Yhden esseeminän tunnustuksia

“Here is a late learning: a fiction writer who also writes essays is looking for trouble. While stories and novels under the eye of a good reader are permitted to bask in the light of the free imagination, essays are held to a sterner standard.”

“An essay is rarely seen to be bewitched contraption in the way of a story. An essayist is generally assumed to be a reliable wittness, sermonizer, lecturer, polemicist, persuader, historian, advocate: a committed intelligence, a single-minded truth-speaker.”

“All these notions are, I am afraid, plain foolishness. They imagine that there is a commanding difference between essays and stories, and that the difference is pure: essays are ‘honest’ and stories are made up. The reality is otherwise: all good stories are honest and most good essays are not.”

“What is fictitious about the essay is that it is pretending not to be made up — so that reading an essay may be more dangerous than reading a story.”

“The essays herein do represent me: didn’t I tackle them, shouldn’t I ‘take responsibility’ for them, whatever unease (or even alienation) they may cause me afterward? What I am repudiating, though, is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung; that an essay is generally more than simply another fiction — a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.”

Yllä olevat lainaukset ovat Cynthia Ozickin esseekokoelman Metaphor & Memory esipuheesta.

Kommentit (2)
  1. Suomalaisuuden paradokseja: mitä enemmän nimi viittaa itään, sitä vahvemmin julkinen esiintyminen viittaa länteen.

  2. Hanhensulka
    16.4.2012, 07:50

    Voi olla, että fiktio on faktan tavoittelua totuudellisempaa. Ehkä yksi syy tähän on se, että faktan odotetaan heijastavan todellista maailmaa kun taas fiktio on aina spekulatiivista. Todenmukainen fiktiohan on jo ajatuksenakin jotenkin spekulatiivinen. Suuri osa parhaasta proosasta tuotetaan fiktion ulkopuolella, esseissäkin.

Vastaa

Sähköpostiosoitettasi ei julkaista. Pakolliset kentät merkitty *