ESSAYISTS

* ESSAY
0#

Montaigne to Our Time

EDITED BY CARL H. KLAUS AND NED STUCKEY-FRENCH

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Essayists on the essay: Montaigne to our time / edited by :
Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, f
i
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60938-076-1 (pbk.)
ISBN-IO: 1-60938-076-1 (pbk.)
i
I. Essay, i. Essay—Authorship. 3. Essays. 4. Essays—
Translations into English. 5. Essayists. I. Klaus, Carl H. f
II. Stuckey-French, Ned. III. Title. !
PN4S00.E714 1011 h

808.849357—dci3 1011031860
f-
1

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To Kate, Jackie, and Elizabeth
.

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 Concents

xi Preface

xv Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay, by Carl H. Klaus

I MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
From “Of Practice,” “Of Repentance,” and “Of Vanity”—1580

7 WILLIAM CORNWALLIS
From “Of Essays and Books”—1600-1601

9 FRANCIS BACON
From The Profuience and Advancement ofLearning—1605

II JOSEPH ADDISON
From the Spectator—1711

1} SAMUEL JOHNSON
From the Rambler—1751

15 WILLIAM HAZLITT
From “On the Periodical Essayists”—1815

19 CHARLES LAMB
From an Unpublished Review of Hazlitt’s Table Talk—1811

1} RALPH WALDO EMERSON

From “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”—1850

15 ALEXANDER SMITH
From “On the Writing of Essays”—1863

Z9 WALTER PATER
From “Dialectic”—1893

3Z AGNES REPPLIER
From “The Passing of the Essay”—1894
 36 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
From “Editor’s Easy Chair”—1902.

38 JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

From “To the Reader"—1914

40 A. C. BENSON
From “The Art of the Essayist”—192.2.

44 VIRGINIA WOOLF
From “The Modern Essay”—192.5

48 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

“An Essay on Virginia”—192.5

51 HILAIRE BELLOC
“An Essay upon Essays upon Essays”—1919

55 ROBERT MUSIL
From The Man without Qtialities—1930

57 G. K. CHESTERTON
“The Essay”—1932

61 KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

From “An Essay on Essays”—1935

65 WALTER MURDOCH
From “The Essay”—1938

68 ENRIQUE ANDERSON IMBERT

From “In Defense of the Essay”—1946

71 MAX BENSE
From “On the Essay and Its Prose”—1947

75 MARIANO PICON-SALAS
From “On the Essay”—1954

78 GERMAN ARCINIEGAS
From “The Essay in Our America”—1956

82 THEODOR ADORNO
From “The Essay as Form”—1958

... viii
88 ALDOUS HUXLEY
From the Preface to Collected Essays—1960

91 MICHAEL HAMBURGER
“An Essay on the Essay”—1965

94 FERNAND OUELLETTE
“Ramblings on the Essay”—1971

99 GUILLERMO DIAZ-PLAJA
“The Limits of the Essay”—1976

IOI EDWARD HOAGLAND

“What I Think, What I Am”—1976

104 E. B. WHITE
From the Foreword to Essays ofE. B. White—1977

106 WILLIAM H. GASS

From “Emerson and the Essay"—1982.

no JEAN STAROBINSKI
From “Can One Define the Essay?”—1983

Il6 ANDRE BELLEAU

“Little Essayistic"—1983

IlO GABRIEL ZAID

From “Alfonso Reyes’ Wheelbarrow”—1988

114 SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS

From “The Singular First Person”—1988

127 PHILLIP LOPATE

“What Happened to the Personal Essay?”—1989

137 GERALD EARLY

From the Introduction to Tuxedo Junction—1989

142 NANCY MAIRS

From “Essaying the Feminine”—1994

147 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

From “f- Words: An Essay on the Essay”—1996

ix...
r

I$I CYNTHIA OZICK

“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body”—1998

159 SARA LEVINE

“The Self on the Shelf”—2000

167 VIVIAN GORN1CK

From The Situation and the Story—1001

169 JOHN DAGATA

From “1003” in The Next American Essay—2003

171 PAUL GRAHAM

From “The Age of the Essay”—2004

174 SUSAN ORLEAN

From the Introduction to The Best American Essays—2005

178 ANDER MONSON

From “The Essay as Hack”—2008

181 JOHN BRESLAND

“On the Origin of the Video Essay” — 2011

186 JEFF PORTER

“Essay on the Radio Essay”—2011

194 ROBERT ATWAN

“Notes towards the Definition of an Essay”—2012

203 Bibliography, compiled by Ned Scuckey-French

217 Thematic Guide to Entries in the Bibliography,

compiled by Ned Stuckey-French

223 Permissions

227 Index

... x
 Preface

A
brief glance at our table of contents might suggest that this book
is essentially a collection of pieces about the essay by essayists
from Montaigne to the present. But beyond the collection, it is
also a guide to hundreds of additional pieces on the essay, as one can see
by consulting our bibliography and the thematic guide that follows it.
With the aid of this bibliographical guide, we hope to stimulate research
and commentary that might lead toward a poetics and analytics of the
essay, as suggested by our introduction, “Toward a Collective Poetics of
the Essay.”
Our decision to produce this source book is the result of a conviction
that despite the extraordinary growth of interest in the essay during the
past twenty-five years—thanks to such important projects as Robert At-
wan’s Best American Essays series, Phillip Lopate’s The Art ofthe Personal
Essay, John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of
the Essay, and G. Douglas Atkins’s recent books on the essay—the essay
has largely been ignored in the world of criticism and theory. By virtue of
being the handmaiden of criticism, the medium in which other forms of
literature, art, and culture are interpreted, the essay perhaps has seemed to
need no explanation. As if it were transparent as a pane of glass. How else
to account for the fact that during the past twenty-five years only a hand­
ful of academic books have been devoted to defining it or interpreting it?
But essayists themselves have not been reticent about the nature, form,
and purpose of the essay, reflecting on it in columns, prefaces, introduc­
tions, letters, and reviews, as well as in essays on the essay and occasionally
in book-length works about it. All in all, they have produced an extensive
body of commentary that constitutes the heart of our concern in this
source book. Our collection offers a historically and culturally representa­
tive sampling, dominated during the early centuries by English essayists,
who were then more self-consciously concerned with the essay than their
counterparts elsewhere in the world. But during the twentieth century,
as our collection reflects, American, Latin American, and European es­
sayists became increasingly concerned with the nature and significance
of the genre. Likewise, women writers became more concerned with the
genre during the twentieth century, as our table of contents reflects.
Some of the pieces in our collection are reprinted here in their entirety,
others are excerpts that we have made because they embody significant is­
sues, themes, or points of view in the history of thinking about the essay.
Each selection is prefaced by a headnote that provides information about
the author’s life and works and about ideas in the piece itself.
Our bibliography includes not only essays on the essay but also a wide
variety of other titles, ranging from brief prefaces and reviews to book-
length works that reflecc on some aspect of the essay or the essayist, or
both. We wish it had been possible to reprint more of the pieces that ap­
pear in the bibliography and that we mention in the introduction, but the
collection is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive. On the
other hand, ourguide to the bibliography offers a broad range of themati­
cally related pieces for further study.
Though precursors of the essay can be found in ancient Greece, Rome,
China, and Japan, our collection begins with Montaigne, for he is the
first essayist to reflect on the nature and form of the essay and is its major
progenitor, having named it and produced such an enduringly influential
book of essays. We have in turn devoted this source book solely to the
commentary of essayists who have published at least one collection or the
equivalent, because as practitioners of the form they know it and under­
stand it from the inside. Thus we have not included or listed scholarly or
cextbook material on the essay, unless it was authored by an essayist.
While we refer to Montaigne and his successors as essayiscs, it is well
to remember that most of them have not earned their living by penning
essays. Montaigne was a statesman and diplomat, Bacon a barrister and
member of Parliament, Boyle a scientist, Lamb a bookkeeper. Even when
they have been professional writers, essayists have usually identified them­
selves not as essayists but as philosophers, critics, playwrights, and more
recently novelists, editors, or professors. Thus we arc keenly aware that
most essayists have a life and a living beyond the essay that often inform
their thinking about it in one way or another. But for the purposes of this
book, an essayist is someone who has written essays and written some-
thing about the essay itself, which we seek to highlight in our individual
headnotes.
Our bibliography grew out of the work of an essay study group at the
University of Iowa. For their assistance in discovering and discussing

...xii
commentary on the essay, we are very grateful to our former colleagues
in that group—Maura Brady, Cassie Kircher, Michele Payne, John Price,
and Dan Roche.
For their excellent assistance in procuring permissions and compiling
the manuscript, we are grateful to Christina Rivera, Misty Bravence, and
Ann Robinson of Florida State University. For its generous support of
the project, we are grateful to Florida State University. And for its excel­
lent production of the book, we are grateful to the staff of the University
of Iowa Press, particularly our editor Joe Parsons and managing editor
Charlotte Wright, as well as our free-lance copyeditor David Chu.

xiii...
 i

:
I5

A
 Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay
CARL H. KLAUS

T
hough the essay has yet to find its Aristotle, essayists have often
written about it with the certitude of a poetics—in prefaces, in­
troductions, letters, journals, and essays on the essay. A hint of
that self-reflective tendency can be heard in musings of the fourteenth-
century Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko: “What a strange, demented feel­
ing it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone,
with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensi­
cal thoughts have entered my head” (jo). Montaigne, on the other hand,
was so enthralled by his pathbreaking literary venture that he repeatedly
sought to describe it, explain it, justify it, celebrate it, and sometimes even
denigrate it in digressive passages that can be found in 2.6 of his 107 es­
says. So many digressions, sometimes rambling on for several hundred
words, increasing in length with each successive edition, that in his final
essay Montaigne exclaimed, “How often and perhaps how stupidly have
I extended my book to make it speak of itself!” (818).
Contrary to that self-deprecating outburst, Montaigne and his descen­
dants have produced a significant body of commentary on a wide range
of interrelated topics—the nature of the essay, the purpose of the essay,
the form, length, and variety of the essay; the style of the essayist, the
voice of che essayist, the personality, mind, and knowledge of the essay­
ist; the essay and the article, the essay and the theme, the essay and the
story, the essay and the lyric. Though their interests vary as widely as their
backgrounds, essayists so often concur on a few crucial issues that their
convergence suggests the key elements of a collective poetics.
The most striking and significant consensus can be seen in the ten­
dency of essayists from every period and culture to define the essay by
contrasting it with conventionalized and systematized forms of writing,
such as rhetorical, scholarly, or journalistic discourse. In keeping with
this contrast, they often invoke images and metaphors suggestive of the
essay’s naturalness, openness, or looseness as opposed to the methodical
quality of conventional nonfiction. Likewise, they typically conceive of
 the essay as a mode of crying out ideas, of exploration rather than per­
suasion, of reflection ratlier than conviction. Montaigne is the first to
invoke the contrast, in passages that highlight both his uncertainty and
his unmethodical manner: “The scholars distinguish and mark oft their
ideas more specifically and in detail. I, who cannot see beyond what I
have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a
general way, and tentatively. As in this: I speak my meaning in disjointed
parts” (814). In a similar vein, Bacon, whose formal and pithy essays have
often been regarded as the antithesis of Montaigne’s, refers to his pieces
as “fragments of my conceices” (138), and in The Proficience and Advance­
ment ofLearning he concludes a defense of the aphoristic mode, typical
of his essays, by contrasting it with methodical writing: “And lastly, apho­
risms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further;
whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they
were at furthest” (173). Though Montaigne seeks to mirror his mind in
action while Bacon aims to provoke the minds of others, boch describe
their prose in antimechodical terms such as “disjointed” and “broken”
that clearly distinguish essayistic form and purpose from the methodical
discourse that dominated classical rhetoric and medieval scholasticism.
The early influence of that dichotomy can be seen in Bacons contem­
porary William Cornwallis, who defined the essay as “a manner of writ­
ing well befitting undigested motions” and compared the essayist to “a
scrivener trying his pen before he engrosses his work” (190). The persis­
tence of che contrast—one might even say the codification of it—is exem­
plified by a surprising statement in one ofJoseph Addison’s Spectator pa­
pers: “Among my Daily-Papers, which I bestow on the Publick, there are
some which are written with Regularity and Method, and others that run
out into the Wildness of those Compositions, which go by the Name of
Essays” (IV: 186). Beyond its pointed contrast of “Regularity” and “Wild­
ness,” this passage contains a notable revelation—that, contrary to most
descriptions of his work, Addison did not consider all of his Spectator
papers to be essays. Anything “written with Regularity and Method,” as
he indicates elsewhere, he considered to be “a set Discourse” (II: 465) in
contrast with “the Looseness and Freedom of an Essay” (II: 465). Having
asserted and reiterated the contrast, Addison subsequently expanded it
by distinguishing between the composing processes he followed in each
case: “As for the first, I have the whole Scheme of the Discourse in Mind,
before I set Pen to Paper. I11 the other kind of Writing, it is sufficient that
I have several Thoughts on a Subject, without troubling myself to range

...xvi
them in such order, that they may seem to grow out of one another, and
be disposed under the proper Heads” (IV: 186). And as if to solidify the
distinction, Addison identifies the antecedents for each type: “Seneca and
Montaigne are patterns of writing in this last Kind, as Tully and Aristotle
excel in the other” (IV: 186). Given his neoclassical bias, it is not surpris­
ing that Addison favored methodical discourse, yet he also knew enough
from his firsthand experience of writing to acknowledge that the essay
allowed him the “Freedom” to explore ideas and to engage material “that
has not been treated of by others” (II: 465).
By the time that Samueljohnson compiled his Dictionary ofthe English
Language, the contrast had become so well established that he echoed it
in his pithy definition of the essay: “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular,
indigested piece, not a regular, orderly performance.” Johnson’s antithesis
is tinged, of course, with neoclassical scorn, much as his extended discus­
sion in the Rambler gives an ironic account of the essays advantages over
lengthy and learned forms of writing:

The writer of essays escapes many embarrassments to which a large

work would have exposed him; he seldom harasses his reason with
long trains of consequences, dims his eyes with the perusal of anti­
quated volumes, or burthens his memory with great accumulations
of preparatory knowledge. A careless glance upon a favourite author,
or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the
first hint or seminal idea, which enlarged by the gradual accretion
of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily ex­
panded into flowers, and sometimes ripened into fruit. (101)

Hasty and careless though the essayist appears to be in this account of an

essay’s gestation, Johnson’s piece just as quickly expands his seminal idea
about the essay into two paragraphs of reflection on the unpredictable
and uncontrollable aspects of composing an essay, which segues into a
meditative essay on the uncertainties of life. Thus in the very form and
content of his piece Johnson tacitly endorsed the ease of the essay, much
as his neoclassical sympathies inclined him against its lack of extensive
learning.
Nineteenth-century essayists, on the other hand, were quite recep­
tive to the contrast, not only because it spoke to their interests in a more
natural or seemingly freer form than methodically structured writing,
but also because it embodied such a clear-cut endorsement of impression­
istic rather than definitive thought. Charles Lamb was so in tune with

xvii...
f

the contrast that he turned it into a sustained distinction between two

mental archetypes, one of which he acknowledged to be the basis of his
Elian persona:

There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must

be content to rank).... The owners of the sort of faculties I allude
to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no
pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their
manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess
clearly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments
and scattered pieces of Truth. (155)

In a more exuberant spirit, the midcentury writer Alexander Smith ex­

tolled the essayist’s wayward and imperfect intellect: “The essay-writer
is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an
ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brood­
ing meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business
with” (17).
Given such a “libertine” view of the essayist, it is hardly surprising
that by century’s end Agnes Repplier went even further and expounded
a hedonic view of the essay: “It offers no instruction, save through the
medium of enjoyment, and one saunters lazily along with a charming
unconsciousness of effort. Great results are not to be gained in this fash­
ion, but it should sometimes be play-hour for us all” (133). By this point,
it would seem that the dichotomy had become so conventionalized and
attenuated as to result in a trivialization of the essay as escapist writing,
espoused both by Repplier and other genteel essayists such as Richard
Burton, who conceived of the essay as “mood and form” and thus consid­
ered “the theme unimportant in itself” (87).
During much of the twentieth century, however, essayists invoked the
contrast to define and affirm a quite different kind of freedom—not just
from the conventionalized structures that prevail in other forms of dis­
course, but also from any kind of generic strictures that inhibit the mind
itself, as Cynthia Ozick makes clear in her definition of the essay “as the
movement of a free mind at play.” Such a wide-open conception of the
genre tacitly implies a freedom from any kind of form, which suggests
that strictly speaking the essay is an antigenre, a heretical form of writing
in the universe of discourse. Or as Theodor Adorno puts it, “the law of
the innermost form of the essay is heresy” (171).
The heretical impulse can be seen most clearly in a pointed contrast

... xviii
between the essay and the article that dominated the thinking of essayists
throughout the twentieth century. Howells invoked the distinction in
1901, as if it were already a commonplace, lamenting the time “when the
essay began to confuse itself with the article, and to assume an obligation
to premises and conclusions” (802.). Though Howells does not venture to
say when the change took place, he distinguishes the article’s “premises
and conclusions” from the essay’s “wandering airs of thought” (801), hark­
ing back, in effect, to the long-standing dichotomy between methodi­
cal discourse and essayistic rambling. By midcentury, however, the di­
chotomy was cast in more up-to-date terms when Joseph Wood Krutch
called the essay “man-made as opposed to the machine-made article” (19).
Hoagland, in a similar spirit, asserted that “essays don’t usually boil down
to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a ‘nap’ to it, a
combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that
stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can’t be brushed flat” (15-16).
Thus the contrast was reframed in terms of a dichotomy between organic
and mechanistic form, and by extension between humanistic and tech­
nological values.
Twentieth-century essayists often echoed and expanded upon that di­
chotomy by distinguishing between the personal orientation of the essay
and the factual mode of the article. In one formulation or another, this
distinction has roused essayists more than any other issue. Some of their
intensity can be traced to the fact that many editors and readers had been
lured away from the essay by the utilitarian appeal of the article. With the
onset of World War I and the economic, political, and social upheavals
that followed, magazine editors found themselves compelled to satisfy a
widespread demand for highly informed articles about the most press­
ing and complex issues of the day. By the early 1930s, magazines had be­
come so dominated by articles that Katharine Fullerton Gerould decried
“the spectacle of the old-line magazines forsaking their literary habit,
and stuffing us month after month, with facts, figures, propaganda, and
counter-propaganda” (393). Gerould’s outburst provoked so many letters
to the editor that the Saturday Review of Literature featured them for two
consecutive weeks in a “Plebiscite for Mrs. Gerould.”
The essayists’ quarrel with the article, though provoked in part by
competition for magazine space, was rooted in their conviction that it
allowed no room for the personal experience, personal thought, or per­
sonal voice of the essayist. Thus they depicted the article as being out of
touch with human concerns. Or, as Krutch put it, “The magazines are

xix...
 full of articles dealing statistically with, for example, the alleged failure
or success of marriage,” but “one man’s ‘familiar essay’ on love and mar­
riage might get closer to some all-important realities than any number
of ‘studies’ could” (19). Krutch’s remarks also reveal that essayists were
aroused by a distrust of specialized studies, heavily reliant on factual in­
formation that they regarded as symptomatic of an ill-placed confidence
in the reliability of systematized and impersonal approaches to knowl­
I
edge. Ultimately, then, they depicted the article as embodying a naively
positivistic approach to knowledge, an approach ouc of touch with the
problematic nature of things. William Gass is especially emphatic on
chis score in his satiric portrait of the scholarly article: “It must appear
complete and straightforward and footnoted and useful and certain and
is very likely a veritable Michelin of misdirection; for the article pretends
that everything is clear, that its argument is unassailable, that there are
no soggy patches, no illicit references, no illegitimate connections” (15).
In keeping with his attack on the certitudes of the article, Gass portrays
the essay as having a disinterested engagement in the play of ideas and
thus as making no special claims about the truth of its observations: “It
turns round and round upon its topic, exposing chis aspect and then that;
proposing possibi 1 ities, reciting opinions, d isposing of prejudice and even
of the simple truth itself” (25).
The mosc fully developed depiction of the essay as inherently skeptical
and antimethodical can be found in the work of Theodor Adorno, who
offers an extensive set of variations on che theme of the essay’s “heresy”:

Luck and play are essencial to the essay (152). The essay does not
obey the rules of the game of organized science__ [T]he essay does
not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. As the
essay denies any primeval givens, so ic refuses any definitions of its
concepts (159). In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of
operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather
the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet (160). The
essay . . . proceeds so to speak methodically unmethodically (161).
Discontinuity is essential to the essay. (164)

Though radical in its opposition to any systematized form of thought,

Adorno’s conception of the essay is the logical extension of Montaigne’s
contrast between the “system of the scholars” and his “disjointed parts.”
Indeed, the continuity of their thought is reflected in Adorno’s equation

. . . XX
of “che neo-positivists,” whom he opposes, “with Scholasticism,” which
Montaigne rejected (160). Adornos echo of Montaigne, like Gass’s cri­
tique of the article, highlights the ultimate yearning of essayists to be
free from any systematized form of thinking or writing. Thus Diaz-Plaja
claims chat “the essayist remains free of the systematic demonstration of
a treatise” (137), much as Hoagland asserts that “because essays are di­
rectly concerned with the mind and the mind’s idiosyncrasy, the very
freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch ofliterature that
does honor to it, and the fascination of che mind is the fascination of the
essay” (17). So it might be said that above all else essayists conceive of the
essay as a place of intellectual refuge, a domain sacred co che freedom of
the mind itself.
Given this colleccively shared view, one might well be moved to won­
der what essayists have to say about the formal essay, that long-honored
subgenre thac frequently turns up in literary handbooks, histories, and
encyclopedias. Surprising as it may be, che formal essay does not seem to
figure in the chinking of essayists, not even in the commentary of Wil­
liam Hazlitt, Leslie Stephen, and Virginia Woolf, who survey the work of
their predecessors and might well have considered academic distinctions
between the formal and informal essay. In fact, this concrast is discussed
only by Phillip Lopate, and he brings it up only to call it into question,
noting that “it is difficult even now to draw a firm distinction between
che two,” though he also acknowledges having excluded Bacon and Em­
erson from his anthology of the personal essay because he “decided in
the end that they were noc really personal essayists but great formal es­
sayists whose minds moved inexorably toward the expression of imper­
sonal wisdom and authority, regardless of flickering references to an ‘I.’”
The closest that any other essayist comes co making such a distinction
is Smith’s assertion that “Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately
essayists—Montaigne the greatest of che garrulous and communicative”
(40), or Huxley’s discussion of three different kinds: chose that focus pri­
marily on “che personal and autobiographical,” those that turn their at­
tention outward to the “concrete-particular” aspects of “some literary or
scientific or political theme,” and those that “work in the world of high
abstractions” (v-vi). But in elaborating their distinctions, neither Smith
nor Huxley refers to the “formal” essay, or to any of che logical, system­
atic, and tightly organized qualities that are usually associated with it.
Ultimately, most essayists probably do not recognize che formal essay,

xxi...
 because it embodies the very antithesis of what they conceive an essay to
be. For much the same reason Paul Graham offers an extensive set of dis­
tinctions “between real essays and the things one has to write in school.
Most essayists do not attempt to classify essays in any fashion, and the
few who do make gestures in that direction offer little more than casual
listings, such as Hardwick’s observation that “most incline to a condition
of unexpressed hyphenation: the critical essay, the autobiographical essay,
the travel essay, the political—and so on and so on” (xiii). Classifications
more rigorous than these would be inconsistent with a conception of the
essay as being allied to the free play of thought and feeling. In keeping with
this view, White playfully suggests the hopelessness of trying to classify es­
says: “There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes and
poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams” (vii).
Despite their resistance to methodical systems of thought and dis­
course, most essayists consider the essay to be a disciplined form of writ­
ing. Indeed, their insistence on its freedom from conventionalized form
and thought probably makes them all the more intent on dispelling any
notion that the essay is a free-for-all kind of writing. White is especially
pointed on this issue: “And even the essayist’s escape from discipline is
only a partial escape: the essay, although a relaxed form, imposes its own
discipline, raises its own problems, and these disciplines and problems
soon become apparent and (we all hope) act as a decerrent to anyone
wielding a pen merely because he entertains random thoughts or is in
a happy or wandering mood” (viii). Montaigne, “disjointed” though he
professes himself to be, sounds the same note of caution: “I go out of my
way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another,
but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a
sidelong glance” (761). Even Adorno makes a point of asserting that the
essay “is not unlogical; rather it obeys logical criteria in so far as the total­
ity of its sentences must fit together coherently” (169).
Adorno’s view of coherence, like White’s and Montaigne’s, is predi­
cated not on mere surface continuity from one statement to the next but
on a deep interconnection among ideas, on a cohesion so powerful, as
Montaigne implies, that related ideas seem to be animated by an affinity
for each other no matter how far apart or seemingly unrelated. Given this
view of coherence, the essay evidently requires a delicate set of mental
adjustments, attuned both to giving the mind free rein and to reining
it in, so that the form of an essay will appear to reflect the process of a
mind in action, but a mind that is always in control of itself no matter

... xxii
how wayward it may seem to be. In other words, the essay is predicated
on an idea akin to organic form, yet also on an idea of artful artlessness,
or as Montaigne exclaims, “Lord, what beauty there is in these lusty sal­
lies and this variation, and more so the more casual and accidental they
seem” (761). Addison hints at this complex combination of the organic
and the artful when he says that in writing an essay “it is sufficient that
I have several Thoughts on a Subject, without troubling my self to range
them in such order, that they may seem to grow out of one another, and
be disposed under their proper Heads” (IV:i86). Gerould reaffirms this
complex idea of essayistic form in her assertion that “the basis of the essay
is meditation, and it must in a measure admit the reader to the medita­
tive process— An essay, to some extent thinks aloud; though not in the
loose and pointless way to which the ‘stream of consciousness’ addicts
have accustomed us” (Essay 411). Gass affirms the same principle when
he speaks of Emerson as having “made the essay into the narrative dis­
closure of thoughc... but not of such thinking as had actually occurred.
Real thoughc is gawky and ungracious” (34). Huxley redefines ic as
“free association artistically controlled” in crying to account for the “par­
adoxical secret of Moncaigne’s best essays” (vii). And Adorno codifies the
paradox in his assertion that the essay “proceeds, so to speak, methodi­
cally unmethodically.”
In keeping with this idea of form, essayists tend to see the significance
of an essay as residing primarily in its display of a mind engaging ideas.
Gass, for example, declares that “the hero of the essay is its author in the
act of thinking things ouc, feeling and finding a way; ic is the mind in
the marvels and miseries of its makings, in the work of the imagination,
the search for form" (19-2.0). In a similar vein, Hoagland asserts that
“through its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the quality of the
author’s mind,” and thus he concludes that “the fascination of the mind is
che fascination of the essay” (17). John D’Agata likewise asserts that “the
essay is the equivalent of a mind in rumination” (9), much as Ander Mon-
son claims that “stepping into an essay is stepping into the writer’s mind.”
In each of these statements, as in others, essayists focus so persistently
on the image of che author in che process of thinking that they tend to
perceive the essay as embodying the drama of thought, or what Elizabeth
Hardwick refers to as “thoughc itself in orbit” (xviii). Lopate, for example,
maintains “that, in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughcs struggling to
achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure” (1).
Adorno shifts the dramatic focus from che essayist thinking to thought

xxiii...
 in action by asserting that “the thinker does not think, but rather trans-
forms himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplify­
ing it" (160—61). And Lukacs views the drama in such abstract terms that
he does not even allude to the essayist, but conceives of the essay instead
as enacting the experience of thought itself: “There are experiences, then,
which cannot be expressed by any gesture and which long for expression.
From all that has been said you will know what experiences I mean and
of what kind they are, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle of
existence” (7). But not even Lukacs goes so far as to remove the essayist
from the scene of the essay, explicitly noting that “the hero of the essay
was once alive, and so his life must be given form; but this life, too, is as
much inside the work as everything is in poetry” (11).
Most essayists give special attention to the role of the essayist in the
essay, not only in their concern with the flow of an author’s thoughts but
also in their preoccupation with an authors implied personality or per­
sona. The importance of personality is reflected in the fact that essayists
generally make it a defining feature of the essay. This emphasis on per­
sonality is reflected in a tendency, especially among nineteench-century
essayists, to discuss their predecessors primarily in terms of the chang­
ing moods or aspeccs of personality that they find in their essays, occa­
sionally even judging them for what they deem to be an inappropriate
manner, as in Hazlitt’s derision ofJohnson for being “always upon stilts”
(101). Hazlitt’s view ofJohnson is reflective of norms that have prevailed
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the basic premise of
which, as Leslie Stephen puts it, is that “no literary skill will make average
readers take kindly to a man who does not attract by some amiable qual­
ity” (69). According to these norms, “the charm of the familiar essayist,”
in Arthur Benson’s view, “depends upon his power of giving the sense of
a good-humored, gracious and reasonable personality" (59). In keeping
with such norms, Woolf asserts that “the voice of the scold should never
be heard in this narrow plot” (2.17), and Hardwick observes that “pomp­
ously self-righteous, lamely jocular forays offend because an air of imma­
ture certainty surrounds them” (xvii). As these remarks suggest, and as
Gass makes clear, “this lack of fanaticism, this geniality in the thinker,
this sense of the social proprieties involved (the essay can be polemical but
never pushy) are evidence of how fully aware the author is of the proper
etiquette for meeting minds.... If there is too much earnestness, too great
a need to persuade, a want of correct convictions in the reader is implied,
and therefore an absence ofcommunity" (14).

