The Lost Origins of the Essay, by John D’Agata
(Graywolf, August 2009)
Joshua Schriftman

David Foster Wallace called John D’Agata “one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.” According to Andre Codrescu, “Here is an essayist who fears nothing.”  These comments reference D’Agata the essayist (who established his own hybrid voice in Halls of Fame) and not D’Agata the anthologist, but both “fearless” and “emergent” are equally suited to a description of D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay and his entire, massive, three-volume mosaic redefinition the essay. The trilogy’s first volume, The Next American Essay, anthologizes one essay per year from 1975 (the year of the anthologist’s birth) through 2003 (the year of the book’s publication). The Lost Origins of the Essay, though the chronologically first of the triptych, has just now arrived, and it endeavors to cover the formative moments of essaying that precede 1975. (The trilogy’s final volume, The Foundations of the American Essay, is still forthcoming.)

Of course D’Agata’s selections do not actually form an inclusive picture of every major essayistic moment in global literary history, and despite the book’s 600-plus-page heft, you still get the feeling that D’Agata may just be getting started. That said, the essays he’s selected do compose a brilliant constellation. He moves from the far shores of history in Sumer and Babylonia to the center of the classical cosmopoleis of Plutarch and Seneca and then east to the proto-essayists of China and Japan. Later writers include Montaigne and Bacon, Basho and Blake, and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. And from the twentieth century, D’Agata plucks Artaud, Pessoa, Woolf, and Celan, but also Ana Hatherly, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Avant-garde and performative essays show up from Clarice Lispector, Kamau Braithwaite, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett. And D’Agata offers his own introductory words to each entry—the sum total of which compose a work that is as much an essay as any of the essays he’s introduced.

In his commentary on a surreal and haunting dialog written in South Africa by Azwinaki Tshipala in 315 C.E., D’Agata writes:  “Ask a friend: what is an essay? An essay, I suspect, is something to which your friend might turn to watch a problem being solved, a proclamation made, the world recorded honestly. After all, no matter how playful Seneca, Plutarch, or Theophrastus make their essays, let’s not kid ourselves about them: their essays are making arguments.” And there it is, I thought on my first reading. A clean definition of all of these strange angels cutting across the page: they’ve each their own voice and form, but in the end they all are rhetorical. They are making arguments.

But on a second read, I paid more attention to the rest of D’Agata’s treatment of the seventeen-hundred-year-old essay: “We might read these arguments through the lens of emotion, or experience, or a boldly clever adventure into the limits of human logic, but once we emerge from reading them aren’t we nevertheless changed? Haven’t we been moved? Doesn’t good art resist the intelligence only almost successfully? Or: is every essay an intelligence that inaugurates its own form?” It’s a subtle enough distinction that I breezed past it at first, but it constitutes the difference between changing readers’ minds and changing their way of thinking. In an essay about essays, D’Agata’s formula accounts for the difference between changing someone’s opinion on what constitutes an essay and changing their way of reading nonfiction.

Throughout this anthology, D’Agata throws everything in his arsenal against the misperception of nonfiction as “a genre that is merely a dispensary of data”—a “genre of negation.”  In his introduction to Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Interior,” for instance, D’Agata offers an etymology of memoir that reaches past the Latin memoria to “the ancient Greek mérmeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’”

And this brings me to the best way I’ve found to express what D’Agata’s constellation is itself essaying: a thing that is both a form and an action, an etymology of the art of the essay.

About a Mountain, another of John D’Agata’s reconsiderations of the nonfiction genre, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in February.

Joshua Schriftman teaches and writes for a living but also has experience in marketing, travel, retail, sushi, and construction. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He has essays of his own appearing in the spring issues of Ninth Letter and The Pinch.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
(Algonquin, January 2010)
Liberty Hultberg

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black.

Like Nella Larsen’s biracial heroine Helga Crane in Quicksand, Rachel is a child of multiple worlds—White, Black, American, foreign.  At once an insider and an outsider, she strives to reconcile parts of her character that belong to rigidly separate lives.  She wonders what it means when friends tell her she “talks white” and worries that “the Danish in me [will] be something time makes me leave behind.”  She ponders how identity is tied to what others see and refuse to see, to the events that confront her unprepared in the present and those that remain only in her memory.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are the voices of other family members and witnesses to the accident, with their own versions of reality. Readers are reminded of how, like ripples in water, a tragedy affects an entire community. But the story remains Rachel’s—it is through her innocent-yet-haunting blue eyes, private ponderings contained in what she calls her “blue bottle,” and the wide stretch of blue sky she sees above that we experience the violence of the everyday, the loss of the past, and the hope for a future in which our vision of race and family and difference is inclusive and expansive.

Though Durrow compellingly shifts Rachel’s perspective to reflect her always-inexact, ever-changing insider-outsider position, at times she sacrifices the cohesiveness of the chronology.  Rachel’s age is too often uncertain, her voice more innocent than her experience would suggest.  Yet beneath the halting words lies a poetry that poignantly captures the pain and loss of death and separation from family. The reader can see the taunting looks of Rachel’s classmates, hear the Danish accent she suppresses, feel the widening circles of heat within her as she experiences her first kiss.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction that addresses issues of social justice, is a book that enlivens American identities of the past and the present. In these pages are echoes of our ancestors, Langston Hughes speaking to Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen speaking to Alice Walker, and this new voice—Durrow’s—speaking to us.

Heidi Durrow will give a reading and lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on April 13, 2010.

Liberty Hultberg is a Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose writing deals with multiracial identity.