theory, to which I’d given little thought. She said my essays weren't just using theory like a tool, weren't applying it like make up, and weren't just engaging or flirting with modes of writing that belong on the wrong side of the English department’s hallway, as it were. My creative nonfiction operated so unlike creative writing sometimes, insisted so doggedly on folding into it ideas and paragraphs from anthropology, from queer and postcolonial and trauma theory, and from psychoanalysis, that the text called into question the creative/critical divide.   

By the time this conversation took place, I knew enough about the essay’s long history to know that if this was true, I was in good company. Walter Pater. Susan Sontag. Adorno, whose “Der Essay also Form” is shown by Sarah Pourciau to suggest that “The truth to which the essay has access emerges only at the point  where thinking, in an effort to remedy the insufficiency of existing categories, drives thought beyond its own boundaries. …[toward] the transcendence of the essayistic truth” (627).

Accessing such essayistic truth not through rational deduction but through what Robert Musil named essayismus has been traced back to ancient Greek dialogues by scholars such as Kuisma Korhonen in Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida. Korhonen writes about the essay as dialogic the way Bakhtin wrote about the novel. The controlling metaphor Textual Friendship suggests that essays work like dialogues between philosopher friends, who hope not to defend their own points’ validity, but to have their own arguments improved by the friend’s even better one. Similarly, essayistic truth arises from an essay that posits one, and then another, apparently contradictory proposition.

Korhonen, a Finn, writes as though the distinction between theory and creative writing had never been invented. And this makes sense when you think about the creative/critical divide from the point of view of Brian Lennon’s 2008 “The Essay, In Theory,” in diacritics. Lennon’s argument is incisive and surprisingly simple: that after Derrida et al. freaked them out with his tauntingly ambiguous openings – “genres are not to be mixed,” (les genres doivent ne pas se mêler) – scholars of literature, consciously or not, diverted the energies of continental philosophy into the “holding pen” of creative writing (89). Even the great Frederic Jameson fretted about objections to writing that was too aware of its own writtenness, too eager to delight in the possibilities of language play—in sum, too essayistic (73).

And it is because we essayists live in the very freedom of which theorists say they’ve been recently deprived that I have spent the first half of my talk rehearsing a history of the essay, which is one with the history of Theory. Whether we mark its beginnings as early as Plato’s dialogues or as late as Adorno, Theory has employed dialogic, and hence essayistic, prose in the work of making new thought possible, and for that reason to theorize is the essayist’s birthright; its legacy is ours.

In “The Essay, in Theory,” Lennon furthermore explains that the segregation of criticism from creative writing has limited the discourse around craft used in creative writing books and classrooms, making it “hopelessly formalist,” and in 2008 I think this claim was largely true (89). But the several panels similar to this one on NonfictioNOW’s schedule prove how seriously we’re owning, now, what I’ve called our birthright, as does brilliant work like Maggie Nelson’s 2015 Argonauts and David Lazar’s 2013 “Queering the Essay.”

Now that I’ve offered my view of the conjoined history of nonfiction and critical theory, I’d like to tell you a little bit about how Theory came to matter to my nonfiction practice, and how I have come to rely on a range of theories – trauma, queer, nationalism, affect, psychoanalytic, ethnographic – for insight. That metaphor of in-sight is the one I’ll stick to given the well-known etymology of theoro (θεωρώ) meaning to look at or see. I have, at many a crossroad in my writing career, found that a many-times revised, lyrically polished essay still refused to work. I had made the ending into a perfect paragraph, but it wouldn’t satisfy, wouldn’t sing. In most cases, it was a problem with my thinking—and even with my feelings. I’ve heard many writers on panels like these assert the inherent validity of the writer’s subjective experience in the face of objections from family or others involved in the action, but I’ll tell a story of how I wasn't seeing my own experience clearly, and how reading theory revealed to me what my own conditioning hid.

