Maybe It Would Be Better If Writers Talked About Themselves A Little Less?

As someone who would be thrilled to live in a world where the only time you saw a capital I in an extended review or piece of reportage — my least favorite thing about journalism is when the writer has to remind you he’s telling you the story, e.g., “I drove over to Anderson’s office later that day and watched him interact with his staff. Everyone seemed happy to have him there, and the work got done quickly.” WHO CARES ABOUT YOU? WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED TO KNOW THAT YOU DROVE THERE? IS THE NEXT PARAGRAPH GOING TO TELL ME HOW YOU FILLED OUT YOUR EXPENSE FORM FOR THE MILEAGE? — was at the beginning of the word “Internet,” I should be completely sympathetic to the argument that “critics need to stop getting personal in their essays,” and for the most part I am. It’s difficult to disagree with this:

Contemporary criticism is positively crowded with first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography. Critics don’t simply wrestle with their assigned cultural object; they wrestle with themselves, as well.

Unfortunately, my objection isn’t so much to the idea that it’s wrong to use your own experiences as a guide to explain how you interact with the items under review as it is to the fact that so many of the critics who are doing it are boring, grasping people whose experiences are mundane at best and often comically over-inflated given how empty and insignificant they are. Most writers are a seemingly impossible mix of neediness, self-importance and insecurity. It should not be shocking that someone who has decided their expertise is so invaluable that everyone else is waiting for them to weigh in on a subject — these are frequently the kind of people who tell you that they have to write, it’s not a choice or an option for them, it’s something that they must do for they can do no other etc. — would prize the earthshaking events of their own life that helped develop their unique, inestimable voice as highly as (if not more highly than) the ostensible subject which they are using as a jumping-off point to tell you more about themselves, but that doesn’t mean it’s in any way tolerable for the reader unless you are one of the six or seven living writers who can actually pull something like that off. (That number may be high.)

Writers have always been gross egomaniacs but at least in the past we were unaware of the vast majority of “but what I learned that summer’s day in college that relates to this Batman movie” pieces because we were shielded from the gigantic torrent of self-regarding wordflow that was just waiting to burst forth. I think the flaw with this piece isn’t that its argument is unfair to the people who engage in this sort of look-at-me-and-my-deep-deep-feelings criticism, it’s that the proscription against first-person exegesis is too narrow: Let’s get rid of the “I” in fiction and memoir too. If that means no more fiction and memoir, well, it is a small price to pay to make all those people who think they are too highly refined and emotionally gifted stop talking about themselves for just a few minutes, and if you’re going to tell me that I’m using the personal pronoun an awful lot in this piece decrying it, well, oh my God, what an amazing point you raise, I never thought of that. I know I’m talking about myself too much here. I’m a writer, I can’t be anything but gross and self-important. It’s just how we are: showy, self-involved and unwilling to shut up about ourselves. The fact that you’re still reading this is a great indication of how you’ve been trained to believe that this kind of disgusting monology is what you deserve as a reader. Someone should shut us all down, or at least take our I’s away.

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