Voice in the Wilderness

John D’Agata finds America

By Mike Miliard

Is the essay a moribund literary form? No. Should the poem be reinvented to offer more relevance? No again. So why should we read John D’Agata? Yes, he’s formulated a new genre — the “lyric essay” — that combines the sensuality of poetry with the hard facts of reportage. And yes, though sometimes cryptic, the results are just as often beautiful and thrilling. But John D’Agata, who hails from Rochester, New Hampshire, should be read primarily because he cares. Because so many other writers his age (he’s only 27) sneer cynically at the world around them, drenching their prose in irony in the hope that it will obscure their lack of perspicacity. John D’Agata offers something different, opposite: a fresh look at the vast sweep of this country — its virtues and foibles both — marked by reverence, love, even awe in his recently published collection, Halls of Fame.

First, the technique. In a piece about dancer Martha Graham, D’Agata recalls an instance where “I am standing in the mezzanine of an enormous old theatre, narrating into a microphone everything I see. I’m an audio describer, which means there are a dozen blind audience members listening right now to my voice, trusting me to report accurately all the physics of this dance . . . Which means I’m their eyes . . . but not their interpreter.”

It’s as perfect a description as possible of the form he’s invented. In seven essays about America, its people and places (the Hoover Dam, the president of the Flat Earth Society, “outsider” artist Henry Darger, Las Vegas), D’Agata reports from the field, relating what he sees not through straight prose, which by its nature requires a certain subjectivity, but with these lyrical works. Some are sparse. Some teem with an overwhelming activity. In their varied presentations of information (flashes of thought, collages, lists) the reader is presented a set of stimuli through which to draw his or her own impressions.

When D’Agata visits Charles Johnson, the now-late president of the Flat Earth Society, for example, the essay takes the form of a tangled web of footnotes, skeletal fragments of Q&A, and quotations from maps and legends. What emerges is a nuanced and touching portrait of a man who was ridiculed by major national publications for his anachronistic beliefs.

We’re treated to a Joycean reading of his impassioned declamation: “How about the space program in America and USSR? you ask? doesn’t it prove earth globe “sphere”? Quite simple, main thing to get is some “proof” earth is ball-planet, but as I’ve said, no proof CAN BE FOUND FOR THE DELUSIONS OF LUNATICS globe world! Nick Kruchief in USSR in league with England started “spook-nick” peep peep. HOAX! remember that? Purpose to “prove” world ball and finally do away with GOD, bring Russian people into total subjugation, no hope at all. As soon as spook-nick done, Vast campaign began to force atheism on the people, saying “we have now proved world a tiny speck globe, world” SO CAN BE NO GOD. . .”

A lunatic’s ravings, right? But later, buried in a footnote (they constitute the bulk of the text), we get D’Agata’s take on this strange man. “11Suppose Charles Johnson believes that if he dies the greatest secret on earth will die with him. For me, this is what makes reading The Flat Earth News so breathtaking: he exhausts me. His breathlessness exhausts, and mocks, and bamboozles my logic, and therefore my life, and therefore I’m left, purely, with wonder.” It’s one of the few instances in the book where D’Agata reveals his opinion directly; he sees Johnson not as a nut, but as a man with passionate beliefs. To him, that’s of supreme importance.

In “And There Was Evening and There Was Morning,” D’Agata travels to Las Vegas. There, in the glitziest, most soulless place in the world, he finds meaning. Visiting the keeper of the brightest light in the world, which shoots skyward from the great pyramid of the Luxor Hotel (D’Agata had to lie, claiming he was a physics student to gain access to it), he meets a man devoted completely to his work. He seems genuinely, deeply hurt that, in a cost-cutting measure, the Hotel decided to dim the light — his light — from 315,000 to 210,000 watts per hour. “I go home and look up and I’m like “Where is it?” It sucks, man. You know? ’Cause all they think about is selling those rooms. They don’t care about the light. It’s just a big dollar sign to them.”

That piece is the book’s most prosaic work. “Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter,” the book’s centerpiece, is its most impressionistic — and its most emotionally fraught. It’s the product of D’Agata’s travels to 80 or so of this country’s over 3,000 halls of fame: the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, Big Daddy’s Drag Racing Hall of Fame, American Hall of Famous Ventriloquists. What he accomplishes in limning their contents is sublime. Through long and short write-ups (some pages contain as few as four words) comprised of lists of exhibits, quotations from signs, even temperature readings from the World’s Tallest Thermometer, he evokes these places wholly. What’s more, instead of laughing at their hokeyness, D’Agata is moved (and, hence, so are we) by the inherent worth of the people whose enthusiasms created them:

 

Big Daddy believes in humans.

