Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
7B
b. Whatever literary-caliber stylistics or
narrative inventiveness you might find in a
person’s “self-discovery” story says absolutely
nothing about their intrinsic value as a human
being (which should be equal across the board)
and very close to nothing about their “depth,”
since what you’re trying to crawl into there is
a drawing of a well and not an actual well (i.e.
whatever “depth” might be there is a sort of
optical illusion produced by the skillful manip-
ulation of perspective).
I should clarify, however, that none of this
critique is meant to discredit the art of the
“self-discovery” narrative as such. What I’m
trying to get at here is that a highly wrought
“self-discovery” narrative is more like a Fer-
rari than you’d think. Like a Ferrari, each fine-
grain narrative is a commodity, which requires
a not-insignificant amount of mechanical skill,
conscious tinkering, access to raw materials,
labor hours and, yes, capital to produce. If you
read Daily Editorial Page Editor writer Claire
Bryan’s recent piece “Generation PS: The
evolution of the personal statement,” how-
ever, you’ll see that, especially in recent years,
American universities have begun to resemble
“self-discovery” narrative Ferrari factories in
certain important ways. Before students even
get into the door at a place like U of M, for
example, they’re expected to produce a pol-
ished personal statement which, demonstrates
their life’s value as raw material to be molded
into the finished narrative/Ferrari. That ini-
tial requirement primes them for four under-
graduate years in which they’ll be expected to
engage in some profound self-reflection14 with
an eye toward gradually working that initial
narrative into a fully functional vehicle com-
plete with doors and windows, a V-12 engine,
hand-stitched leather seats and many other
finely tuned, aesthetically pleasing parts.
When you’re done, you get a wonderfully
articulate luxury-class narrative/person that
can get you into some very nice dinner clubs
and attract much more positive attention from
peers, potential employers, grad school admis-
sions offices, grant disbursement committees,
etc.
So part of the reason why we’re so fascinat-
ed with personal statements, “self-discovery”
narratives and other sorts of creative non-
fiction, I think, is that they canhelp you get
into very nice dinner clubs (i.e. allow you to
hang with the upper crust, the 1 percent, the
aristocracy or what have you). They’re the sort
of thing we assume that a person picks up at
university, so they suggest that the person
writing/reciting them has a certain degree of
learning, sophistication and respectability15
that the uneducated masses don’t.
But, of course, the problem with using a
narrative/Ferrari to get into a fancy dinner
club is that the Ferrari doesn’t make the got-
damn dinner club more inclusive! All they do
is get you in the door, and once you’re in, your
friends who never made it through the per-
sonal statement draft round are stuck outside
in their 2002 Toyota Camrys, leaving you with
nothing but your “self-discovery” to get you
through a lifetime’s worth of gilded cocktail
hours.
So is our obsession with “self-discovery”
narratives really a productive obsession? Does
it do anything to improve the world we live in?
At the very least, I don’t think it’s all bad.
Indeed, it might even be good in a sort of
1776-vintage liberal sense. Cultivating self-
awareness and self-reflection should, in theo-
ry, also require you to question your place in
the world around you. Questioning your place
in the world around you, of course, requires
that you not be the same thing as the world
around you, which is to say that your “self” is
something distinct from the various socioeco-
nomic systems and communities within which
you are otherwise hopelessly embedded.
Having “found yourself”16 in this way, you’re
immediately provided with a platform — your
“self,” which has its own subjective experience
of communal life and likes to demand things
like “personal freedom” — from which to cri-
tique the terms under which you’re expected
to participate in society. This is why things like
labor unions don’t exist without first having
people who view themselves as “labor,” why
you can’t have gay rights without first having
“gay people,” why you can’t have rap music
without first having a “rapper” who makes it,
etc.
But maybe — and this is the troubling part —
there’s a point at which “self-discovery” ceases
to have any kind of redemptive feature, where
the “self” no longer functions as a platform
from which to effect change in a society, where
“self-expression” ceases to be counter-culture
and instead becomes a practice that reinforces
the status quo. When I watched the earlier
rounds of the presidential debates this election
cycle, for example, I was a little disconcerted
by the amount of time even establishment can-
didates like Hillary Clinton and John Kasich
spent talking about their life stories. Not too
long ago, that sort of thing was reserved for
memoirs and posthumous biographies; the
Powers that Be were expected to be more-or-
less empty suits and the art of governing was
less art and more science. There were obvi-
ously problems with the old cold-blooded
model (see: Henry Kissinger, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Cold War-era spats/proxy wars
over “spheres of influence,” the partitioning
of Africa in the 19th century, etc.) but, I don’t
know, somehow I’m bothered by the idea of an
election going one way or another based on a
candidate’s ability to craft an entertaining nar-
rative. I also got a C- in the only PoliSci class
I’ve ever taken, so maybe these are waters I
shouldn’t be swimming in.
