Manipulations of the World: On The Lyric Essay

For something that should not be tricky, non-fiction is tricky. Of course, there’s the issue of telling the truth -- a contract that is signed the second that something is described as “non-fiction” or “memoir”:  that the author will not steer you wrong, that the story being told is as close as humanly possible to what actually happened, that the feelings felt are accurate.

This is what we expect from our non-fiction and it is why many protect the sanctity of the genre vehemently -- the truth, simply, is more valuable. Horror films gain credibility and add an extra element of terror when the phrase “based on true events” is put before the cold open of a family peacefully eating dinner in a lake cabin. We are more emotionally stirred when we believe that someone has gone through something, has “lived to tell”, can speak from experience.

However, the concept of non-fiction is flawed in this way as well: thus the birth of the phrase “creative non-fiction,” which if you mention to anyone who is not in the writing community (I’m looking at you, family friends and clever uncles) they will believe it to be an oxymoron -- that things that are true cannot be creative, that truth is the direct opposite of creating something new of value.

This, of course, is laughably false: even by providing a timeline or a list of facts one is presenting the truth in a scripted form -- the choice of font, the decision of spacing, the way everything fits on the page. Yet at what point does the piece gain the distinction of being a “lyric essay”?

David Shields’ Reality Hunger has become the ur-book for the modern-day lyric essay: a blur of quotations and insights into writing, technology, persona, our relationship with the other with brief sprinkles of narrative intertwined. When we choose to enter a piece of fiction or when we read a poem, we are asked to suspend belief in order to find ourselves entranced in the language as well as the narrative:  we are certainly still in our chairs or couches reading, but we will allow ourselves to get caught up in what is being weaved.

The lyric does this as well -- the reader is immersed in language and synthesis: the knowledge that what we are being told is true, yet the way we are being told these truths are masked in some sort of artifice -- that instead of being immersed in narrative and plot, we are immersed in structure: what words repeat themselves, the speed of the language varying, phrases meant to express the intangible in a tangible way.

The beauty of the lyric essay is in its playfulness and manipulation of a world -- it is play at its most primitive level: the idea of vertigo, in which sociologist Roger Caillois defines as “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness."

To me, the lyric essay exists in a lucid world but it is being presented in a way that one is uncertain of, in the same way when you have a dream about your house: you know it is your house despite it not looking anything like your house looks, despite having dead relatives and ex-girlfriends and people from across the country all living underneath one roof.

And yet it makes sense while you’re in it: you sit at the counter and eat a slice of pizza, you listen as faces melt into other faces, as the walls change around you. It isn’t until afterward you realize the oddness of it all: the craft and attention to strange detail the dream took to make you feel these things -- sadness for those past, homesickness for a version of home. It might only be a version of the truth, yet it was presented so beautifully and honestly, you can’t help but feel and live it strongly.