A friend sent me a Jan Carson essay; The Voice is a Leaky Vessel. She focusses the essay on ‘the first person’. At the end of the essay, she says she’s never going to master that voice, because she herself is a leaky writer. The metaphor gets strained to within an inch of its life.
I enjoyed Jan Carson’s essay. It got me thinking. And what could be better than that?
I was about three pages in when it struck me that Jan Carson and I have different understandings of what fiction is. I rest on the definition in my Chambers dictionary: fiction is an invented or false story; to form or fashion; with origins in the word Italian fingere (to feign); it is a novel or storytelling as a branch of literature.”
I make the work up, as per the Chambers’ definition. I use the formula
experience+imagination=story.
Selecting the voice to write in is part of the feint.
The opening line of the novel Tristam Shandy introduces, in the “I” voice, a character who is not the writer, Laurence Sterne, though Sterne’s own reading, life and times inform the character and the novel, which are imagined grandly. And that was in 1759.
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
The choice of voice, I suggest, is one of the many choices a writer makes when setting out. I’ve just finished Sue Divin’s new book, Guard Your Heart. It is written in two “I” voices. There’s nothing leaky about Sue!
I was three or four pages into Jan Carson’s essay, when the sense grew that she and I have different understandings of the word empathy. I went back to my Chambers: empathy is the power of entering into another’s personality and imaginatively expressing his or her experiences.
The key words there, for me, are ‘personality’, which does not mean ‘person’, and ‘imaginatively’. The word ‘solidarity’ kept coming to mind and I was delighted to find it bolstering Jan Carson’s arguments as the essay drew to a close. Though she’s hesitant about it, I was pleased to read that
“In short, I can practice solidarity without trying to make another’s personal experience all about me.”
And there’s the rub. I found the essay all about "me” rather than all about “Empathy and the first-person narrative in the era of Covid-19”. I sense this is one of the challenges of writing a personal essay, where the writer’s practice, their person and their world, notably how they manage to survive in the world, are the material of the essay.
Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, uses the notion of re-description as a way for writers to make solidarity manifest in the world.
“Her description of what she is doing when she looks for a better final vocabulary than the one she is currently using is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversity and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedent present. She thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as the fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria.”
Might such thoughts assist writers such as myself and Jan Carson as we gather voices, ideas, structures, language, characters and more, to caulk our works, our vessels of solidarity, and keep them from leaking and sinking?
The Voice is a Leaky Vessel; Jan Carson; Little Atom, 27.12.2020
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Richard Rorty; Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1989
Guard Your Heart; Sue Divin; Macmillan Children’s Books; London, 2020
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