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| Collage Essays |
| Once you start working with this odd but liberating principle -throw away everything that doesn't work and shake up the good bits to see how they want to arrange themselves -- it turns out that you can apply it to expository writing: essays, reports, profiles. Essays are a traditionally loose form: the essay, when it was invented, was an "assay," that is, a "try," a "go at" something. Some of the best essays have been informal, chatty, and associative in structure. But whereas essays have traditionally had a strong conversational thread, here you don't worry about a thread at all, you just look for quality. You get an implied thread to assert itself by arranging the good bits in the right order. I remember a recent New Yorker profile of a college professor (volume 55, number 43, February 18, 1980) which was really a string of paragraphs or groups of paragraphs, each one tending to begin with "----- at the office," or "----- talking to students," or "----- taking a walk." Lazy and simple, but it worked. And there was an implied thread. The object of a transition is to get you from A to B. If you can do it without the transition, why waste the reader's time? The loop writing process is an ideal way to produce material for a collage essay: something that fulfills the function of an essay but is made up almost entirely of passages in which you try to give your reader an experience of what you are saying rather than an explanation of it. Sometimes one of your good bits will explain clearly and directly what you are trying to say in the whole piece (or what you discover those good pieces of writing are trying to say). Such a passage will probably go well at the beginning or the end of your collage. If there is no such piece in your original writing, you must figure out what your essay is driving at as you contemplate and arrange your good fragments, and on that basis write an introduction or conclusion. Many feature stories in daily and especially Sunday newspapers drift into the collage form -- for example, a neighborhood in Brooklyn written up in a series of bits that present rather than explain: portraits of people and of terrain, street corner scenes, mini-narratives, dialogues, and reminiscent monologues. I'm struck with the way many regular news stories now jettison the traditional who-what-when-where opening -- or rather delay it -- in order to begin with a bit of collage: a piece of presentationwithout-explanation. Here is the beginning of a story about a policy change at city hall -- a story from the first section of The New York Times -- but notice how it begins with a little piece of particularized drama: Under New Mayor, Philadelphia Police Shift Tactics By LESLIE BENNETTS (Special to The New York Times) PHILADELPHIA, April 11 [1980] -- A couple of weeks ago, Marlene Nimmo strolled up to a woman in a midtown bar and asked her if she had any nickle bags. The woman reached into her brassiere and pulled out two bags of marijuana -- whereupon Mrs. Nimmo showed her police identification and said, "You're under arrest." "Her eyes bugged out, her jaw dropped open, and she was in a complete state of shock," Mrs. Nimmo recounted. She said, "When did this happen? This isn't supposed to be!" Mrs. Nimmo laughed. I fool the daylights out of them; I make the buy and I make the bust. They'll sell to a woman because they don't know any women are narcs." Until recently, drug dealers were correct in their belief . . . and so on into a conventional news story about changes in policy in the mayor's office and reasons for these changes. Jane Howard book Families ( New York, 1978) is really a collage in which she presents portraits of all sorts of families and family arrangements. She spells out her message or conclusion in the introduction and the final chapter. Ken Macrorie Uptaught (Rochelle Park, N.J., 1970) is a memoir of experiences and an argument about teaching. He makes it a collage in which experiential fragments such as narratives and portraits are intermingled with conceptual passages explaining his argument. Martin Duberman, in writing a careful history of Black Mountain College, includes fragments from his own diary and imaginary dialogues between himself and some of these characters he never met ( Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Garden City, N.Y., 1973). You might make a collage essay on the causes of the French Revolution that consists entirely of stories, portraits, and scenes. You would have to choose and arrange your fragments in such a way that they tell why the French Revolution happened as it did. Or you might have one that consists entirely of dialogues: between nobles, peasants, middle-class city dwellers, and thinkers of the period; between people who came before and those who came afterwards. Of course you may have to revise and polish some of these fragments to make them as good as possible -- perhaps even write some more bits to give at least a minimal coherence. You could write a collage essay that explores the meaning of a poem or another work of art by juxtaposing brief passages from the poem with incidents from your own experience or from history or other works of literature. An essay about a work of art or scholarship could consist of an interview between you and the author or between the author and one or two of the characters who figure in it. |
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