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The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay
The human presence that animates the personal essay is surely one of the most beguiling of literary phenomena, for it comes across in so familiar a voice that it’s easy to believe we are listening to the author rather than a textual stand-in. But the “person” in a personal essay is always a written construct, a fabricated character, its confessions and reminiscences as rehearsed as those of any novelist. In this first book-length study of the personal essay, Carl Klaus unpacks this made-up self and the manifold ways in which a wide range of essayists and essays have brought it to life. By reconceiving the most fundamental aspect of the personal essay—the I of the essayist—Klaus demonstrates that this seemingly uncontrived form of writing is inherently problematic, not willfully devious but bordering upon the world of fiction. He develops this key idea by explaining how structure, style, and voice determine the nature of a persona and our perception of it in the works of such essayists as Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, E. B. White, and Virginia Woolf. Realizing that this persona is shaped by the force of culture and the impress of personal experience, he explores the effects of both upon the point of view, content, and voice of such essayists as George Orwell, Nancy Mairs, Richard Rodriguez, and Alice Walker. Throughout, in full command of the history of the essay, he calls up numerous passages in which essayists themselves acknowledge the element of impersonation in their work, drawing upon the perspectives of Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Scott Russell Sanders, Annie Dillard, Vivian Gornick, Loren Eiseley, James Baldwin, and a host of other literary guides. Finally, adding yet another layer to the made-up self, Klaus succumbs to his addiction to the personal essay by placing some of the different selves that various essayists have called forth in him within the essays that he has crafted so carefully for this book. Making his way from one essay to the next with a persona variously learned, whimsical, and poignant, he enacts the palimpsest of ways in which the made-up self comes to life in the work of a single essayist. Thus over the course of this highly original, beautifully structured study, the personal essay is revealed to be more complex than many readers have supposed. With its lively analyses and illuminating examples, The Made-Up Self will speak to anyone who wishes to understand—or to write—personal essays.
168 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2010
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83 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 11, 2013
Not a book for the casual reader, but for anyone interested on narrative persona in nonfiction, or questions of how writers manifest the self in general, will find a depth of mental cud to chew. (Sorry about that metaphor, but I guess I'm leaving it.)
January 11, 2019
In many ways, this is the sort of effort that could only be in an age as obsessed with irony and meta-analysis as our own is. To wit, this is a collection of personal essays by an essayist that examines the artifice of identity in the writings of other essayists who wrestled with the problem in their own essays. I don't comment on the artifice involved in all of this to dislike it, after all, I have written personal essays on the same subject, and I offer here a review (in a somewhat personal essay format with the problematic "I") of this book, adding yet more layers of impersonation. In many respects, the author points out, it is unavoidable that writing personal essays should lead to problems with the persona of the author. The author, in the context of writing a personal essay, turns disorderly reality into a comprehensible picture that is more coherent and more appealing than the reality, but in many cases the act of writing is the only way in which the writer himself (or herself) and the audience can understand the thought processes of the writer. We know ourselves by writing ourselves, but in the process of writing ourselves we change what is into something that can be understood and organized. In short, essayists face the same sort of Heisenburg uncertainty principle as scientists trying to look at the velocity and position of subatomic particles. By observing what is inside of ourselves, like observing the interior of the atom, we change what we observe in the act of observing it.
This short book of about 150 pages or so contains four parts, each of which contains two or three essays. After a prologue that introduces the problem of the "person" in the personal essay, the author discusses evocations of consciousness in three essays, with one on Montaigne's thoughts on himself and his complex movements towards a poetics of self, ideas of consciousness in the personal essay, and discontinuous forms of consciousness, particularly focusing on the writing of E.B. White. After this the author looks at evocations of personality, with a look at the tension between the singular "I" and the Chameleon "I," an essay on the pseudonymous self "Elia" in Charles Lamb's essays, and a discussion of the problem of the essayist in never being one's self while always being oneself in the writing of Virginia Woolf. After this the author discusses the relationship between personae and culture, with a look at cultural consciousness as well as a discussion of politics in Orwell's "A Hanging." The fourth part of the book discusses the relationship between personae and personal experience, with a discussion of malady in the personal essay and turning daily experiences into essays through the medium of notebooks and diaries in the writing of Jane Didion.
