The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!