I wrote, in past years, with an unexamined passion about my love of Cyprus, the island nation where I spent my youth. As a writer, my task was to communicate to readers what my feelings were, and the inherent validity of those feelings was not open to question.  I thought this way until, in a conditional acceptance note, an editor invited me to interrogate my language. She pointed out how I had constructed the archetypal nostalgic Greek subject as male: “old men haunt the watersides. In fishermen’s caps, long mustaches and glasses, they clutch newspapers rolled up like telescopes.” The image, she said, suggested that ethno-cultural identity is a masculine terrain, and condoned the differential access to ethno-cultural subjectivity for Greek women and men. I didn’t want to believe her when she accused me of reproducing heteropatriarchal notions of belonging, and perpetuating a “gendered nationalism” when I wrote my experience and the way I felt about my country. But when I turned to Said’s Orientalism, to Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather, to understand the editor’s point and then to prove her wrong, I ended up embracing her critique. As a result, my entire book became in part an examination of how, as a child, I internalized gender norms that expect women to be silent and passive, to be desired rather than desirous. With theory sharpening my ability to see what really happened to me, and what historical forces were behind what I earnestly felt, I was better equipped to choose scenes from childhood and better render them on the page. Craft books prescribe “distance” from autobiographical material, because distance allows us to clearly see. In my case, Theory helped me see as though from that distance, and clear seeing simply would not have been possible any other way.

An example. One of my childhood memories involves me jumping off the school stage onto a pile of gym mats, while reenacting this scene from the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire: in mid-December, 1803, Turkish soldiers began to close in on the place where a group of Greek women were under siege. To avoid being taken hostage, the women took their children in their arms and ran towards a bluff. Before their pursuers could catch and “dishonor” them (we never asked our teachers what this meant), the women tightened their kerchiefs, straightened their dresses, and broke into song, dancing in loops toward the cliff. Tracing complicated footwork over the snow, dead grass and rock, they took their last steps—still free, still honorable, still Greek—and one by one they jumped, singing still.  
 
I used to take pride in this moment, and believed that the Greek women were heroic for jumping off that cliff. To those who didn’t grow up with this story, it might seem obvious that the re-enactment glorifies infanticide, and is misogynistic because it prefers sacrificed (dead) women over the chance that those women be penetrated by other, darker, men. Theory allowed me to see that the Greek men who controlled collective memory feared having their women violated, because that would be emasculating, and the women had died to relieve men of the anxiety of being penetrated by a dark, foreign Other.

A second brief example also has to do with the Greek dancing that recurs constantly in my book. Investigating why dancing just feels so good to me, I learned about kinesthetic empathy, and about how mirror neurons work when we make the same motions as others in time to music. This wholly distinct theory allows me to see what’s happening to the me-character in my essay from a vantage point that allows clarity when I describe myself engaged in Greek dance.

The third and last example is an essay I wrote about serving coffee at Cornell, where my customers were A. R. Ammons and Jonathan Culler. It was back then, in 1998, that I started to worry about the divide between the literary and theoretical, and what I watched for as a teenage coffee worker was which professors were most in love with their job. To write it, I read about Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and about Judith Butler’s reading of Emmanuel Levinas: “Let's face it. We're undone by each other.” These are words for my teenage physical-intellectual desire—for a connection between intellectual and artistic labor and the flesh.

In the end I quote no one but Audre Lorde, the great theorist-poet-essayist, who explains in “The Uses of the Erotic”:

​The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need …. is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion  for ourselves and those we love. (55)

I think there prevails an illusion that love is the purview only of creative writing – that only creative work is fired by desire, and that nonfiction is sensual only insofar as it is not theoretical thinking neither too hard nor too obviously.  Nonfiction is associated with love as long as thinking isn't  on the page. I’m optimistic about the end of divisions between creative and critical writing, which are recent and founded on ahistoric assumptions about what nonfiction is and can be. For those  willing to spend their lives reading and writing theory, thought is erotic; thought fuels and is fueled by desire. We theorize because of a wanting, a wanting to know—and because theory is our right and our inheritance, we do.

​Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “The Essay as Form.” Trans. Bob Hullott-Kentor. New German Critique 32 (1984): 151-171. 

Korhonen, Kuisma. Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida. New York: Prometheus Books, 2006.

Lennon, Brian. “The Essay, in Theory.” diacritics 38.3 (2008): 71–92.

Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Coward-McCann, 1953.
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Pourciau, Sarah. “Ambiguity Intervenes: The Strategy of Equivocation in Adorno’s ‘Der Essay Als Form’.” MLN 122.3 (2007): 623–646.

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Theorizing Nonfiction, Continued.

Travis Scholl
Theorizing Nonfiction: My Friend Wally Benjamin

Beth Peterson
Theorizing Nonfiction

Corinna Cook
​Eating Our Neighbors: Giorgio Agamben, Animality, and Essaying North
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