One of the aspects that makes this book so appealing is that the books is written by a noted essayist who has read a lot of essays and who is writing the book for other essayists. I can scarcely imagine someone caring about the problem of the mask of personae in the writing of essayists unless one is in the habit of writing essays and considers the identity of the implicit author of one's essays to be problematic or at least interesting. If you do not read or write essays, this problem will be an incomprehensible one and not an interesting and thought-provoking one. Yet when we write personal essays, we are at least pretending to the world (or ourselves) that we are revealing something genuine about the person writing those essays, namely ourselves, even as we are aware that we are cleaning up the space inside ourselves to welcome that company, and putting on company manners, and not acting ourselves as we would if no one was paying any attention. The fact that essay writers have always wrestled with this tension between honest self-portrayal and the awareness of the artifice in any self-portrayal means that we can wrestle with that problem ourselves as essayists in the knowledge that we have plenty of company, including this author.
This short book of about 150 pages or so contains four parts, each of which contains two or three essays. After a prologue that introduces the problem of the "person" in the personal essay, the author discusses evocations of consciousness in three essays, with one on Montaigne's thoughts on himself and his complex movements towards a poetics of self, ideas of consciousness in the personal essay, and discontinuous forms of consciousness, particularly focusing on the writing of E.B. White. After this the author looks at evocations of personality, with a look at the tension between the singular "I" and the Chameleon "I," an essay on the pseudonymous self "Elia" in Charles Lamb's essays, and a discussion of the problem of the essayist in never being one's self while always being oneself in the writing of Virginia Woolf. After this the author discusses the relationship between personae and culture, with a look at cultural consciousness as well as a discussion of politics in Orwell's "A Hanging." The fourth part of the book discusses the relationship between personae and personal experience, with a discussion of malady in the personal essay and turning daily experiences into essays through the medium of notebooks and diaries in the writing of Jane Didion.
One of the aspects that makes this book so appealing is that the books is written by a noted essayist who has read a lot of essays and who is writing the book for other essayists. I can scarcely imagine someone caring about the problem of the mask of personae in the writing of essayists unless one is in the habit of writing essays and considers the identity of the implicit author of one's essays to be problematic or at least interesting. If you do not read or write essays, this problem will be an incomprehensible one and not an interesting and thought-provoking one. Yet when we write personal essays, we are at least pretending to the world (or ourselves) that we are revealing something genuine about the person writing those essays, namely ourselves, even as we are aware that we are cleaning up the space inside ourselves to welcome that company, and putting on company manners, and not acting ourselves as we would if no one was paying any attention. The fact that essay writers have always wrestled with this tension between honest self-portrayal and the awareness of the artifice in any self-portrayal means that we can wrestle with that problem ourselves as essayists in the knowledge that we have plenty of company, including this author.
July 23, 2019
“The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay” by Carl H. Klaus
This book proved to be an interesting, if inconsistent, treatise on the history, form, and voice of the personal essay. As someone who has, at this early stage in his academic career, built much of my work on personal narrative and identity performance, the revelations in this book are not necessarily groundbreaking. However, there are still plentiful gems which help clarify the persona of the personal essay, the construction of a self which is not a self in writing.
I must critique Klaus for what I perceive to be a significant blind spot in his writing, namely his role as an inadvertant defender of the white western canon of literature. Although some voices of color were represented as examples, they still hailed mostly from the Western hemisphere and therefore Western influence. Voices from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and countries of Africa were not really present, nor were voices of queer persons from any locale. Klaus further dismisses the importance of difference as experienced by the Other, relying on an All Lives Matter, All Differences Matter mentality. He also seeks a way to relegate essays which feature the voice as an extension of the body to a special category, away from the mainstream, thus marginalizing writing which has granted power to the Other for centuries. Anything which does not seem to fit under the white Western Canon is given an addendum, a new label, a note of something exceptional. To grant any of these exceptional essays mainstream influence in the genre of personal essays would be too radical for Klaus, who clearly still has his foot deeply rooted in classic literary traditions.
With that said, Klaus himself does not write with malice. He simply reiterates the voices and experience which resonate with his own, an unintentional conduit of hegemony. If you are a lover of nonfiction and of personal essay, this book is still interesting and worth a read. But for the more critical reader, you may wish to enter with the acknowledgement that Klaus, while covering a vast swath of important observations, has not accounted for much in the way of new, provocative, and radical forms of the perosnal essay.
This book proved to be an interesting, if inconsistent, treatise on the history, form, and voice of the personal essay. As someone who has, at this early stage in his academic career, built much of my work on personal narrative and identity performance, the revelations in this book are not necessarily groundbreaking. However, there are still plentiful gems which help clarify the persona of the personal essay, the construction of a self which is not a self in writing.
