Reality Hunger (48 page)

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape that, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal; this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

I wrote a story once about a man who began a very large picture, and therein was a kind of map—for example, hills, horses, streams, fishes, and woods and towers and men and all sorts of things. When the day of his death came, he found he had been making a picture of himself. That is the case with most writers.

In, for example, Naipaul’s
A Way in the World
, Sebald’s
The Emigrants
, Hilton Als’s
The Women
, each chapter, when considered
singly, is relatively straightforwardly biographical, but when the book is read as a whole and tilted at just the right angle, it refracts brilliant, harsh light back upon the author.

In a larger sense, all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is: this massive autobiographical writing enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self-construction—does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself?

The final orbit is oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

What personal essayists, as opposed to novelists or faux-naïf memoirists, do: keep looking at their own lives from different angles, keep trying to find new metaphors for the self and the self’s soul mates. The only serious journey, to me, is deeper into self. We’re all guaranteed, of course, never to fully know ourselves, which fails, somehow, to mitigate the urgency of the journey.

You keep excavating yourself. You want/don’t want this self-knowledge. Tough fucking task.

Every documentary film, even—especially—the least self-referential, demonstrates in its every frame that an artist’s chief material is himself.

What does it mean to write about yourself? To what degree is this a solipsistic enterprise? To what degree are we all solipsists? To what degree can solipsism gain access to the world?

Speaking about oneself is not necessarily offensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be most profitable to his hearers. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home. It is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

Mad genius? Narcissistic artist? An entertainer who can’t resist throwing in the kitchen sink? Viewers will make up their own definition for Nedžad Begovićz, the director and central character of the aptly titled
Totally Personal
, which has much to say about what it’s like to live in Sarajevo, as seen through the quizzical eyes of his narrator-protagonist. Starting with his birth in 1958, Begovićz fills us in on what it was like to have the first TV on the block, to take loyalty oaths to Yugoslavian leader Tito and the Motherland, to get married to Amina, and to decide to make a no-budget film with a digital camera. All this and much, much more is narrated with self-deprecating
humor in wonderfully accented English. The filmmaker’s precarious means, far from being a handicap to his storytelling, seem to inspire him to ever greater heights of imagination. He introduces whimsical theories about body parts and why the Serbian Chetniks started a war in Bosnia and what the UN forces were really doing during said war (answer: counting the number of shells fired). The film’s financial and technical limitations finally converge with the serious shortages that Bosnians experienced during the war—including no water, bread, electricity, or gasoline. Bosnians’ innate creativity, Begovićz seems to say, has seen them through under all circumstances, just as his own imagination has created what he modestly calls his own little masterpiece.
Totally Personal
. Nedžad Begovićz. Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2004. 79 minutes. Color and B&W. In Bosnian with English subtitles. World premiere.