... xxiv
 Given their concern for engaging readers, “for meeting minds,” it
should come as no surprise that essayists tend to offer problematic defini­
tions of the persona or personality of an essayist. Woolf hints at the com­
plexity when she speaks of personality as “the essayists most proper but
most dangerous and delicate tool” (2.2.2.). A few sentences later she defines
the complexity in terms of another paradox: “Never to be yourself and
yet always—that is the problem” (2.2.2). In a similar spirit, Vivian Gornick
tells of discovering the need for a persona “who was me and at the same
time was not me.” And Nancy Mairs likewise declares that “I am not the
woman whose voice animates my essays. She’s made up__ But I am more
the woman of my essays than I am the woman of my fiction.” This para­
doxical conception of the essayists persona as being at once an authentic
reflection and a fictionalized construction of self can be traced in part to
the practices of the periodical essayists, whom Hazlitt describes as hav­
ing “assumed some fictitious and humorous disguise, which, however, in a
great degree corresponded to their own peculiar habit and character” (95).
Even in the absence of self-evidently fictitious disguises, essayists tend to
discuss personality in terms that suggest they see it as involving a subtle
combination of actual and fictional qualities. In an unpublished review of
Hazlitt, for example, Lamb notes that “this assumption of a character, if it
be not truly (as we are inclined to believe) his own, is that which gives force
& life to his writing” (303). Similarly, Benson’s previously cited remark
about the essayist’s “power” to create a pleasing personality suggests that it
is not necessarily an authentic reflection of the author but a textual qual­
ity that the essayist is capable of projecting. Weeks likewise observes that
“style is at once the man himself and the shimmering costume of words
which centers your attention” (81). This complex interplay between the es­
sayist’s authentic self and the self in costume is vividly delineated by E. B.
White: “The essayist... can pull on any sort ofshirt, be any sort of person,
according to his mood or subject matter.... [he] cannot indulge himself
in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in time” (vii-viii). So
it would seem that essayists explicitly recognize an intimate connection
between role-playing and essay writing, even as they affirm that the roles
they play must be deeply in tune with their innermost sense of themselves.
The complexity of role-playing is further complicated by the challenge
of doing so at the same time that one is projecting the impression of a par­
ticular “meditative process.” Ac first thought, of course, there might appear
to be no problem here, since the two impressions presumably must be in
harmony with each other—the persona or personality giving direction to

xxv...
 the meditative process and the meditative process in turn revealing the
most distinctive aspects of personality. But as essayists define personal­
ity, it seems to refer to a public or exterior aspect of self, something that
one can put on and take off as easily as if it were a “costume” or “garb”
or “shirt,” whereas a meditative process is centered in ones mind or con­
sciousness and thus involves the most private and interior aspect of one s
self. Paradoxically, then, essayists apparently conceive of the essay as em­
bodying a multistable impression of the self, in the process of thought and
in the process of sharing thought with others. Interiority and exterior­
ity simultaneously manifest. Or, as Gass says, “The unity of each essay is
a unity achieved by the speaker for his audience as well as for himself, a
kind of reassociation of his sensibility and theirs” (35). Considered in this
light, the essay, rather than being a straightforward and transparent form
of exposition, is a highly complex and problematic kind of writing—an
enactment of thought and a projection of personality that use language
dramatically, as in a monologue or a soliloquy, and that thereby call for
literary interpretation. To explain and illustrate what might be entailed in
such analysis is clearly beyond the scope of this piece, but it does suggest
that a methodology for understanding the essay is long overdue.

Works Cited
Adorno, T. W. “The Essay as Form.” Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor. New German
Critique 31 (Spring-Summer 1984): 151-71.
Anonymous [Virginia Woolf). “Modern Essays.” Times Literary Supplement 30
(November 1911): 1-1.
Bacon, Francis. The Propcience and Advancement ofLearning. Oxford: Oxford
English Texts, 1974.
Benson, Arthur C. “The Art of the Essayist.” Modern English Essays. Ed. Ernest
Rhys. Vol. 4. London: J. M. Dent, 1911. 50-63.
Cornwallis, William. “Of Essays and Books." Essays. London: n.p., 191- 101.
D’Agata.John. “1500 b.c.f..” The Lost Origins ofthe Essay. St. Paul: Gray wolf.
1009. 9.
Diaz-Plaja, Guillermo. “Los limites del ensayo."La Estafeta Literaria 581 (Febru­
ary 15,1976): 136-39.
Gass, William. “Emerson and the Essay.” Habitations ofthe Word. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985. 9-49.
Gerould, Katharine Fullerton. “An Essay on Essays.” North American Review
140.3 (December 1935): 409-18.
Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1001.
Graham, Paul. “The Age of the Essay.” http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
Hardwick. Elizabeth. Introduction. The Best American Essays, ipS6. Ed. Elizabeth

... xxvi
 Hardwick. Series cd. Robert Atwan. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1986.
xiii-xxi.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Periodical F.ssayists.” The Complete lYorks of William
Hazlitt. Vol. 6. London: Dent, 1931. 91-105.
Hoagland, F.dward. “What I Think, What I Am.” The Tugman’s Passage. New
York: Random House, 1981.14-17.
Howells, William Dean. “The Old Fashioned F.ssay.” Harpers (October 1901):
801-3.
Huxley, Aldous. Preface. Collected Essays. New York: Harper, i960, v-ix.
Johnson, Samuel.// Dictionary ofthe English Language. London: W. Strahan, 1755.
--------. “Rambler No. 184.” The Complete Works ofSamuelJohnson. F.d. W. J. Bate
and Albrecht B. Strauss. Vol. 5. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.100-104.
Kenko. “F.ssays in Idleness.” The Art ofthe Personal Essay. F.d. Phillip Lopatc. New
York: Anchor Books, 1994.30-37.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. "No F.ssays, Please.” Saturday Review of Literature (March
10,1951): 18-19,55-
Lamb, Charles. “Imperfect Sympathies.” Essays of Elia. Iowa City: U of Iowa P,
1003.133,147-
--------. Unpublished Review of Hazlitt’s Table Talk. Lamb as Critic. F.d. Roy
Park. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980.199-307.
/ Lopate, Phillip. “The Essay Lives—In Disguise.” New York Times Book Review
(November 18,1984): 1, 47-49.
Lukacs, Georg. “On the Nature and Form of the F.ssay.” Soul and Form. Trans.
Anna Benstock. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1978.1-18.
Mairs, Nancy. “But First.” Carnal Acts. New York: HarperColIins, 1990.
Monson, Andcr. “F.ssay as Hack.” http://othcrelcctricitics.com/swarm/cssayashack
.html
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays ofMontaigne. Trans. Donald M.
Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1957.
Ozick, Cynthia. “She: Portrait of the F.ssay as a Warm Body.” Qitarrel and Qjtan-
dry. New York: Vintage, 1001.
Repplier, Agnes. “The Passing of the F.ssay.” In the Dozy Hours. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1895.116-35.
Sanders, Scott Russell. “The Singular First Person." Essayists on the Essay: Re­
defining the Genre. F.d. Alexander Butrym. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.31-41-
Smith, Alexander. “On the Writing of F.ssays.” Dreamthorp: A Book ofEssays
Written in the Country. Portland, MF.: Thomas Bird Mosher, 1913.13-46.
The Spectator. F.d. Donald Bond. 5 vols. London: Oxford UP. 1965.
Stephen, Leslie. “The F.ssayists." Men, Books, and Manners. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1956. 45-73.
Weeks, F.dward. “The Peripatetic Reviewer.” Atlantic Monthly (August 1954):
81-81.
White, E. B. Essays ofE. B. White. New York: Harper, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Modern F.ssay.” The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt
Braccjovanovich, 1953.

xxvii...
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ESSAYISTS ON THE ESSAY
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M
ICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE (1555-91), though widely
recognized for his philosophic skepticism and his pathbreak­
ing, free-ranging Essais, was known in his own time for his
statesmanlike moderation of the prevailing religious conflicts between
Catholics and Protestants. Even after retiring from public life in 1571 co
work on his essays and co travel, he was called back into service as mayor
of Bordeaux. But Montaigne incessantly wrote and revised his self-
oriented essays—“I am myself the subject of my work” — in defiance of
licerary conventions that scorned such writing. His self-absorption was
ultimately motivated by a distinctively modern preoccupation with che
complexity of his inner life, with the flow of his thoughts, as he makes
clear in the excerpts that follow: “What I chiefly portray is my cogita­
tions, a shapeless subject that does not lend icself co expression in actions.
It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words.”

From “Of Practice,” “Of Repentance,”

and “Of Vanity”
From “Of Practice”
What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for
others, but for me.
And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write.
What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover,
I am not spoiling anyching, I am using only what is mine. And if I play
the fool, it is ac my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly
that will die with me, and will have no consequences. We have heard of
only two or three ancients who opened up chis road, and even of them we
cannot say whether their manner in the least resembled mine, since we
know only their names. No one since has followed their lead. It is a thorny
undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wander­
ing as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost

1...
 folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate
it. And it is a new and extraordinary amusement, which withdraws us
from the ordinary occupations of the world, yes, even from those most
recommended.
It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my
thoughts, that I have been examining and studying only myself; and if I
study anything else, it is in order promptly to apply it to myself, or rather
within myself. And it does not seem to me that I am making a mistake
if—as is done in the other sciences, which are incomparably less useful—
I impart what I have learned in this one, though I am hardly satisfied with
the progress I have made in it. There is no description equal in difficulty,
or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself. Even so one must
spruce up, even so one must present oneself in an orderly arrangement, if
one would go out in public. Now, I am constantly adorning myself, for I
am constantly describing myself.
Cuscom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it
out of hatred for the boasting that seems always to accompany it. Instead
of blowing the child’s nose, as we should, this amounts co pulling it off.

Flight from a fault will lead us into crime.

Horace

I find more harm than good in this remedy. But even if it were true
that it is presumptuous, no matter what the circumstances, to talk to
the public about oneself, I still must not, according to my general plan,
refrain from an action that openly displays this morbid quality, since it
is in me; nor may I conceal this fault, which I not only practice but pro­
fess. However, to say what I think about it, custom is wrong to condemn
wine because many get drunk on it. We can misuse only things which are
good. And I believe that the rule against speaking of oneself applies only
to the vulgar form of this failing. Such rules are bridles for calves, with
which neither the saints, whom we hear speaking so boldly about them­
selves, nor the philosophers, nor the theologians curb themselves. Nor
do I, though I am none of these. If they do not write about themselves
expressly, at least when the occasion leads them to it they do not hesitate
to put themselves prominently on display. What does Socrates treat of
more fully than himself? To what does he lead his disciples’ conversation
more often than to talk about themselves, not about the lesson of their
book, but about the essence and movement of their soul?

... z
From “Of Repentance”
Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-
formed, whom 1 should really make very different from what he is if I had
to fashion him over again. But now it is done.
Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change
and vary. The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in
constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of
Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability
itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering,
with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the
moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being; I portray pass­
ing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from
seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.
My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change,
not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and
changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contra­
dictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of
my subjects in different circumstances and aspects. So, all in all, I may
indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do
not contradict. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make
essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on
trial.
I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can
tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as
with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.
Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark;
I am the firsc to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as
a grammarian ora poet or a jurist. If the world complains that I speak too
much of myself, I complain chat it does not even think of itself.
But is it reasonable that I, so fond of privacy in actual life, should aspire
to publicity in the knowledge of me? Is it reasonable too that I should
set forth to the world, where fashioning and arc have so much credit and
authority, some crude and simple products of nature, and of a very feeble
nature at that? Is it not making a wall without stone, or something like
that, to construct books wichouc knowledge and wichout art? Musical
fancies are guided by arc, mine by chance.
At least I have one thing according to the rules: chat no man ever

3...
 treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject
I have undertaken; and that in this I am the most learned man alive.
Secondly, that no man ever penetrated more deeply into his material, or
plucked its limbs and consequences cleaner, or reached more accurately
and fully the goal he had set for his work. To accomplish it, I need only
bring it to fidelity; and that is in it, as sincere and pure as can be found. I
speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare
to do so a little more as I grow old, for it seems that custom allows old age
more freedom to prate and more indiscretion in talking about oneself. It
cannot happen here as I see it happening often, that the craftsman and his
work contradict each other: “Has a man whose conversation is so good
written such a stupid book?” or “Have such learned writings come from
a man whose conversation is so feeble?"
If a man is commonplace in conversation and rare in writing, that
means that his capacity is in the place from which he borrows it, and not
in himself. A learned man is not learned in all matters; but the capable
man is capable in all matters, even in ignorance.
In this case we go hand in hand and at the same pace, my book and I.
In other cases one may commend or blame the work apart from the work­
man; not so here; he who touches the one, touches the other.

From “Of Vanity"

I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow
one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other,
but with a sidelong glance. I have run my eyes over a certain dialogue
of Plato, a fantastic motley in two parts, the beginning part about love,
all the rest about rhetoric. The ancients do not fear these changes, and
with wonderful grace they let themselves thus be tossed in the wind, or
seem to. The titles of my chapters do not always embrace their matter;
often they only denote it by some sign, like those other titles, The Maid
of Andros, The Eunuch, or those other names, Sulla, Cicero, Torquatus. I
love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols. It is an art, as Plato says, light,
flighty, daemonic. There are works of Plucarch’s in which he forgets his
theme, in which the treatment of his subject is found only incidentally,
quite smothered in foreign matter. See his movements in “The Daemon
of Socrates.” Lord, what beauty there is in these lusty sallies and this varia­
tion, and more so the more casual and accidental they seem.
It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word

• ■ ■ 4
about it will always be found offin a corner, which will not fail to be suf­
ficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and
tumultuously. My style and my mind alike go roaming. “A man must be
a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid,” say the precepts
of our masters, and even more so their examples.
A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient
prose—and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse—shines throughout
with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy.
To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech.
The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a
frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, with­
out ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different
colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is
utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first
philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods.
I want the matter to make its own divisions. It shows well enough
where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, where it resumes,
without my interlacing it with words, with links and seams introduced
for the benefit of weak or heedless ears, and without writing glosses on
myself. Who is there that would not rather not be read than be read sleep­
ily or in passing? Nothing is so useful that it can be of value when taken
on the run [Seneca], If to take up books were to take them in, and if to
see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp
them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say
I am.
Since I cannot arrest the attention of the reader by weight, it is all to
the good if I chance co arrest it by my embroilment. “True, but he will
afterward repent of having wasted his time over it.” That may be, but still
he will have wasted his time over it. And then there are natures like that,
in whom understanding breeds disdain, who will think the better of me
because they will not know what I mean. They will conclude that my
meaning is profound from its obscurity, which, to speak in all earnest, I
hate very strongly, and I would avoid it if I could avoid myself. Aristotle
somewhere boasts of affecting it: blameworthy affectation!
Because such frequenc breaks into chapters as I used at the beginning
seemed to me to disrupt and dissolve attention before it was aroused,
making it disdain to settle and collect for so little, I have begun mak­
ing them longer, requiring fixed purpose and assigned leisure. In such an

5...
 occupation, if you will not give a man a single hour, you will not give him
anything. And you do nothing for a man for whom you do nothing except
while doing something else. Besides, perhaps I have some personal obliga­
tion to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly.
The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, 1580; translated by Donald Frame, 1958

... 6
s IR WILLIAM CORNWALLIS THE YOUNGER (c. 1579-1614)
served in Parliament, in the king’s privy chamber, and as a diplo­
matic courier for his father, who was ambassador to Spain. But he
lived so extravagantly that his wife and eight children were impoverished
when he died. His two collections of essays (1600,1601) appeared shortly
after Bacons first collection of 1597, yet differed markedly in their plain­
ness, directness, and sometimes personal stance, as in the opening of his
piece “Of Alehouses”: “I write this from an Alehouse, into which I am
driven by night.” His thoughts on the essay, excerpted below, are simi­
larly frank in declaring himself at the outset to be in effect the first genu­
ine essayist, because, unlike those who preceded him, his pieces were not
“strong, and able to endure the sharpest trial”—a clear allusion to the
root meaning of essay as a trial or attempt.

From “Of Essays and Books”

I hold neither Plutarch’s, nor none of these ancient short manner of writ­
ings, nor Montaigne’s, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed
essays, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure
the sharpest trial: but mine are essays, who am but newly bound prentice
to the inquisition of knowledge, and use these papers as a painter’s boy
a board, who is trying to bring his hand and his fancy acquainted. It is a
manner ofwriting well befitting undigested motions, or a head not know­
ing his strength like a circumspect runner trying for a start, or providence
that tastes before she buys: for it is easier to think well then, to do well;
and no trial to have handsome dapper conceits run invisibly in a brain,
but to put them out, and then look upon them: if they prove nothing but
words, yet they break not promise with the world; for they say but an
essay, like a scrivener trying his pen before he engrosses his work; nor to
speak plainly, are they more to blame then many other that promise more:
for the most that I have yet touched, have millions of words to the bring-

7...
 ing forth one reason, and when a reason is gotten, there is such borrowing
it one of another, that in a multitude of books, still that conceit, or some
issued out of that, appears so belabored, and worn, as in the end it is good
for nothing but for a proverb.
Essayes by Sir William Cornwallis, the Younger, 1600-1601, modernized by Patrick
Madden, http://essays.quotidiana.org

...8
F rancis bacon (1561-1626), the first English essayist, was a
prolific author who wrote a utopian novel entitled New Atlantis
(162.6), as well as substantial works on philosophic and scientific
methodology, contributing to the development of what is now known
as controlled research. Bacon was also trained in the law and rose to
become Lord Chancellor of England in 1618, before being stripped of
his office on charges of corruption in 1621, for the then-common prac­
tice of accepting gifts from legal petitioners. Bacon’s pithy essays, first
published in 1597 and expanded in 1612 and 1625, differ markedly from
Montaigne’s, not only in their brevity and rigorous focus but also in their
complete self-effacement and their notably pragmatic outlook. In the
following passage from The Proficience and Advancement of Learning
(1605), Bacon offers a detailed rationale for “writing in aphorisms,” as he
did in his essays, rather than “in method.”

From The Proficience and

Advancement ofiLearning
But the writing in aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the
writing in method1 doth not approach.
For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for
aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the
pith and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off; recit­
als of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off;
descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaincth nothing to fill the
aphorisms but some good quantity of observation; and therefore no man
can suffice, nor in reason will attempt, to write aphorisms, but he that is
sound and grounded. But in methods,

“Tantum series juncturaque pollet,

Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris,”2

9...
 as a man shall make a great show of an arc, which, if it were disjointed,
would come to little. Secondly, methods are more fit to win consent or
belief, but less fit co point to accion; for they carry a kind of demonstra­
tion in orb or circle, one part illuminating another, and therefore satisfy.
But particulars being dispersed do best agree with dispersed directions.
And lastly, aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men co
inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure
men, as if they were at furthest.

1. By“writingin method "Bacon means “a systematically organized and methodi­

cally interconnected mode of presentation.”
2. The numerous connections make such a strong case that everything in the
middle is taken for granted and accepted without question.

The Profcience and Advancement ofLearning, 1605

... to
J
oseph addison (1672.-1719) was known in his cime not only for
cofounding the Spectator with Richard Steele but also for his Latin
verse, his lives of the English poets, his translation of Virgil’s Geor­
gies, and his tragic play Cato, which celebrated individual liberty
over governmental tyranny and thus helped to inspire the American
Revolution. Though Addison is justly celebrated for creating the persona
of a spectator, as well as a cast of characters, to reflect on London society,
his Spectator pieces are too often classified as essays. For Addison him­
self thought of his pieces as comprising two distinctly different kinds of
writing, as he makes clear in a sustained contrast between “some which
are written with regularity and method” and “others that run out into
the Wildness of those Compositions, which go by the Name of Essays!"
Thus, in the following passage from the Spectator, he clearly conceives of
the essay as the antithesis of systematic discourse.

From the Spectator

—lucidus Ordo—
[Mechod gives light] —
Hor. Ars Poet. 41

Among my Daily-Papers which I bestow on the Public, there are some

which are written with Regularity and Method, and others that run out
into the Wildness of those Compositions which go by the Names of Es­
says. As for the first, I have the whole Scheme of the Discourse in my
Mind before I sec Pen to Paper. In the other kind of Writing, it is suf­
ficient chat I have several Thoughts on a Subject, withouc troubling my
self to range them in such order, that they may seem to grow out of one
another, and be disposed under the proper Heads. Seneca and Montaigne
are Patterns for Writing in this last kind, as Tully and Aristotle excel in
the ocher. When I read an Author of Genius who writes without Method,
I fancy myself in a Wood that abounds with a great many noble Objects,

11...
 rising among one another in the greatest Confusion and Disorder. When
I read a methodical Discourse, I am in a regular Plantation, and can place
my self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the Lines and
Walks that are struck from them. You may ramble in the one a whole Day
together, and every Moment discover something or other that is new to
you; but when you have done, you will have but a confused imperfect No­
tion of the Place: In the other, your Eye commands the whole Prospect,
and gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory.
Irregularity and want of Method are only supportable in Men ofgreat
Learning or Genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore
choose to throw down their Pearls in Heaps before the Reader, rather
than be at the Pains of stringing them.
Method is of advantage to a Work, both in respect to the Writer and
the Reader. In regard to the first, it is a great help to his Invention. When
a Man has planned his Discourse, he finds a great many Thoughts rising
out of every Head, that do not offer themselves upon the general Survey
of a Subject. His Thoughts are at the same time more intelligible, and
better discover their Drift and Meaning, when they are placed in their
proper Lights, and follow one another in a regular Series, than when they
are thrown together without Order and Connection. There is always an
Obscurity in Confusion, and the same Sentence that would have enlight­
ened the Reader in one part of a Discourse, perplexes him in another. For
the same reason likewise every Thought in a methodical Discourse shows
itself in its greatest Beauty, as the several Figures in a piece of Painting
receive new Grace from their Disposition in the Picture. The Advantages
ofa Reader from a methodical Discourse, are correspondent with those of
the Writer. He comprehends every thing easily, takes it in with Pleasure,
and retains it long.
Spectator, No. 476 (September 5,1711)

... 11
s amuel JOHNSON (1709-84) is widely regarded as the most dis­
tinguished man of letters in the history of English literature, given
the extraordinary range of his achievements in producing the Dic­
tionary ofthe English Language, The Lives ofthe Most Eminent English
Poets, and an annotated edition of Shakespeare, as well as poems, plays,
and periodical magazines such as the Idler and the Rambler. Johnsons
neoclassical bias led him, like Addison, to make a clear-cut contrast be­
tween the essay and systematic discourse—a contrast reflected in his
Dictionary definition of it as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular, in­
digested piece, not a regular, orderly performance.” That contrast is at
the heart of his extended reflections on the essay in the following excerpt
from the Rambler.

From the Rambler

As every scheme of life, so every form of writing, has its advantages and
inconveniences, though not mingled in the same proportions. The writer
of essays escapes many embarrassments to which a large work would have
exposed him; he seldom harasses his reason with long trains of conse­
quences, dims his eyes with the perusal of antiquated volumes, or bur­
thens his memory with great accumulations of preparatory knowledge. A
careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties
of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged
by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth
of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened into fruit.
The most frequent difficulty by which the authors of these petty com­
positions are distressed, arises from the perpetual demand of novelty and
change. The compiler of a system of science lays his invention at rest, and
employs only his judgment, the faculty exerted with least fatigue. Even
the relator of feigned adventures, when once the principal characters are
established, and the great events regularly connected, finds incidents and
episodes crowding upon his mind; every change opens new views, and

15...
 the latter part of the story grows without labour out of the former. But
he that attempts to entertain his reader with unconnected pieces, finds
the irksomeness of his task rather increased than lessened by every pro­
duction. The day calls afresh upon him for a new topick, and he is again
obliged to choose, without any principle to regulate his choice.
It is indeed true, that there is seldom any necessity of looking far, or in­
quiring long for a proper subject. Every diversity of arc or nature, every pub-
lick blessing or calamity, every domestick pain or gratification, every sally
of caprice, blunder of absurdity, or stratagem of affectation, may supply
matter to him whose only rule is to avoid uniformity. But it often hap­
pens, that the judgment is distracted with boundless multiplicity, the
imagination ranges from one design to another, and the hours pass imper­
ceptibly away, till the composition can be no longer delayed, and necessity
enforces the use of those thoughts which chen happen to be at hand. The
mind, rejoicing at deliverance on any terms from perplexity and suspense,
applies herselfvigorously to the work before her, collects embellishments
and illustrations, and sometimes finishes, with greac elegance and happi­
ness, what in a state of ease and leisure she never had begun.
Rambler, No. 184 (December 21,1751)

...14
 ILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) attended a Unitarian sem­

W inary, where he developed the free-thinking habit of mind

that distinguishes most of his writing. Though he first as­
pired to be a philosopher, expounding the “disinteredness of the human
mind,” tried his hand as a portrait painter, and then produced an En­
glish grammar book, Hazlitt had his first taste of success as a journalist,
turning out spirited commentary on a wide range of aesthetic, literary,
and political topics. Writing for a variety of newspapers and magazines,
Hazlitt developed the outspoken, often abrasive voice that distinguishes
most of his collected lectures and essays, particularly his pieces in Table
Talk (1811-11). Lamb characterized Hazlitt’s work as embodying “the
style of a discontented man ... which gives force and life to his writing.”
But Hazlitt’s remarks about Montaigne, in the following excerpt from
his piece on che periodical essayists, might also be applied to Hazlitt
himself, for he always “had the courage to say as an author what he felt
as a man.”

From “On the Periodical Essayists”

I now come to speak of that sort of writing which has been so successfully
cultivated in this country by our periodical Essayists, and which consists
in applying the talents and resources of the mind to all that mixed mass of
human affairs, which, though not included under the head of any regular
art, science, or profession, falls under the cognizance of the writer, and
comes home to the business and bosoms of men.

Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli,

Quotidiana
[Whate er men do are the sum of my report.]

is the general motto of this department of literature. It does not treat of

minerals or fossils, of the virtues of plants, or the influence of planets;

15...
 it does not meddle with forms of belief, or systems of philosophy, nor
launch into the world of spiritual existences; but it makes familiar with
the world of men and women, records their actions, assigns their motives,
exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their singular and
endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies,
“holds the mirror up to nature, and shews the very age and body of the
time its form and pressure;” takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words,
thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays
the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlight­
ened Spectators of its many-coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to
become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to per­
form a part. “The act and practice part of life is thus made the mistress
of our theorique.” It is the best and most natural course of study. It is in
morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy, as
opposed to the dogmatical method. It does not deal in sweeping clauses
of proscription and anathema, but in nice distinctions and liberal con­
structions. It makes up its general accounts from details, its few theories
from many facts. It does not try to prove all black or all white as it wishes,
but lays on the intermediate colors, (and most of them not unpleasing
ones,) as it finds them blended with “the web of our life, which is of a
mingled yarn, good and ill together.” It inquires what human life is and
has been, to shew what it ought to be. It follows it into courts and camps,
into town and country, into rustic sports or learned disputations, into
the various shades of prejudice or ignorance, of refinement or barbarism,
into its private haunts or public pageants, into its weaknesses and little­
nesses, its professions and its practices—before it pretends to distinguish
right from wrong, or one thing from another. How, indeed, should it do
so otherwise?

Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,

Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.

[Who says, more plainly and better than Chrysippus and Cran-
tor, what is beautiful, what base, what useful, what the opposite of
these.—Horace, Epist. I. z. 4.]

The writers I speak of are, if not moral philosophers, moral historians,

and thats better: or if they are both, they found the one character upon
the other; their premises precede their conclusions; and we put faith in
their testimony, for we know that it is true.

...16
 Montaigne was the first person who in his Essays led the way to this
kind of writing among the moderns. The great merit of Montaigne then
was, that he may be said to have been the first who had the courage to
say as an author what he felt as a man. And as courage is generally the
effect of conscious strength, he was probably led to do so by the richness,
truth, and force of his own observations on books and men. He was, in
the truest sense, a man of original mind, that is, he had the power of
looking at things for himself, or as they really were, instead of blindly
trusting to, and fondly repeating what others told him that they were.
He got rid of the go-cart of prejudice and affectation, with the learned
lumber that follows at their heels, because he could do without them. In
taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or mor­
alist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed
through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force, that he thought any
ways worth communicating. He did not, in the abstract character of an
author, undertake to say all that could be said upon a subject, but what in
his capacity as an inquirer after truth he happened to know about it. He
was neither a pedant nor a bigot. He neither supposed that he was bound
to know all things, nor that all things were bound to conform to what he
had fancied or would have them to be. In treating of men and manners, he
spoke of them as he found them, not according to preconceived notions
and abstract dogmas; and he began by teaching us what he himself was.
In criticizing books he did not compare them with rules and systems, but
told us what he saw to like or dislike in them. He did not take his stan­
dard of excellence “according to an exact scale” of Aristotle, or fall out
with a work that was good for any thing, because “not one of the angles at
the four corners was a right one.” He was, in a word, the first author who
was not a book-maker, and who wrote not to make converts of others to
established creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own mind of the truth
of things. In this respect we know not which to be most charmed with,
the author or the man. There is an inexpressible frankness and sincerity,
as well as power, in what he writes. There is no attempt at imposition or
concealment, no juggling tricks or solemn mouthing, no labored attempts
at proving himself always in the right, and everybody else in the wrong;
he says what is uppermost, lays open what floats at the top or the bottom
of his mind, and deserves Pope’s character of him, where he professes to

pour out all as plain

As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne.

17...
 He does not converse with us like a pedagogue with his pupil, whom he
wishes to make as great a blockhead as himself, but like a philosopher and
friend who has passed through life with thought and observation, and
is willing to enable others to pass through it with pleasure and profit. A
writer of this stamp, I confess, appears to me as much superior to a com-
moil bookworm, as a library of real books is superior to a mere book-case,
painted and lettered on the outside with the names of celebrated works.
As he was the first to attempt this new way of writing, so the same strong
natural impulse which prompted the undertaking, carried him to the end
of his career. The same force and honesty of mind which urged him to
throw off the shackles ofcustom and prejudice, would enable him to com­
plete his triumph over them. He has left little for his successors to achieve
in the way of just and original speculation on human life. Nearly all the
thinking of the two last centuries of that kind which the French denomi­
nate morale observatrice, is to be found in Montaigne’s Essays: there is the
germ, at least, and generally much more. He sowed the seed and cleared
away the rubbish, even where others have reaped the fruit, or cultivated
and decorated the soil to a greater degree of nicety and perfection....
The ice being thus thawed, and the barrier that kept authors at a dis­
tance from common sense and feeling broken through, the transition was
not difficult from Montaigne and his imitators, to our Periodical Essay­
ists. These last applied the same unrestrained expression of their thoughts
to the more immediate and passing scenes of life, to temporary and local
matters; and in order to discharge the invidious office of Censor Morum
more freely, and with less responsibility, assumed some fictitious and hu­
morous disguise, which, however, in a great degree corresponded to their
own peculiar habits and character. By thus concealing their own name
and person under the title of the Tatler, Spectator, See. they were enabled
to inform us more fully of what was passing in the world, while the dra­
matic contrast and ironical point of view to which the whole is subjected,
added a greater liveliness and piquancy to the descriptions. The philoso­
pher and wit here commences news-monger, makes himself master of “the
perfect spy o’ tie time,” and from his various walks and turns through life,
brings home little curious specimens of the humors, opinions, and man-
ners of his contemporaries, as the botanist brings home different pla nts
and weeds, or the mineralogist different shells and fossils, to illustrate
their several theories, and be useful to mankind.

