"Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with most things in art, there is no straight road from the product back to the person who made it. There are writers read and loved for their humor who are not especially funny people, and writers read and loved for their eloquence who, in conversation, swallow their words or can't seem to finish a sentance. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high IQ: they just seem to have very little to do with one another."
-Louis Menand in "Voice and Personality"
As Robert Atwan states earlier, here once again we find an essay with "a conclusion in which nothing is concluded." Typical of all well-written essays, it isn't the answer that is important, but rather, the question. Menand doesn't wish to tell us, "here's the facts, here's what I want to say, cut and dry." Instead his essay makes us think; it's purpose is to stretch the mind a little bit. I found it very fascinating, because it's so true. Each different person has their own unique medium for communicating. Some are great talkers, others are amazing writers. Some prefer to communicate via phone or computer rather than talking to someone face to face. Still others communicate what they wish to say through artwork. And others just aren't great at communicating at all, but it doesn't mean they aren't intelligent people. Therefore, a person can appear one way through a certain medium while appearing completely different through another. For example, Albert Einstein himself, as brilliant as he was, would put people to sleep whenever he would get up to speak.
That being said, for all the truth in Menand's words, he fails to make the concession that quite often a person's writing personality does match their true personality. Also, I found his comparison of the batter's average to the IQ to be something of a red herring. At first glance the comparison works, but where a person's batting average and their IQ have absolutely nothing to do with one another, I believe that a person's writing personality and their real one do have something to do with each other. How could they not? If essays must be true, then it naturally follows that there must be something of the essayist in the essay.
The important thing to remember is that something a person writes is solely a snapshot of who they are, just a piece of a much bigger whole. Human beings are, after all, so incredibly complex. A reader might meet an author, as Menand states, and say, "How they write isn't how they really are." Well, it may be true: that isn't how they normally are or how they come across, but perhaps that's why they write that way. Maybe writing allows them to convey a truth about themselves that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
Monday, September 3, 2007
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