Famous Essay Follow-up: "The Imp of the Perverse"

Yesterday I posted an essay that has been called the best admission essay ever written. If not the best, then certainly the most well known.  Just tonight in conversation with a student I mentioned I was going to talk about the most famous essay and mentioned one sentence and the student immediately recognized it. (Those of you familiar with rhetoric know this is anything but solid proof, but it is still representative of how this essay has taken on the status of a cultural meme.)

Here are the questions I asked after posting the essay itself:

1.     What makes this a great essay?

First off, it is audacious.  The claims it makes are so grand that while we know them to be untrue, we admire his ability to swing hyperbole around with confidence and panache. In addition, the range of statements is proof of the unconventional imaginative leaps his mind makes. The movement of this particular mind is quirky, funny, and just a bit edgy.  As readers we see the world differently after we have read these words. In this sense the words are inspirational.  In both good and bad ways.

The words open up new spaces in our brains and that is good. In a more literal sense what this essay did for some students who read it was to ‘inspire’ them to use the essay as a template. In other words, while they changed the specific sentences, all they did for their own essay was to write another set of unconventional assertions and end with the last sentence: I have never been to college.  I think I read about 50 of these knock-offs. What these writers did not understand was that the message of this essay was not the template but the imagination it took to create the form. The form, as the great writer Gustave Flaubert, knew, and who is often cited as searching always for "le mot juste” (the right word) follows from the mind. Or to use Flaubert again: “The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.” And so it is with this student’s essay. His voice is clearly present and yet the person behind the voice, the ‘real’ person is invisible. And yet we feel we know him, as it is, to quote yet another cultural cliché, the style that makes the man.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few how to write successful college essay books on that market that offer templates as the method to gain acceptance. These templates range from the 5-paragraph essay to this essay. As with any template, there can be good examples and bad ones (for example, good sonnets and bad ones). To assume the form is the key is to miss the point. The form is a mold into which words are poured. If the mind doing the pouring is simply imitating, then the form will not save the essay, the poem, or the student from appearing derivative to a teacher or an admission committee. 

2.     Are personal statements supposed to true, and if so, how does this essay fare?

Prevarication is different from exaggeration. Or at least in this particular case it is. This essay is a humorous satire of a heroic resume.  We know, or at least we should know, by the end of the first paragraph that we have entered a land of fictional claims. If not, then I think it is the fault of the reader rather than the writer. The sentences, piled as they are in machine gun fashion, and in such contradictory ways, should be more than enough to prevent readers from assuming this to be an accurate listing of attributes.

If we rate this essay in terms of following directions of a college essay (all statements must be accurate) then he should be doomed. And yet the consensus around the world is that this student should be offered a place at virtually any school. Why? Satire is not meant to be ‘true” in a factual sense and I would argue that this applies to the larger genre of creative non-fiction.  Liberties are taken all the time by writers, be it a detail (for example in the previous essay on learning to dance the writer might well have decided to excise out the lone person in the square in order to dramatize the scene more effectively by making the town square completely empty), or sometimes huge chunks of text (The speeches in Thucydides’ "History of the Peloponnesian War," one of the great works of history, are all made up). 

3.     What character traits can you generalize about the writer of this essay based on his words?

If I were to trace the lineage of this essay, it would go back to ancient Greece. Rather than travel back that far yet again, however, I will keep my references a little more current and democratic. 

The great American poet, Walt Whitman, spent his life writing and rewriting his masterpiece “Song of Myself”. The song of myself not a narcissistic love fest of self-refection; instead, it is a refection of the self that he is a part of—all those who he has met literally and figuratively. He embodies them.  And anything that large is bound to be full of images and observations that undermine or contradict one another. Here is how Whitman responds to this issue in the poem itself:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

I have purposely enlarged the font as Whitman claims here that he is larger than life. And so too does the writer of the essay. He does contradict himself, and he does indeed contain multitudes. The essayist does so for satirical reasons, but even so his words embrace so many actions and traits that he becomes a comic (in all senses of the word) superhero. Satire depends upon exaggeration and the writer makes great use of it throughout the essay. But the list is also impressive for the range and scope of its images and claims. It is his imagination, finally, that really is beyond the scope and range of most of us.

4.     Would you categorize this essay as a sure bet, a risk, or something in-between?

This question is actually a trick question. Why? Because the essay that is known as the best admission essay ever is not. It is a great essay, at least in my opinion, but the essay itself that is used in classrooms around the world as a sample of a great admission essay is actually not an admission essay. That part is an urban legend. Here is what the site, urbanlegend.com says:

Analysis: This satirical essay (or a version of it, at any rate) was written in 1990 by a high school student named Hugh Gallagher, who entered it in the humor category of the Scholastic Writing Awards and won first prize. The text was subsequently published in Literary Calvalcade, a magazine of contemporary student writing, and reprinted in Harper's and The Guardian before taking off as one of the most forwarded "viral" emails of the decade.

Though this was not Gallagher's actual college application essay, he did apply and was ultimately accepted at NYU, where he graduated in 1994. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer. His first novel, Teeth, was published by Pocket Books in March 1998.

Yoshimura's "Clothes of Deception"

If you think that I have included this essay in part to fool you, then you are correct. This essay is not ‘true’ is two ways. On the level of content, the statements are false, and yet thousands of readers have still found the essay to be one that they remember as the best admission essay ever. To return to Flaubert, we see the author present everywhere; his voice is what matters. The fact that this was not actually submitted as an admission essay is also factually correct, and yet hundreds of people have learned from this essay how to think creatively about the college essay. For me, this cause and effect is much more important to people contemplating how to approach the open-ended essay question of the common application.

It is proof that there are ways of saying things that while not true, are still useful (to quote the philosopher Richard Rorty). In other words, great writing, in whatever genre, in whatever form, can inspire us to create great essays. Too often we are fixated on the genre (fiction, creative non-fiction, satire, prose poem) instead of the matter at hand—the words on the page and the mind that has moved them. It is, finally, the movement of the mind that matters. (More about this in subsequent posts.)