First published in the Round Table, No. io (May $, 1815)

...18
c harles LAMB (1775-1834) spent most ofhis working life as a
clerk in the accounting office of the British East India Company,
and he devoted most of his private life to the care of his elder
sister Mary, after she stabbed their mother to death in a fit of insanity.
Despite such burdens and mental problems ofhis own, Lamb found time
to write essays, poems, plays, and literary criticism on Shakespeare, as
well as to collaborate with his sister on a popular childrens book of tales
from Shakespeare. But not until he adopted the complex persona of Elia
(182.1—2.5), modeled to some extent on his own whimsical, wistful, witty
temperament, did Lamb come into his own as an essayist. Lamb’s belief
in the importance of a distinctive persona, in the “assumption of a char­
acter,” is clearly reflected in the following excerpt from his unpublished
review of William Hazlitt’s Table Talk.

From an Unpublished Review

of Hazlitt’s Table Talk
A series of Miscellaneous Essays, however well executed in the parts, if
it have not some pervading character to give a unity to it, is ordinarily
as tormenting to get through as a set of aphorisms, or a jest-book.—The
fathers of Essay writing in ancient and modern times—Plutarch in a mea­
sure, and Montaigne without mercy or measure—imparted their own
personal peculiarities to their themes. By this balm are they preserved.
The Author of the Rambler in a less direct way has attained the same ef­
fect. Without professing egotism, his work is as essentially egotistical as
theirs. He deals ouc opinion, which he would have you cake for argument;
and is perpetually obcruding his own particular views of life for universal
truths. This is the charm which binds us to his writing, and not any steady
conviction we have of the solidity ofhis thinking. Possibly some of those
Papers, which are generally understood to be failures in the Rambler—its
ponderous levities for instance, and unwieldy efforts at being sprightly—

19...
 may detract less from the general effect, than if something better in
kind, but less in keeping, had been substituted in place of them. If the
author had taken his friend Goldsmith into partnership, and they had
furnished their quotas for alternate days, the world had been gainer by
the arrangement, but what a heterogeneous mass the work itself would
have presented!
Another class of Essayists, equally impressed with the advantages of
this sort of appeal to the reader, but more dextrous at shifting off the
invidiousness of a perpetual self-reference, substituted for themselves
an ideal character; which left them a still fuller licence in the delivery
of their peculiar humours and opinions, under the masqued battery of
a fictitious appellation. Truths, which the world would have startled at
from the lips of the gay Captain Steele, it readily accepted from the pen
of old Isaac Bickerstaff. But the breed of the Bickerstafts, as it began, so
alas! it expired with him. It shewed indeed a few feeble sparks of revival
in Nestor Ironside, but soon went out. Addison had stepped in with his
wit, his criticism, his morality—the cold generalities which extinguish
humour—and the Spectator, and its Successor, were little more than
bundles of Essays (valuable indeed, and elegant reading above our praise)
but hanging together with very slender principles of bond or union. In
fact we use the word Spectator, and mean a Book. At mention of the
Tatler we sigh, and think of Isaac Bickerstaff. Sir Roger de Coverly, Will
Wimble, Will Honeycomb, live for ever in memory—but who is their
silent Friend?—Except that he never opens his mouth, we know noth­
ing about him. He writes finely upon all subjects—but himself. He sets
every thing in a proper light—but we do not see through his spectacles.
He colours norhing with his own hues. The Lucubrations come as from
an old man, an old bachelor to boot, and a humourist. The Spectator too,
we are told, is all this. But a young man, a young married man moreover,
or any description of man, or woman, with no sort of character beyond
general shrewdness, and a power of observation, might have strung to­
gether all that discordant assemblage of Papers, which call the Spectator
father. They describe indeed with the utmost felicity all ages & condi­
tions of men, but they themselves smack of no peculiar age or condition.
He writes, we are told, because he cannot bring himself to speak, but
why he cannot bring himself to speak is the riddle. He is used to good
company. Why he should conceal his name, while he lavishly proclaims
that of his companions, is equally a secret. Was it to remove him still fur­
ther from any possibility of our sympathies?—or wherein, we would be

... 2.0
informed, lurks the mystery of his short chin?—As a visitor at the Club (a
sort of umbra) he might have shewn to advantage among those short but
masterly sketches—but the mass of matter, spread through eight volumes,
is really somewhat too miscellaneous and diffuse, to hang together for
identity upon such a shade, such a tenuity!
Since the days of the Spectator and Guardian, Essayists, who have ap­
peared under a fictitious appellation, have for the most part contented
themselves with a brief description of their character and story in the
opening Paper; after which they dismiss the Phantom of an Editor, and
let the work shift for itself, as wisely and wittily as it is able, unsupported
by any characteristic pretences, or individual colouring. — In one particu­
lar indeed the followers of Addison were long and grievously misled. For
many years after the publication of his celebrated “Vision of Mirza,” no
book of Essays was thought complete without a Vision. It set the world
dreaming. Take up any one of the volumes of this description, published
in the last century;—you will possibly alight upon two or three succes­
sive papers, depicting, with more or less gravity, sober views of life as it is
—when—pop—you come upon a Vision, which you trembled at before­
hand from a glimpse you caught at certain abstractions in Capitals, Fame,
Riches, Long Life, Loss of Friends, Punishment by Exile—a set of de­
nominations part simple, part compounded—existing in single, double,
and triple hypostases.—You cannot think on their fantastic essences
without giddiness, or describe them short of a solecism.—These authors
seem not to have been content to entertain you with their day-light fan­
cies, but you must share their vacant slumbers & common-place reveries.
The humour, thank Heaven, is pretty well past. These Visions, any thing
but visionary—(for who ever dreamt of Fame, but by metaphor, some
mad Orientalist perhaps excepted?)—so tamely extravagant, so gothically
classical—these inspirations by downright malice aforethoughc—these
heartless, bloodless literalities—these “thin consistencies,” dependent for
their personality upon Great Letters—for write them small, and the ten­
der essences fade into abstractions—have at length happily melted away
before the progress of good sense; or the absurdity has worn itself out.
We might else have still to lament, that the purer taste of their inventor
should have so often wandered aside into these caprices; or to wish, if
he had chosen to indulge in an imitation of Eastern extravagance, that
he had confined himself to that least obnoxious specimen of his skill, the
Allegory of Mirza.
The Author before us is, in this respect at least, no visionary. He talks

ii...
 CO you in broad day-light. He comes in no imaginary character. He is
of the class of Essayists first mentioned. He attracts, or repels, by strong
realities of individual observation, humour, and feeling.
The title, which Mr Hazlitt has chosen, is characteristic enough of
his Essays. The tone of them is uniformly conversational; and they are
not the less entertaining, that they resemble occasionally the talk of a very
clever person, when he begins to be animated in a convivial party. You
fancy that a disputant is always present, and feel a disposition to take up
the cudgels yourself [o]n behalf of the other side of the question. Table-
Talk is not calculated for cold or squeamish readers. The average thinker
will find his common notions a little too roughly disturbed. He must
brace up his ears to the reception of some novelties. Strong traits of char­
acter stand out in the work; and it is not so much a series of well argued
treatises, as a bold confession, or exposition, of Mr Hazlitt’s own ways of
feeling upon the subjects treated of. It is in fact a piece of Autobiography;
and, in our minds, a vigorous & well-executed one. The Writer almost
every where adopts the style of a discontented man. This assumption of a
character, if it be not truly (as we are inclined to believe) his own, is that
which gives force & life to his writing.
First printed in Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1980

... zz
 1 alph Waldo Emerson (1803-81), arguably America’s greatest
hy essayist, began his career as a schoolmaster and Unitarian minis-
JL V.ter. He left the ministry in 1831, a year after his young wife’s
death, and remade himself as a Transcendentalist, poet, and lecturer.
Emerson’s essays, which grew out of his journals and lectures, were
marked by the aphoristic style displayed in the selections from those
journals printed below. In these excerpts one hears him working to re­
solve the contradictions he felt between his own lofty ambitions and his
commitment to democratic egalitarianism and familiar style. For guid­
ance he turns again and again to Montaigne, who was for him a “repre­
sentative man,” representative of the skepticism that lay at the center of
essay writing.

From “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”

Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote “Que scais
je?” under it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear
him say, “You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,
—I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states and churches and
revenues and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I
see it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,—my
house and barns; my father, my wife and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I prefer, and
a hundred straws just as ridiculous,—than I will write, with a fine crow-
quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I
am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that
do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not constrain me, and plain
topics where I do not need to strain myself and pump my brains, the most
suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One cannot
be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off
into some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and play the
philosopher, instead of ballasting, the best I can, this dancing balloon?

13...
 So, at least, I live within compass, keep myself ready for action, and can
shoot the gulf at last with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a
life, the blame is not mine; let it lie at fates and nature’s door.
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating every thing without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight; but,
one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is never
dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all
that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of con­
versation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed;
they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels
in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any
unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For
blacksmiths and teamsters do noc trip in cheir speech; it is a shower of
bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves and begin again at
every half sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and
swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks with shrewd­
ness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive de­
gree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no
superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or
annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tasces every moment of the
day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we
pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely
mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. His
writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting and
keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception,—in his love
for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style
rises to passion.
Representative Men: Seven Lectures, 1850

...Z4
 A LEXANDER SMITH (1850-67), chough born co Scottish parents
who could not afford to give him a college education, produced
JL JL a collection of poetry entitled Life Drama and Other Poems
(1853) that was initially so well received it went chrough several editions
and led to his appointment as secretary of Edinburgh University. Sub­
sequently, however, Smith’s predilection for poetic drama, centering on
che inner world of the mind, was derisively referred to as “spasmodic,” in
mockery of its bombastic self-absorption. After a few other such works,
he turned out a collection of essays called Dreamthorp (1863) and A Sum­
mer in Skye( 1865), an idealized evocation of life on a Hebridean isle that
remains his most successful work. Given the self-absorption of his po-
ecry, ic is not entirely surprising that in the following excerpt from his
piece on the essay, Smith celebrates the essayist’s “egotism, this perpetual
reference to self, in which the charm of che essayist resides.”

From “On the Writing of Essays”

The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded
by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood,
and the essay, from the first sentence co the last, grows around it as the
cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered liber­
tine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability co discern che
infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding medicative spirit,
are all that che essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in “As
You Like Ic,” had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not the essay­
ist’s ducy to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, co
cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things.
Incidentally he may do something in thac way, just as the poet may, but
it is noc his duty, and should not be expected of him. Skylarks are pri­
marily created co sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in
pies and brought to cable; they were born to make music, although they
may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger. The essayist is a kind

15...
 of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, he might be un-
able to render a better apology for his existence than a flower might. The
essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature. The essayist
wears a lance, but he cares more for the sharpness of its point than for
the pennon that flutters on it, than for the banner of the captain under
whom he serves. He plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick s skull,
and he reads the morals—strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging
—which are folded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is
deficient in a sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble
from the ground, and puts it aside more carefully chan any gem; and on
a nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily
brocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysian fields
through portals the most shabby and commonplace.
The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now
in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, let­
ting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he ex­
tracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to discover
the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most un­
promising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not
beholden to their titles. Let him cake up the most trivial subject, and ic
will lead him away to the great questions over which che serious imagina­
tion loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as
the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleat­
ing, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come
to in che city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into
the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost
in a sense of strangeness and solicariness. The world is to the meditative
man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has
no lack of subject-matter. He has the day chat is passing over his head;
and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the worlds six thousand years to de­
pasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I
am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is an essay
in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only
be che world’s amanuensis. The proverbial expression which lasc evening
the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, the light of che
setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen pages. The coffin
of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly along, is as good a
subject as the funeral procession ofan emperor. Craped drum and banner
add nothing co death; penury and disrespecc take nothing away. Incon-

...z6
tinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearse with sable nodding
plumes. Two rustic lovers, whispering between the darkening hedges, is as
potent to project my mind into the tender passion as if I had seen Romeo
touch the cheek ofJuliet in the moon-light garden. Seeing a curly-headed
child asleep in the sunshine before a cottage door is sufficient excuse for a
discourse on childhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep
in the lap of Eve with Adam looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven
without raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. Dawn
cannot pour its white light on my village without starting from their dim
lair a hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in
the west without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime. When
spring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay
on hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols of the
birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion, were
it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the woods.
Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced words have but
a shallow meaning.
The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world
which surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism
is not unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency,
of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home. If a man dis­
courses continually of his wines, his plate, his titled acquaintances, the
number and quality of his horses, his men-servants and maid-servants,
he must discourse very skilfully indeed if he escapes being called a cox­
comb. If a man speaks of death—tells you that the idea of it continu­
ally haunts him, that he has the most insatiable curiosity as to death and
dying, that his thought mines in churchyards like a “demon-mole”—no
one is specially offended, and that this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing
likely to be said of him. Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive,
that exalts trifles and takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in
matters of equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because
it runs counter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which
rises no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind—it crosses
no man’s path, it disturbs no man’s amourpropre. You may offend a man if
you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he. You offend
no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. The king, in his
crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to claim that relation­
ship with him. To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.
The speaking about one’s self is not necessarily offensive. A modest,

17...
 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.
Certainly, there is no subject with which he is better acquainted, and on
which he has a better title to be heard. And it is this egotism, this per­
petual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. Ifa man
is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you
his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them. He
has nothing to conceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets
him enter who will. You like to walk round peculiar or important men
as you like to walk round a building, to view it from different points, and
in different lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you
obtain a full picture. You are made his contemporary and familiar friend.
You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made heir of his
whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the whole nature
of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii, looking into the in­
terior of stately mansions, reading the satirical scribblings on the walls.
And the essayist’s habit of not only giving you his thoughts, but telling
you how he came by them, is interesting, because it shows you by what
alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted into the finer.
Dreamthorp: A Book ofEssays Written in the Country, 1865

...18
 ~JT Walter pater (1839-94) has inspired many an aesthece,
\ X / epicure, and hedonist with his assertion that “experience
▼ T itself, is the end,” and therefore “To burn always with this
hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” Despite
those bold maxims from the conclusion of his Studies in the History of
the Renaissance (1873), Pater himselfwas evidently a reclusive scholar and
tucor, devoted at first to his studies in art and literature, and then to
an ascetic balancing of his often misunderstood aesthetic philosophy in
Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Imaginary Portraits (1887). While Pa­
cer’s devotion to beauty is often manifest in the elaborate prose scyle of
his essays, his allegiance to more ascetic values can be seen in the follow­
ing excerpt from Plato and Platonism (1893), where he explicitly traces
the origins of the essay to the truth-seeking dialectic of the Platonic
dialogues.

From “Dialectic”
Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual condi­
tions of different ages, prevailed-three distinct literary methods, in the
presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form earliest, when
philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often
turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Flepi (piiaeosc;, “Concerning Na-
cure”; according to the manner of Pythagoras, “his golden verses," of Par­
menides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the
finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of thinking.
It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native intu­
ition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle in
one’s ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the
perfected philosophic temper being situate midway between those op­
posites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely
the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich
and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious

19...
 in its sense of their ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate foi m of our
modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really
the invention of the relative, or “modern ’ spirit, in the Renaissance of the
sixteenth century.
The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three
methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the per­
sonal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary
form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially
different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth. If oracular
verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle of enthusiastic intu­
itions; if the treatise, with its ambitious array of premise and conclusion,
is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay,
as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly
in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter,
inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing—of the essay, in its seem­
ingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities—is indica­
tive of Montaigne’s peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the
commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary
form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realis­
able not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particu­
lar personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random
lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension
ofjudgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking:
Qtte scais-je? Who knows?—in the very spirit of that old Socratic conten­
tion, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.
And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue,
in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially an essay—an
essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of philosophic poetry,
the prose-poem of Heraclitus. There have been effective writers of dia­
logue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley, Landor, with whom, however,
that literary form has had no strictly constitutional propriety to the kind
of matter it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) structurally to a
many-sided but hesitant consciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley,
its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions,
about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer’s
own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the
dialogue—that peculiar modification of the essay—anything less than
essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism
of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato’s Dialogues, in fact, reflect,

...30
they refine upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in
which, by preference to anything like formal lecturing (the lecture being,
so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others.
We see him in those Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places,
the open houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from
others; seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help
of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own
native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully registering
just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding.
The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of
what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of
conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself. The essence
of that method, of “dialectic” in all its forms, as its very name denotes,
is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of question and answer,
primarily with one’s self.
Plato and Platonism, 1893

31...
 Agnes repplier (1855-1950) was a political conservative and
l\ devout Catholic whose pointed, bookish essays were saved from
dogmatism by a self-deprecating sense of humor (she poked fun,
for instance, at her own spinsterhood and weakness for drink). In her
“happy half century” as an essayist, she produced fifteen volumes of es­
says on subjects ranging from dogs and ale to Christianity and war. She
was a classicist and defender of literary traditions who fretted about the
effects of modernization and war on the traditional essay. As early as
1894 she engaged in the debates over the “passing of the essay,” arguing
in the piece that follows that even though the essay had been “warned
that it is not in accord with the spirit of the age, and that its day is on the
wane,” it would survive.

From “The Passing of the Essay”

When I am told, among other prophetic items, that the “light essay” is
passing rapidly away, and that, in view of its approaching death-bed, it
cannot be safely recommended as “a good opening for enterprise,” I am
fain, before acquiescing gloomily in such a decree, to take heart of grace,
and look a little around me. It is discouraging, doubtless, for the essayisc
to be suddenly informed that his work is in articulo mortis. He feels as
a carpenter might feel were he told that chairs and doors and tables are
going out of fashion, and that he had better turn his attention to mining,
engineering, or a new food for infants. Perhaps he endeavors to explain
that a great many chairs were sold in the past week, that they are not
without utility, and that they seem to him as much in favor as ever. Such
feeble arguments meet with no response. Furniture, he is assured,—on
the authority of the speaker,—is distinctly out of date. The spirit of
the time calls for something different, and the “best business talent”—
delightful phrase, and equally applicable to a window-frame or an epic
—is moving in another direction. This is what Mr. Lowell used to call
the conclusive style of judgment, “which consists simply in belonging to

...32
the other parish;” but parish boundaries are the same convincing things
now that they were forty years ago.
Is the essay, then, in such immediate and distressing danger? Is it un­
written, unpublished, or unread? Just ten years have passed since a well-
printed little book was offered carelessly to the great English public. It
was anonymous. It was hampered by a Latin title which attracted the few
and repelled the many. It contained seven of the very lightest essays that
ever glided into print. It grappled with no problems, social or spiritual; it
touched but one of the vital issues of the day. It was not serious, and it was
not written with any very definite view, save to give entertainment and
pleasure to its readers. By all the laws of modern mentors, it should have
been consigned to speedy and merited oblivion. Yet what happened? I
chanced to see that book within a few months of its publication, and sent
at once to London for a copy, thinking to easily secure a first edition. I
received a fourth, and, with it, the comforting assurance chat the first was
already commanding a heavy premium. In another week the American
reprints of “Obiter Dicta” lay on all the book counters of our land. The
author’s name was given co che world. A second volume of essays followed
the first; a third, the second; a fourth, che third. The last are so exceed­
ingly light as co be little more than brief notices and reviews. All have sold
well, and Mr. Birrell has established—surely with no great effort—his
reputation as a man of letters. Editors of magazines are glad to print his
work; readers of magazines are glad to see it; newspapers are delighted
when they have any personal gossip about the author co tell a curious
world. This is what “the best business talent” must call success, for these
are the tests by which it is accustomed to judge. The light essay has a great
deal of hardihood to flaunt and flourish in this shameless manner, when
it has been severely warned that it is not in accord with the spirit of the
age, and that its day is on the wane.
It is curious, too, to see how new and charming editions of “Virgini-
bus Puerisque” meet with a ready sale. Mr. Stevenson has done better
work chan in this volume of scattered papers, which are more suggestive
than satisfactory; yet there are always readers ready to exult over the val­
orous “Admirals,” or dream away a glad half-hour to the seductive music
of “Pan’s Pipes.” Mr. Lang’s “Essays in Little” and “Letters to Dead Au­
thors” have reached thousands of people who have never read his admi­
rable translations from the Greek. Mr. Pater’s essays—which, however,
are not light—are far better known chan his beautiful “Marius che Epi­
curean.” Lamb’s “Elia” is more widely read than are his letters, though it

35 - • •
 would seem a heart-breaking matter to choose between them. Hazlitts
essays are still rich mines of pleasure, as well as fine correctives for much
modern nonsense. The first series of Mr. Arnolds “Essays in Criticism”
remains his most popular book, and the one which has done more than
all the rest to show the great half-educated public what is meant by dis­
tinction of mind. Indeed, there never was a day when by-roads to culture
were more diligently sought for than now by people disinclined for long
travel or much toil, and the essay is the smoothest little path which runs
in that direction. It offers no instruction, save through the medium of en­
joyment, and one saunters lazily along with a charming unconsciousness
of effort. Great results are not to be gained in this fashion, but it should
sometimes be play-hour for us all. Moreover, there are still readers keenly
alive to the pleasure which literary art can give; and the essayists, from
Addison down to Mr. Arnold and Mr. Pater, have recognized the value
of form, the powerful and persuasive eloquence of style. Consequently, an
appreciation of the essay is the natural result of reading it. Like virtue, it is
its own reward. “Culture,” says Mr. Addington Symonds, “makes a man
to be something. It does not teach him to create anything.” Most of us in
this busy world are far more interested in what we can learn to do than
in what we can hope to become; but it may be that those who content
themselves with strengthening their own faculties, and broadening their
own sympathies for all that is finest and best, are of greater service to their
tired and downcast neighbors than are the unwearied toilers who urge us
so relentlessly to the field.
A few critics of an especially judicial turn are wont to assure us now
and then that the essay ended with Emerson, or with Sainte-Beuve, or
with Addison, or with Montaigne,—a more remote date than this being
inaccessible, unless, like Eve in the old riddle, it died before it was born.
Montaigne is commonly selected as the idol of this exclusive worship. “I
don’t care for any essayist later than Montaigne.” It has a classic sound,
and the same air of intellectual discrimination as another very popular
remark: “I don’t read any modern novelist, except George Meredith.”
Hearing these verdicts, one is tempted to say, with Marianne Dashwood,
“This is admiration of a very particular kind.” To minds of a more com-
monplace order, it would seem that a love for Montaigne should lead
insensibly to an appreciation of Sainte-Beuve; that an appreciation of
Sainte-Beuve awakens in turn a sympathy for Mr. Matthew Arnold; that
a sympathy for Mr. Arnold paves the way to a keen enjoyment of Mr.
Emerson or Mr. Pater. It is a linked chain, and, though all parts are not of

■ ■•54
equal strength and beauty, all are of service to the whole. “Let neither the
peculiar quality of anything nor its value escape thee,” counsels Marcus
Aurelius; and ifwe seek our profit wherever it may be found, we insensibly
acquire that which is needful for our growth. Under any circumstances,
it is seldom wise to confuse the preferences or prejudices of a portion of
mankind with the irresistible progress of the ages. Rhymes may go, but
they are with us still. Romantic fiction may be submerged, but at present
it is well above water. The essay may die, but just now it possesses a lively
and encouraging vitality. Whether we regard it as a means of culture or as
a field for the “best business talent,” we are fain to remark, in the words of
Sancho Panza, “This youth, considering his weak state, hath left in him
an amazing power of speech.”
First published in Lippincott’s Magazine (June 1894)

35...
 ILLIAM DEAN howells (1837-1910) grew up in Ohio,

W the son of a newspaper editor. As a young man he wrote

a campaign biography of Lincoln that earned him an ap­
pointment as United States Consul to Venice and the attention of James
Russell Lowell, founding editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Picked by Low­
ell as his successor, Howells served as an editor of the Atlantic and then
Harpers for four decades, writing in his editor’s columns about political
and literary matters. As a novelist, poet, and essayist, he was especially
concerned with issues of justice and the role of the writer in the new
world of mass culture. In the piece below he discusses the effects of com­
mercialism on the essay, worrying that the essay had begun “to confuse
itself with the article.”

From “Editor’s Easy Chair”

The old-fashioned essay, as we had it in Montaigne, and almost as we
had it in Bacon, obeyed a law as subjective as that of the gypsy music
which the Hungarian bands made so popular with us ten or fifteen years
ago. Wandering airs of thought strayed through it, owning no allegiance
stricter than that which bound the wild chords to a central motive. Often
there was apparently no central motive in the essay; it seemed to begin,
where it would, and end where it liked. The author was bound to give it
a name, but it did not hold him bound otherwise. It could not very well
take for title a first line, or part of a first line, like those poems, now rarely
written, which opened with some such phrase as, When those bright eyes;
or, Had I the wings; or, Ifyon sweet star. If it could, that would have been
the right way of naming most of the essays which have loitered down to
us from antiquity, as well as those which help to date the revival of polite
learning. Such a custom would have befitted nearly all the papers in the
Spectator and the Tatler and the Rambler, and the other periodicals illus­
trating the heyday of the English essay. These, indeed, preserved an essen­
tial liberty by setting out from no subject more severely ascertained than

...36
that which lurked in some quotation from the classics, and unless there
was an allegory or an apologue in hand, gadded about at their pleasure,
and stopped as far from it as they chose. That gave them their charm, and
kept them lyrical, far from the dread perhaps of turning out a sermon,
when the only duty they had was to turn out a song.
Just how or why the essay should have departed from this elder ideal,
and begun to have a conscience about having a beginning, a middle and
an ending, like a drama, or a firstly, secondly, and thirdly, like a homily, it
would not be easy to say, though we feel pretty sure that it was not from
any occasion of Charles Lamb’s, or Leigh Hunt’s, or William Hazlitt’s, or
their compeers, in bearing down to our day the graceful tradition which
seems now to have been lost. We suspect that the change may have hap­
pened through the greater length to which the essay has run in modern
times. You may sing a song for a certain period, but if you keep on you
have an opera, which you are bound to give obvious form. At any rate, the
moment came when the essay began to confuse itself with the article, and
to assume an obligation of constancy to premises and conclusions, with
the effect of so depraving the general taste that the article is now desired
more and more, and the essay less and less. It is doubtful, the corruption
has gone so far, whether there is enough of the lyrical sense left in the
reader to appreciate the right essay, whether the right essay would now
be suffered; whether if any writer indulged its wilding nature, he would
not be suspected of an inability to cultivate the growths that perceptibly
nourish, not to say fatten, the intellect. We have forgotten, in this matter,
that there are senses to which errant odors and flying flavors minister, as
grosser succulences satisfy hunger. There is a lyrical sense, as well as a dra­
matic, an epical, an ethical sense, and it was that which the old-fashioned
essay delighted.
First published in Harper’s Magazine (October 1901)

37...
 J
ose ortega y gasset (1883-1955), a Spanish philosopher and ed­
ucator, wrote on a wide range of subjects, from aesthetics to politics
to metaphysics. He served as a professor at the University of Madrid
from 1910 to 1936, when the Spanish civil war forced him to live
and teach abroad before returning to Spain after World War II. Ortega
is widely known for his cautionary idea in The Revolt of the Masses
(1919) that democracy can easily lead to the tyranny of an amoral major­
ity, “mass man”; and for his rejection of an ego-centered philosophy (“I
think therefore I am”) which he countered with his notable belief that
“I am myself and my circumstance,” and that life therefore embodies an
inescapable tension between freedom and fate. Most of Ortegas ideas
are contained in collections of essays and lectures that are marked by the
clarity of his following reflections on the essay as “science, minus the ex­
plicit proof.”

From “To the Reader”

These Meditations, free from erudition—even in the best sense of the
word—are propelled by philosophical desires. Nevertheless I would be
grateful if the reader did not expect too much from them. They are not
philosophy, which is a science. They are simply essays. The essay is sci­
ence, minus the explicit proof. For the writer it is a point of intellectual
honor not to write anything susceptible of proof without possessing the
latter beforehand. But it is permissible for him to eliminate from his work
all apodictic appearance, leaving the verifications merely indicated in el­
lipse, so that he who needs them may find them and so that they do not
hinder, on the other hand, the communication of the inner warmth with
which the thoughts were conceived. Even books of an exclusively scien­
tific intention are beginning to be written in a less didactic style with
fewer labor-saving aids, with footnotes omitted as far as possible and the
rigid mechanical apparatus of proof dissolved in a more organic, flowing,
and personal discourse.

...38
 With greater reason this should be done in essays of this kind, in
which, although for the author the doctrines are scientific convictions,
he does not expect the reader to accept them as truths. I only offer modi
res considerandi, possible new ways of looking at things. I invite the reader
to test them for himself, to see if, in fact, they provide fertile visions. He,
then, by virtue of his intimate and sincere experience, will test their truth
or error.
It is my intention that these ideas serve a function much less serious
than a scientific one: chey will not stubbornly insist on being adopted by
others, but merely wish to awaken in kindred minds kindred thoughts,
even though they be antagonistic. They are only a pretext and an appeal
for a wide ideological collaboration on national themes, and nothing else.
Meditations on Quixote, 1914, reprinted by W. W. Norton, 1961

39...
 A [rthur] c[hristopher] BENSON (1861-1915),chough report-
cdly afflicted with a manic-depressive condition, not only served
JL V. as master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, but also produced
more than seventy books, including novels, short-story collections, essay
collections, literary biographies, an edition of Queen Victoria’s letters, as
well as an unpublished diary of more than 4 million words, covering the
last twenty-eight years of his life. Benson was best known for his many
essays, each typically focused on a single topic, thoughtfully developed in
a personable manner that he considered an essential element of the essay,
as he makes clear in the following excerpt from “The Art of the Essay­
ist,” where he declares that “the charm of the familiar essayist depends
upon his power of giving the sense of a good-humoured, gracious and
reasonable personality and establishing a sort of pleasant friendship with
his reader.”

