I happened to be reading these two books at the same time, and though they’re very different from each other, there’s a lot they have in common, not least of which is sheer charisma. Both authors just seem incredibly badass and cool. But they also further fed my ongoing rumination on the essay form, and its relationship to autotheory. Gurba’s book is more in the first-person memoir sort of vein, whereas Graeber’s is ostensibly more academic, though, being published by Penguin, it’s what they call a “cross-over” book, aimed at a broader audience. But both are, at their core, explorations of particular topics or ideas, and their thinking is informed both by their life experience and by things they’ve read.
This really jumped out at me when Gurba mentioned, in one of her essays, that after seeing Hannah Arendt name-dropped repeatedly in political writing around Trump, she “read as much of her work as I could. I wanted to study her ideas in context. Some of Arendt’s writing helped me to understand what was happening in the United States. Some of it helped me to understand myself. Some of it, like the essay ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’ is awful and bigoted.” And then she spends a little bit of time talking about what she learned from Arendt, and how it relates to what she’s writing about — anti-Mexican racism. Much of the essay is about her own experiences, and family history of experiences, with such racism, but the point here isn’t just to tell her story, it’s to understand the phenomenon and to think about how it works. Also, she actually read a bunch of Arendt, which I am always intending to do, but have mostly failed to do. Myriam Gurba does the homework (and provides a short bibliography for each essay at the end of the book so that you can do it too). But the point isn’t that her essays are good because she cites scholarship, it’s that these essays, even when they are largely in the form of memoir, are actively theorizing the things she examines. Her essay on jokes and rape, for example, is a complex meditation on humor and trauma, and a sterling example of how autotheory can be a powerful resource for understanding a really thorny problem (the relationship between violence, especially sexual assault, and humor). I’ll probably assign it next semester in the class session I regularly teach on feminism and humor, where I always assign Lindy West’s “How to Make a Rape Joke” (which is dated in many ways that are kind of interesting!). I’ve sometimes also assigned Lauren Berlant’s “The Predator and the Jokester,” but my students struggled with it. Gurba’s essay covers some of the same ground as Berlant’s, but is both more developed and more approachable. Anyways. My point is, these essays are really fucking smart. And though reading about someone’s experience of violent abuse isn’t exactly pleasant, no matter how well written it is, it does teach you something about misogyny that you don’t fully get from the more depersonalized writing about it.
Graeber, meanwhile, might be expected to be more conventionally intellectual, but reading this book is less like learning from a carefully researched and patiently developed argument, and more like watching a brilliant and creative mind soar and do loop-de-loops around various questions. Why don’t we have flying cars yet goddamnit? I almost wrote that he rarely narrates his personal experiences, and then I remembered that the argument in one of the essays flows largely from an account of the paperwork he had to fill out when his mother was on her deathbed. It’s true that these anecdotes are presented with a kind of ethnographic detachment — the moments that feel more intimately personal are those where you intuit, rather than get a detailed account of, the experience behind them, as when he writes about Occupy Wall Street, or most interestingly to me, when he mentions how much he’s learned by reading feminist theory, and acknowledges that he had only barely been aware of it when writing his previous books.
It’s funny, because much like collections of short stories, books of essays hold very little appeal for me at the bookstore, but most of the time when I read one, I love it. The essay is a very cool form! It can do a lot! Why don’t I give it more credit? I’m especially interested in what essays can do that more ‘typical’ academic writing can’t. It’s not that I don’t love academic writing, because I really do, and to be clear, I think that the concern over the first-person-ification of intellectual ideas isn’t totally wrong. I just think it tends to go too far, and to operate in stark contrasts and rigid binaries that don’t do justice to the richness of the actual works. Neither of these books is officially an academic theory, but they’re both great to think with, as well as being great reads.
Kasia Reads 