I must critique Klaus for what I perceive to be a significant blind spot in his writing, namely his role as an inadvertant defender of the white western canon of literature. Although some voices of color were represented as examples, they still hailed mostly from the Western hemisphere and therefore Western influence. Voices from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and countries of Africa were not really present, nor were voices of queer persons from any locale. Klaus further dismisses the importance of difference as experienced by the Other, relying on an All Lives Matter, All Differences Matter mentality. He also seeks a way to relegate essays which feature the voice as an extension of the body to a special category, away from the mainstream, thus marginalizing writing which has granted power to the Other for centuries. Anything which does not seem to fit under the white Western Canon is given an addendum, a new label, a note of something exceptional. To grant any of these exceptional essays mainstream influence in the genre of personal essays would be too radical for Klaus, who clearly still has his foot deeply rooted in classic literary traditions.
With that said, Klaus himself does not write with malice. He simply reiterates the voices and experience which resonate with his own, an unintentional conduit of hegemony. If you are a lover of nonfiction and of personal essay, this book is still interesting and worth a read. But for the more critical reader, you may wish to enter with the acknowledgement that Klaus, while covering a vast swath of important observations, has not accounted for much in the way of new, provocative, and radical forms of the perosnal essay.
March 13, 2017
I read so many books on writing that it becomes hard for me to find books that say something new about this topic. But The Made Up Self b is such a book, because it added something to my understanding of the form of personal essay, and memoir too to some extent. I particularly love the distinction that Klaus makes between different aims essayists may have in how they use their selves in their works. For example, some want to trace the precise movement of their consciousness, whereas others want to put certain identities on the central stage. My only slight disappointment with the book is that Klaus predominantly discusses essayists from previous centuries and there is little engagement with the more contemporary (and exciting, in my view) developments in the art of essay.
November 10, 2015
Essays on the personal essay and the self in the essay. Style, voice, personality, and the protean nature of each in their interplay. Montaigne, E. B. White, Didion, Orwell, Woolf, Richard Wright, Annie Dillard, among others. I was happy to see attention given to Nancy Mairs.
Klaus himself writes such fine sentences of complexity, logic, precise language, and perfect rhythm that I wanted to crawl inside and breathe them. To me this is an example of the very best sort of academic writing: following a thinker's ideas through a complicated interwoven emergent argument, recursive, reflective, both focused and meandering - a mind observing itself encounter its world (e.g. the natural world, politics and morals, illness and malady, other minds on the page, the essayist's own consciousness).
Includes an interesting survey of the "discontinuous essay" - a form that often annoys me for its disparate, seemingly disconnected (discontinuous) observations, tied together by an overarching theme the reader must glean. It's not that I can't make the effort to comprehend the overall effect, or don't recognize that this form captures the nature of postmodern life and the seeming randomness of events and thoughts that we live through, but rather that it sometimes seems too easy to write, too glib. I want the writer to do some work of interpretation (Amy Fusselman, please?). Klaus doesn't mention D'Agata here, but my patience was surely tried by About a Mountain. The discontinuous essay reaches it's most-recent apotheosis in David Shields's Reality Hunger.
While reading I wondered what happens when style and personality differ. In an early essay Klaus discusses Woolf's perplexing assertion that "To write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder exercise than to write like Addison and Steele and call it writing well." Klaus considers what this means, calling it a "schizophrenic distancing of oneself from oneself, so as to arrive at a conception of oneself, or of one's writing, that one might then imitate, so as 'to write like oneself' . . . to engage in such a deliberately self-imitative activity but also to 'call it not writing'." [page 81] My own question about style and personality/mood was answered in a later essay when Klaus reflects on his personal experience of traumatic life events and his thoughts of mortality affecting his style, despite the strictures he placed on his writing project (a daily 500 word diary-essay about the local weather). He writes in conclusion: ". . . I've come to believe in recent years that the self inhabiting a piece of prose is the product of so many things in addition to style - the length of a piece, as well as its form, its mode, its mood, its gist, its pacing, its point of view, its state of mind - that 'gestalt' is the only word I can think of to suggest the multiplicity and complexity of its determinants." [page 1
Klaus himself writes such fine sentences of complexity, logic, precise language, and perfect rhythm that I wanted to crawl inside and breathe them. To me this is an example of the very best sort of academic writing: following a thinker's ideas through a complicated interwoven emergent argument, recursive, reflective, both focused and meandering - a mind observing itself encounter its world (e.g. the natural world, politics and morals, illness and malady, other minds on the page, the essayist's own consciousness).