From “The Art of the Essayist”

I have little doubt in my own mind that the charm of the familiar es­
sayist depends upon his power of giving the sense of a good-humoured,
gracious and reasonable personality and establishing a sort of pleasant
friendship with his reader. One does not go to an essayist with a desire for
information, or with an expectation of finding a clear statement of a com­
plicated subject; that is not the mood in which one takes up a volume of
essays. What one rather expects to find is a companionable treatment of
that vast mass of little problems and floating ideas which are aroused and
evoked by our passage through the world, our daily employment, our lei­
sure hours, our amusements and diversions, and above all by our relations
with other people—all the unexpected, inconsistent, various simple stuff
of life; the essayist ought to be able to impart a certain beauty and order
into it, to delineate, lec us say, the vague enrocions aroused in solitude or
in company by the sight of scenery, the aspect of towns, the impressions
of art and books, the interplay of human qualities and characteristics, the

...40
half-formed hopes and desires and fears and joys thac form so large a pare
of our daily thoughts. The essayist ought to be able to indicate a case or a
problem that is apt to occur in ordinary life andsuggesc the theory of it, to
guess what it is that makes our moods resolute or fitful, why we act consis­
tently or inconsistently, what it is that repels or attracts us in our dealings
with other people, what our private fancies are. The good essayist is the
man who makes a reader say: “Well, I have often thought all those things,
but I never discerned before any connection between them, nor got so far
as to put them into words.” And thus the essayist must have a great and
far-reaching curiosity; he must be interested rather than displeased by the
differences of human beings and by their varied theories. He must recog­
nize the fact that most people’s convictions are not the result of reason,
but a mass of associations, traditions, things half-understood, phrases,
examples, loyalties, whims. He must care more about the inconsistency
of humanity than about its dignity; and he must study more what people
actually do think about than what they ought to think about. He must
not be ashamed of human weaknesses or shocked by them, and still less
disgusted by them; but at the same time he must keep in mind the flashes
of fine idealism, the passionate visions, the irresponsible humours, the
salient peculiarities, that shoot like sunrays through the dull cloudiness
of so many human minds, and make one realize that humanity is at once
above itself and in itself, and that we are greater than we know; for the
interest of the world to the ardent student of it is that we most of us seem
to have got hold of something that is bigger than we quite know how to
deal with; something remote and far off, which we have seen in a distant
vision, which we cannot always remember or keep clear in our minds. The
supreme fact of human nature is its duality, its tendency to pull different
ways, the tug-of-war between Devil and Baker which lies inside our rest­
less brains. And the confessed aim of the essayist is to make people inter­
ested in life and in themselves and in the part they can take in life; and
he does that best if he convinces men and women that life is a fine sort of
a game, in which they can take a hand; and that every existence, however
confined or restricted, is full of outlets and pulsing channels, and that the
interest and joy of it is not confined to the politician or the millionaire,
but is pretty fairly distributed, so long as one has time to attend to it, and
is not preoccupied in some concrete aim or vulgar ambition.
Because the great secret which the true essayist whispers in our ears is
that the worth of experience is not measured by what is called success, but
rather resides in a fullness of life: thac success tends rather to obscure and

41...
 to diminish experience, and that we may miss the point of life by being
too important, and that the end of it all is the degree in which we give
rather than receive.
The poet perhaps is the man who sees the greatness of life best, because
he lives most in its beauty and fineness. But my point is that the essayist
is really a lesser kind of poet, working in simpler and humbler materials,
more in the glow of life perhaps than in the glory of it, and not finding
anything common or unclean.
The essayisc is the opposite of the romancer, because his one and con­
tinuous aim is to keep the homely materials in view; to face actual condi­
tions, not to fly from them. We think meanly of life if we believe that it
has no sublime moments; but we think sentimentally of it if we believe
that it has nothing but sublime moments. The essayist wants to hold the
balance; and if he is apt to neglect the sublimities of life, it is because he
is apt to think that they can take care of themselves; and that if there is
the joy of adventure, the thrill of the start in the fresh air of the morn­
ing, the rapture of ardent companionship, the gladness of the arrival,
yet there must be long spaces in between, when the pilgrim jogs steadily
along, and seems to come no nearer to the spire on the horizon or to the
shining embanked cloudland of the West. He has nothing then but his
own thoughts to help him, unless he is alert to see what is happening in
hedgerow and copse, and the work of the essayist is to make some-tiling
rich and strange of those seemingly monotonous spaces, chose lengths of
level road.
Is, then, the Essay in literature a thing which simply stands outside
classification, like Argon among the elements, of which the only thing
which can be predicated is that it is there? Or like Justice in Plato’s Re­
public, a thing which the talkers set out to define, and which ends by
being the one thing left in a state when the definable qualities are taken
away? No, it is not that. Ic is rather like what is called an organ prelude, a
little piece with a theme, not very strict perhaps in form, but which can
be fancifully treated, modulated from, and coloured at will. It is a little
criticism of life at some one point clearly enough defined.
We may follow any mood, we may look at life in fifty different ways—
the only thing we must not do is to despise or deride, out of ignorance or
prejudice, the influences which affect others; because the essence of all
experience is that we should perceive something which we do not begin
by knowing, and learn that life has a fullness and a richness in all sorts of
diverse ways which we do not at first even dream of suspecting.

...41
 The essayist, then, is in his particular fashion an interpreter of life, a
critic of life. He does not see life as the historian, or as the philosopher, or
as the poet, or as the novelist, and yet he has a touch of all these. He is not
concerned with discovering a theory of it all, or fitting the various parts of
it into each other. He works rather on what is called the analytic method,
observing, recording, interpreting, just as things strike him, and letting
his fancy play over their beauty and significance; the end of it all being
this: that he is deeply concerned with the charm and quality of things,
and desires to put it all in the clearest and gentlest light, so that at least he
may make others love life a little better, and prepare them for its infinite
variety and alike for its joyful and mournful surprises.
First published in Modern English Essays, Vol. 5,1911

43...
 V
IRGINIA WOOLF (1881-1941) is besc known for her interior-
ized novels, her feminist projects, her revelatory diaries and let­
ters, but she was also a prolific reviewer, persistently seeking to
reform the essay. In one of her earliest pieces on the subject, “The Decay
of Essay Writing” (1905), she urged aspiring essayists to “leave the great
mysteries of art and literature unassailed” and to “write of themselves”
—“that single book to which they alone have the key.” In her most ambi­
tious piece on the subject, “The Modern Essay” (1911), excerpted below,
she uses a recently published anthology of essays edited by Ernest Rhys as
the occasion to offer not only a historical survey but also a virtual poetics
of the essay, centered on a paradoxical relationship between essayists and
their essayistic personae: “Never to be yourself and yet always—that is
the problem.”

From “The Modern Essay”

The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza,
or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five
little volumes, containing essays written between 1870 and 1910, certain
principles appear co control the chaos, and we detect in the short period
under review something like the progress of history.
Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls
for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it
should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we cake it from the
shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued
to that end. It should lay us under a spell with ics first word, and we should
only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the
most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation;
we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge co the depths
of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay muse lap
us about and draw its curtain across the world.
So great a feat is seldom accomplished, chough the fault may well be

• •■44
as much on the reader’s side as on the writers. Habit and lethargy have
dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can the
essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us
in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life—a bask­
ing, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know—that
is the first essential—how to write. His learning may be as profound as
Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of writ­
ing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture.
Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this superbly over and over
again. They have blown more knowledge into us in the course of one essay
than the innumerable chapters of a hundred text-books__
But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet
had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now
usual, and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down
to its magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of
culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon serious
matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as well as
one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public which had
welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once more in a
book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated people to a
larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated. The change
was not altogether for the worse. In volume 3 we find Mr. Birrell and Mr.
Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a reversion to the classic
type, and that the essay by losing its size and something of its sonority
was approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and Lamb. At any rate,
there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell on Carlyle and the essay which
one may suppose that Carlyle would have written upon Mr. Birrell. There
is little similarity between “A Cloud of Pinafores,” by Max Beerbohm,
and “A Cynic’s Apology,” by Leslie Stephen. But the essay is alive; there is
no reason to despair. As the conditions change so the essayist, most sensi­
tive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself, and if he is good makes
the best of the change, and if he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly
good; and so we find that, though he has dropped a considerable amount
of weight, his attack is much more direct and his movement more supple.
But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay and what did he take from
it? That is a much more complicated question, for here we have an essay­
ist who has concentrated on the work and is without doubt the prince of
his profession.
What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence,

45...
 which has haunted che essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had
been in exile since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was
never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in
a thousand homes to Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give.
Thus, some time in the nineties, it must have surprised readers accus­
tomed to exhortation, information, and denunciation to find themselves
familiarly addressed by a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger
than themselves. He was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no
gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and
directly, and himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist ca­
pable of using che essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate
tool. He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and
impurely, but so consciously and purely chat we do not know whether
there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the
man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word
that he writes. The triumph is the triumph ofstyle. For it is only by know­
ing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self; thac self
which, while it is essential to literature, is also its mosc dangerous antago­
nist. Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of
the essayists in Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether suc­
ceeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities
decomposing in the eternity of print. As calk, no doubt, it was charming,
and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a bottle of beer. But
literature is stern; it is no use being charming, vircuous, or even learned
and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she seems to reiterate, you fulfil her
firsc condition—to know how to write.
This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not
searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm pe­
riods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange melodies.
Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are
momentarily more impressive. But A Cloud of Pinafores has in it that
indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to life
and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it,
any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up
and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we
find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we
look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come
September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. Yet it is true
that the essayist is che most sensitive of all writers to public opinion. The

...46
drawing-room is the place where a great deal of reading is done nowadays,
and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie, with an exquisite appreciation of all
that the position exacts, upon the drawing-room table. There is no gin
about; no scrong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and
gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course, are not said.
But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one
room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the artist,
the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our age. There
are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes of the pres­
ent collection. His age seems already a little distant, and the drawing­
room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an altar where, once
upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from their own orchards,
gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the conditions have
changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more.
The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words,
or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply.
Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes two, Mr. Belloc
at a rough computation produces three hundred and sixty-five. They are
very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised essayisc will
utilise his space—beginning as close to the top of the sheet as possible,
judging precisely how far to go, when to turn, and how, without sacrific­
ing a hair’s-breadth of paper, to wheel about and alight accurately upon
the last word his editor allows! As a feat of skill it is well worth watching.
But the personality upon which Mr. Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends
suffers in the process. It comes to us not with the natural richness of the
speaking voice, but strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affecta­
tions, like the voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd
on a windy day.
The Common Reader, 1915

47...
 ILLIAM CARLOS williams (1883—1963) earned his liv­

W ing as a physician but he also wrote poems, short stories,

novels, plays, criticism, an autobiography, and essays. He
was an American high modernist who grappled with the problem of
America. Williams criticized Eliot and Pound for their European al­
lusions and sought instead to maintain “contact” with what he called
“the local.” He wrote his epic poem Paterson (published between 1946
and 1963) about the New Jersey town in which he lived, half ironically
titled one ofhis novels The Great American Novel (1913), and collected a
group of essays about American myths and heroes under the title In the
American Grain (192.5). The short piece that follows, entitled “An Essay
on Virginia” (1915), is a kind of outtake from In the American Grain. It
simultaneously advances and enacts a modernist, and more specifically
cubist, theory of the essay while also critiquing Virginia, regionalism,
and American democracy.

“An Essay on Virginia”

Begin with A to remain intact, redundant not even to the amount of a
reflective title. Especially today is it necessary to be academic, the apology
for academic precision—which is always essential in realistic ages—being
that this has no relation to facts. To essay is to try but not to attempt. It
is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is
always sure, it remains from the first to last fixed. Nothing affects it. It may
stop, but if it stops that is surely the end and so it remains perfect, just as
with an infant which fails to continue. It suffers disclosures, up and down,
but nothing can affect it. It is as a man: a lunatic or not; no matter. What­
ever passes through it, it is never that thing. It remains itself and continues
so, pure motion.
Perhaps one should say that it is only an essay when it is wholly uncol­
ored by that which passes through it. Every essay should be, to be human,
exactly like another. But the perfect essay should have every word num-

...48
bered, say as the bones in the body and the thoughts in the mind are
fixed, permanent and never vary. Then there could be no confusion, no
deception and the pleasure of reading would be increased.
Naturally, that which is sure to remain intact is the only thing to which
experience is sufferable. So it is said “to essay” to stand firm, that is, during
penetration by a fluid.
“The only thing that changes is man” it is said. This falsehood is true.
Its vitality is the same as that of fashions: changelessness. Without one
there is not the other. Periods and places by their variety function as do
the fashions, to establish man who essays. Geography and history deal
wholly with fashion. But the rigidity of the essay is in itself human.
After this description of Virginia it would be impossible to go on were
it not for vanity which, the essence of science, enforces accuracy and thor­
oughness. Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must
prove permanent by fracture. This is an essay: the true grace of fashion.
The essay muse stand while passion and interest pass through. The thing
must move to be an engine; this in an essay means the parts are infinitely
related to each other—not to “unity” however. It is the crossing of forces
that generates interest. The dead centers are incidental. But the sheer cen­
trifugal detail of the essay, its erudition, the scope of its trial, its vanity
or love, its force for clarity through change is not understood except as a
force that is in its essence centripetal. The motion is from change to the
variety of changclessness.
Each essay rings the changes of its range, the breadth, the penetration
moving inward about the fashionable brick of all styles, unity. Unity is
the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is
the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. There is no less
significant matter for the attention. Every piece of writing, it matters not
what it is, has unity. Inexpert or bad writing most terribly so. But ability
in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed
forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness. So the his­
tory of Virginia has gone, even more so than in most of the states.
The varied intellectual and moral phases of Virginia are disclosed in a
seacoast, a plain and a great valley, taken from east to west. It is covered by
holly and wild turkeys. At least there are a few turkeys. You get a turkey
dog. He flushes the covey. You chen build a blind of brushwood and hide
in ic, the dog too, since his work is done. Take out the turkey-call and
blow it skillfully. The birds will then come creeping in to be killed. Here
and there on che old estates there are even a few great holly trees they

49...
 brought from Carolina. All these things come originally from England.
The women are charming. But the men still carry firearms generally and
keep the bull in the pasture behind the hill, preferring witticisms with
quail or the fox to the sexual breakdown.
The opalescent, sluggish rivers wander indeterminately about the plain.
Africans, corn, tobacco, bull-bats, buzzards, rabbits, figs, persimmons are
the common accompaniments of these waters. There are no lakes. Oaks
and yellow pines are the usual trees. These are essentially the component
moments of all essays, hams, anecdotes of battles, broken buildings—the
materia are the same. It is their feudal allocation in Virginia that is impor­
tant. But the essay is essentially modern.
Of Virginia, especially, among the other states, one may say, the older
it is the newer it has become. Oaks and women full of mistletoe and men.
Hollow trunks for possums and the future. It clings and slips inside.
Hunt for it with hounds and lanterns under the “dying moon” crying
rebel yells back and forth along the black face of the ridge—from sunset
to i A.M.: the yelp of the hounds, the shouts, now a horse neighing, now a
muffled gunshot. The black women have the faces of statesmen and curi­
ously perfect breasts—no doubt from the natural lives they lead.
Often there will appear some heirloom like the cut-glass jelly stand
that Jefferson brought from Paris for his daughter, a branching tree of
crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly—on oc­
casion. This is the essence of all essays. Or there will be the incident of
John Paul, a Scotch gardeners son whom Governor Jones, who owned the
most of North Carolina, built into his name. Or there will be an Indian
war club; a cylindrical rod of stone encrusted with natural garnets. Or
a bronze ax of Spanish make which they found in the hole they dug in
removing the old pear tree from the garden. Or, by Willis mountain, a
converted Negro cabin: the man who owned the ground on which a great
part of Richmond stands—lives here alone a millionaire—on whom the
rest draw inexhaustibly. An essay in himself.
In Virginia there is the richest gold mine known to the country before
the rush of 49. In the cornfields almost anywhere you’ll pick up Indian
arrowheads of quartz.
The country is still largely agricultural.
First published in This Qitarter (Spring 1915)

...50
H ilaire belloc (1870-1955), the son of an English mother
and French father, grew up in England, attended Balliol Col­
lege, Oxford, and became a naturalized British subject in 1901.
A devout Catholic and skillful debater, Belloc served from 1906 to 1910
as a Liberal Party Member of Parliament and from 1914 to 1910 as edi­
tor of a political journal. He earned his living writing journalism, nov­
els, travel pieces, children’s books, and especially essays. Belloc loved to
argue. Wells said debating him was “like arguing with a hailstorm,” and
Woolf likened the voice in his essays to that “of a man shouting through
a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day.” His iconoclasm and fearless
embrace of mass culture come through in the piece thac follows, in
which he argues, albeit reluctantly, for the modern daily essay of opinion
that takes up all the issues of the twentieth century, including religion
and Communism.

“An Essay upon Essays upon Essays”

There has been a pretty little quarrel lately—it will probably be forgotten
by the time this appears, but no matter—a quarrel between those who
write essays and those who have written an essay or two to show that the
writing of essays is futile. These last seem to be particularly annoyed by
the foison of essays in the present generation. They say it has burst all
restraint and is choking us under a flood.
Of old, the essay appeared here and there in some stately weekly paper.
Then it dignified once a week some of the more solemn of the daily pa­
pers. Then it appeared in another, and another more vulgar. Then, not
once a week, but twice a week, in these last: finally, every day. And now
(say they) it is everywhere. And the enemies of the essay—or at least
of this excess of essays, this spate of essays, this monstrous regiment of
essays—are particularly annoyed by the gathering of the same into little
books, which they think a further shocking sin against taste. It is bad
enough (they say) to drivel away week by week, or even day after day, for

51...
 your living, but you may be excused (poor devil!), for a living you must
get. What is quite unpardonable is to give this drivel the dignity of covers
and to place it upon shelves.
The enemies of the modern essay go on to say that it cannot possibly
find sufficient subject-matter for so excessive an output. And so on.
Now here let me break modern convention at once, and say that I am
a good witness and in a good position also to plead in the matter. I have
written this sort of essay for many weary years. I know the motive, I know
the method, I know the weakness, but also all that is to be said for it. And
I think that, upon the whole, the modern practice is to be supported.
I certainly do not say that with enthusiasm. It would be better for lit­
erature, no doubt, and for the casual reader (who reads a great deal too
much), if the output were less. It would certainly be better for the writer if
he could afford to restrict that output. But I know that, in the first place,
the level remains remarkably high in this country (where there are a dozen
such things turned out to one in any other), and that it does so remain
high is an argument in favour of the medium. For a sufficient standard
maintained in any form of writing should be proof that there is material
and effort sufficient to that form: that there is a need for that form to
supply, and that it is supplied.
These modern essays of ours may be compared co conversation, with­
out which mankind has never been satisfied, which is ever diverse (though
continually moving through the same themes), and which finds in the
unending multiplicity of the world unending matter for discussion and
contemplation. It lacks the chief value of conversation, which is the alter­
native outlook—the reply. That cannot be helped. But I fancy the reader
supplies this somewhat in his own mind, by the movements of appre­
ciation or indignation with which he receives what is put before him.
Indeed, sometimes his indignation moves him to provide free copy in pro­
test; though I am afraid that the corresponding pleasure does not get the
same chance of expression. I do indeed note, especially in the daily papers
nowadays, continual letters from correspondents approving (usually) the
more horribly commonplace pronouncements, or those which have been
put in to order, as part of some propaganda or other undertaken by the
owner of the sheet. These letters I suspect. I believe they are arranged for.
But the letters of indignation are certainly genuine, and editors get a good
many more than they print. When such letters are written in disapproval
of what I myself have written, I nearly always agree with them.
I can also claim to give evidence as a reader of other people’s essays.

...jz
For I can read this kind of matcer with less disgust than any other in the
modern press. Yes, I prefer it even to murders. And I cannot tell you how
much I prefer it to ignorant comment upon the affairs of Europe or con­
ventional rubbish upon affairs domestic: the presentation of little men as
great, of falsehood as truth, of imaginaries as realities.
As fora dearth of subject, I see no sign of it at all. If I consider any one
man of that half-dozen or so whom I read regularly, my colleagues in this
same trade, I can name no one except myselfwho tends to repetition. And
there is no reason why a fairly well-read man, still active and enjoying oc­
casional travel, let alone the infinite experience of daily life, should lack
a subject. Stuff is infinite. The danger lies not in the drying up of matter
but in the fossilization of manner. Nor do I find much trace of that in my
contemporaries.
I have, indeed, the contrary fault to find with the English essay to-day,
and that is the restriction of matter. There are whole departments of the
highest interest to man which are, by convention, avoided. For instance,
until quite lately (when the ice was courageously broken by one group
of newspapers), a discussion of the ultimate truths and of whether those
truths could be discovered or stated—in other words, a discussion of
what is generically called “religion”—was forbidden. Now that the ice
has been broken, editors have discovered—a little to their astonishment,
I think—that the pioneer was right—that there is nothing for which the
public has a stronger appetite than theology.
Another form of restriction is the absence of a devil’s advocate, and
that absence is more clearly marked and of worse effect here than abroad.
The really unpopular, or the really unusual, point of view cannot get
stated in pages of general circulation. And that means the absence of cre­
ative friction; for conflict is the mother of all things.
The opposition is, indeed, allowed to appear in small, obscure sheets
which are devoted to nothing else. But that is of no great public service.
What would be of public service would be eager and general discussion,
and the perpetual presentation of argument and fact, which the public
are not allowed to have.
Take such a simple point as that of Communism. It is a very living
issue in our time. It is an active threat in the French commonwealth, a
triumphant one in the Russian; it is a subject of immediate anxiety to
every government in Europe, and though it has less place here than in any
other industrial country, it does indirectly leaven a wide area of thought
even here.

53...
 But to get it stated—to have said in its favour all that can be said in its
favour—one must turn to small publications which are ignored by the
principal newspapers and reviews. In these last you never get the Com­
munist position fully and strongly put. You get it vaguely if violently
abused—but without definitions and without concrete details; you feel
that it is always there in the background, and yet you are never allowed
to see it.
Let no one flatter himself that opposition can be heard because certain
points ofview supposedly unpopular are sometimes put in what are called
“daring” or “paradoxical” essays. These are never true opposition. They
are always either a jest or that worst form of demagogic flattery which
consists in telling people what they really think but what they have not
hitherto dared to say. Of true opposition in English letters we have to-day
none. And English letters are badly the worse for the lack of it.
Written in 192.9; published in One Thing and Another, 1955

|
•••54
 |A obert musil (1880-1942) grew up the son of an Austrian engi­
rd neering professor and pursued engineering himself, soon for-
JL saking it for studies in psychology and philosophy. Though he
completed a doctorate, he turned down an academic appointment to
devote himself to his art. He maintained close but complicated relation­
ships with Kafka, Rilke, and Mann, all of whom admired his fiction. In
this selection from his novel The Man without Qitalities (1930, 1941),
Musil ascribes the quality of “essayism” to his protagonist Ulrich. The
term (itself an English translation of Musil’s word Essayismus) turns the
essay’s passionate skepticism into a way of life, as Musil’s narrator makes
clear in this question: “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar;
a man who wants to give free range to his subjectivity may become a
writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?”
His answer is the balancing act that is essayism, which derives from Em­
erson (whom Musil admired), is akin to Pater’s “unmethodical method,”
and launches an Austrian-German essayistic tradition that later includes
Benjamin, Lukacs, and Adorno.

From The Man without Qualities

There was something in Ulrich’s nature that in a haphazard, paralyzing,
disarming way resisted all logical systematizing, the single-minded will,
the specifically directed drives of ambition; it was also connected with his
chosen term, “essayism,” even though it contained the very elements he
had gradually and with unconscious care eliminated from that concept.
The accepted translation of “essay” as “attempt” contains only vaguely
the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provi­
sional or incidental expression of a conviction capable of being elevated
to truth under more favorable circumstances or of being exposed as an
error (the only ones of that kind are those articles or treatises, chips from
the scholar’s workbench, with which the learned entertain their special
public); an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a

55 • • ■
 man’s inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than
the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectiv­
ity. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable,
and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to
be delicate and ineffable. There have been more than a few such essayists,
masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in nam­
ing them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between
example and doctrine, between amor intellcctualis and poetry; they are
saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men
on an adventure who have gone astray.
Nothing is more revealing, by the way, than one’s involuntary experi­
ence of learned and sensible efforts to interpret such essayists, to turn
their living wisdom into knowledge to live by and thus extract some
“content” from the motion of those who were moved: but about as much
remains of this as of the delicately opalescent body of a jellyfish when one
lifts it out of the water and lays it on the sand.
The Man without Qualifies, 1930, modern version trans. Sophie Wilkins, Knopf,
<995

...56
I

G
[ilbert] k[eith] CHESTERTON (1874-1936) was a journal­
ist, novelist, playwright, essayist, biographer, historian, religious
apologist, mystery writer, and incisive satirist, whom George
Bernard Shaw referred to as “a man of colossal genius,” in spite of (or
perhaps because of) their many disagreements and debates. Though
Chesterton reportedly suffered from problems of memory and physical
coordination, he produced some eighty books and more than four thou­
sand essays, most of which are marked by a witty style and paradoxical
turn of mind, epitomized in the following piece on the “indefinite and
indeterminate quality” of the essay—a commonplace of sorts that leads
him nonetheless to a striking assertion that “The perfect essay has never
been written; for the simple reason that the essay has never really been
written,”

«»T*1 T"’ »
1 he hssay
The essay is the only literary form which confesses, in its very name, that
the rash act known as writing is really a leap in the dark. When men
try to write a tragedy, they do not call the tragedy a try-on. Those who
have toiled through the twelve books of an epic, writing it with their own
hands, have seldom pretended that they have merely tossed oft an epic as
an experiment. But an essay, by its very name as well as its very nature,
really is a try-on and really is an experiment. A man does not really write
an essay. He does really essay to write an essay.
One result is that, while there are many famous essays, there is fortu­
nately no model essay. The perfect essay has never been written; for the
simple reason that the essay has never really been written. Men have tried
to write something, to find out what ic was supposed to be. In this respect
the essay is a typically modern product, and is full of the future and the
praise of experiment and adventure. In other words, like the whole of
modern civilization, it does not know what it is trying to find; and there­
fore does not find it.

57...
 It occurs to me here, by the way, that all this applies chiefly to English
essayists; and indeed that in this sense the essay is rather an English thing.
So far as I remember, English schoolmasters tell a boy to write an essay,
but French schoolmasters tell a boy to write a theme. The word theme
has a horrid suggestion of relevancy and coherence. The theme is only too
near to the thesis. The English schoolmaster profoundly understands his
pupils when he assumes that they will not produce a theme but an essay
at a theme, or a considerably wild cockshy or pot-shot at a theme. Mr.
P. G. Wodehouse (the works of whose imagination do not fall strictly
within either the tragic or the epic form) has described how the benevo­
lent nobleman, burdened with a son of the name of Freddie, appealed to
that youth to behave, if possible, like a sane and rational human being;
to which Freddie replied, with a solemn fervour: “I’ll have a jolly good
stab at it, Governor.” The essayist should be the reasonable human being;
the philosopher, the sage with a judgment at once delicate and detached;
the thinker considering a theme; the logician expounding a thesis. But
England, expecting every man to do his duty, does not expect so much as
all this. England knows that her beloved essayists will not be reasonable
human beings; but will only have a jolly good stab at it. It is something
of a symbol that, for the English schoolboy, an essay is an effort. The
whole atmosphere of the thing is full of doubt, experiment and effort. I
know not if it is hell, or heaven, or perhaps merely a piece of earth that is
for ever England; anyhow all this field is paved with bad essays and good
intentions.
Of course there are essays that are really themes and themes that are
really theses. They represent what may be called the Extreme Right of
rigid right reason and militant purpose, after the Latin model. A model of
the militant or controversial essay (and all the more so because there is no
mailed fist, but a very iron hand in a very velvet glove) is Alice Meynell’s
essay in defence of the despised wife of Dr. Johnson. The words are spo­
ken in the softest accent of irony; the mere style preserves all the styl­
ist; special pose of gliding over things easily; but the whole thing is con­
structed controversially; it is as argumentative as any argument in any
law court or debating club. It is also very effective argument, for until it
was written, nearly everybody talked exactly that nonsense about poor
Mrs. Johnson; and nobody I know of has talked it since. This theme
really is a thesis; but when the same writer turns, let us say, to describing
in the same elegant English the mere effect of blue twilight glowing in
the cracks of the London streets, she is at most concerned with a theme.

