In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write that, “A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. – and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for over quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machines the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.” (379). This quote and many others in this essay reassured me why my favorite form of writing, to read and to write, is the personal essay.
Essays are dated back at least to classical Greece and Rome. However, Michel de Montaigne, the “father of the essay”, was the first to actually give the form of writing the name of essay. The word essay comes from the French word, essayer: to attempt, to try. As Phillip Lopate wrote in his essay, “What Happened to the Personal Essay?”, “Montaigne understood that, in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot. The essayist must be willing to contradict himself (for which reason an essay is not a legal brief), to digress, even to risk ending up in a terrain very different from the one he embarked on.”
I have often found myself quoting the essayist, Anne Lamott. She is always honest and blunt and every sentence is loaded with sarcasm and personality. That is why, when I read her work and I relate to it, I feel real comfort. I put her work into an abstract machine and, even if her experiences are not exactly like my own, I at least have the comfort of knowing that others have succeeded in emotionally or physically pulling themselves through situations and to the other side. And when I write creative nonfiction, I write to get a better understanding for myself of what I’m writing, but also, of why I feel the need to write it. I, like Montaigne, understand that when I start writing, I don’t really know where it is going to end up.
In class, when we discussed A Thousand Plateaus, we reviewed vocabulary and phrases from the reading. One of the phrases was “A book has neither object nor subject”. We discussed in class that nothing is definite and that time doesn’t apply to ideas in books, since they take on new meanings for everyone and reach everyone in different ways. We then related this to crab grass.
I like the image of creative nonfiction being like really bad crab grass. I am more than familiar with crab grass. We’ve actually had this ongoing rocky relationship since my early years. Gardening in my dad’s back yard has never been pleasant since crab grass staked its domain years before we moved into the house. It stretches across the backyard to each fence, to the back of the house, to the garage, and encircles every tree and plant. There is no center to it. I have no idea where it began. It just is. That’s a lot like creative nonfiction. The year of a creative nonfiction piece means nothing. Whether it was written two centuries ago or yesterday, it still speaks to everyone. George Lukàcs said that, “The essay is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system), but the process of judging.” And so, even people who don’t directly relate to the nonfiction writing, can at least relate or react to the process that the writer is making since, like crab grass, creative nonfiction stretches and is able to speak to all types of people.
My favorite type of creative nonfiction is the personal essay. Just as creative nonfiction is a lot like crab grass, the personal essay, essentially, is crab grass. This reminded me of a portion of “What Happened to the Personal Essay?”. The personal essay is an odd genre, because its form is everywhere. Personal essays can be seen in New Journalism, autobiographical-political mediations, nature and ecological-regional writing, literary criticism, travel writing, humorous pieces, and food writing. Throughout the years, the personal essay has truly stretched itself throughout all kinds of writing. I was reminded of this when discussing our reading in class that, although there is difference in literature, they are all somehow connected.
The phrase “The rhizome is antigeneology” was also discussed in class. My understanding was that there is no linear progression. Also, the word “plateau” was discussed which, as I understood, referred to there being no beginning or end in history. Whether I am reading Lopate whose essay was published in 1969, or Deleuze and Guattari who wrote from the 1960s-1980s, their ideas still apply now, in 2009. Their beliefs are not old. Just as both works were implying, the readers make of writing whatever applies best to them. No matter their age or the time, writing can always be personally applied. And this is where my love for creative nonfiction and the personal essay comes from. It’s thrilling knowing that writing, no matter how personal, will always have some sort of effect on another whether they read it the day it is published or hundreds of years later. Our work is just waiting to be plugged into other “machines”, as Deleuze and Guattar call them, in order to be understood in another way. This shows that history isn’t linear. History is now. History is our future. Whatever has happened in a previous time is still in effect to this day. There is no linear.
Truly, literature is crab grass. And that is why I like it.
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