The 3rd Grade Hangover

When I was in third grade, we wrote reports on things in our lives. I don't remember exactly what we wrote about--I think it was someting like a story of something someone in our family did that was heroic--but I remember, with incredible clarity, the major lesson that we were to take away from the exercise: never use the first person in serious writing. Or, anyway, that was how it came off, and the overly officious part of me took that lesson to heart. "I" was anathema, and "me" would inevitably be the nadir of our writing. Well, that's what they told us anyway.

Somehow, that brief period where I imagined that I was a poet (T.S. Eliot, specifically, but I digress) didn't shake that shit out of me. Eventually, sometime in college, I started added the distant, academic "I" that is permissable within the grand New Historicist tradition: "I will argue," "I intend," etc. The people I looked up to didn't foreground themselves in their writing, so there never really seemed to be much reason to learn that skill. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure how I got that impression, though, because Stephen Greenblatt, whose writing I adored, is really present in his texts in his own majesterial way, as is Walter Ong and a handful of others that I really loved as an undergraduate. And anyway, my relationship to texts is so very different than it is to art objects.

Anyway, I think one of the most difficult parts of coming to graduate school and changing fields is the way in which really good art historians seem to be able to effortlessly negotiate their presence in the text. I don't mean that they use the first-person voice constantly--though some do--but they seem to have settled the question of how they relate to the both the object and the text that they're writing. In many ways, I'm still trying to get over Mrs. Graham admonishing me, that one time, to never use the first person.