...58
Even here a certain Latin logic in her made her stick to the theme. We all
know, however, that there are English essays that are very English essays
and yet very jolly essays; that are none the less beautiful because they twist
and ramble like an English road. Of these are some ofThackeray's Round­
about Papers and some of Mr. Belloc’s best essays; like that highly unscru­
pulous dissertation which promises to deal with a particular feature of
seventeenth century architecture, proceeds to argue with itself about the
respective ages of Charles the Second and Louis the Fourteenth, ampli­
fies itself into a glowing panorama of the landscapes of the Pyrenees, and
ends with a Rebuke to His Pen, chiding it for having taken him so far
away from the mere title and topic of his essay. People are so prone to say
that Mr. Belloc is French that it is worth noting that in this and many
other matters he is extraordinarily English. By the true test of literary
consistency and conscientiousness, there was much more that was French
about Mrs. Meynell. Or perhaps it might be maintained that something
of Latin lucidity, which leads the former writer to value the strict form of
the sonnet, in itself enables him to perceive the essential formlessness of
the essay. Anyhow, except when it is tightened by the militant relevancy
of debate or propaganda, the essay does tend to be formless, or at the best
to present a very bewildering variety of forms. But I cannot help think­
ing a man must be as English as Mr. Belloc to enjoy it in its most formless
form.
This indefinite and indeterminate quality would at once appear if
we tried to classify the subordinate type under the general type of the
essay. The types are so many and the tests are so few. There is one kind
of essay that consists of staring out of the window at the garden and de­
scribing what you see there; but from this I am inhibited by a complete
ignorance of the names of all the plants that I see. I have sometimes won­
dered whether it would be possible to disguise my ignorance under an
appearance of abstruse or specialized or purely localized knowledge, as
by saying, “That torrid and almost terrible blossom which is called in
Persia the Blood of Kings,” or: “The shrub which, in spite of its new sci­
entific name, I still love to call JudatisEsuriens, as did the dear old natu­
ralists of the later seventeenth century,” or: “The little flower that we in
Westmoreland have always called Bishops Buttonhook, though they have
another name for it in the South.” It is obvious that the same bright and
rather breathless enterprise might be applied to another sort of essay; the
rambling historical and archa:ological causerie, in which one name leads
to another; and generally to very little else. Would it be safe to begin a

59...
 paragraph: “I was dipping into Dio Cassius the other day...” or to go on:
“To find a parallel to this, I imagine we should have to go as far afield as
the second period of the Upanishads,” and perhaps conclude: “But after
all, is not all this to be found in Scotus Erigena?” Very few people have
read Dio Cassius or Erigena; and it may be doubted if even the aged The-
osophists, who can still be found stranded in drawing-rooms, could pass
an examination in the Eastern documents I have named. If done as a skit,
it would be a successful skit; for certainly it would expose many before it
was itself exposed. If done as the foundation for a solid career of learning,
it would be unwise; for though only two people in the world knew it was
nonsense, those two would certainly turn up. This covers an excellent
sort of essay; the solemn skit, such as Mr. Gilbert Norwood’s immortal
fancy called Too Many Books. Then there is another sort of essay that has
lately become fairly common and frequently quite picturesque; that may
be called the Historical Glimpse. It will be devoted to describing a day
with Moses or an afternoon call on Mahomet or Marat, or a chance meet­
ing with Nero or Mr. Gladstone. The special technique developed for
this design generally involves the detailed description of the hero before
he is introduced by name, and it ends with: “Fear not, you carry Ca:sar,”
or: “You may be interested to know that you have given a glass of milk
to Prince Albert.” All these are bold and promising essays at the elusive
nature of the essay; but in itself it remains somewhat elusive. And, if I
may end this rambling article on the subject of rambling articles, and end
it with a personal confession, I will own that I am haunted with a faint
suspicion that the essay will probably become rather more cogent and
dogmatic, merely because of the deep and deadly divisions which ethical
and economic problems may force upon us. But let us hope there will
always be a place for the essay that is really an essay. It is an old story that
soldiers sing songs round the camp-fire; but I doubt if they are all about
soldiering. Indeed they are sometimes so lively in their range over other
topics, that respectable patriots have found a difficulty in including them
in collections of patriotic songs. St. Thomas Aquinas, with his usual com-
monsense, said that neither the active nor the contemplative life could be
lived without relaxations, in the form of jokes and games. The drama or
the epic might be called the active life of literature; the sonnet or the ode
the contemplative life. The essay is the joke.
Firsc published as the preface to Essays ofthe Year 1931-32,193a

... 60
K ATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD (1879-1944) thoughc of
herself first of all as a fiction writer, but she was probably best
known for her provocative essays on everything from the first
Dempsey-Tunney fight to the “plight of the genteel.” Politically and cul­
turally she was intensely conservative, and her provocative essays might
seem at odds with the argument she makes in the piece that follows
—that “the essay is essentially meditative” and not “polemical”—but she
is trying to pit Montaignean skepticism against the Leftism of the 1930s,
which she saw as universally dogmatic. A year earlier she had called in
the pages of the Saturday Review for a “plebiscite” on the essay in which
she asked readers to choose between “articles” or “essays," “news” or the
“truth.” Most readers balked at her false either/or and for the next two
months they filled the magazine’s letters column with complaints.

From “An Essay on Essays”

Though an essay must state a proposition, there are other requirements
to be fulfilled. The bones of subject and predicate must be clothed in a
certain way. The basis of the essay is meditation, and it must in a measure
admit the reader to the meditative process. (This procedure is frankly
hinted in all those titles that used to begin with “Of” or “On”: “Of Truth,”
“Of Riches,” “On the Graces and Anxieties of Pig-Driving,” “On the
Knocking at the Gate in ‘Macbeth,’” “On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant
Places.”) An essay, to some extent, thinks aloud; though not in the loose
and pointless way to which the “stream of consciousness” addicts have
accustomed us. The author must have made up his mind—otherwise,
where is his proposition? But the essay, I think, should show how and
why he made up his mind as he did; should engagingly rehearse the steps
by which he came to his conclusions. (“Francis ofVerulam reasoned thus
with himself.”) Meditation; but an oriented and fruitful meditation.
This is the most intimate of forms, because it permits you to see a mind
at work. On the quality and temper of that mind depends the goodness

61...
 of the production. Now, if the essay is essentially meditative, it cannot
be polemical. No one, I think, would call Cicero’s first oration against
Catiline an essay; or Burke’s “Speech on the Conciliation of America”;
hardly more could we call Swift’s “Modest Proposal” a true essay. The
author must have made up his mind, but when he has made it up with a
vengeance, he will not produce an essay. Because the process is meditative,
the manner should be courteous; he should always, by implication, admit
that there are good people who may not agree with him; his irony should
never turn to the sardonic. Reasonableness, urbanity (as Matthew Arnold
would have said) are prerequisites for a form whose temper is meditative
rather than polemical.
We have said that this is the most intimate of forms. Not only for tech­
nical reasons, though obviously the essayist is less sharply controlled by
his structure than the dramatist or the sonneteer or even the novelist. It
is the most intimate because it is the most subjective. When people talk
of “creative” and “critical” writing—dividing all literature chus—they
always call the essay critical. In spite of Oscar Wilde, co call it critical
is probably correct; for creation implies objectivity. The created thing,
though the author have torn its raw substance from his very vitals, ends by
being separate from its creator. The essay, however, is incurably subjective;
even Wuthering Heights ox Manfred is less subjective—strange though
it sound—than “The Function of Criticism” or “The Poetic Principle.”
What Oscar Wilde really meant in “The Critic as Artist”—if, that is,
you hold him back from his own perversities—is not that Pater’s essay
on Leonardo da Vinci was more creative than many a novel, but that it
was more subjective than any novel; that Pater, by virtue of his style and
his mentality, made of his conception of the Mona Lisa something that
we could be interested in, regardless of our opinion of the painting. I do
not remember that Pater saw himself as doing more than explain to us
what he thought Leonardo had done—Pater, I think, would never have
regarded his purple page as other than criticism. I, myself—because I like
the fall of Pater’s words, and do not much care for Mona Lisa’s feline
face—prefer Pater’s page to Leonardo’s portrait; but I am quite aware that
I am merely preferring criticism, in this instance, to the thing criticized. I
am, if you like, preferring Mr. PecksnifFs drunken dream—“Mrs. Todg-
ers’s idea of a wooden leg”—to the wooden leg itself. Anything (I say to
myself) rather than a wooden leg!
A lot of nineteenth century “impressionistic” criticism—Jules Lemai-
tre, Anatole France, etc.—is more delightful than the prose or verse that

... 6z
is being criticized. It is none the less criticism. The famous definition of
“the adventures of a soul among the masterpieces” does not put those
adventures into the “creative” category; it merely stresses their subjec­
tivity. Wilde is to some extent right when he says that criticism is the
only civilized form of autobiography; but he is not so right when he says
that the highest criticism is more creative than creation. No one would
deny that the purple page Wilde quotes tells us more about Pater than it
does about Leonardo, or even about Mona Lisa—as Macaulays “Essay
on Milton” conceivably tells us more about Macaulay than about the au­
thor of Paradise Lost. All Bacons essays together but build up a portrait
of Bacon — Francis of Verulam reasoning with himself; and what is the
substance of the Essays of Elia, but Elia? “Subjective” is the word, however,
rather than “creative.”
It is this subjectivity—Montaigne’s first of all, perhaps—that has
confused many minds. It is subjectivity run wild that has tempted many
people to believe that the familiar essay alone is the essay; which would
make some people contend that an essay does not necessarily state a prop­
osition. But we are talking of the essay itself; not of those bits of whimsi­
cal prose which are to the true essay what expanded anecdote is to the
short story.
The essay, then, having persuasion for its object, states a proposition; its
method is meditation; it is subjective rather than objective, critical rather
than creative. It can never be a mere marshalling of facts; for it struggles,
in one way or another, for truth; and truth is something one arrives at by
the help of facts, not the facts themselves. Meditating on facts may bring
one to truth; facts alone will not. Nor can there be an essay without a
point of view and a personality. A geometrical proposition cannot be an
essay, since, though it arranges facts in a certain pattern, there is involved
no personal meditative process, conditioned by the individuality of the
author. A geometrical proposition is not subjective. One is even tempted
to say that its tone is not urbane!
Perhaps—with the essay thus defined—we shall understand without
effort why it is being so little written at present. Dorothy Thompson has
said that Germany is living in a state of war. The whole world is living
more or less in a state of war; and a state of war produces any literary
form more easily than the essay. It is not hard to see why. People in a
state of war, whether the war be military or economic, express themselves
polemically. A wise man said to me, many years ago, that, in his opinion,
the worst by-product of the World War was propaganda. Many times, in

63...
 the course of the years, I have had occasion to recall that statement. There
are perhaps times and places where propaganda is justified—it is not for
me to say. But I think we should all agree that the increasing habit of
using the technique of propaganda is corrupting the human mind in its
most secret and delicate processes. Propaganda has, in common with all
other expression, the object of persuasion; but it pursues that legitimate
object by illegitimate means—by suggestiofalsi and suppressio veri\ by the
argumentum tidhominem and hitting below the belt; by demagogic ap­
peal and the disregard of right reason. The victim of propaganda is not in­
tellectually persuaded, but intellectually—if not emotionally—coerced.
The essayist, whatever the limitations of his intelligence, is bound over to
be honest; the propagandist is always dishonest.
First published in the North American Review (December 1935)

...64
 alter Murdoch (1874-1970) was the youngest of four­

W teen children born to a Scottish minister and his wife. The

family moved to Melbourne, Australia, when Walter was
ten, and he was educated there. Murdoch spent his life as an academic
but always reached beyond the classroom for a larger audience, writing
regular book reviews and “Answers” columns for various Australian
newspapers, lecturing to clubs, and speaking on radio about cultural and
political issues. He advocated for womens rights, was against outlawing
the Communist Party, and argued that Australia should not secede from
the Commonwealth. In the piece that follows, his sure but measured,
friendly tone is on display as he argues that the essays main tradition is
Montaignean and personal rather than Baconian and formal. Accord­
ing to Murdoch, “The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry; it is
intensely personal. It is not a statement of facts, it is not a cold, abstract
argument, it is not an inflammatory harangue; it is a quiet talk, reflect­
ing the personal likes and dislikes of the author.”

From “The Essay”

I have been reading the excellent little volume of Selected Modern En­
glish Essays which the Oxford University Press has added to its “World s
Classics” series—a collection of cheap books for which we ought to give
thanks twice a day. The essays selected are modern with a vengeance;
most of the authors are still alive; those who are not are among them
that died o’ Wednesday; and the later essays in the volume are by men
considerably younger than he who now writes. And the subjects cover
a wide range—from Walt Whitman to the House of Commons, from
“A Medieval Girl School” to “Cockney Humour,” from Judas Iscariot to
Alphonse Daudet; very fine mixed feeding. And as I read essay after essay
(they are all readable), I asked myself:—What is the bond between all
these pieces of writing, so different in manner, and in matter so various?
and why do we call them all essays? Essays they are—genuine essays, not

65...
 chapters of books, not sermons, not newspaper articles, not harangues,
but essays.
What then is an essay? And I came to the conclusion that a good essay is
the best substitute that literature has to offer us for a good talk. The word
“essay” has, of course, been terribly misused. Bacons bundles ofwise saws
are not essays—nobody ever talked like that. Macaulays narratives are
little histories or little biographies, but they are not essays. Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding is not an essay, but a treatise. Pope’s
Essay on Man is a piece of didactic verse, whereas a real essay is never di­
dactic and never verse. Emerson’s Essays are not essays, but sermons. Half
the things that masquerade as essays are really dissertations. But the real
essay—the art whose patron saint is Montaigne—is quite distinct from
any other form of literature. It began, in England, with Cowley; flowered
in the days of Addison and Steele; faded; revived a little in Goldsmith’s
time; faded again; flowered again, gorgeously, in the days of Lamb and
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt; faded once more, this time so completely that
it might have been thought to be dead. The Victorians—whose virtues I
have so often praised—could not write essays. In a sense, it was their very
virtue that disqualified them; they were too earnest. It is the mark of the
Victorian that when you sit down for a cosy chat with him, before you
know where you are you find that he is “holding forth.” Now an essayist
never holds forth. I have sometimes thought we might define by saying,
“Have you read Ruskin? Well, an essayist is the opposite of Ruskin.”
And now it has revived a little; and it is delightful to run through this
little Oxford volume and see how many genuine essayists are among us,
excellent practitioners of this most delicate and difficult and beautiful
art. And what is more, the essay has actually become popular again, more
popular than at any time since the days of the Spectator. The essay is, in
fact, the one kind ofwritingthat can at present hold up its head and look
the popular novel in the face, and say, “I, too, have a public.” I do not
mean, of course, that a volume of essays can hope for the kind of resound­
ing success that a bad novel can command; but I mean that with dis­
criminating readers who know a good thing when they see it the essay has
come to its own again. The publishers’ lists prove this. Mr E. V. Lucas and
Mr Max Beerbohm, Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc, all genuine essayists,
are popular in a sense in which no essayist was popular twenty years ago.
The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry; it is intensely personal.
It is not a statement of facts, it is not a cold, abstract argument, it is not an
inflammatory harangue; it is a quiet talk, reflecting the personal likes and

...66
dislikes of the author. It never pretends to treat a subject exhaustively; it is
brief, informal, modest. The style of an essayist must be, as Sir Edmund
Gosse has said, “confidential,” and “a model of current cultivated ease of
expression and a mirror of the best conversation.” It must have a certain
dignity; it must be familiar—not high-faluting—but not too familiar.
There are some authors who seem continually, as they write, to be wink­
ing at you, and callingyou “old chap,” and pointing their jokes by digging
you playfully in the ribs. I do not like being called “old chap,” and I am
sensitive in the region of the ribs. The essayist must behave himself like
a gentleman; good manners are more essential to him than to any other
kind of writer. He must have a sense of humour, but he must not be a
buffoon. He must be wise, too; but with all his wisdom he must never
forget that he is talking to the reader, not instructing him. Whatever he
talks about—and his range is infinite, from the philosophy of Hegel to
the habits of cats—he must touch it lightly; that is essential. If for a mo­
ment he becomes heavy or pompous or pontifical, the charm is snapped,
the spell dissolved. It is, as I have said, a most delicate art; it looks so
extremely easy and is really so difficult. We have a hundred good lyrics,
in English, for one good essay; as good singers are a hundred times more
plentiful than good talkers. The editor of this little anthology has chosen
some of the best talkers of our time, and has caught them at their happiest
moments. I cannot imagine a better book to slip into your pocket when
you are setting out upon a walking tour or a finer companion for a rail­
way journey. ... If the essay should come to displace the novel in popular
favour, it would be a clear sign of an advance in civilization. When we
are prepared to sit down and listen to an easy, informal talk by a wise,
humorous, kindly observer of life, without demanding that he shall tell
us a story, we show chat we are growing up.
First published in Collected Essays, 1938

67...
 E
nrique anderson imbert (1910-zooo), an Argentinian
journalist, literary critic, and fiction writer, known as one of the
early practitioners of “magic realism,” spent most of his early
years writing and teaching in Argentina, until the dictatorship of Juan
Peron compelled him to leave in 1947. Taking up residence in the United
States, Anderson Imbert devoted himself primarily to pathbreaking his­
torical and critical studies of Spanish-American literature. As a profes­
sor at the University of Michigan, then at Harvard, he was known for
an intensely personal classroom style that once led him to teach a work
dressed in the garb of a gaucho. Anderson Imbert’s intense style can also
be heard throughout his defense of the essay, reprinted below, a highlight
of which is his spirited assertion that “I do not believe a systematic trea­
tise, constructed with methods and bibliographies, like those that arouse
professors, is worth more, necessarily, than a personal essay, spontaneous
and audacious, on the same theme.”

From “In Defense of the Essay”

I do not believe that a systematic creatise, constructed with methods and
bibliographies, like those that arouse professors, is worth more, necessar­
ily, chan a personal essay, spontaneous and audacious, on the same theme.
Everything depends on the author and his fruit.
It is clear that the fanatics of philosophy will say that a philosophical
system—above all if it is German—has more rigor, dignity, and hierarchy
chan an essay—above all if it is English. But, people, let us not talk about
philosophy, first as if it monopolizes all offices of intelligence; and second
as if it truly exists! I lament emphasizing philosophy, but I have no other
choice: philosophy professors are chose I have seen—with their very high
eyebrows—disdaining essayists. Professionals of the concept, it would
not be at all strange if they were to chink that written genres have greater
objectivity than writers.
The belief that concepts can become independent of the psychological
process chat elaborates them, substantiate themselves like the spiritual-

...68
iscs ectoplasm, convert chemselves into “objective spirit,” and resent the
men who gave them life has always seemed a manifestation of madness
to me. It was in a rage of sensibility that Aristotle elaborated his concept
of poetic genres; but it was in a prolonged span of madness—from the
Renaissance to Romanticism—that those genres were hypostatized into
rhetorical realities and began to exercise an insulting power upon poets
themselves. I respect the theoretical investigations of many sincere and
original men whose work I envision as the concept of philosophy; but
if they tell me, with the defiant air of a Quixote, that philosophy (from
Toboso or wherever) demands something greater than respect, since it is
the unparalleled queen of all intellectual disciplines, and I should obey it
or die, then I rebel and swear I do not know that lady named Philosophy.
I am not absolute enough in my idealism to suppose that everything,
even the elephant, is an illusion of my conscience. No. I believe in the
heavy elephant. At least I believe that outside my being there is something
that, upon entering my conscience, is represented to me as an image I call
“elephant.” But I refuse to believe that there is something called Philoso­
phy, and much less that this Philosophy obliges me to be ashamed of my
essays or to comply with academic methods. I do not know what an el­
ephant is in itself, but it is enough for me to know that if that piece of
noumenon puts a foot on me (or what I imagine is a foot) the noumenal
foot will crush me. On the other hand, in the dominion of my conscience
I am free, and there is nothing spiritual from the outside that can crush
me. There are two elephants: the illusory and the other, which crushes me;
but there is only one Philosophy, the illusory one, which cannot harm me.
I am skeptical, therefore, of the prejudice that an essay is less worthy
than a philosophical treatise. The pellet is as round as the moon.
What happens is that many suppose that an essay is a rehearsal in
something that one does not know well. A certain university profes­
sor (Argentine, of course) was upset because a colleague had published
an essay. It seemed a trifling thing. “Why not rehearse at home,” he ex­
claimed, “instead of rehearsing in public?” It seemed to him that to ex­
press oneself in informal, quick, and pleasant pages was to squander the
theme and probably the brain!
But essays are not mumblings in an unlearned language; they are not
the first steps on a path that others—the authors of treatises, theses,
dissertations, and discourses—have already traveled to its end. Neither
mumblings nor first steps were the pages by Montaigne, “the father of
the essay.” The history of the essay does not show us a limbo of indecisive

69...
 people or apprentices, but ofan emphatic assembly of spirits who felt con­
fident, ingenious, and aware.
The essays discredit in Argentina is due to snobs who have suddenly
begun to make usurious calculations: if instead of being generous with
periodicals—they say—they were to commit themselves to writing more
extensive and systematic works, the country would grow in cultural im­
port. Why? English literature is among the finest in the world thanks, in
part, to the essay: Bacon, Cowley, Steele, Addison, Swift, Johnson, Gold­
smith, Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Ruskin, Pater, Stevenson, Shaw, Ches­
terton, Woolf, Huxley, etc., are presences entirely on the face of a great lit­
erature, not loose threads hanging oft the back of the tapestry. The essay
is not always more humble than other literary genres. Who doubts that
an essay by Addison is worth more than a tragedy by Addison? The essay
is not always more ephemeral than a treatise. Great Sttmmac have disap­
peared in the abyss and—as Paul Valery says of the ancient empires—they
have left us only their beautiful names. The word Tbotnism, for example;
doesn’t it sound beautifully phantom like the word Babylonia?
As I do not believe in genres, I do not believe in definitions either.
A scholarly approximation would be this: the essay is a composition in
prose, discursive but artistic through its richness in anecdotes and de­
scriptions, brief enough that we can read ic in one sicting, with an unlim­
ited register of themes interpreted in all tones and with total liberty from
a very personal point of view. If one considers this more or less current
definition, one will see that the essay’s very noble function consists of
poeticizing the plain exercise of the writer’s intelligence and fantasy, in
prose. The essay is a conceptually constructed work of art; it is a logical
structure, but one where logic begins to sing. I know that Croce would
reject these opinions: he, who in one of his theoretical abuses arrived at
denying poetic worth even to Dante’s allegories, would not admit that
there could be lyricism in an essay. “Where there is concept there is no po­
etry!” But conferring unity to something is already a poeticizing act. Any
construction is animated with a touch of poetry when its interior unity
has become visible, easy, and pleasant. There are philosophical systems,
mathematical theories, scientific hypotheses, and historical characteriza­
tions that are converted into poems by the work and grace of a unifying
spirit. And the essay is, above all else, a minimal unity, delicate and viva­
cious, wherein concepts may shine.
From The Oxford Book ofLatin American Essays, translated byjcssc H. Lytle

...70
M
ax bense (1910-1990), a German philosopher of science
and aesthetics, spent most of his teaching career as a profes­
sor of the philosophy of technology at the University of Stutt­
gart. In his teaching and in numerous books, Bense sought to promote
a rational, scientific, even mathematical approach to the analysis of art
and literature, as in Mathematics and Beauty (i960). Bense was particu­
larly interested in using such an approach to explain the communicative
nature of signs and symbols, images and texts—an approach that he set
forth in An Introduction to Information Theoretical Aesthetics (1969).
Bense’s scientific orientation to writing is reflected in the following
excerpt from his piece “On the Essay and Experimentation,” in which
he asserts that “the essay is an experimental method; it is about writing
experimentally, and one needs write about it in the same sense that one
speaks of experimental physics, which distinguishes itself from theoreti­
cal physics rather cleanly.”

From “On the Essay and Its Prose”

“Essay” means in German; Versttch—attempt and experiment. This poses
the question of whether the expression means rhat an enlightened liter­
ary person is “attempting” to write about something, or whether writing
about a defined or half-defined subject has the character of an experi­
ment, an experiment on that subject. We are convinced chat the essay is
an experimental method; it is about writing experimentally, and one
needs write abouc it in the same sense that one speaks of experimental
physics, which distinguishes itself from theoretical physics rather cleanly.
I11 experimental physics, to stay with our metaphor, one poses a question
to nature, expects an answer, examines it and quantifies; theoretical phys­
ics describes nature by demonstrating analytically, axiomatically, and de­
ductively its adherence to ics laws due to machematic necessity. This is the
difference between an essay and a treatise. Composing experimentally,

71...
 pushing an object ofstudy here and there, interrogating, prodding, exam­
ining, thoroughly reflecting on it, tackling subject matter from different
sides and gathering what is seen in mental purview and giving name to
what the subject matter makes visible under the conditions produced by
writing: That is essay writing. The writing subject at work in the essay
is not “attempting” anything; rather, he produces the conditions under
which subjecc matter is brought into the context of a literary configu­
ration. There is no attempt at writing, there is no attempt at knowing;
the attempt is at how subject matter behaves literarily; thus a question is
posed, subject matter is experimented with. We can see that the charac­
ter of essay writing does not simply reside in che literary form in which
something is composed. The content, the subject matter treated, appears
“essayistic” because it appears under conditions. In this respect a capac­
ity for perspective as in Leibniz, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset
is inherent to every essay. They advance a philosophical perspectivalism
to the extent that in their meditations they exert a certain thinking and
knowing which are based on point of view. Even those who have read
only a small portion of the writings of these men will not fail to recognize
the mastery of their abilities in the essay. If this mastery is concealed in
Leibnizs epistolary form, it is obvious in Dilthey; if, as with Nietzsche, it
dresses up in the ability to write aphorisms, in Ortegas case the essay is
the intended form.
At this point I must emphasize that in every essay those wonderful sen­
tences show up which are like the seeds of the whole thing, from which
the essay can replenish itself again and again. I mean those enticing prose
sentences, in which one can see chat there is no perfect border to poetry
here. These are, so to speak, the elementary sentences of an essay, which
belong to prose and poetry alike. They are fragments of a “perfected
speech of sense,” that is, fragments of a linguistic body which touch us
like part of nature, and they are fragments of a bluntly expressed thought,
that is, fragments of a completed deduction, which touch us like a part of
a Platonic idea. One must take it upon himself co read in both languages
ifone wants to partake in the full satisfaction of an essay... or one trans­
forms che essay before realizing it into a series of aphorisms which all
pointedly express a thought, as can be seen in Lichtenberg, Novalis, and
Goethe, or perhaps into a series of very compressed images, something
like Rimbaud s “Illuminations,” whose torn parts present an almost per­
fect unending lyric.

...71
 And with that we confront a further point of definition in our medita­
tion. Is it not striking that all great essayists are critics? Is it not striking
that all historical periods, which are distinguished by the essay, are ulti­
mately periods of criticism? What does that imply?
To dissect the thought: In France the essay developed in relation to the
sober, critical works of Montaigne. His advice for living and dying, think­
ing and working, enjoyment and lamentation are the fruits of a critical
spirit. The element within which these reflections operate is the element
of the grand French moralists and doubters. He is a spiritual source of his
time, the beginning of a protesting critical context of spirit, which goes
on to influence in full the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A lin­
eage runs from Montaigne to Gide, Valery and Camus. Bacon developed
the essay in England. Bacon—who in every respect wrote his essays with
cunningly moral, skeptical, enlightened, and succinctly critical ulterior
motives. At bottom he was the great precursor of Swift, Defoe, Hume,
W. G. Hamilton, De Quincey and Poe, as well as the others who came
later: Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Strachey, et cetera. In Germany Lessing,
Moser and Herder—whose inexhaustible “Letters for the Advancement
of Humanity” stand out as the most significant collection of German
essays—initiate and at the same time master our form of experimental
literature. Everyone knows the critical depths their works contain. Fried­
rich Schlegel, himself a master critic and essayist, describes Herder as a
pure manifestation of the critic and identifies in him the man of protest
in the fullest sense, while Adam Muller calls the Lessing of his lecture on
the origin of German criticism and the essay “one of the most influential
spiritual sources.” And we have furthermore already mentioned Dilthey,
Nietzsche, and Ortega y Gasset. More recent authors follow them: Gott­
fried Benn, who came out of expressionism; Hofmiller, one of our first lit­
erary critics; Karl Hillebrand and Ernst Robert Curtius, who succeeded
in making an analyst’s penetrating take on the world sparkle out of mo­
ments from the present day. Ernst Jiinger, whose essays experiment with
things in Montaigne’s calm, half cynical, half skeptical manner; Rudolf
Kassner, who tirelessly seeks to preserve the world-historical conditions
for analytical understanding; Thomas Mann, who pours the breath of
the epic into prolonged expressions, doing so with a diversity of theme
that encompasses art, historiography, psychology, history, and politics; fi­
nally the Austrian essayists from Kiirenberger and Speidel to Karl Kraus,
Hofmannsthal and Stoessl, who even honored this literary form with a

73...
 theory stating that “the instinctual and the known” are “equally” at work
in the essay.
This much is clear: the essay originates from the critical essence of our
intellect, whose desire for experimentation is simply a necessity of its man­
ner of being, its method.
First published in Merkur (1947). translated here by F.ugcnc Sampson

•••74
M ariano PICON-SALAS (1901-65) was a Venezuelan dip­
lomat, historian, and essayist, who lived in Chile and else­
where during brutal dictatorships in Venezuela but always
returned to his native country. Throughout his career, Picon-Salas de­
voted himself to interpreting the varied culture, history, and literature
of South America; like others of his time, known as mundonovistas (that
is, “newworldists” or Latin Americanists), he sought to overcome the
elitist influence ofSpain. In a wide-ranging series ofbooksand essays,he
contributed to the definition and celebration of a South American iden­
tity by writing not only about specific personages and countries but also
about the entire continent, as in A Cultural History of Spanish America,
from Conquest to Independence (1944). Though the following excerpt
from “On the Essay” resonates with a concern for social justice, born no
doubt of his experience in Venezuela, Picon-Salas ultimately seems most
concerned that essayists express themselves in “a language so personal
and appropriate that it is recognized as one’s own.”

From “On the Essay”

The function of the essayist—one like Carlyle, Emerson, Santayana, or
Unamuno—would seem to be to reconcile poetry and philosophy, to
offer a strange bridge between the world of images and that of concepts,
warning the reader of the dark turns of the labyrinth and hoping to help
him seek an opening through which to pass. The essayist doesn’t pretend
like a philosopher to offer a systematic understanding of the world uni­
versally valid but works from and within the immediate situation or con­
flict. For isn’t it the case that Plato and St. Augustine participate similarly
in joining the world of ideas and the world of interior subjectivity? This
explains the final inadequacy and artificiality of the literary genres since,
for example, the Platonic Dialogues and the Confessions of St. Augustine
draw simultaneously upon the nature of philosophy and upon the essay.
The essay’s primary insistence on the concrete, a vision of the universe

75...
 not only intellectual but physical and plastic, marks a permeable frontier
between its territory'and philosophy. Probably on that English autumn
afternoon when the physicist Isaac Newton saw an apple fall, the essay­
ist would have been content to describe the event and leave to the good
Isaac all its fine calculations; perhaps he would venture—if it were no
anachronism—to announce to the Edinburgh Review that something
of supreme importance was on the verge of being understood about the
physical world. Meanwhile the philosopher would not have left it to New­
ton to formulate the laws of gravitation in language clear and distinct.
By this pathway we can say, metaphorically, that the essayist writes when
an apple has fallen at his feet and when, with the fine senses of a hunter
and a poet, he detects that something is happening or is going to happen.
An essayist like Erasmus seems to say to the Roman Catholic Church,
be careful or a Luther will appear, and one like Carlyle to the English
liberals, don’t give in too much to their cries and demands or there may
arise an avenger of the working class. Perhaps the essayist does not dare
convert into law a whole series of symptoms as a philosopher may, but he
will profile and describe them. And this description, for its part, is not
that of the novelist who would resolve it in the relations ofJohn, James,
and Maria (for there are no novels without women and even in the nar­
ratives considered the most misogynist there is always a woman hidden),
but he would write in such a way that, while feeling intensely personal,
aspires also to what we call realism.
In its own nature, the essay develops by preference in epochs of crisis,
when humans feel most confounded and, threatened, are expressing with
alarm—before new ones emerge—the values of an older culture. Plato,
Lucian, and St. Augustine testified successively to crises of the ancient
soul; they saw gods be born and die in order to draw out clarity and cer­
tainty from the general turbulence. In the same manner, our good neigh­
bor from Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne, who did not aspire to be a hero
but to be an enlightened man, benevolent and sensitive, advanced mod­
ern philosophy and the thought of future ages by epitomizing in himself
the confusion of his time. It is terrible that the Catholics slaughter the
Huguenots and the Huguenots the Catholics since no religion should
be wiped out is the simple truth he deduced when, returning to his cha­
teau, burdened with the tragic news of the street and feeling once again
the discomforting pain of his kidney stones, he sac in his study, reread
Tacitus—who saw similar butcheries and violence—and laid ouc a higher
standard co which humans could aspire.

