To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Author:Phillip Lopate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2013-02-11T14:00:00+00:00

The Made-Up Self: On the Difficulty of Turning Oneself into a Character

The idea that personal essayists and memoirists construct a persona would seem to be self-evident. In The Made-Up Self, Carl H. Klaus has given us an excellent, nuanced, and very useful elaboration of that historical process. I said much the same in my previous essay, “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” and so I was delighted when I read Klaus’s book. And yet, asked to speak about this self-evident phenomenon today, I find myself hesitating and entertaining objections. Why is that? Am I such a contrarian that I must argue with my own understanding and the collective wisdom of my fellow panelists? There is that, but I think it goes further. I do not remember ever having concocted this made-up self; I can’t recall the night when, like Geppetto fabricating his Pinocchio, I stayed up late and finished off the puppet that would stand in for me.

On the contrary: what impresses and appalls me is how little I seem to be able to change my everyday personality, not to mention my writing style. I have been writing with literary intent for half a century, and for the most part, my I-persona has remained fairly constant. Even the papers I wrote in college show many traces of characteristic syntactical constructions, tones of voice, argumentation, and strategies that have followed me around and still infect my writing. When you add to that the fact that I continue to make the same interpersonal mistakes in my domestic life, in my friendships, in my handling of students, despite the embarrassment they have caused me and the pain they have caused others, I have to wonder how much is in my control and how much is not.

The United States has often been characterized as a generator of self-invention. How could it be otherwise, when so many immigrants cut their ties with the social stratification of the Old Country and began what they hoped was a new, more fluid life, aiming to fulfill their dreams on these shores? Nineteenth-century America saw a plague of con artists who passed themselves off as counts and dukes, in the absence of a national aristocracy: they were merely the gaudiest representatives of that tendency toward self-invention that enveloped large swatches of the population. So yes, we as a people are receptive to the idea of a made-up self. Contrast that with Europe, where the very idea that one has a self, made up or otherwise, is contested. Continental cultural criticism seems more inclined to view the self as a social construct, an aggregate of mass media inputs and political indoctrinations. In this regard I instinctively side with the American viewpoint: yes, I am an individual and I damned well have a self, which I rely on with comfort and consolation—though I just can’t recall how I came by it.

Many people like to think that they are radically different from their parents, that they took a separate path of self-invention, so to speak, sometime around adolescence.

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