In any case, my deadline is fast approaching
and this introduction has gone way beyond the
sort of word count that makes my editors want
to quit their jobs and join the Peace Corps. The
last few thousand words have been about some
of the problems I see with the idea of “find-
ing oneself” and putting that fictional process
into writing, but I’ll shut up and conclude this
discussion with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s
essay “A Room of One’s Own.” The quote,
I think, pretty accurately (and succinctly)
describes the merits of an admittedly fictional
“self-discovery” narrative and I’d like to try to
let it justify my decision to write a narrative of
this sort. Anywho, here it is:
"At any rate, when a subject is highly contro-
versial … one cannot hope to tell the truth. One
can only show how one came to hold whatever
opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s
audience the chance of drawing their own con-
clusions as they observe the limitations, the
prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth
than fact."
a self-concept every day. Instead of catching his wife’s murderer he lays in bed for an hour and
forty-five minutes before the screen fades to black.
11. Now, the question of precisely how private it is in our own heads is, naturally, up for debate.
Certain branches of contemporary philosophya are especially concerned with this topic, the
general consensus being that you never can get entirely out of the Matrix. A good introductory
example of this contemporary philosophizing (featuring plenty of entertaining pop culture ref-
erences) is Slovenian Marxist philosopher/top-notch storyteller Slavoj Žižek’s “The Pervert’s
Guide to Ideology” (a film available on Netflix).
11a. Most of them descendants of or in conversation with psychoanalytic theory, which, in
turn, owes quite a bit to Marxist theory — especially Marx’s comments re: commodity fetishism
(!) which have already received a much more in-depth treatment in my “Hotline Bling” column.
12. You will need to keep prodding them with (sincere) smiles and (sincere) supportive excla-
mations, hmms and hums whenever they hit dead ends. Perhaps the occasional gentle reminder
of why you wanted to hear this story in the first place (sincere yet disinterested curiosity re: your
fellow man’s thoughts and feelings). This technique is often called “listening.”
13. There is a high degree of formal similarity between this sort of response and the sort of
response you might hear in undergraduate English classrooms when the professor demands that
an obviously clueless student give a plot synopsis of the book they haven’t read.
14. Which, if we’re being honest, is a sort of University-sanctioned self-absorption.
15. A brief alternative history of the collegiate narrative factory:
We should remind ourselves, of course, that the undergraduate period (roughly around age
18 to 22) has been, since the middle of the last century, more-or-less universally designated by
successive generations of undergraduates (often with the complicity of their ex-undergraduate
parents and our pop culture’s borderline-fanatical obsession with 18-to 22-year-olds’ search
for meaning) as the time in which American youth must “find themselves,” i.e. spend a few
years out of the house, beyond the reach of their immediate family and most of the professional
and behavioral expectations placed on full-fledged adults in their economic class and cultural
milieu, trying on various personality hats, drinking to excess, experimenting with a palette of
hallucinogenic drugs, sampling from a number of atypical sexual and romantic permutations,
otherwise engaging in a prolonged, noble rail against the various aspects of the System which
have always kept them down, and thanking God all the while for college, which finally shook
them free from their cultural programming, dragged them kicking and screaming out of the
sheeple herd and molded them into a species of satyric goat-person, carrying between their clo-
ven fingers a Certificate of Completion indicating that their four years of personhood-forging/
debauchery have fully prepared them for their choice between a. drifting along the horizonless
sea of global capital or b. signing on for the graduate round of university life, in which they will
trade in a sizable share of their debauchery credits for access to esoteric learnings of the highest
caliber.
16. “Finding oneself” being, again, a sort of exercise in creative writing. “I” don’t exist in my
own head unless I take the time out of my day to writea that character into existence.
16a. Or choose from one of the many fine selections of “I” lining the shelves of the post-post-
modern Wal-Mart we like to call the 21st century. Current American options include, but are
not limited to, the Donald Trump Model,i the Bernie Sanders Modelii and, of course, the Under-
graduate Model, which I believe I was starting to sketch somewhere back three or four levels of
footnote ago.iii
16ai“I” is a natural-born millionaire (despite any appearance to the contrary) whose attain-
ment of incomparable wealth and the state of pure individualism is constantly threatened by the
combined forces of the encroaching hordes of unemployed brown-skinned barbarians and their
crypto-communist “American” P.C. liberal allies. Comes complete with blonde toupee, Ameri-
can flag pin and one complimentary spray-tan session.
16aii “I” is a person free from the sort of jingoistic, nationalistic, individualistic and capitalistic
fantasies that have caused so much harm and destruction over the centuries. “I” realizes that, at
the end of the day, we’d be so much better off if we all understood that we’re in this boat togeth-
er. “I” also knows that if there are bad guys, they wear suits and ties and think money’s more
important than building a society where their fellow man can live a healthy, happy, sustainable
life. The suits might also be lizard men and, yes, of course “I” has watched every season of “The
X-Files” (except the second half of season five, which was far too campy) and can quote lengthy
snatches of “Twin Peaks” dialogue from memory. David Lynch is an unparalleled genius, after
all. But “I” doesn’t want to talk about “Dune.” And, yes, if we’re being completely honest “I” fell
asleep in the middle of “Eraserhead” and has not seen “The Elephant Man.” Comes complete
with one complimentary folk guitar lesson and a guest spot on “SNL,” which “I” will accept
despite thinking “SNL” is only barely watchable even with the best host imaginable.
16aiii I think it was before the footnotes, actually. David Foster Wallace must have been a
really clear-headed sort of dude.