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.