...76
 Considering the matter this way, everyone could write essays since ev­
eryone has contemplated injustices; but apart from the fact that the field
of the essay is not exclusively that of ethics, nor would the most ambi­
tious association of essayists aspire to the immediate correction of the
multiple griefs and errors of humankind, the problem becomes, as always,
the larger one of literature. Many young men have been lost to the streets
of Carthage, loving the prostitutes, adoring false gods, and receiving
later—like an extraordinary light in the dark—the message of the new
religion of Christ; but only St. Augustine could write the Confessions.
In the same manner, among all the letters and testimonies that would
have passed between Paris and Bordeaux during the religious wars of the
late sixteenth century, we preserve, above all, the words of the author of
the Essays, not only because they teach tolerance and justice, but because
they were written in that language which their author himself called “suc­
culent and nervous, short and concise, less delicate and decked out than
vehement and brusque,” the language that signals the unmistakable per­
sonality of Montaigne as the father of all essayists.
The formula of the essay—how simple this seems to affirm—is that
of all literature; have something to say, say it in a manner that excites the
conscience and awakens the emotions of other persons, in a language so
personal and appropriate that it is recognized as one’s own. So we speak
of the prose of Plato, of Voltaire, of Cervantes, of Unamuno. All the rest
is but the confetti of rhetoric that not even the greatest writers avoid en­
tirely so as to make more social, easy, and approachable the explosive and
cathartic effect of their greatest ideas and most authentic books. Litera­
ture, too, like all human products, dons a mask, which in our age could
be a mask of vapors.
First published in Cuadcrnos 8 (1954), translated here by David Hamilton

77...
 G
erman arciniegas (1900-99) was a Colombian journal­
ise, historian, educator, diplomat, and political activist, who de­
voted much of his career to speaking out against the brutality
and oppression of military governments throughout South America. In
The State ofLatin America (1951), he chronicled the tortures so exten­
sively and vividly that a concern for his safety compelled him to emigrate
to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University before
returning to Colombia. In numerous books and essays, Arciniegas also
sought to challenge a Eurocentric view of South America with a celebra­
tion of its multicultural heritage, as he makes clear in asserting that “In
our America, from Indian copper, African ebony, and Iberian olive has
come an infinite range of hues.” Here as elsewhere in “The Essay in Our
America,” excerpted below, Arciniegas conceives of the South American
essay as inextricably bound up with the complex cultural history of the
continent itself.

From “The Essay in Our America”

In this America of ours, which is mestizo, not Latin, the novel arrives
late, the theater does not mature, but the essay flourishes. Because we are
problematic, we must interpret ourselves. In a certain sense, we are the
most difficult and complicated people in all the world. When in the field
of letters an essayist appears who discovers a new angle on the problem
that grips us—that of knowing who we are and where we are going—he
is called “Maestro? It is the only occasion when we use that term with re­
spect, almost with veneration. Otherwise we use it ironically and call the
shoemaker a maestro or the musician who plays the guitar in the square
in the middle of the night. But it is another matter when we speak of
Justo Sierra, of Hostos or Rodo, or more recently of Alfonso Reyes or
Sarn'n Cano.
America is the only continent to have appeared recently, the only one
to have sprung out of what was totally unknown. Some dreamers had

...78
premonitions of its existence but only as an exercise of the imagination,
and even then the best they could do was invent and then destroy an
image, create a fantasy of Atlantis then tell of its immediate disappear­
ance. When Toscanelli and Columbus insisted on the roundness of the
earth, the one by way of simple calculation the other by daring to dem­
onstrate the fact, they imagined only the coasts of Asia on the far side of
the Atlantic, the islands ofJapan. The revelation that Amerigo Vespucci
made of discovering a new continent produced such stupefaction in Eu­
rope that geographers felt compelled to ask that he give his name to the
new world. Asia and Africa had been explored centuries earlier. The spirit
of Asia and Africa had long been flowing in the European bloodstream,
their sources no more than journeys clouded by distance and by the dif­
ficulty of travel. But there had been Marco Polos, and they knew the color
of those peoples, what they thought, and what they produced. America
erupted like the provocation for an essay. It is the ultimate subject. It was
not mere coincidence or by caprice rhac Montaigne, the creator of the
modern essay, preoccupied himselfwith a man from America. That good
savage of whom he spoke would remain alive in the minds of Europeans
until travelers of the age of Bougainville, La Condamine, and Humboldt
refreshed their memories of him and so the outpouring of romantic lit­
erature burst forth by which Europeans understood America in the eigh­
teenth century.
In truth, the essay on the New World began to be written in the first
decade of the sixteenth century by the explorers themselves. Amerigo Ves­
pucci discussed fully the problem of the color of American people just as
he discussed all the geographical theories that stood between what men
saw with their own eyes in the new world and what they had glimpsed in
books. From the work of Las Casas or of Sahagun, one can extracc inde­
pendent essays in which it is wonderful to see how currents of medieval
thought and humanism cross. Of everything said later in essays of the
nineteenth century, there are adumbrations not at all negligible in those
primitive texts born of the surprise of discovery.
Moreover, it is our America chat stands almost alone in modern times
for forming the grand hybridization of race. It is a hybridization that re­
mains green and fresh for sociological study. Europe is certainly a conti­
nent of mixed breeding, but the Asian invasion is so distant from us that i
it has evaporated as a point of memory, similar to the mixing of Africans
with the people of Mediterranean Europe, and no one concerns himself
with a process that remote. Here on the contrary we have a Babel not of

79...
 languages but of colors. And we bear it with relative case. In the United
States, which must only combine black with white, the partisans of seg­
regation still fight to the death and the Supreme Court must endure their
arrogant defiance. In our America, from Indian copper, African ebony,
and Iberian olive has come an infinite range ol hues, and when Jose Vas-
concelos suggests the possibility that a cosmic race could have established
in our land all those colors and then tied them to the other three conti­
nents with strings now lost, he is called by that name that we honor most,
Maestro.
In another sense, too, our America is unique. It is unstable, chaotic,
and anarchic, but it minds a different theory on the issue that, perhaps,
has mosc concerned European history in the modern period: the manner
in which some people murder others. Three centuries of continual peace
offer something Europeans have never known. It is true that in the nine­
teenth century we practiced the exercise of civil war, but the total number
of dead in those wars does not reach thac of a major battle on the old con­
tinent. There have been no wars of conquest. No armies have been formed
to invade one’s neighbors. The only large-scale invasion one remembers
is that of Mexico by the United States. The War of the Pacific involving
Chile, Peru, and Bolivia and the alliance of Brazil and Argentina againsc
Paraguay are episodes that one cannot compare with the constant warfare
of Europe. The system of the American states has frozen international
war. But our America is unstable. In every country, constitutions change
with feverish frequency. Dictatorships and revolutions alternate without
respite or truce. Our collective passions contrast with the mechanical pre­
cision of the imperturbable growth of the United States before and after
the Civil War.
There is one situation evident in the contrasting histories of the United
States and ofLatin America that explains this phenomenon. In the United
States, independence was no more than the natural development and polit­
ical evolution of the colonies. There a democratic government, liberal and
representative, was being practiced in separate regions that already had the
experience of self-governing. Those bodies corresponded to populations
from all over Europe that had been drawn to America by a democratic
vocation. The English, German, French, Russian, and Dutch colonies chat
had begun to function as business enterprises were formed by those who
needed to find freedom for themselves in the practice of their religion.
They emigrated from Europe with the plan of achieving an independent
life. In Latin America the opposite occurred. There one lived under the

... 80
absolute power of an empire governed on the one hand by Roman ideas
of a central power and on the other by the strong arm of the Catholic
Church. The Church saw in the slightest gesture of independence an ide­
ology that suggested Lutheranism, Judaism, or Calvinism and smothered
it with evident efficiency. Because of these circumstances, the essay in the
United States becomes an optimistic synthesis of its own progress; it is a
philosophy in which one sees the complacency of a healthy organism that
develops industries, cities, farms and ranches across the width of a republic
unburdened by the green infernos of our furious and deadly geography.
In contrast, the Latin American essay is a passage along the edge of an
abyss. Among our themes is the temptation that one feels only along the
precipices of death. One of our first great essays, “The Letter of Jamaica”
by Bolivar, illustrates this dramatic element of our being. You look in vain
in the writings of Washington for a comparable page. The deeds that the
hero of the north needed to consider during his campaigns or after his tri­
umph never formed in him the urgency of reflections so profound. While
the United States, rich and arrogant, emboldened by its successes and
with a big game hunter at its head, coins the happy and oblivious expres­
sion, “Manifest Destiny,” which presumes to include half the Caribbean,
Alcides Arguedas speaks, in Hispanic America, of a diseased people, our
people, and Francisco Garcia Calderon tries in vain, with his elegant and
Francophile rhecoric, to imagine the creation of a continent born from
the actions he himself presents in macabre parade.
It is obvious that the natural resources of our America and its human
reserves of communities formed in battles most anguished and unequal
allow us to consider a future of extraordinary influence. But the depths
from which we emerge place us in a tragic landscape. One cannot find
as a theme for the essay anything more rich of contrasts, with more mel­
ancholy shadows, recondite secrets, and sharper crises—and with more
hymns of hope and life.
First published in Cuadernos 19 (1956), translated here by David Hamilton

81 ...
 T
heodor w. adorno (1903-69) was born Theodor Ludwig
Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of a wealthy
Gernian-Jewish wine merchant and Corsican-Catholic singer
and musician. Displaced by the Nazis, he spent 1934 to 1949 in Oxford,
New York, and Los Angeles, during which time he became a naturalized
American citizen and adopted his mother’s name. Adorno, an accom­
plished pianisc, composer, and music critic, did not join the Institute of
Social Research (or Frankfurt School) until 1938 but is usually associ­
ated with the school’s Marxian critique of the culture industry and col­
laborated often with its director Max Horkheimer. In an excerpt from
his “The Essay as Form” (1958), Adorno argues that because it is a kind
of antigenre, the essay promotes skepticism and independent thought,
a view that dates to Pater but that Adorno finds in conversation with
Lukacs and Musil. When Adorno claims, “The essay shys away from the
violence of dogma,” his use of “shys away” wisely suggests that it would
be dogmatic to hold that any form is inherently, always, and definitely
not dogmatic.

From “The Essay as Form”

With regard to scientific procedure and its philosophic grounding as
method, the essay, in accordance with its idea, draws the fullest conse­
quences from the critique of the system. Even the empiricist doctrines
that grant priority to open, unanticipated experience over firm, concep­
tual ordering remain systematic to the extent that they investigate what
they hold to be the more or less constant pre-conditions of knowledge
and develop them in as continuous a context as possible. Since the time of
Bacon, who was himself an essayist, empiricism—no less than rationalism
—has been “method.” Doubt about the unconditional priority of
method was raised, in the actual process of thought, almost exclusively
by the essay. It does justice to the consciousness of non-identity, without
needing to say so, radically un-radical in refraining from any reduction

...82
 co a principle, in accentuating the fragmentary, the partial rather than
the total. “Perhaps the great Sieur de Montaigne felt something like this
when he gave his writings the wonderfully elegant and apt title ofEssays.
The simple modesty of this word is an arrogant courtesy. The essayist
dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes lead him co believe that
he has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than
explanations of the poems of others, or at best of his own ideas. But he
ironically adapcs himself co this smallness—the eternal smallness of the
most profound work of the intellect in face of life—and even empha­
sizes it with ironic modesty.” The essay does not obey the rules of the
game of organized science and theory that, following Spinoza’s principle,
the order of things is identical with that of ideas. Since the airtight order
of concepts is not identical with existence, the essay does not strive for
closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It revolts above all against
the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and ephem­
eral is unworthy of philosophy; against that ancient injustice coward the
transitory, by which it is once more anathematized, conceptually. The
essay shys away from the violence of dogma, from the notion that the
result of abstraction, the temporally invariable concept indifferent to
the individual phenomenon grasped by it, deserves ontological dignity.
The delusion that the ordo idearum (order of ideas) should be the ordo
rerum (order of things) is based on the insinuation chat the mediated is
unmediated. Just as little as a simple fact can be thought withouc a con­
cept, because co chink it always already means to conceptualize it, it is
equally impossible to think the purest concept without reference co the
factual. Even the creations of phantasy that are supposedly independent
of space and time, point toward individual existence—however far they
may be removed from it. Therefore the essay is noc intimidated by the
depraved profundity which claims that truth and history are incompat­
ible. If truth has in fact a temporal core, then the full historical content
becomes an integral moment in truth; the a posteriori becomes concretely
the a priori, as only generally stipulated by Fichte and his followers. The
relation to experience—and from it che essay takes as much substance as
does traditional theory from its categories—is a relation to all of history;
merely individual experience, in which consciousness begins wich what is
nearest to it, is itself mediaced by the all-encompassing experience of his­
torical humanity; the claim that social-historical contents are nevertheless
supposed to be only indirectly important compared with the immediate
life of the individual is a simple self-delusion of an individualistic society

85...

i
 and ideology. The depreciation of the historically produced, as an object
of theory, is therefore corrected by the essay. There is no salvaging the
distinction of a first philosophy from a mere philosophy of culture that
assumes the former and builds on it, a distinction with which the taboo
on the essay is rationalized theoretically. The intellectual process which
canonizes a distinction between the temporal and the timeless is losing
its authority. Higher levels of abstraction invest thought neither with a
greater sanctity nor with metaphysical content; rather, the metaphysical
content evaporates with the progress of abstraction, for which the essay
attempts to make reparation. The usual reproach against the essay, that
it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness [sic] of totality
and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man
is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter
the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory
eternal. Its weakness testifies to the non-identity that it has to express, as
well as to that excess of intention over its object, and thereby it points to
that utopia which is blocked out by the classification of the world into the
eternal and the transitory. In the emphatic essay, thought gets rid of the
traditional idea of truth.
The essay simultaneously suspends the traditional concept of method.
Thought acquires its depth from penetrating deeply into a matter, not
from referring it back to something else. In this the essay becomes po­
lemical by treating what is normally held to be derived, without however
pursuing its ultimate derivation. The essay freely associates what can be
found associated in the freely chosen object. It does not insist stubbornly
on a realm transcending all mediations—and they are the historical ones
in which the whole of society is sedimented—rather the essay seeks truth
contents as being historical in themselves. It does not concern itself with
any supposed primeval condition in order to contravene society’s false
sociality, which, just because it tolerates nothing not stamped by it, ul­
timately tolerates nothing indicative of its own omnipresence and nec­
essarily cites, as its ideological complement, that nature which its own
praxis eliminates. The essay silently abandons the illusion that thought
can break out of thesis into physis, out of culture into nature. Spellbound
by what is fixed and admittedly deduced, by artifacts, the essay honors na­
ture by confirming that it no longer exists for human beings. The essays
Alexandrianism replies to the fact that by their very existence the lilac
and the nightingale, wherever the universal net allows them to survive,
only want to delude us that life still lives. The essay abandons the main

...84
road to the origins, the road leading to the most derivative, to being, the
ideology that simply doubles chat which already exists; at the same time
the essay does not allow the idea of immediacy, postulated by the very
concept of mediation, to disappear entirely. All levels of the mediated are
immediate to the essay, before its reflection begins.
As the essay denies any primeval givens, so it refuses any definition of
its concepts. Philosophy has completed the fullest critique of definition
from the most diverse perspectives, including those of Kant, Hegel and
Nietzsche. But science has never adopted this critique. While the move­
ment beginning with Kant, a movement against the scholastic residues in
modern thought, replaces verbal definition with an understanding ofcon­
cepts as part of the process in which they are temporally embodied, the
individual sciences insist stubbornly on the pre-critical job of definition
—and do so for the sake of the undisturbed security of their operation.
In this regard the neopositivists, who identify philosophy with scientific
method, agree with Scholasticism. The essay, in contrast, takes the anti-
systematic impulse into its own procedure, and introduces concepts di­
rectly, “immediately,” as it receives them. They gain their precision only
through their relation to one another. In this, however, the essay gets
some support from the concepts themselves. For it is a mere superstition
of a science exclusively concerned with the appropriation of raw materi­
als to believe that concepts are in themselves undetermined, that they
are first determined by their definition. Science requires the image of the
concept as a tabula rasa, in order to secure its claim to domination; the
claim co be che sole power at the head of the table. Accually, all concepts
are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they
stand. The essay begins with such meanings and, itself being essentially
language, it forces these meanings on farther; it wants co help language, in
its relation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectively in the way that
they are already unconsciously named in language. That effort is already
envisaged by che procedure of meaning-analysis in phenomenology; only
there the relation of concepts to language is fetishized. The essay remains
as skeptical of this as it is of definition. Without apology the essay draws
on itself che reproach that it does not know beyond a doubc just what is
co be understood as che real concent of concepts. For the essay perceives
that the longing for scrict definitions has long offered, through fixating
manipulations of the meanings of concepts, to eliminate the irritating
and dangerous elements of things chat live within concepts. Yet the essay
can neither do without general concepts—even language that does not

85...
 fetishize the concept cannot do without concepts—nor does it treat them
arbitrarily. It therefore takes the matter of presentation more seriously
than do those procedures that separate out method from material and are
indifferent to the way they represent their objectified contents. The how
of expression should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacri­
fices, without, however, betraying the intended matter to the arbitrariness
of previously decreed significations. In this Benjamin was an unequaled
master. Such precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Noc less, but
more than the process of defining, the essay urges the reciprocal interac­
tion of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In the essay,
concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not ad­
vance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave
as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of
this texture. Actually, the thinker does not think, but rather transforms
himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplifying it.
While even traditional thought draws its impulses from such experience,
such thought by its form eliminates the remembrance of these impulses.
The essay, on the other hand, takes them as its model, without simply imi­
tating them as reflected form; it mediates them through its own concep­
tual organization; it proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically.
The way in which the essay appropriates concepts is most easily com­
parable to the behavior of a man who is obliged, in a foreign country,
to speak that country’s language instead of patching it together from its
elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dictionary. If he has
looked at the same word thirty times, in constantly changing contexts, he
has a clearer grasp of ic than he would if he looked up all the word’s mean­
ings; meanings that are generally too narrow, considering they change
depending on the context, and too vague in view of the nuances that the
context establishes in every individual case. Just as such learning remains
exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it must pay for its affinity with
open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm
of established thought fears like death. It is not so much that the essay
ignores indisputable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal. The essay
becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in a
hoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light
from a terminus ad quern hidden to the essay itself, and not from an ob­
vious terminus a quo. In this the very method of the essay expresses the
utopian intention. All of its concepts are presentable in such a way that
they support one another, that each one articulates itself according to

...86
the configuration that it forms with the others. In the essay discreetly
separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding,
no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a
configuration. It is a force field, just as under the essay’s glance every intel­
lectual artifact must transform itself into a force field.
First published in Noten zur Literatur, 1958, translated by Bob Hullot-Kentor and
Frederic Will

87...
 A ldous huxley (1894-1963) was born into a family of pronii-
nent British intellectuals. His grandfather Thomas was a col-
JL V. league of Darwin's and his mother was the niece of Matthew
Arnold. His own circle of friends included D. H. Lawrence, George Or­
well, the Bloomsbury writers, and, after moving to Southern California,
Ray Bradbury and Anita Loos. Best known for his dystopian novel Brave
New World (1931) and his memoir about using hallucinogenic drugs The
Doors ofPerception (1954), Huxley also wrote plays, poetry, screenplays,
travel books, and many collections of essays. The taxonomy that follows
comes from the preface to his i960 Collected Essays. In it, Huxley sug­
gests “a three-poled frame of reference” for thinking about the essay: the
“personal,” “objective,” and “universal.”

From the Preface to Collected Essays

What is true of the novel is only a little less true of the essay. For, like the
novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about al­
most anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece,
and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of
a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground,
and cover it almost as thoroughly as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third
Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comedie Humaine.
Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be
studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There
is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of
the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of
the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the
neighborhood of only one of the essay’s three poles, or at the most only
in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly per­
sonal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who
look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There
are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of
themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific

...88
or political theme. Their art consists in setting forth, passing judgment
upon, and drawing general conclusions from, the relevant data. In a third
group we find those essayists who do their work in the world of high ab­
stractions, who never condescend to be personal and who hardly deign to
take notice of the particular facts, from which their generalizations were
originally drawn. Each kind ofessay has its special merits and defects. The
personal essayists may be as good as Charles Lamb at his best, or as bad
as Mr. X at his cutest and most self-consciously whimsical. The objective
essay may be as lively, as brassily contentious as a piece by Macaulay; but
it may also, with fatal ease, degenerate into something merely informa­
tive or, if it be critical, into something merely learned and academic. And
how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great general-
izers! “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for
they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.”
And from Bacon we pass to Emerson. “All men plume themselves on the
improvement of society, and no man improves. Society never advances.
It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. For everything that
is given, something is taken.” Even a Baltasar Gracian, that briefest of
essayists who writes as chough he were cabling his wisdom, ac two dol­
lars a word, to the Antipodes, sometimes achieves a certain magnificence.
“Things have their period; even excellences are subject to fashion. The
sage has one advantage: he is immortal. If this is not his century, many
others will be.” But the medal of solemn and lapidary generalization has
its reverse. The constantly abstract, constantly impersonal essayist is apt
to give us not oracles but algebra. As an example of such algebraic writing,
let me quote a short passage from the English translation of Paul Valery’s
Dialogues. It is worth remarking that French literature has a tradition of
high and sustained abstraction; English literacure has not. Works chat in
French are not ac all out of the common seem, when translated, strange
almost to the point of absurdity. But even when made acceptable by tradi­
tion and a great talent, the algebraic style strikes us as being very remote
from the living reality of our immediate experience. Here, in the words
of an imaginary Socrates, is Valery’s description of the kind of language
in which (as I think, unfortunately) he liked to write. “What is more
mysterious than clarity? what more capricious than the way in which light
and shade are distributed over the hours and over men? Certain peoples
lose themselves in cheir thoughts, but for the Greeks all things are forms.
We recain only their relations and, enclosed, as it were, in the limpid day,
Orpheus-like we build, by means of the word, temples of wisdom and
s
89...
 science that may suffice for all reasonable creatures. This great art requires
of us an admirably exact language. The very word that signifies language
is also the name, with us, for reason and calculation; the same word says
these three things.” In the stratosphere of abstract notions this elegant al­
gebra is all very well; but a completely bodiless language can never do jus­
tice to the data of immediate experience, nor can it contribute anything
to our understanding of the “capricious lights and shades” in the midst
of which, whether we like it or not, we must perforce live out our lives.
The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not
of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for
the essay to exist. Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these
consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three
poles—from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the
concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.
The perfection of any artistic form is rarely achieved by its first inven­
tor. To this rule Montaigne is the great and marvelous exception. By the
time he had written his way into the Third Book, he had reached the lim­
its ofhis newly discovered art. “What are these essays,” he had asked at the
beginning ofhis career, “but grotesque bodies pieced together of different
members, without any definite shape, without any order, coherence, or
proportion, except they be accidental.” But a few years later the patch­
work grotesques had turned into living organisms, into multiform hybrids
like those beautiful monsters of the old mythologies, the mermaids, the
man-headed bulls with wings, the centaurs, the Anubises, the seraphim—
impossibilities compounded of incompatibles, but compounded from
within, by a process akin to growth, so that the human trunk seems co
spring quite naturally from between the horses shoulders, the fish mod­
ulates into the full-breasted Siren as easily and inevitably as a musical
theme modulates from one key to another. Free association artistically
controlled—this is the paradoxical secret of Montaigne’s best essays. One
damned thing after another—but in a sequence that in some almost mi­
raculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human
experience. And how beautifully Montaigne combines the generalization
with the anecdoce, the homily with the autobiographical reminiscence!
How skilfully he makes use of the concrete particular, the chose vue, to
express some universal truth, and to express it more powerfully and pen-
etratingly than it can be expressed by even the most oracular of the dealers
in generalities!
Collected Essays, i960

...90
M ICHAEL hamburger (192.4-2007) was born in Berlin.
His father was a Jewish pediatrician, his mother a Polish
Quaker. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the family
moved to England, where Hamburger earned a degree at Christ Church,
Oxford. After marrying the poet, actress, and broadcaster Anne Beres-
ford in 1951 and beginning a family, he taught at a number of universi­
ties in England and the United States. Hamburger thought of himself
first as a poet and published more than twency volumes of verse, but
he earned a steady living and many awards as a translator, introducing
English readers to Friedrich Holderlin and Paul Celan, and providing
definitive translations of many others, including his friend W. G. Sebald.
He also wrote criticism, autobiography, and journalism. In “An Essay
on the Essay,” Hamburger uses the metaphor of the essay as a walk to
digress upon many of the form’s traits, worrying all the while that our
automobile- and results-centered modern culture may not be hospitable
to a genre more concerned with the journey than with the destination.

“An Essay on the Essay”

Even that isn’t quite right: an essay really ought not to be on anything, to
deal with anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion,
not a business trip. So if the title says “on” that can only mean that this
essay passes over a certain field—but with no intention of surveying it.
This field will not be ploughed or cultivated. It will remain a meadow,
wild. One walker is interested in wild flowers, another in the view, a third
collects insects. Hunting butterflies is permitted. Everything is permitted
—everything except the intentions of surveyors, farmers, speculators.
And each walker is allowed to report whatever he happens to have ob­
served about the field—even if that was no more than the birds that flew
over it, the clouds that have still less to do with it, or only the transmuta­
tions of birds or clouds in his own head. But the person who drove there,
sat there inside his car and then says he was there is no essayist. That’s why

91...
 the essay is an outmoded genre. (“Form” is what I almost wrote, but the
essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.)
The essay is just as outmoded as the art of letter-writing, the art of
conversation, the art of walking for pleasure. Ever since Montaigne the
essay has been highly individualistic, but at the same time it presupposes
a society that not only tolerates individualism but enjoys it—a society lei­
sured and cultivated enough to do without information. The whole spirit
of essay-writing is contained in the first sentence of the first great collec­
tion of English essays—Francis Bacon’s of 1597: “What is Truth; said jest­
ing Pilate-, And would not stay for an Answer.” A jesting Pilate who asks
questions but doesn’t wait for answers is the archetypal personification of
the essay, of essay-writing and essayists. The English essay flourished for
three centuries, even when the earnestness of the Victorian age had begun
to question its peculiar relation to truth. Only the totalitarian systems of
this century turned walking without a purpose into a crime. Since the
time of G. K. Chesterton and Virginia Woolf the essay has been a dead
genre. Needless to say, people continued—and still continue—to write
prose pieces which they call essays; but already George Orwell was too
“committed,” coo puritanical, too much aware of a crisis to take walks
without a bad conscience.
The essay is not a form, but a style above all. Its individualism distin­
guishes it from pure, absolute or autonomous art. The point of an essay,
like its justification and itsscyle, always lies in the author’s personality and
always leads back to it. The essayist is as little concerned with pure, imper­
sonal art as with his subject. Since the vast majority of so-called critical
essays accaches primary importance to subjects, chat is, to answers and
judgments, the perpetuation of that genre does not prove that che essay
has survived. Most cricical essays are short treatises. With a genuine essay
it makes no difference whether its title refers to a literary theme, whether
to che origin of tragedy or the origin of roast pig.
But since the essay is not a form the spirit of essay-writing can assert
itself outside the genre. Where confidence in his readership was lacking,
for instance, the essayist often changed into an aphorist. Lichcenberg,
Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Nietzsche were laconic, partly repressed
essayists. Essay-writing insinuated itself even into poetry; a pseudo-epic
like Byron’s DonJuan or Heine’s Atta Troll, whose wit always points back
to the personalities of their authors, whose plots are interrupted again
and again by their narrators’ peripatetic arbitrariness. Story-telling and
essay-writing were inseparable in the prose pieces of Robert Walser, and

... 91
 it was no accident that one of them, an outstanding one, was called “The
Walk.” It was the spirit of essay-writing that drove Walser the storyteller
into self-destructive parody: “In Thuringia, at Eisenach if you like, there
lived a so-called beetleologist, who once again had a niece. When shall
I have done with nieces and the like? Perhaps never. In that case, woe is
i me! Grievously the girl in the house next door suffered under learned
surveillance.”
Some of the digressions in Musil’s The Man without Qiialities, too, are
genuinely essayistic, because Musil was a seeker, a man without designs
who asked questions that he couldn’t answer. So are the Ficciones ofJorge
Luis Borges. So are many of the shorter writings of Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin and Th. W. Adorno—however weighty their themes.
The spirit of essay-writing walks on irresistibly, even over the corpse of
the essay, and is glimpsed now here, now there, in novels, stories, poems
or articles, from time to time in the very parkland of philosophy, for­
midably walled and strictly guarded though it may seem, the parkland
from which it escaped centuries ago to wander about in the wild meadow.
But it is never glimpsed where that wild meadow has been banned from
human consciousness even as a memory or possibility, where walls have
become absolute and walking itself has become a round of compulsion
and routine. It has come to terms with the overcrowded streets of large
cities, but hardly with factories, barracks, offices, not at all with prison
yards and extermination camps. Anyone who can never get these out of
his mind cannot tolerate the aimlessness and evasiveness of essay-writing,
but calls it shameless, egotistic and insolent. But somewhere or other the
spirit of essay-writing is walking on; and no one knows where it will turn
up. Perhaps in the essay again, one day?
Firsc published in Akzcntc n (1965)

95 • • •
 F ernand Ouellette (1930-) is one of Canada’s most renowned
writers and intellectuals. Though known for his passionate, mysti­
cal poetry, Ouellette has also been a fierce advocate for Quebec
independence. He cofounded the magazine Liberte in 1959 (which his
friend Andre Belleau also helped edit), produced radio essays for Radio-
Canada, and has taught at several universities. He has won the Governor
General’s Award three times, accepting it twice: in 1985, for his novel
Lucie on un midi en novembre, and in 1987, for the collection of poetry
Les Heures. In 1970, after winning the award for Les actes retrouves, a
collection of essays, he refused it in protest against the government’s ac­
tions during the October Crisis, when the War Measures Act was used
to arrest 497 people and to hold them without charges or bail. Ouel­
lette’s poetic inclinations (and learning) are on display in “Ramblings
on the Essay,” where he argues for a lyrical essay, one that “can only be
flashes of lightning, fragments from a strange time, desperate leaps out
of its own form.”

