by ELISA GABBERT
IMAGE/Accountancy Age
n How Not to Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg uses a John Ashbery line as a guiding principle for those making claims or predictions based on probabilistic mathematical models (or any models, really): “For this is action, this not being sure.”Ellenberg calls it “the greatest summation I know of the way uncertainty and revelation can mingle, without dissolving together, in the human mind […] It is a sentence I often repeat to myself like a mantra.” He once asked me if, as a poet presumably, I thought he was “reading Ashbery too literally,” but Ashbery can only be read literally out of context, and then why not?
Literature seems to depend on uncertainty to qualify as art: A sculpture or a piece of music just exists, but language is so often used to argue or persuade that writers of literature (I use this term only to avoid the silly, infantilizing “creative writing”) must actively steer away from those tendencies. It’s easy enough in poetry, the most open and least linear of genres; for writers of fiction, less so, but semantics is on their side, since fictive means made up. With essays, it’s much trickier; many essays do attempt to persuade. But what if an essayist just wants to play? How does she signal to readers that the essay is an exploration and not an argument?
Recently, I have noticed an overabundance of uncertainty in literature – across genres, but especially in essays. The tricks we use to appear uncertain – asking questions instead of making definitive, declarative statements, for example – have become tics. Overuse these tricks and the piece assumes a pose of ignorant wonder – What is such & such abstract concept? Who can say? How can we ever know?
I have been thinking about this since reading an essay on necronyms by Jeannie Vanasco, in the Summer 2015 issue of The Believer. Vanasco was named after a half-sister, Jeanne, who died before she was born – that’s what necronym means; they were common when many children died in birth or shortly after. In the essay, she weaves personal narrative with research on other artists with necronyms, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Salvador Dali, and Vincent van Gogh. I loved this essay, but felt unsatisfied by the ending: “Is that why my father added an i to my name? To remind me that I was my own person?”
The British technology journalist Ian Betteridge is credited with the adage “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I want to make a similar claim: Any question at the end of an essay can be answered with the word yes. (Same goes, most likely, for poems, short stories, etc.) The question is a kind of weasel syntax that lets the author have it both ways: make a gesture toward profundity without having to commit to it.
Call it the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but now I’m seeing this everywhere. Take Laura van den Berg’s new novel Find Me, which I’m about 100 pages into. (Full disclosure: I both know Laura and genuinely love her writing.) I keep noticing how chapters and sections tend to resolve without resolution, to end on a question or note of uncertainty: “For me, the woman had no answers” (79). “I wonder if I will ever know what it’s like to feel at peace” (76). “He looks like himself, but acts like a different person – how can we be sure who he is?” (73). “I wonder if she ever thinks about me” (70). This isn’t a problem, just a pattern, and I see the reasoning – it’s a way of propelling the reader forward, of deepening suspense, heightened by the present tense. Plus, this novel is about uncertainty – a mysterious illness that causes loss of memory; an orphan looking for her mother and other missing pieces from her past.
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