Story and argument
Thinking about essays
My apologies for my absence, my five dear readers. I’ve been very well and writing on storytelling and memory, which has been prompted by remembering past Augusts and helping format my grandmother’s memoirs, among other things.
At certain times of life — late summer 2021 was the last time I remember, and before that winter 2019, and before that December 2018 when I was leaving Zambia, and some scattered days and weeks in between — everything becomes luminous, and time stretches to encompass both memory and present, and you have vivid dreams of the past and possible futures.
I have been slowly reading In Search if Lost Time since I moved, since it was the only book I brought in my carry-on luggage, and now I am beginning to feel again how Proust felt the world — every moment lived connecting to many more.
When you write a blog or run long distances, people sometimes ask “how do you write a blog?” or “how do you run long distances?” They are probably just asking to be polite, but in the off-chance they want an answer, I earnestly say I just start writing.
This is not about how to write an essay, on which better essayists have written better essays. This is just what I’ve been thinking.
I think about writing an essay like sculpting a statue, except you also have to build the marble from which you’re sculpting. And as you build it, you begin to see the statue in the marble, simultaneously creating and chipping away. Good editors and friends help. It’s never really perfect, but it becomes close to the shape of the thing.
The essays that have stuck with me over time are mostly the classics: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, The Really Big One, the eternally haunting Hiroshima. I have Nabokov’s essays and narratives from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the latter of which is a fascinating insight, like old letters, into the stories of people that might have otherwise been lost.
Every good essay needs two things: story and argument.
If you’re writing an essay, you are probably compelled by one or both (I’m not sure if anyone really writes essays for fun).
Stories are in many ways easy; they have been shaping your world since you were born. Almost everyone has some innate ability to storytell. Some stories are better told in person, or through movies or TV, and some through books; some, when the medium changes — like Howl’s Moving Castle — become completely different things, masterpieces of multiple genres.
If you want to write, though, reading is most important, because the form of telling a story is part of the story itself. If you like someone’s style, read them obsessively and you will find their style seeping into yours. Essays are great, but I think you learn more about story and form and style and even maybe argument from books. There is a reason many great essayists are still better known for their novels. Moby Dick is like five books all patchworked together and also makes the best argument in literature which is that a whale is a fish.
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has The Grand Inquisitor chapter, in which Christ returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested by an Inquisitor. The chapter is brilliant philosophical argument in itself — Ivan, the in-text narrator, calls it a poem and himself a writer, and it’s often read out of context in classes as essentially a dialectic essay — but in the context of the full book it becomes more profound and messy as argument and counterargument, more like the story of a life.
In my intro college philosophy class our first couple assignments were simply to recreate the arguments of early modern philosophers in 600-800 words. You lost points for going over. It was really difficult and I am forever in the professor’s debt. My first two recommendations to people trying to get back into writing would be to read good books and to try to recreate arguments within a word limit.
I taught writing to first-year college students during graduate school during Covid, when many of them were at home with their families and many of them were in strange isolated on-campus rooms to which cloistered kitchen workers delivered meals in sealed bags. It was over Zoom. It was before AI.
The key idea I learned while teaching was the idea of a “warrant” — the reason behind the reason — in argument. I learned from the teaching class I took — which is I believe essentially this book, which seems to be itself adapted from the Toulmin Argument — that when you make an argument you’re making “a claim which is based on reasons which are supported by evidence”. So far, pretty clear. But why should I trust the argument? Do the reasons and evidence even connect to the claim?
I can make the argument: I should eat more ice cream because rabbits have lots of babies. That’s where the warrant comes in. Yes, rabbits have lots of babies. And maybe I should eat more ice cream. But how are baby-having rabbits connected to ice cream? If you can’t answer that then there’s a problem with your warrant and argument as a whole.
Or: I should eat more ice cream because I need more calcium. The evidence is that ice cream has lots of calcium and the warrant is that ingesting this calcium-rich ice cream will bring more of this needed calcium into my body. This makes sense! And breaking down the different parts of the argument also surfaces counterarguments: maybe there are better ways than eating ice cream to get the calcium you need?
Often warrants are assumed; in intro philosophy classes they are usually not. In trying to recreate philosophers’ arguments, we had to write out and break down the reasons, evidence, and the “reasons behind the reasons”, even if they seemed obvious, which made us better thinkers and writers. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy was an great first text for this reason because he questions everything that we take for granted (am I living in the world I think I am or am I being deceived by an evil demon?) and then walks you through his process.
Warrants are also are very helpful in different cultures, because often the same things are not assumed — what if somone has never heard of ice cream?
The argument of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor is essentially that most people do not want to and are not strong enough to be free, and they are doomed; his reasons and evidence are laid out explicitly in the chapter and his preceding conversation with his brother Alyosha.
What is the warrant of The Grand Inquisitor? It is easy, or difficult — the warrant is the Church and all its hypocrisy, the world and all its suffering.
The counterargument is simply Alyosha kissing his brother as Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor. Out of context this is not a very good argument.
But what is the warrant behind this, and possibly of The Brothers Karamazov? It is the life of Christ, says the Christian; it is Dostoevsky the Christian, Dostoevsky the existentialist. It is the life of Alyosha as it unfolds through the rest of the book.
You can buy any of these warrants or not, but the form of the novel allows all of these the potential to be true. The beauty of literature is that the story can be an argument in itself.
In a good essay, story will marry argument.
I was once asked why I couldn't write about economics as easily and smoothly as I wrote about literature. I still don't know; I still wish I could — it seems lucrative.
Writing about literature comes easy because both the stories and arguments are already there in the text, waiting to be carved out of the marble. Writing about economics, the arguments flow easy, but the stories do not; often when you do add them, they seem awkwardly pasted on, like one of those things at fairs where you can put your face through a cut-out hole in a painting of a sheep.
And in personal essays, there is often too little argument, just a series of vignettes pasted together. That is the pitfall of being in one of these luminous times; sometimes all I want to do is talk about flowers and the sun in early evening and how the air smells crisp and tree-like everywhere in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, even at airports and city downtowns.
Sometimes I forget what it is to feel like this. I write myself notes without argument when I have strong feelings, so that I can reread them years later and remember, partially to know that this too shall pass, and partially to know that this too shall come again.
Beauty may be fleeting; it may yet save the world.