“Ramblings on the Essay”

Longing is the umbilical cord of the highest life. — Kierkegaard
All of this is, yet again, only a story of ecstasy and disappointment.
— Mallarme
Criticism seemed to us to be a path of sorts, not a view or a position.
—Jean-Picrrc Richard

What seems to most to be a work devoted to “weighing” the souls of

memory is for me essentially a “trial,” a “struggle,” a “glance," the unload­
ing of what has been shaped or lived. A specific form of being, of action,
and of purpose is answered by the epiphany of another form. The essay
shakes the foundation of memory by proposing a plan of the whole based
on one or several parts of a whole. So it seems to me like one of the privi­
leged forms of desire, of aspiration, of the “unhoped for.” It is moved more

•••94
by “the imagination of desire,” by the possible, than by the volition to
create a synthesis, by seizing what is. In this respect, Northrop Frye was
correct to write that “ in essays and in lyrics the primary interest is in
diano'ia or poetic thought... that the reader gets from the writer” [from
Anatomy of Criticism, si]. And on the other hand, young Lukacs is not
far off the mark in Soul and Form, when he offers a definition of the essay
as an autonomous “form” situated between literature and philosophy, be­
tween “imaginative creation” and “conceptual creation.”
I should make clear that when I think of the form or genre of the essay,
I am not referring to the elaborate work of a Camus but rather to assertion
[in affirmation], to a fabric of leaps and “sallies.” To me, the essay seems
a melting pot of “verbal combustion,” a melting pot of prose that will
not allow itself to be depleted, prose that refuses to “perish.” The essayist
holds on to traces of brilliance the way a feline tracks a moving shape. He
desires so ardently that he runs the risk of “blindinghis soul to everything
else” (Democritus). I’m not interested in finding a global answer, when I
let myself be so fascinated by the swelling of the irreducible, by projecting
on a screen the leaps of my imagination, by my thoughtful reflections.
Forms, characters, aspects, and essences are, certainly, chosen by chose
who are completely devoted, but they are also filtered and distilled co the
oneness of the person who posits ideas, who only knows how to do so by
projecting a beam of light straight inco the eyes of those who approach
him. Achim von Arnim was right to observe that “judgments are quice
insignificant things; each should do what he must for his own salvation.”
This does not seem very far from Heraclitus’s “I searched for myself.”
Therefore, for me the essay is like a trial, a precipitation of the human,
a fragment of confession: a concentrated fragment of imagination, of
awareness, and of writing. (How this would have appalled the great clas­
sical minds of the seventeenth century, especially Pascal, who rejected
the imagination as “a teacher of error and falsity!”) This is why I spoke of
a melting pot above, because it truly is really about transmutation, since
all chat remains of che encounter between the “self” and the other when
the writing is done is a complete transformation of the self. The other
is in a way invaded chen transmuted within che self. The essayisc rivets
himself to che essence of a Holderlin, for example, but what remains of
the man-poet afterwards? What remains of the crystallized dazzle and
sound of his poems if they can only be returned to us through a self, a self
who, we can only hope, does not turn away from the “divine”? How can
the essayist claim to be objective? Isn’t he wearing a mask? How radical

95...
 has he become? To what extent does he consume the object of his essay?
Those who do not instigate, do not create, but conceive of the essay as an
ideological category are undoubtedly better off to think with a critical ap­
proach. For if, as is claimed, it is within criticism chat the crisis in writing
is ending, one could on the contrary speak of an increasing tension within
the essay. The essayisc who does not claim to be a critic—I set aside criti­
cal essays here—is a strange being who, without becoming overwhelmed,
only feeds oft the insights ofhis fellow-man. He is not likely to dominate
from the summit ofhis structural reading or to produce, like a scholar,
a socio-historical synthesis of what he perceives around him. The essay­
ist communes with what could undo him. He desires “to think with his
entire body.” He throws himself into the volcano, hoping that the volcano
will liquefy in his veins.
It’s clear that he hardly cares about pondering the multiple forms of
memory. And it is even clearer that he accs as a counter-memory, that the
essay does not lec itself be scripped down to an abstract idea. Contemplat­
ing the subscance of memory, or its acts, seems more comforting to me.
It is not a question, moreover, of denying the usefulness of such work.
But I feel thac the essayist is someone who mourns the loss of the great
flashes of insight into what was clearly a pach toward accomplishment
or pathetic disaster. He agrees to the work of mourning. He insists on
setting a few lights out in the dark, to follow their path, where to try to
fully embrace certain forms or events might well reduce everything to
ashes. Notice how Simone Weil exposes the illusion of strength, how she
reveals the quality of her soul by uncovering che moments in which soul
itself is revealed in The Iliad... Notice how Bonnefoy immerses himself
in the stones of Ravenna... I could easily provide countless examples ...
Of course, it isn’t a matter of claiming some praxis, like Novalis, some
“magical idealism” where a chought provides the means of changing the
world. This does not mean that I completely deny the efficacy of the
essay—on the contrary. However, the essayist is not a wizard. He doesn’t
have “magical powers.” Moreover, unlike the scientist, he doesn’t aspire
to power. His strength comes to him from his concentration, from his
meditation, even from the effectiveness ofhis speech. His effect is not
significantly different from the poet’s. A reversal of sorts takes place in
the verbal realm when moving from the poem to the essay: a sliding from
one pole to the other in an attempt to find a delicate balance between
the concept and the “sound-sense.” Essays like poems are creations and,
consequently, acts. From this standpoint, Baudelaire was right to assert

...96
that only the poet could be a true critic. For isn’t it necessary “to face po­
etry in order to write good prose”? Or, in another sense, isn’t it a matter
of “the quest for a style,” as Mallarme said? Is it possible that they were
speaking of the person whom I conceive of as an essayist? That person
seems to me like a creature who spins and leaps. And without renouncing
the essayist, wouldn’t he be somewhat antithetical to Montaigne, who
dedicated himself to making detailed portraits of his self, by means of
concentrating on his memories? Wasn’t it as an essayist that Pascal pitted
himself against Montaigne? Even considering Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Saint
Augustine and many others, it still seems to me that a certain kind of
thought and writing were toppled by the great Pascal. But we had to wait
for Holderlin, Novalis, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Nietzsche
to be truly convinced of this. After all, isn’t A Season in Hell a prime ex­
ample of a radiant essay?

Of course, I’m not categorizing the numerous forms of the essay accord­
ing to the standards that academics give them. I’m not proposing any
models to anyone. My essayist is someone who prefers to sally forth, to
indulge in “verbal combustion,” and essentially chooses to accept wander­
ing absolutely—a being who, as Chestov has hoped, proceeds at things
“haphazardly, eyes closed,” a rambling and playful spirit. Didn’t Mal­
larme present himself as a “man accustomed to dreaming” in order to
gaze at Villiers de l’lsle-Adam? Can it be said of the essayist, as Aristotle
said of “the poet” Homer, that he lies a loti One of the critic’s roles is,
doubtlessly, to point out the inanity of the leaps that the reckless essayist
takes in the “course” of his writings and the impotence of his “gaze” of
things—or even to extract from it the kinds of shifting that it would be
useful to submit to memory. Couldn’t a dialectical relationship be estab­
lished between the essayist and the critic, like the interplay of shapes in
the sand and the movement of the tide?
Thus, the essay can only be a work or, according to Valery’s expression,
the state that results from a series of internal transformations. We are not
far removed from the situation of poetry. For a poet, an essay must have
the characteristics of poetry, ofpoesis. Isn’t this the sense in which it was
said that as a critic Baudelaire was never wrong?
To summarize—in taking a bit of a detour toward a lovely expression
drawn from Valery’s Dance and the Soul—I could almost say that the
essay, by definition, can only be flashes of lightning, fragments from a
strange time, desperate leaps out of its own form. Undoubtedly, this may

97...
 all seem “ridiculous,” especially compared ro che attempts at synthesis
of critics, philosophers, and sociologists. But to follow the essayist is to
venture onto quicksand or to leap from the top of a tower. And no one is
obliged to ramble. No one is obliged to welcome the brilliance and fol­
low it along the wandering path on a quest for oneness, a quest for Being.

Here is the poet who has not yet sung.

But soon he will sing,
And by the end of his song
He will know the science of the stars.
—Taliesin

First published in Etudes Littcraires 5 (1971). translated here by Carl Klaus, Ned
Stuckcy-Frcnch, and Lindsey Scott

...98
G
uillermo diaz-plaja (1909-84) was a member of a noted
Spanish literary family. One brocher wrote children’s books,
another was a journalist. A professor at important Spanish uni­
versities, including Instituto del Teacro de Barcelona and Universidad
de Barcelona, Diaz-Plaja was extremely prolific, publishing over two
hundred books, including more than two dozen collections of essays.
He also edited anthologies and textbooks, and wrote poetry, cultural
history, literary criticism, travel narratives, autobiography, and journal­
ism. In the following piece, this noted professor, having recently judged
a student essay contest, concludes that the essay is an “adult genre,” one
that requires “discreetly” hidden erudition and a willingness to remain
in “permanent doubt”—traits that come only with age, if at all.

“The Limits of the Essay”

I have been asked once again to take on the bittersweet role of judging
the Young Essayist Competition of the Spanish Editorial Press, and the
experience has been rich in suggestions, which, as I will explain, take the
form of questions.
I have asked myself, in fact, whether a competition for a young essayist
(by which we mean a writer under forty) is not a contradiction in terms.
I believe it is. If, in contrast, we connect poetry with youth, why not then
connect similarly the essay? Simply put, it is because the essay is an un­
equivocal symptom of maturity.
An essayist is produced when the period of acquiring information is
allowed to develop into a personal understanding. Like wine left in a cask
co acquire its appropriate character, the essay is the product of a long dis­
tillation of mental juices. It is the resulc of data received then analyzed at
length from the sovereign vantage of a thinker.
The essay, then, is a difficult genre because it is an adult genre. Be­
cause ic is an essence, the fruit of a passion meditated upon to the point
of transcendingpremature expression since, as Dante put it in a verse that

99...
 pleased Montaigne—“doubting pleases me as much as knowing” (Che
non men (juc super dnbbiar I’agrata)— it does not matter to the essayist
that he remains in doubt. From doubt comes the enormous freedom that
the essay possesses as a genre.
These thoughts come together because, given the presentations at the
competition mentioned, one notices the gross error of mistaking the essay
for an investigation. A doctoral thesis is not an essay; a scientific treatise is
not an essay. Each of those literary genres embodies erudite learning and
systematic exposition. The essay possesses neither of those characteristics.
Erudition, which it hides discreetly, it leaves as a supporting substructure.
“The essay is learning without explicit proof,” said Ortega. Consequently,
the essayist remains free of the need of footnotes at the bottom of every
page, and its suggestions gain support through an understanding with the
reader to accept the essayist himself as his own authority, freely expressed.
With regard to methodology, the essayist remains free of the system­
atic demonstration of a treatise—or of pure investigation in the form of
a thesis. The essayist, really, is an arbitrary wanderer over a theme that
remains hidden. One recognizes in him the ability of ordering his ideas
capriciously, hovering over a line of thought like bees around their hive.
He is permitted even to surprise us, to deceive us, to snatch away an an­
ticipated vantage and reveal a profile unexpressed and more suggestive
concerning the theme in question.
But, beware. The essay is no superficial game. It demands depth, pen­
etration, and novelty of perspective. The mere gloss (in the epigrammatic
sense of Orsiano) does not reach that level, nor does the journalistic ar­
ticle, which can place itself in contrast at the opposite generic extreme.
And so we can say that the essay negotiates exactly the middle of the
road that goes from airy glossing to the solid doctoral thesis.
First published in La Estafeta Literaria 581 (February 15,1976), translated here by
David Hamilton

... too
E
DWARD hoagland (1931-) began his writing career as a nov­
elist in the mid-1950s and 1960s, but most of his work since then
has been devoted to nonfiction, particularly nature writing and
travel writing, based on numerous expeditions in Alaska, British Co­
lumbia, and Africa, as well as wide-ranging essays in a Montaignean
manner, often about his life in New York City or his home in Vermont,
which led John Updike to speak of him as “the best essayist of my gen­
eration.” Hoagland’s allegiance to Montaigne is reflected in the title of
the following piece on the essay, “What I Think, What I Am,” as well
as in its ultimate concern with the essay as the embodiment of authorial
consciousness: “the very freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this
branch of literature, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination
of the essay.”

“What I Think, What I Am”

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days. The personali­
ties in the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Daily News, New York Post
constitute our neighbors now, some of them local characters but also the
opinionated national stars. And movie reviewers thrive on our yearn­
ing for somebody emotional who is willing to pay attention to us and
return week after week, year after year, through all the to-and-fro of other
friends, to flatter us by pouring out his/her heart. They are essayists of a
type, as Elizabeth Hardwick is, James Baldwin was.
We sometimes hear that essays are an old-fashioned form, that so-and-
so is the “last essayist,” but the facts of the marketplace argue quice ocher-
wise. Essays of nearly any kind are so much easier than short stories for
a writer to sell, so many more see print, it’s strange that though two fine
anthologies remain chat publish the year’s best stories, no comparable col­
lection exists for essays. Such changes in the reading public’s tasce aren’t
always to the good, needless to say. The arc of telling stories predated even
cave painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves again,

101...
 it (with painting and drumming) will be the only art left, after movies,
novels, photography, essays, biography, and all the rest have gone down
the drain—the art to build from.
One has the sense with the short story as a form that while everything
may have been done, nothing has been overdone; it has a permanence.
Essays, if a comparison is to be made, although they go back four hun­
dred years to Montaigne, seem a mercurial, newfangled, sometimes hokey
affair that has lent itself to many of the excesses of the age, from spuri­
ous autobiography to spurious hallucination, as well as to the shabby ca­
reerism of traditional journalism. Its a greased pig. Essays are associated
with the way young writers fashion a name—on plain, crowded news­
print in hybrid vehicles like the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York
Review ofBooks, instead of the thick paper stock and thin readership of
Partisan Review.
Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles:
this is what I think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren’t
novels are generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the
human voice talking, its order the mind’s natural flow, instead of a sys­
tematized outline of ideas. Though more wayward or informal than an
article or treacise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center,
even if the point couldn’t be utcered in fewer words than the essayist has
used. Essays don’t usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and
the style of the writer has a “nap" to it, a combination of personality and
originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece
of wool and can’t be brushed flat. Essays belong to the animal kingdom,
with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the
flat, conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the
vegetable kingdom, instead. But essays, on the other hand, may have fewer
“levels” than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue much about
their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching and storytelling,
the essayist, however cleverly he camouflages his intentions, is a bit of a
teacher or reformer, and an essay is intended to convey the same point to
each of us.
This emphasis upon mind speaking to mind is what makes essays less
universal in their appeal than stories. They are addressed to an educated,
perhaps a middle-class, reader, with certain presuppositions, a frame of
reference, even a commitment to civility that is shared—not the grand
and golden empathy inherent in every man or woman that a storyteller
has a chance to tap.

... 102
 Nevertheless, the artful “I” of an essay can be as chameleon as any nar­
rator in fiction; and essays do tell a story quite as often as a short story
stakes a claim to a particular viewpoint. Mark Twain’s piece called “Corn-
pone Opinions,” for example, which is about public opinion, begins with
a vignette as vivid as any in Huckleberry Finn. Twain says that when he
was a boy of fifteen, he used to hangout a back window and listen to the
sermons preached by a neighbor’s slave standing on top of a woodpile:
“He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and
did it well and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I
believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some
day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards
he was overlooked. . . . He interrupted his preaching now and then to
saw a stick of wood, but the sawing was a pretense—he did it with his
mouth, exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its
way through the wood. But it served its purpose, it kept his master from
coming out to see how the work was getting along.”
A novel would go on and tell us what happened next in the life of the
slave—and we miss that. But the extraordinary flexibility of essays is what
has enabled them to ride out rough weather and hybridize into forms that
suit the times. And just as one of the first things a fiction writer learns is
that he needn’t actually be writing fiction to write a short story—that
he can tell his own history or anybody else’s as exactly as he remembers
it and it will be “fiction” if it remains primarily a story—an essayist soon
discovers that he doesn’t have to tell the whole truth and nothing but
the truth; he can shape or shave his memories, as long as che purpose is
served of elucidating a truthful point. A personal essay frequently is not
autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in common with autobiog­
raphy is that, through its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the
quality of the author’s mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are
directly concerned with the mind and the mind’s idiosyncrasy, the very
freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literature that
does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the
essay.
First published in thciVert/ York Times Book Review (June 17,1976)

103...
 1

E
[lwyn] b[rooks] white (1899-1985) is best known for his
children’s books Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet
ofthe Swan, in addition to The Elements ofStyle (with William
Strunk Jr.), which have sold cens of millions of copies, but his essays
for the New Yorker and Harper’s were some of the best of the twenti­
eth century. Even as an essayist, he is often characterized as a humorist,
but again he was more than this. Though he never abandoned his sense
of humor and genial tone, he wrote important essays about the natu­
ral world and the need for a world government, and took strong stands
against fascism, nuclear testing, and the anticommunist witch-hunts of
the 1950s. In the piece that follows, White acknowledges che essayists
“self-imposed role of second-class citizen,” but also revels in the essayist’s
freedom to adopt a variety of personas, including “philosopher, scold,
jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, [and] enthusiast.”

From the Foreword to

Essays ofE. B. White
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief chat
everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general
incerest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, jusc as people
who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayisc, each
new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This
delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the ef­
frontery and the stamina co write essays.
There are as many kinds of essays as there are human accitudes or poses,
as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essay­
isc arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from
an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any
sort ofperson, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher,
scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast. I

...104
like the essay, have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, at­
tempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by put­
ting them on paper. I early broke into print in the pages of St. Nicholas.
I tend still to fall back on the essay form (or lack of form) when an idea
strikes me, but I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-
century American letters—it stands a short distance down the line. The
essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be con­
tent in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his
sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write
a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content
with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undis­
ciplined existence. (Dr. Johnson called the essay “an irregular, undigested
piece”; this happy practitioner has no wish to quarrel with the good doc­
tor’s characterization.)
There is one thing the essayist cannot do, though—he cannot indulge
himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time.
Desmond MacCarthy, in his introductory remarks to the 1928 E. P. Dut­
ton & Company edition ofMontaigne, observes that Montaigne “had the
gift of natural candour....” It is the basic ingredient. And even the es­
sayists escape from discipline is only a partial escape: the essay, although
a relaxed form, imposes its own disciplines, raises its own problems, and
these disciplines and problems soon become apparent and (we all hope)
act as a deterrent to anyone wielding a pen merely because he entertains
random thoughts or is in a happy or wandering mood.
I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much
too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is
presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small
observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their com­
plaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and
egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too
great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have
worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I
am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet,
and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de
Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.
Essays of E. B. White, 1977

105...
 =

illiam H. GASS (192.4-) is an American fiction writer

W and professor of philosophy best known for his literary es­

says. His erudite, richly rhetorical, and sometimes personal
essays have been occasioned by invitations to symposia or to deliver com­
mencement addresses, or have begun as book reviews or introductions
to new editions, but they invariably turn round to discussions of Gass’s
theory of art and his philosophy of language. The excerpt that follows
is taken from a longer meditation on Emerson and his career as an es­
sayist. In it, Gass discusses Emerson in detail, but also advances his own !
formalist concerns, displays his love of figurative language, and fiercely
defends the essay (and imaginative literature more broadly) against the
I
slick, the commercial, and the merely scholarly.

From “Emerson and the Essay”

The essayist is an amateur, a Virginia Woolf who has merely done a little
reading up; he is not out for profit (even when paid), or promotion (even
ifit occurs); but is interested solely in the essays special art. Meditation is
the essence of it; it measures meanings; makes maps; exfoliates. The essay
is unhurried (although Bacon’s aren’t); it browses among books; it enjoys
an idea like a fine wine; it thumbs through things. It turns round and
round upon its topic, exposing this aspect and then that; proposing pos­
sibilities, reciting opinions, disposing of prejudice and even of the simple
truth itself—as too undeveloped, not yet of an interesting age.
The essay is obviously the opposite of that awful object, “the article,”
which, like items picked up in shops during one’s lunch hour, represents
itself as the latest cleverness, a novel consequence of thought, skill, labor,
and free enterprise; but never as an activity—the process, the working,
the wondering. As an article, it should be striking of course, original of
course, important naturally, yet without possessing either grace or charm
or elegance, since these qualities will interfere with the impression of
seriousness which it wishes to maintain; rather its polish is like that of

... 106
 the scrubbed step; but it must appear complete and straightforward and
footnoted and useful and certain and is very likely a veritable Michelin
of misdirection; for the article pretends that everything is clear, that its
argument is unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit in­
ferences, no illegitimate connections; it furnishes seals of approval and
underwriters’ guarantees; its manners are starched, stuffy, it would wear a
dress suit to a barbecue, silk pajamas to the shower; it knows, with respect
to every subject and point of view it is ever likely to entertain, what words
co use, what form co follow, what authorities to respect; it is the careful
product of a professional, and therefore ic is written as only writing can be
written, even if, at various times, versions have been given a dry dull voice
at a conference, because, spoken aloud, it still sounds like writing writcen
down, writing born for its immediate burial in a Journal. It is a relatively
recent invention, this result of scholarly diligence, and its appearance is
proof of the presence, nearby, of the Professor, the way one might, perceiv­
ing a certain sore of speckled egg, infer that its mother was a certain sort
of speckled bird. It is, after all, like the essay, modest, avoiding the vices
and commitments of the lengthy volume. Articles are co be worn; they
make up one’s dossier the way uniforms make up a wardrobe, and ic is not
known—nor is it clear about uniforms either—whether the article has
ever contained anything of lasting value.
Like the article, the essay is born of books, as Benjamin’s essay, “Un­
packing My Library,” points out about itself; and for every essay inspired
by an event, emotion, bit of landscape, work of plastic art, there are a
hundred (such as Montaigne’s famous “On Some Lines of Virgil”) which
frankly admit it—to having an affair; because it is the words of others
which most often bring the essay into being. “I myself am neither a king
nor a shepherd,” Hazlitt writes apropos a speech from Henry VI he’s
cited, “books have been my fleecy charge, and my thoughts have been my
subjects.” Hence the essayisc is in a feminine mood at first, receptive co
and fertilized by texts, hungry to quote, eager to reproduce; and often,
before the essay itself is well underway in the reader’s eye, its father will
be briefly introduced, a little like the way a woman introduces her fiance
to her friends, confident and proud of the good impression he will make.
Thus Lukacs begins “Longing and Form” with a quote from La vita
i nuova and Roland Barthes, to outdo all, opens The Pleasures ofthe Text
with one in the Latin of Thomas Hobbes. It is the habit of Emerson to
add these mottoes later, and to compose chem himself, which is not sur­
prising, for we do find Emerson moved by his own hand more chan most.

107...
 Born of books, nourished by books, a book for its body, another for its
head and hair, its syllable-filled spirit, the essay is more often than not a
confluence of such little blocks and strips of text. Let me tell you, it says,
what I have just read, looked up, or remembered of my reading. Horace,
Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Lucretius meet on a page of Montaigne. Emerson
allows Othello and Emilia words, but in a moment asks ofjacobi, an ob­
scure reformer and now no more chan a note, a bigger speech. A strange
thing occurs. Hazlict does not quote Shakespeare but Henry VI, whose
voice is then lined up to sing in concert with the rest: the living and the
dead, the real and the fictitious, each has a pare and a place. Virginia
Woolf writes of Addison by writing of Macaulay writing of Addison, of
whom Pope and Johnson and Thackeray have also written. On and On.
In this way the essay confirms the continuity, the contemporaneity, the
reality of writing. The words of Flaubert (in a letter), those of Madame
Bovary (in her novel), the opinions ofGide (in hisJournal), of Roger Fry,
of Gertrude Stein, of Rilke, of Baudelaire (one can almost imagine the
essay’s subject and slant from this racy cast of characters), they form a
new milieu—the context of cication. And whac is citation but an attempt
to use a phrase, a line, a paragraph, like a word, and lend it further uses,
another identity, aparc from the hometown it hails from?
It was inevitable that a compilation should be made of them. In my
edition (the second) of the Oxford Dictionary ofQiiotations, there are 104
from Emerson, one of which is “I hate quotations," while another states
that “Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”
(Have I just now quoted Emerson, or have I quoted the Oxford Dictionary
ofQuotations?) Occasions call for quotations, qualify them, sanctify them
somewhat as the Bible was—that book from which the habit stems and
still draws sustenance, since the essay is, after all, a sort of secular sermon,
inducing skepticism, and written by the snake.
And how they dispose themselves, these voices: inside the writer’s sen­
tences like an unbroken thread; in an isolated block upon the page, a
lawn of white space around them like a house in a clearing; or in a note
dropped out of the text like a piece of loose change from the author’s
pocket. Sometimes they stand alone like inscriptions on gates or conclude
like epitaphs on tombs; they filter through a text like light through leaves
or are enclosed like a hand in loving hands. Emerson’s own essay “Quota­
tion and Originality” permits me to make another point: that the essay­
ist’s subjects—in a sense always the same: other books, loneliness, love
and friendship, human frailty—constantly provide a fresh challenge to

... 108
thought, for if I were to write on quotation now, I should have to take
into account a whole history since, not only Herman Meyer’s The Poetics
ofQuotation in the European Novel, for example, but certainly Beckett’s
How It Is, which is mainly a buried quotation:

how it was I quote before Pirn with Pirn after Pirn how it is three
parts I say it as I hear it

The essay convokes a community of writers, then. It uses any and each
and all of them like instruments in an orchestra. It both composes and
conducts. Texts are plundered precisely because they are sacred, but che
method, we are essay-bound to observe, is quite different from that of the
Scholastics, who quoted authorities in order to acquire their imprima­
turs, or from that of the scholar, who quoced in order co provide himself
with a set of subjects, problems, object lessons, and other people’s errors,
convenient examples, confirming facts, and laboratory data. However, in
the essay, most often passages are repeated out of pleasure and for praise;
because the great essayist is not merely a sour quince making a face at
the ideas of others, but a big belly-bumper and exclaimer aloud; the sort
who is always saying, “Listen to this! Look there! Feel this touchstone!
Hear that!” “By necessity, by proclivity,—and by delight, we all quote,”
Emerson says. You can be assured you are reading an excellent essay when
you find yourself relishing the quotations as much as the text that con­
tains them, as one welcomes the chips of chocolate in those overcelebrated
cookies. The apt quotation is one of the essayist’s greatest gifts, and, like
the good gift, congratulates the giver.
Yale Review 71.3 (Spring 1981)

109 ...
J
EAN STA ROB INSKI (1920-) is a Swiss literary critic, historian of
ideas, and scholar of French literature, who holds not only a PhD
but also an MD. During his early career, he worked as an assistant
in psychiatry and internal medicine at the University of Geneva,
and subsequently taught both French literature and the history of medi­
cine in American, French, and Swiss universities. He is known for his
book-length studies of Montaigne and of Rousseau, as well as for his
works on melancholia and his semantic history of key scientific terms.
His wide-ranging interests have also led to studies of European cloth­
ing, art, and revolution in the eighteenth century and of the morality of
evil. Starobinski’s interest in the semantic history of words (and in Mon­
taigne) is fully on display in the following reflections on the problem of
defining the essay.

From “Can One Define the Essay?”

