This is the second in a series, Adventures in Composition and the Essay.
Last year I taught a hybrid creative writing class and a monster-themed composition class at Fordham. My creative writing class considered authors whose work crosses genres, blends media, and breaks the boundaries of form through invention and experiment. The composition class explored essay writing through a consideration of the cultural questions surrounding monsters but also looked at the way that both the essay and monsters are constructed.
One night as I was preparing for both classes, I realized the book I was assigning for the experimental nonfiction class, Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, shed intriguing light on my monster composition class. In the preface to the book, Marcela Sulak writes “When we speak of hybrid literature, we are speaking of individual works that do not replicate any previously existing pattern of literary affiliation. Rather, they take features from multiple parents — multiple genres — and mix them to create a new entity.” A monster.
I often encouraged my students to write what I call a “Frankenstein essay.” Far from a take on the Five-Paragraph Monster (although nicely thematically related), I mean a piece of writing that employs a radically innovative structure and whose author has a profound awareness of this style and works — doggedly, ingeniously, methodically, like a mad scientist — to deploy it.
I teach my students that Shelley’s Frankenstein is a monstrous book in both form and content. It’s about a monster, of course, but it’s also hybrid in form (as, we have already learned as a class by that point, are monsters). Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, formed from various letters and narratives; Shelley sews the book itself, like the monster whose story she tells, from various exhibits until it creates something wholly new.
And this is just what the best essays do.
This semester in my composition class while reading 40 Model Essays, we came upon the following definition of the analysis that takes place in an essay: “Analysis comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to undo.’ Using this method, we separate a whole into its elements, examine the relations of the elements to one another and to the whole, and reassemble the elements into a new whole informed by the examination. The method is essential to understanding and evaluating objects, works, and ideas.”
Just like these elements, the most committed readers, writers, and teachers of monstrous writing risk becoming remade, monstered themselves — aware of their own hybridity, radically innovative. In her “Introduction to Hybridity,” in Family Resemblance, Susanne Paola Antonetta writes: “To understand the hybrid creature, we must also remember the teacher the Greeks celebrated above all others: Chiron the centaur, half-man, half-horse…Machiavelli in The Prince praised Chiron, noting the peculiar genius of elevating a centaur as teacher, uniting the cool intellect of the human with the brute strength of the beast.” There’s a reason the same terrific professor taught the pedagogy, theory, and horror movie courses I took in my Ph.D. program.
We become monstrous when we step into our own hybridity, when we decide that we are not content being merely horse or human, but require instead the creativity of the centaur. Julia Kristeva refers to this monstrous, interstitial space as the abject, as that which, “disturbs identity, system, order: What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” She characterizes the abject as existing, “beyond the limits of the thinkable,” and that’s exactly where I think the best monsters and the best books live.
Ander Monson writes, “A hybrid is a thing that’s not entirely comfortable with the container it’s placed in…Containers need walls, but the hybrid in the container pushes back and tries to find where it might become electrically porous.” One day I woke to find that I was no longer comfortable in my container—that I never was—and that my whole life was becoming “electrically porous.”And so I turned toward the monstrous in my writing.
One way my writing is monstrous is I wish I could enclose my every aspect in this essay. I want to put the different pieces of me behind glass, let you look, say, “here lies the writer’s spleen,” maybe even make a hole in the glass where you could hold it. For a single shattering moment we’d be one throbbing body before I cracked the glass and ran away from any sort of enclosure. It would be unsettling, but it’s just the sort of shock Virginia Woolf thought necessary to good writing—the kind that ensures you’ll never be the same afterward. She went so far as to say, “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer.”
William Strunk Jr., who wrote the book we all had to read in composition class, The Elements of Style, believed the reader to be a drowning man in a swamp. He thought it was the job of the good writer to save him through the clarity of his written movements. (I guess the drowning woman can just be left in the swamp.) While this sounds good and all, it doesn’t describe my favorite books. On the contrary, I want the writer to throw me right into the swamp, show me everything.
The most creative works force me to remake my notion of what the world is, what art is, what I am. The result is writing that gestures towards another world outside or within me for which there may not even be official language. Please show me something I’ve never seen before, something monstrous, monster me.
You can read the first post in Adventures in Composition and the Essay here.