 

Big Daddy has human dreams.

 

Other times, he looks inward. Some locations — Storyland in New Hampshire, a sperm bank in Cambridge — are referred to not by name but by the flood of emotions and memories they call to mind: Hall of Fame of You; Hall of Fame of Me; Hall of Fame of Us.

 

Halls are like this, elegiac.

 

After time, however, even they will signify nothing at all but themselves.

Like now, standing beside you glowing —

The greatest reward of this challenging work is the discernment of intense, empathetic feeling through D’Agata’s disjointed verbal clues. His writing is fresh, tricky and moving — and its power stems from the fact that the reader is complicit in the experience. As he writes, “There is, no doubt, a gap between what I am thinking at this moment and the moment that you are thinking of. Between me, writer, and you reader, and the brink across which knowledge and we stare. But you know all this. Know that the spot which we essay together is seldom marked with an X.”

How do you make something informational lyrical too? The Phoenix met John D’Agata in Boston recently to talk about his craft and his country. Here’s what he had to say:   Phoenix: Many writers your age seem to have an off-putting dependence on irony; your work strikes me as a sort of antidote to that. D’Agata: A writer I really dig, Carol Maso, has a great line: “irony is a temptation, not a solution.” Which seems pretty apt. I’ve never understood the appeal of telling jokes at the expense of one’s subjects, especially in non-fiction. It’s really easy to take someone like the president of the Flat Earth Society, this guy who believes the earth is flat, and poke fun at him. Obviously, on the surface, it’s an absurd idea to believe in. But I want to give myself the challenge of not being ironic. Okay, he believes the earth is flat. But what exactly does that mean? What is it that he thinks? And I realized that he wasn’t a goofball, he was just someone who believed in something. For me it seemed like the ideal kind of religion, because it could never be proven. He would never find the flat earth. So, in that way, it was a kind of faith that would never die. That sounds maybe a little too cheesy, but I guess that was the same thing I was thinking as I visited all these people who maintained all these little halls of fame in their backyards. There has to be something else about these things that intrigues people. It just seemed more interesting to try to figure out why it is that people believe in the things they do.   Q: The nature of these “lyric essays” doesn’t allow you to cast judgment; The reader is offered a set of facts or images and left to form the impressions. A: That’s the other side of it. If you’re working in a journalistic style, you’re kind of forced into offering an opinion. The lyric in any genre is a form that holds information back. It invites the reader back into the text and requires the reader to interpret the facts or the images in order to figure out what they think. It engages the reader, and it becomes a more active experience. And, to be honest, it allows me to do both things. It allows me to kind of chuckle initially at the absurdity on the surface of these things, but not necessarily make fun of the subjects.   Q: How and why did you formulate this technique? A: While I was in grad school I was the only one in my class who didn’t hand in a memoir for my thesis. I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t memoir. So I just started hunting for other things; I started going through the stacks of our library trying to find a community of writers. And I started finding people like Basho. He has his poetry, which he’s famous for, but he also has these astonishing travelogues which, because he’s a poet, are highly lyrical. I started bumping into people like Georges Perec. People I’d never been introduced to in school because they don’t fit into what sells. I don’t want nonfiction people to get angry, but there’s just doesn’t seem to be a tradition of experimentation or much of a literary tradition in the most recent nonfiction stuff. I formulated this as a reaction to that. And I was also in grad school in two programs at once. I was in a poetry program and in non-fiction. So, it was just, I think, natural instinct.   Q: Is it difficult to take the facts gathered from your reportage then decide how you’re going to present them poetically? A: It is difficult. But that’s the exciting part: how do you make something informational lyrical too?   Q: To change the subject, talk about what you love about America. I love how in the Las Vegas piece, for instance, you travel to this crass, sinful city and find a kind of virtue there. A: As offensive as Las Vegas is, there are more people who are in love with it than there are people who aren’t. And for some reason I find that really touching. I find it really touching that this guy who takes care of the brightest light in the world in Las Vegas would be really pissed off by the fact that they decided to dim it a little bit . . . Most of us would be like, ‘so what?’ But for him it’s his career, and it’s his art, too. And, I’m just kind of touched that those things matter to people. It just reminds me — because I’m probably like most people of our generation: overeducated and probably feel more comfortable in academia than anywhere else — that the world outside of where most of us grew up or were schooled is a lot bigger and there are people making lives in all of those things that, maybe, the rest of us make fun of as we pass them by. It sounds cheesy, but I’m just really touched by it and I still don’t know why. —MM

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard@phx.com.