Nothing Fictional About It (Contra Merve Emre)

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

The critic Merve Emre argues that the “I” of the personal essay is a fiction and that individual subjectivity is an illusion: see her recent “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022). She makes a similar point in her absorbing “The Act of Persuasion” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022), a review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s work:

In her essays, Hardwick reproved and indulged the temptation to fictionalize. How could she help it? Between the person and the page lies the prism of fiction, always. No genre can avoid it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of the lives and works of the dead, must bring the dead to life—the words of the past distilled in the words of the present. 

Well, the writers I admire most (e.g., John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Edward Hoagland) write in the first person major. They’re subjective to the bone. They write about what they want to write about, and say what they want to say. They get their words as close as they can to the solidity, the materiality of the world they’re noticing. There’s no “prism of fiction.” There is the prism of sensibility. We see the world refracted through the prism of who they are. That’s the secret of their art. There’s nothing fictional about it.