and voice. I focus the last half of the chapter on the third convention, which seems to be the most celebrated of the three because there is the most at stake in it—namely, the opportunity for empowerment through writing.
To do this work on the third convention, I turn to Expressivist notions of voice-in-writing and examine the ways in which voice is thought to manifest and operate on the page. To explore said Expressivist notions, I have taken up the work of Peter Elbow, who is generally understood by the field of Rhetoric and Composition to be the figurehead of Expressivism. As such, he seems an easy choice for my work in Chapter 1. On the other hand, as I’ll discuss briefly in Chapter 1, Elbow’s concept of voice is slippery. His descriptions of it are often tentative, highly metaphorical, and they evolve in important ways over the course of his career. It has been no easy task to try to pin down the concept in his work. Consequently, I rely on key passages in his work and explore them at length but always within the framework of this project’s question: what might a productive theory of the personal essay look like?
In the end, I find that the voice-informed conception of the relationship between the writer and the page ultimately fails essayists who are interested in the free form of the essay and in the possibility it is supposed to engender: writing that expresses the natural or essential self, unmediated and uninhibited by social impositions. The problem is that the concept of voice in writing hinges on the assumption that a writer can transcend not only the social influences working on him/her, but also his/her own self in order to express the self in unmediated form on the page. As I will show, even if one could transcend social influences and one’s own self, that transcendence would cause the self-on-the-page to function not as a subject wielding social forces but as an object acted on by the writer and the reader, one that is essentially made impotent by its pretended dislocation from “the social.”
I turn, in Chapter 2, to the most popular conception of the relation between writer and page in rhetoric and composition scholarship, a conception that takes the shape of the “socially constructed” self. Bringing, again, the two disciplines of Creative Nonfiction and Rhetoric and Composition into conversation with one another, I present this conceptualization of the writer-page relation and apply it to the essayist-essay relation in order to test out a different theoretical framework for the essay. Specifically, I examine David Bartholomae’s and others’ work on discourse communities, Pratt’s work on contact zones, and Fish’s and Bizzell’s work on (anti)foundationalism. I find that however much said scholars labor to move away from the problems that occur in Expressivist notions of the writer-page relation, any theory of the socially constructed self still works by objectifying the subject through the use of an impossible transcendent move. I show how this problem occurs in personal essays that enact a contact zone on the page (e.g., in essays by Molly Ivins and Linda Brodkey). In the end, I find that such essayists and scholars who are invested in the concept of a social self and its construction are still participating in what Bizzell and Fish call “theory hope” (the belief that we can transcend our socialness in order to have some say in it, in order to wield it, even), and as the same scholars so famously point out, theory hope is really just a grand pretend; it doesn’t accomplish the kind of empowerment-through-engagement that it hopes.
Consequently, I find that these two potential theories of the essay don’t actually accomplish what they set out to do; they don’t empower the essayist to negotiate his/her self in relation to the world in the ways they promise. As much as I value both potential theories of the essay for their reflective ways of accounting for the self of the essayist and the self-on-the-page, I find myself turning to “The” great obstacle to the personal essay to find another possibility: poststructuralist theory. Many scholars of the essay emphatically proclaim that the essay is not only atheoretical but that it is opposed to poststructuralist theory. 3 For example, in his well-known article “The Essay: Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship,” Chris Anderson argues that in the essay “a certain number of a priori assumptions are allowed.” He describes those assumptions as such: “the stones we kick are here, people are born, there are origins.” These assumptions, he pits against “contemporary scholarship,” which he describes as “articles necessitated by poststructuralism,” i.e., articles “in which no assumptions about words can be taken for granted” (301).
Above, Anderson leverages what seems a common critique of poststructuralism: that in poststructuralism there are no origins, that objects don’t exist, and that meaning is impossible or, perhaps, naïve. Of course, all of the criticisms listed in the above statement would present major obstacles for the essay, for the essay is celebrated for its origination in the individual essayist, is valuable precisely because reality exists and can be explored in an essay, and is at its core an exercise in meaning-making. I would argue, though, that many advocates of the personal essay, who posit it against poststructuralism, are essentially doing what the academy has done to the personal essay: misreading it. Anderson’s reading of poststructuralism, for example, is misleading—at least with regard to one “poststructuralist,” Michel Foucault. Though his work would easily fit into the “poststructuralist” category, in Foucault’s work there are, in fact, origins, objects, and meaning, but the difference is that they are not metaphysical origins, objects, and meanings. Origins happen within a complex of relations of power, so that origins are more like junctures than sources.
In “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” Paul Veyne best explains this concept of origins in response to Foucault’s study of madness. He states,
To say that madness does not exist is not to claim that madmen are victims of prejudice, nor is it to deny such an assertion, for that matter…. It means that at a level other than that of consciousness a certain practice is necessary for there even to be an object such as ‘the madman’ to be judged to the best of one’s knowledge and belief, or for society to be able to ‘drive someone mad.’ (169)
To clarify, Foucault never says that madness does not exist; rather, his point, as I think Veyne is trying to explain it, is that madness does not pre-exist as a stable entity/category that then acts on or determines an individual’s mode of existence. Instead, Foucault emphasizes that there are ways of talking (discourses) about an individual and ways of acting (practices) on/by an individual that “objectivize” (make into a subject) him/her as “the madperson.” I will explore this idea at greater lengths in the third chapter.
It’s important to clarify here, though, that Foucault does not mean to make “discourse” or “practices” the origin of all things either. Veyne states, “Foucault has not discovered a previously unknown new agency, called practice” (Veyne 156). Instead, these practices are “what people do,” and they originate “from historical changes, quite simply, from the countless transformations of historical reality” (156). In other words, practices originate in other practices, in relation to other practices, in particular historical moments, in relation to other historical moments, at points of rupture and continuity.
Perhaps this seems a strange example, but I’m reminded of the new interest in natural horsemanship (I live in Colorado and ride a horse, so this is a discourse to which I’m privy). Many critics of the movement argue that there is nothing new in the practices of natural horsemanship; rather, they are old practices that have been repackaged in a leftist belief about how human beings should interact with animals. If so, then in this example, the practices of natural horsemanship originate in much older practices, but they have been made new in the discourse which has emerged around a responsibility to animals and to the natural world.
Of course, Foucault’s conception of origins would disrupt the traditional conception of an essay’s origin: that it derives from some unique essential or social makeup of the essayist. And much of poststructuralist theory would do the same, though by different means. Thus, poststructuralist theory, though it has reinvigorated the academic article in new ways, presents the essay with a supposed impasse. The problem is that when this impasse is endorsed in order to keep essay writing from adapting to different and new conceptions of subjectivity, then the genre, itself, consequently gets left behind. Indeed, one might easily conclude that the fact that the