Includes an interesting survey of the "discontinuous essay" - a form that often annoys me for its disparate, seemingly disconnected (discontinuous) observations, tied together by an overarching theme the reader must glean. It's not that I can't make the effort to comprehend the overall effect, or don't recognize that this form captures the nature of postmodern life and the seeming randomness of events and thoughts that we live through, but rather that it sometimes seems too easy to write, too glib. I want the writer to do some work of interpretation (Amy Fusselman, please?). Klaus doesn't mention D'Agata here, but my patience was surely tried by About a Mountain. The discontinuous essay reaches it's most-recent apotheosis in David Shields's Reality Hunger.
While reading I wondered what happens when style and personality differ. In an early essay Klaus discusses Woolf's perplexing assertion that "To write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder exercise than to write like Addison and Steele and call it writing well." Klaus considers what this means, calling it a "schizophrenic distancing of oneself from oneself, so as to arrive at a conception of oneself, or of one's writing, that one might then imitate, so as 'to write like oneself' . . . to engage in such a deliberately self-imitative activity but also to 'call it not writing'." [page 81] My own question about style and personality/mood was answered in a later essay when Klaus reflects on his personal experience of traumatic life events and his thoughts of mortality affecting his style, despite the strictures he placed on his writing project (a daily 500 word diary-essay about the local weather). He writes in conclusion: ". . . I've come to believe in recent years that the self inhabiting a piece of prose is the product of so many things in addition to style - the length of a piece, as well as its form, its mode, its mood, its gist, its pacing, its point of view, its state of mind - that 'gestalt' is the only word I can think of to suggest the multiplicity and complexity of its determinants." [page 1
May 16, 2015
4.5 stars
I thoroughly enjoyed Klaus's thoughtful examination of the evolution of the persona adopted by personal essayists throughout the history of the personal essay. The book offers some detailed treatments of particular writers–Montaigne, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, Charles Lamb as Elia–as well as more thematic chapters on writing difference, writing about illness, etc. I often found myself wishing that Klaus had produced a companion anthology, since the essays for which he provides detailed readings seem to make an excellent primer for the personal essay as a literary form, something I'm sure I could use.
I like the way Klaus's own chapters, individual essays really, mimic the subject he is exploring. It's particularly noticeable in his essay on discontinuous essays. Klaus ends the book with an essay about some of his own essays, a delightfully and appropriately personal ending for a book on this subject.
I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in the personal essay as a genre.
I thoroughly enjoyed Klaus's thoughtful examination of the evolution of the persona adopted by personal essayists throughout the history of the personal essay. The book offers some detailed treatments of particular writers–Montaigne, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, Charles Lamb as Elia–as well as more thematic chapters on writing difference, writing about illness, etc. I often found myself wishing that Klaus had produced a companion anthology, since the essays for which he provides detailed readings seem to make an excellent primer for the personal essay as a literary form, something I'm sure I could use.
I like the way Klaus's own chapters, individual essays really, mimic the subject he is exploring. It's particularly noticeable in his essay on discontinuous essays. Klaus ends the book with an essay about some of his own essays, a delightfully and appropriately personal ending for a book on this subject.
I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in the personal essay as a genre.
December 2, 2014
It's a textbook by a U. Iowa professor, and the style is correspondingly dry. ("Is this for a class?" asked the bookstore clerk when I asked for it.) But it's a short read, and it builds a case I find both thought provoking and highly topical in an age when people self-publish unprecedented numbers of personal essays in the form of blog entries and the like. Is there really a such thing as non-fiction, strictly speaking? Who is the self you portray when you write about yourself? The book takes you on a tour of the literati of the personal essay genre and their reflections about their arguably-fictional selves.
October 4, 2013
A slim, wonderful volume of essays about the various ways authors have of disguising/presenting their selves/voices in nonfiction and a quick history of how, starting with Montaigne, "personal essayists have perennially been so adept at creating the illusion of a spoken voice, a conversational manner, a 'familiar style,' as Hazlitt calls it."
Want to read
October 23, 2010Note to self: this might be a useful resource when teaching first-year composition.
April 7, 2020
A series of essays on essay-writing and the creation of the authorial persona. Thought-provoking and reflective.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews