‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay

Edward Hoagland once characterized personal essays as living on a line between ‘what I think and what I am’. I propose a parallel essay dynamic between ‘experiences I remember’ and ‘experiences I make’, between the ‘lived’ or found stories of memoir and the ‘sought’ stories of journalism. On the one hand, Joan Didion and George Orwell might remember Los Angeles in the 1960s and Burma in the 1930s. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin and Rebecca Solnit might seek a lobster festival, a Swiss village and an Irish coastal town. From either starting point, if the resulting work functions as an essay (as opposed to memoir or feature article), it features reflection and authorial presence. Essays drawing from already-lived experience must invest the past with more than recall. Essays driven by sought experience must move beyond journalistic report. While the reflective, associative, exploratory conventions of the personal essay traditionally have favored chance natural encounters over deliberately pursued ones, the latter expands written possibilities – not only in topic but also in idea. To Hoagland’s formulation comes a third element, ‘How the world is’, with the added essayistic qualifier ‘as I make it to be’.To explain some differences between lived and sought experience, I shall describe three pieces by David Foster Wallace: ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, ‘Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All’ and ‘Consider the Lobster’. The first relies on lived experience (his adolescence as a Midwestern tennis player) and resides firmly in that corner of the personal essay that adjoins memoir. The second is built on sought experience (Harper’s magazine commissioned Wallace to write about the Illinois State Fair) and walks a line between New Journalism and personal essay. The third is also sought experience (Gourmet magazine commissioned Wallace to write about the Maine Lobster Festival), but here we are squarely in the realm of essay, experience begetting the ideas that ultimately (and happily) take the piece over.‘Derivative Sport’, which also appeared in Harper’s, is a thoroughly first-person meditation built around Wallace’s memory that,[b]etween the ages of twelve and fifteen, I was a near-great junior tennis player.