I've been thinking about the question Scott raised in our last class about the status of truth with regard to essay-writing and I thought I might share with you all the following note on the subject, which appears in the Fifth College Edition of Robert Atwan's The Best American Essays (Boston: Houghton, 2008). The words are those of Geoffrey Wolff [that's Wolff in the photo at right]:"I work by Hemingway's precept that a writer's root charge is to distinguish what you really felt in the moment from the false sentiment of what you now believe you should have felt. The personal essay, autobiography, has been a red flag to professional classifiers and epistemologists; a critical industry has flourished for the refinement of generic protocols (many in French, with as much fine print as an installment purchase agreement), subcontracted principally to skeptics. In the judgment of Northrop Frye, for instance, a piece of work is shelved with autobiography or with fiction according to whether the librarian choose to believe it.
"Well. I've written one, and I've written the other, and I'm here to testify that the issue is at once weightier and simpler: a personal essayist means to tell the truth. The contract between a personal essayist and a reader is absolute, an agreement about intention. Because memory is fallible, and point of view by its nature biased, the personal essayist will tell a slant tale, willy-nilly. But not be design." (29)
I don't mean for this to be a definitive statement on the subject. I do like the advice given by Hemingway, though.
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