Receiving the European Essay Prize forced me to ask: can one define the
essay, once accepting the assumption that the essay does not submit to
any convention? What power does one attribute to this form of writing,
what are, all things considered, the essay’s conditions, responsibilities, and
challenges?
What is important is the present effectiveness that one can ascribe to
the essay, which is the future works that one will invent following from
this form. But it is not pointless to take a look back in the direction of
etymologies and origins. And primarily, where does the word itself come
from? Its history consists of too many remarkable aspects to not be re­
called. (I will only examine the word essay' and I will neglect, not without
regret, the Latin words that Montaigne’s contemporaries used to translate
the title of his book; conatus, tentamina, etc.)
Essay, known in French since the twelfth century, stems from the
Latin base exagium, the scale; to try2 derives from exagiare, which signi­
fies to weigh. In proximity to this term we find examen: needle, long nar-

... no
 row strip on the beam of the scale, thus follows, weighed consideration,
control. But another meaning of examcn designates a swarm of bees, a
flock of birds. The common etymology would be the verb exigo, to push
out, to chase, then to demand. How enticing if the nuclear meaning of
todays words had to result from their meanings in a distant past! The
essay might as well be the demanding weighing, the thoughtful examina­
tion, but also the verbal swarm1 from which one liberates development.
By which singular intuition did the author of The Essays strike a balance
on his work, by adding for a motco the famous What do I know? This
emblem—doubtlessly destined, when the trays are at equal heights, to
represent the suspense of the spirit—also represented the act of the essay
itself, the examination of the position of the beam. It is in resorting to
the same weight metaphor that Galileo, founder of experimental physics,
calls the work that he published in 162.3 “II saggiatore.” ... If we continue
to examine the lexicons, they will teach us that to try was rivaled by to
prove, to test in the speakers of the east and the south, an enriching rivalry
that makes the essay the synonym of a testing of a searchfor proof. These
are, admittedly, true letters of semantic nobility that make us admit that
the best philosophy manifests itself in the form of the essay.
Let us pursue again for a moment the history of the word. Its fortune
will extend outside of France. The Essays' of Montaigne have the good
fortune of being translated and published in English by John Florio in
1603 and they will impose in England their title, if not their style. Starting
with Sir Francis Bacon, people set to writing Essays across the Channel.
When Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, the
word “essay” does not announce the spontaneous prose of Montaigne, it
signals a book where new ideas are proposed, an original interpretation of
a controversial problem. And it’s in this value that the word will be often
used. It alerts the reader and makes him wait for a renewal of perspec­
tives, or at least the statement of the fundamental principles from which
a new idea will be possible. Voltaire dramatically changes the approach
to historical faces in his Essay on the Manners ofNations-, the inaugural
act of Bergsons philosophy is entitled Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness.5
Nevertheless, we must be careful not to believe that the history of the
word essay and its derivatives is a uniformly triumphant progress. I have
celebrated until the present the eminent dignity of the essay. I must how­
ever admit that this is not universally recognized. The essay also has, at
least to certain eyes, its stains, its indignity, and the word itself, in one of

hi ...
its meanings, is responsible for this. Tire essay, thefirst essay, is only a pre­
liminary approach. He who wants to succeed, doesn’t he have to do more?
It is not French, but English that, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, invented the word essayist. And this word, since ics first appear­
ances, is not exempt from a pejorative nuance. One reads from the quill
of Ben Jonson: Mere essayists, afew loose sentences, and that’s all! It seems
that the word essayist was not transplanted into France until later. We
find it in 1845 in the work of Theophile Gautier meaning “of an author of
non-detailed works.” Let us notice that a suspicion of superficiality could
attach itself to the essay. Montaigne himself offers weapons to detractors
of the essay. He is ironic, or feigns to be ironic, about his book (because
Montaigne’s strategies are subtle) in declaring that he is only claiming
to touch upon and to nip at the head of his chosen subject matter: so that
one does not take him for a learned man, for a miracle worker of the
system, for an author of massive treaties. The head is the flower, not the
roots. There are specialists, artists to trace back co the roots. Montaigne,
he only writes for pleasure, without looking to fill his work with citations
and commentaries. But it is necessary to note: the learned men who had
well-scorned him, or rather, they took to noticing the difference in genres
and to defending the professionalism of knowledge of which Montaigne,
perhaps by nobiliary pride, did not intend to be suspected. The Univer­
sity, at the peak of his positivist period, having fixed the rules and the
canons of serious exhaustive research, rejected the essay and essayism to
foreign darkness, at the risk of banishing at the same time the splendor of
style and the audacities of thought. Seen from the classroom, evaluated
by the dissertation committee, the essayist is a likeable amateur departing
to rejoin the impressionist critic in the suspicious non-scientific area. And
it is true that, losing sometimes its substance; the essay could transform
itself into a journal column, a polemic pamphlet, and chatter about this
and that. Still, none of these sub-genres of the essay merits being criticized
in itself! The column can become a short poem in prose-, the pamphlet, if
written by Constant, can be titled Ofthe Spirit of Conquest-, the chatter
can speak with the voice of Mallarme. A certain ambiguity, nevertheless,
persists. Let us say it plainly, if one declared that I practice essayism, I
would be slightly hurt, and I would take it as a reproach.

Let us imagine that we are looking at the title page of the book, such as it
reads in 1580: Essays ofMessire Michel, Lord ofMontaigne, Knight of the
Order ofthe King, and Ordinary Gentleman ofhis Chamber. Montaigne

... 112.
 displays all ofhis names and titles and recommends himself. Messire Mi­
chel appears in many more characters chan the little word Essays that is
isolated on the upper line. This title reveals at the same time an evasion
and a provocation: an evasion, because, in this intolerant time, it is not
good to give foothold, in arguments that are too affirmative, co the ac­
cusation of heresy and of impiety. The cataloging was thus postponed
by several decades. Whac pretext can be offered to religious censure by
a thought of which the products define themselves, in cheir apparently
disparate plurality, as drafts, attempts, fantasies, indecisive imaginations?
To say that one goes no further than thinking in the essay or again: I
go inquiring and not knowing, or again: I do not teach at all, I narrate, is
to announce chat we must not look for, in this volume, material of doc­
trinal disputation. This humility, entirely visible, is nothing but a show.
Montaigne knows very well that one calls essay the use of a touchstone
that allows a determination without fail of the nature and the name of
a metal. And in declaring himself the auchor of essays, Montaigne pre­
sents another challenge. He leads us to believe that a book warrants being
published, even if it remains open, if it achieves no essence, if it only offers
an unfinished experience, if it only consists of preliminary work,—for
as much as he relates closely to an existence, co the singular existence of
Messire Michel, Lord of Montaigne. I am not the first to highlighc this:
the importance of the individual, of the person (saying ic with the word
that Denis de Rougemont has charged so much with meaning), must have
become considerable, outside of all religious consecration, historic or po­
etic, so that the first gentleman would come co decide to give us his essays,
to reveal to us his conditions and his humors.
From what objects and from what realities did Montaigne make che
essay and how did he do it? Such is the question thac we must post with
insistence if we want to understand the challenges of the essay. Let us no­
tice right away thac the peculiarity of the essay is plural, multiple, which
legitimizes the plural of the title Essays. It is not only about repeated tenta-
tives, resumed ponderings,first essays at the same time partial and untir­
ing: this allure of beginning, this inchoative aspect of the essay, are surely
key, since he implies the abundance of joyous energy thac never exhausts
itself in his game. But moreover, his scope is unlimited, and the diversity,
co which measures the wingspan of Montaigne’s work and activity, gives
us since che creation of the genre an exact insight inco the rights and che
privileges of the essay.
At first glance, let us say that we can discern two sides of the essay: one

113 - - -
 objective, the other subjective. And let us add straight away that the work
of the essay aims at establishing between these two sides, an indissoluble
relationship. The domain of experience, for Montaigne, is first the world
that resists him: these are the objects that the world offers to his clutches;
it is fortune that is making light work out of him. Such is the experi­
mented material, the substance submitted to his weighing, to a weighing
which for him, despite the emblem of the scale, is less the instrumental
act practiced literally by Galileo, than a weighting in naked hands, a shap­
ing, a handling. “Think with your hands,” Montaigne heard himself in
that phrase, him whose hands were always moving, although he declared
himself unfit for all manual labor; it is necessary to know how to both
meditate and handle life__
But that is not yet where the domain of the essay ends. What is princi­
pally put to the test is the power to try and to test, the ability to judge and
to observe. To fully satisfy the law of the essay, “the essayer” must have a
go at himself. In each essay directed towards the external reality, or to­
wards his body, Montaigne experiments with his own intellectual forces,
their strengths and their insufficiencies: such are the reflexive aspect, the
subjective side of the essay, where self-consciousness begins to develop as a
new authority of the individual, authority that judges the act of judging,
that observes the ability of the observer. From his foreword To the Reader,
declarations are not lacking where Montaigne assigns the primordial role
to self-study, self-comprehension, as if the “benefit” for which the con­
science searches was to shed light on the self, for the self. In the history of
mentalities, innovation is so important that one was pleased to salute in
the Essays the advent of the portrayal of the self, at the very least in Vulgar
language. (Montaigne had been preceded by religious autobiographers,
by Petrarch, but in Latin.) One saw in them their principal merit, their
novelty the most striking. But it is important to remark that Montaigne
offers us neither a diary, nor an autobiography. He depicts himself while
looking at himself in the mirror, certainly: but, even more often, he de­
fines himself indirectly, as though leaving himself out—in expressing his
opinion: he depicts himself with scattered brushstrokes, for general in­
terest questions: presumption, vanity, repentance, experience. He depicts
himself speaking of friendship and education; he depicts himself medi­
tating on state policy, evoking the massacre of the Indians, challenging
confessions obtained by torture in criminal interrogations. In the essay
according to Montaigne, the practice of internal reflection is inseparable
from the inspection of exterior reality. It is after tackling the great moral

... 114
questions, after listening to the maxims of the classic authors, after facing
the rifts of the present-day world, that in looking to communicate his
cogitations he finds himself consubstantial to his book, offering of himself
an indirect representation, that only looks to complement and to enrich
itself: lam myselfthe matter ofmy book.

i. It will be important to note here that the French for essay, essai, holds two
meanings in English, that of the essay, as well as that of a try or an attempt', the lat­
ter being the original meaning, while the former has developed as a direct result of
Montaigne’s work in question here.
i. In French, essayer, follows a more obvious etymological link.
3. In French, essaim.
4. NB. Montaigne’s writing has been modernized.
5. Diderot, whose thought is quite often the tuning fork for Montaigne's, brings
confirmation: “I prefer an essay to a treaty: an essay where one throws me some
genius ideas that arc almost isolated, to a treaty where these precious seeds arc suf­
focated under a heap of repetition.” On the Diversity ofourJudgments, in Complete
IVorks, (Club Francis du Livre, 1.13,1971, 874.)

First published in La Revue de Belles-lettres (1983), translated hereby Lindsey Scott

MS...
 A NDRE BELLEAU (1930-86), born and raised in Montreal, spenc
much of his early career as a civil servanc for the Canadian gov-
JL jL ernment. But in mid-life he left governmental work, returned
to college, earned a doctorate, and became a literature professor and the­
orist of literary texts. Belleau was especially interested in the problem
of how a writer can give voice to the numerous voices chac inhabit and
surround him, a problem he set forth in his second collection of essays
To Catch the Voices (1986). This notable collection contains short pieces
that he wrote between 1959 and 1986, focusing on his fascination with
the wide-ranging idioms of journalism, television, public officials, and
the street. In the following piece, Belleau bears witness to the complex
way in which an essay evolves, given the interplay between language and
thought within an essayist’s head and the language of the culture for
which he writes.

<c T •1 T1 • • »
Little Lssayistic
Let us start with a banality: the novelist and the poet are no more origi­
nal writers than the essayist (or the critic). One hears occasionally in
our milieu: “We, the poets and the novelists, we work with life while
you, poor essayists, you work with what we make.” But what one forgets
is that novelists also work with what has been said and written before
them, so much so that they do not enjoy a sort of metaphysical presence
or an entitlement towards what one could call life or art or the primary
substance of art. Most critics and essayists—at least as I imagine—are
conscious of the necessarily secondary character of their venture. But to
say to one or another of our local novelists: “Your novel presents itself as
the rearrangement of a particular type of writing and of some themes of
which the prototypes appeared ten, twenty, or thirty years ago,” is to seri­
ously risk becoming the object of physical abuse. We must forgive them.
They do not know or they pretend not to know.

... 116
■

A writer is always first and foremost a rewriter. There is no indignity

in that. Authors never hid from this fact until recently. That is not the
essential. What is essential is the assuming the esthetic function. That is
not nothing.
Therefore, to finish with this banality, the distinction between “cre­
ator,” on one hand, and critic, on the other, shows itself now to be com­
pletely obsolete and tacky, since the modern novel has evolved to include
a more and more critical dimension, and critique has also evolved to be­
come an endeavor of writing, it proves quite difficult to separate the two.
In this way, today, an essayist is an artist of the narrativity of ideas and a
novelist, an essayist of the artistic plurality oflanguage. The novel is eaten
by the essay (Sophie’s Choice by Styron, La mort vive by Ouellette), the
essay overturns fiction (Vadeboncoeur, Borges).
There is a story; I would say even an intrigue in the essay, in the sense
that one gives these words when one speaks of the story or the intrigue of
a novel or a short story. The triggers that launch the activity of the essayist
are sometimes cultural events, sometimes emerging ideas from the cul­
tural domain. But so that they may enter into the transforming space of
writing, these ideas and events must be swept-up in a space of movement
that includes campaigns, roadblocks, issues, divisions, junctions, attrac­
tions, and repulsions. And the next thingyou know they drive themselves
to the heart of fictional characters and they fuel between them relation­
ships of love, of hate, of opposition, of aid, etc. They produce a real dra­
matization of the cultural world and I would bet that at the end, there are
both winning and losing ideas. An idea sparks the taste for writing, an
idea makes, in a way, the desire to write for the essayist more strong than
not writing, and this idea will encounter all sorts of obstacles like the hero
of the novel. Idea or hero problematic...
Which event? Which idea? Let us here think about a real or possible
cultural event, about a current or new idea that pops up all of the sud­
den in the essayists mind. They are not immaterial. They have a color, a
heat, an outline, almost a physical weight. The most abstract idea, for the
writer impassioned for abstraction, becomes alive just from this abstrac­
tion. It can also happen that the essayist begins with a title that attracts
him, solicits him in the same way as a color for the painter or a chord for
the musician. The whole essay will consist precisely in allowing the plea­
sure of a desired title (the reader does not realize this). One will say that
here the essay will find itself in words and ideas.

117...
 (I came across some time ago a title that much pleased me: “On an
Adage of Erasmus.” I am counting on soon writing an essay in order to
be able to use it.)
Let us admit, thus, that it consists in eroticized ideas operating on the
essayist in the manner of fantasies. They come back, they haunt him.
He guards the idea in himself as if in a sort of elementary magnetic field
where he feels the circuits take shape, possibilities that have the idea to
orient them, to connect them to other ideas. During this period of matu­
ration, attentive to the trips, to the journeys, to the openings and closings,
the essayist will decide if all of this is vivid enough, fast enough, plentiful
enough, unexpected enough, and complex enough to give place co the
form of an essay, or moreover to the course of an essay. One will recall
the Latin etymology of the word “essay,”1 exagium, itself derived from
the verb exigere, which has two meanings: to tveigh (the essay “weighs”
ideas; the examination, scholarly form of exagium, “weighs” the merits
of candidates) and to chase out ofa place (from where the swarm} not a
scholarly form, but popular form of exagium). The essay is not a weighing,
an evaluation of ideas; it is a swarm of ideas-words.
Everyone knows it: writers make new work with the discourse of their
society. It is the indispensable environment of language without which
I we would not be able to even begin to write the start of a sentence. But
the apparition of essayists in literature supposes another condition: that
the cultural content of social discourse is not situated below a certain
threshold. Because the essayist works more specifically with the language
of the culture. And to me it seems evident that a society where the signs
of culture are made scarce will produce few essayists. It would be easy co
imagine culture as a rare gas in a society thac is saturated with sports talk,
publicity, etc.
The formation of an essayist demands much more time chan that of
a poet or of a novelise. I say this without sarcasm. At eighteen, one can
be Rimbaud, one cannot be an essayist. The reason for this is simple. I
repeat: the essayist works in the cultural domain with the signs of culture.
He has the pleasure to live in the semiosphere. And yet the knowledge
and the mastery of language that make up the cultural world turn out
to be an endeavor chat is infinitely longer than the knowledge and mas­
tery of fictional forms that are destined to represent social languages of
existence. That is why, often, the essayisc only begins co feel like a writer
later in life.

... 118
 The essayist sometimes likes to take questions which are complicated
in appearance and give them another kind of confusion than the received
confusion. But inversely, he may find himself possessed by the demon
of clarity, of logic, of the demonstrable. We should not hesitate to here
speak of obsessions. There are desires or what is clear and perfectly ar­
ticulated. They are the triggers and motors of writing. One must respect
them on the same level as the taste for the color mauve in Flaubert writ­
ing Madame Bovary. We have here phenomenon of the same order. That
which is of the order of the fantastic is anchored in the most material and
profound realities of our lives. According to certain viewpoints, which
are short sighted and superficial, the passion for clarity found in essayists
would have an ideological vector, would reveal a Cartesian spirit, reac­
tionary, tinted with “male chauvinism.” And if the essayist who seems to
battle against confusion would himself impose this confusion to feel the
pleasure of dispelling it? In fact, the essay is a research cool. He who has
practiced it knows chat it allows him to discover.

i. The French for essay, “essai” has a double sense in F.nglish: essay, anti a try or an
attempt.
z. In the original French essaim.
First published in Liberty 150 (December 1983), translated here by Lindsey Scott

119...
G
abriel zaid (1954-) is a native of Monterrey, Mexico’s
second-largest city. Trained as an engineer, he became a poet
and essayist. He has written for many magazines but is most
often associated with Vuelta, which he launched with Octavio Paz in
1976. A reclusive figure who grants no photographs or interviews, Zaid
is an independent, even iconoclastic thinker who criticizes armchair
Marxists as rabanos, or radishes (red on the outside, white on the inside),
and the Mexican bourgeoisie as slavish imitators of their counterparts
to the north. He is best known in the United States for So Many Books
(1005), which dismisses “the death of the book” and focuses instead on
the fact that books remain cheap, plentiful, and diverse. In the following
piece, Zaid describes the essay as a kind of stealth genre—a centaur that
is both man and horse, but recognized as neither, or a kind of wheel­
barrow foolishly valued for its contents rather than for its ability to carry
those contents.

From “Alfonso Reyes’ Wheelbarrow”

Among industrial folklore’s stories and legends, there is the one about the
guy who was carting construction materials in a wheelbarrow in a suspi­
cious manner. The inspectors checked his papers over and over again, but
everything was fine; they went through the materials to see if something
was hidden there, but to no avail. The man would walk away smiling,
like a triumphant prankster, while the inspectors remained perplexed,
defeated at a game they didn’t comprehend. It took them a long time to
figure out that he was stealing wheelbarrows.
Alfonso Reyes’s inspectors seem more fortunate, but they are not.
They miss the essays while checking their content. An essay is not a re­
port of research conducted in a laboratory: it is the laboratory itself, where
life is put to the test in a text, where the author’s imagination, creativity,
experimentation, critical sensitivity are displayed. To essay is just that:
to try, to probe new wordings to live with, new possibilities of being by

... izo
 reading. The misunderstanding arises when the essay instead of referring,
for instance, to “The Traveler’s Melancholy” (Calendario), refers to issues
that could or should (in the eyes of the narrow-minded reader) be consid­
ered academic. It arises when the reader focuses solely on the improvable
data rather than on the unbeatable prose. Similarly, the inspector can
grow indignant with the actor who plays marvelously the evil character,
instead of admiring him. Or with Shakespeare because he penned the
play using someone else s plot. Or with the painter who considers his own
the copy he made in a museum of a painting that he found interesting, so
that he could observe it and take pleasure in recreating it (like Reyes who
rewrote and published in his Archivo a book that had interested him).
Or with the audience who lisccns to Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion with­
out knowing any German, even if what matters in this work are not the
words, but the music.
Reyes was aware of this problem and he helped us understand it
through a memorable metaphor: the essay is the centaur ofliterary genres.
An inspector of centaurs will not be able to understand the game if he
believes that a centaur is a man on a horse; if he believes that the horse is
simply a means of transportation. The essay is both art and science, but
its science is not in the content it conveys, but in the wheelbarrow; it is
not the professor’s science (even if it takes advantage of it, illustrates it,
or opens new venues for it). Its science is that of the artist, who experi­
ments, combines, searches, imagines, builds, criticizes what he wants to
say, before knowing it. In an essay, the knowledge that matters is the one
achieved by virtue of writing it; the knowledge that did not exist before,
even if the author knew many things, both from his own experience and
from that of others, that helped him in his essay.
The essayist may advance on both paths, because that’s what the cen­
taur calls for. He may not only bring to light important original texts,
which spring from his being, his mind, his hands, but also things that
the experts had not discovered, and that they should take advantage of.
Unfortunately, they cannot do so without risking their reputation. The
assumption being that there cannot be valid discoveries outside the trade.
That’s why the chicanery of borrowing without acknowledgment is so
common: it would be frowned upon to quote an essayist in an academic
work. Which shows pettiness, but is without literary consequence, unless
the essayists allowed themselves to be intimidated and acted as if creation
were less important or any less research than academic work.
Reyes was not intimidated. In his early twenties he wrote reviews

in...
admirable for the qualicy of their prose, verve, and precision for the
Revista dc Filologia Espaiwla (collected in Entre libros). He wrote like
a philologist who masters his technique, in the double sense of being a
professional and of writing way above his profession: like a true writer.
He recalled it, thirty years later in Monterrey (“Mi idea de la historia,”
Marginalia, second series): “I complied from research to publication with
all of its critical apparatus. However, I would not mistake those prepara­
tory disciplines with the actual exegesis and cultural evaluation that I was
aspiring to do. You see, learned tricks can be narrowed down to easy to
teach automatic rules, which, once learned, are applied with monotonous
impersonality. That is not the case with the arts of interpretation and
narration, where the technique hinges upon being talented.” The impor­
tance of this distinction and, especially, of the hierarchy it establishes, is
obvious in the reviews found in Entre libros, which have retained all their
flavor despite being written between 1912. and 1923. It doesn’t matter that
the books and facts they refer to are outdated. The true novelty, what is
still news, as Pound would say (poetry is news that stays news), is the prose
worked on like poetry. Facts grow old, the wheelbarrow doesn’t.
It is possible and desirable, as Reyes shows, that the expert be much
more than a specialist: an essaying mind, a true writer. It has happened
with philosophers, historians, lawyers, physicians. But with the rise of
the university as training center for technocrats, free culture (as opposed
to wage-earning culture), authorial culture (as opposed to culture autho­
rized by proceedings and credentials), the creation of ideas, metaphors,
points of view, ways of seeing things, look like nothing compared with
sound academic work. The correct hierarchy is the opposite one. Writing
essays is so difficult that mediocre writers should not try it: they should
limit themselves to academic work.
It is only natural that the experts, especially when science necessitates
large budgets, be aware of the importance of public relations. That they
engage in two complementary forms of social communication: the pub­
lication of findings formally addressed to their colleagues in specialized
periodicals and in popular science magazines aimed at the general public.
For them an essay is popular science. They even hire writers to present
their work for them. But the essay is a literary genre of the creative intel­
lect, not the news broadcast of layman science. The ancillary function
(that is how Reyes calls it in El deslinde) uses prose as an ancilla, a maid,
a slave, a servant of the material being conveyed; a wheelbarrow subservi-

...122
ent to the specialist’s laboratory. The essay, on the contrary, subjects data
(specialized or otherwise) to the laboratory of prose, to the laboratory of
learning sought in original formulations, to the laboratory of being that
is questioned, criticized and recreated in a text.
The reader incapable of refreshing, restoring, or reorganizing himself
when reading an essay that is truly essaying, is a reader impoverished by
technocratic culture. He doesn’t know that his wheelbarrow has been
stolen.
First published as “La carrctilla alfonsina” in Proceso 585 (January 4,1988), trans­
lated here by Maria Willstedt and Gabriel Zaid

113...
s COTT russell Sanders (1945-) is a literary critic, fiction
writer, and essayist who taught at Indiana University from 1971
until his retirement in 1009. He is an environmentalist and peace
activist and has focused often in his essays on the geography—spiritual
and political—of his native Midwest. Though he has written movingly
about public issues, his work has achieved perhaps its most powerful ef­
fects when confronting dark, personal themes that are at once both pri­
vate and universal. In essays about his father’s death and alcoholism, for
instance, Sanders infuses his careful, polished style with the details of
memory and the energy of emotion. In the piece reprinted below, Sand­
ers states that his intention as an essayist is to “pay my respects to a minor
passage of history in an out-of-the-way place” and to “speak directly out
of my life into the lives of others.”

From “The Singular First Person”

In this era of prepackaged thought, the essay is the closest thing we have,
on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and at play. It is
an amateurs raid in a world of specialists. Feeling overwhelmed by data,
random information, and the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we rel­
ish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a portion of
the chaos. We are grateful to Lewis Thomas for shining his light into
the dark corners of biology, to John McPhee for laying bare the geology
beneath our landscape, to Annie Dillard for showing us the universal fire
blazing in the branches of a cedar, to Peter Matthiessen for chasing after
snow leopards and mystical insights in the Himalayas. No matter if they
are sketchy, these maps of meaning are still welcome. As Joan Didion
observes in her own collection of essays, The White Album, “We live en­
tirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze
the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” (Didion, 11).
Dizzy from a dance that seems to accelerate hour by hour, we cling to the

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 narrative line, even though it may be as pure an invention as the shapes
drawn by Greeks to identify the constellations.
The essay is a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice in an era of
anonymous babble. Like the blandburgers served in their millions along
our highways, most language served up in public these days is textureless,
tasteless mush. On television, over the phone, in the newspaper, wherever
humans bandy words about, we encounter more and more abstractions,
more empty formulas. Think of the pablum ladled out by politicians.
Think of the fluffy white bread of advertising. Think, Lord help us, of
committee reports. In contrast, the essay remains stubbornly concrete
and particular: it confronts you with an oil-smeared toilet at the Sunoco
station, a red vinyl purse shaped like a valentine heart, a bow-legged den­
tist hunting deer with an elephant gun. As Orwell forcefully argued, and
as dictators seem to agree, such a bypassing of abstractions, such an insis­
tence on the concrete, is a politically subversive act. Clinging to this door,
that child, this grief, following the zigzag motions of an inquisitive mind,
the essay renews language and clears trash from the springs of thought. A
century and a half ago, Emerson called on a new generation of writers to
cast off the hand-me-down rhetoric of the day, to “pierce this rotten dic­
tion and fasten words again to visible things” (Emerson, 30). The essayist
aspires to do just that.
As if all these virtues were not enough to account for a renaissance of
this protean genre, the essay has also taken over some of the territory ab­
dicated by contemporary fiction. Pared down to the brittle bones of plot,
camouflaged with irony, muttering in brief sentences and gradeschool
vocabulary, today’s fashionable fiction avoids disclosing where the author
stands on anything. Most of the trends in the novel and short story over
the past twenty years have led away from candor—toward satire, artsy
jokes, close-lipped coyness, metafictional hocus-pocus, anything but a
direct statement of what the author thinks and feels. If you hide behind
enough screens, no one will ever hold you to an opinion or demand from
you a coherent vision or take you for a charlatan.
The essay is not fenced round by these literary inhibitions. You may
speak without d isguise of what moves and worries and excites you. In fact,
you had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart, or the reader
will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases.
In the essay you may be caught with your pants down, your ignorance and
sentimentality showing, while you trot recklessly about on one of your
hobbyhorses. You cannot stand back from the action, as Joyce instructed

115...
us to do, and pare your fingernails. You cannot palm off your cockama-
mie notions on some hapless character. If the words you put down are
foolish, everyone knows precisely who the fool is.
To our list of the essay’s contemporary attractions we should add the
perennial ones of verbal play, mental adventure, and sheer anarchic high
spirits. The writing of an essay is like finding one’s way through a forest
without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you
are seeking. You sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs you in a
new direction, and then off you go, dodging and circling, lured on by the
songs of unfamiliar birds, puzzled by the tracks of strange beasts, leaping
from stone to stone across rivers, barking up one tree after another. Much
of the pleasure in writing an essay—and, when the writing is any good,
the pleasure in reading it—comes from this dodging and leaping, this
movement of the mind. It must not be idle movement, however, if the
essay is to hold up; it must be driven by deep concerns. The surface of a
river is alive with lights and reflections, the breaking of foam over rocks,
but beneath that dazzle it is going somewhere. We should expect as much
from an essay: the shimmer and play of mind on the surface and in the
depths a strong current.

Works Cited
Didion.Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Vol. 1 of The Complete Works ofRalph Waldo
Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903.

First published in the SewaneeReview 96.4 (1988)

...i16
P hillip lopate (1943-) is a distinguished American essayist,
film critic, cultural commentator, and educator, who currently
holds an endowed professorship at Hofstra University. A versatile
author, Lopate has produced two poetry collections, three novels, a col­
lection of film criticism, a book about the Manhattan waterfront, and
the award-winning memoir Being With Children (1975), based on his
twelve years as a “writer-in-the-schools.” He is perhaps best known for
three collections of wide-ranging and candid personal essays, Bachelor­
hood (1981), Portrait ofMy Body (1986), and AgainstJoie de Vivre (1989),
as well as for his pathbreaking anthology The Art ofthe Personal Essay
(1994). Lopate s devotion to the essay is reflected in the following piece
that features a sweeping history of it together with an exploration of
where it stands in contemporary writing.

“What Happened to the Personal Essay?”

The personal or familiar essay is a wonderfully tolerant form, able to ac­
commodate rumination, memoir, anecdote, diatribe, scholarship, fantasy,
and moral philosophy. It can follow a rigorously elegant design, or—held
together by little more than the authors voice—assume an amoebic
shapelessness. Working in it liberates a writer from the structure of the
well-made, epiphanous short story and allows one to ramble in a way that
more truly reflects the mind at work. At this historical moment the es­
sayist has an added freedom: no one is looking over his or her shoulder.
No one much cares. Commercially, essay volumes rank even lower than
poetry.
I know; when my first essay collection, Bachelorhood, came out, book­
sellers had trouble figuring out where to stock it. Autobiography? Self-
help? Short stories? I felt like saying, “Hey, this category has been around
for a long time; what’s the big deal?” Yet, realistically, they were right:
what had once been a thriving popular tradition had ceased being so.
Readers who enjoyed the book often cold me so with some surprise, be-

117...
 cause they hadn’t thought they would like “essays.” For them, the word
conjured up those dreaded weekly compositions they were forced to write
on the gasoline tax or the draft.
Essays are usually taught all wrong, they are harnessed to rhetoric
and composition, in a two-birds-with-one-stone approach designed to
sharpen freshman students’ skills at argumentation. While it is true that
historically the essay is related to rhetoric, it in fact seeks to persuade more
by the delights of literary style than anything else. Elizabeth Hardwick,
one of our best essayists, makes this point tellingly when she says, “The
mastery of expository prose, the rhythm of sentences, the pacing, the sud­
den flash of unexpected vocabulary, redeem polemic__ The essay ... is
a great meadow of style and personal manner, freed from the need for
defense except that provided by an individual intelligence and sparkle.
We consent to watch a mind ac work, without agreement often, but only
for pleasure.”
Equally questionable in teaching essays is the anthology approach,
which assigns an essay apiece by a dozen writers according to our latest
notions of a demographically representative and content-relevant sam­
pling. It would be more instructive to read six pieces each by two writers,
since the essay (particularly the familiar essay) is so rich a vehicle for dis­
playing personality in all its willfully changing aspects.
Essays go back at least to classical Greece and Rome but it was Michel
de Montaigne, generally considered the “father of the essay,” who first
matched the word to the form around 1580. Reading this contemporary
of Shakespeare (thought to have influenced the Bard himself), we are re­
minded of the original, pristine meaning of the word, from the French
verb essayer, to attempt, to try, to leap experimentally into the unknown.
Montaigne understood that, in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts
struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot. The
essayist must be willing to contradict himself (for which reason an essay
is not a legal brief), to digress, even to risk ending up in a terrain very
different from the one he embarked on. Particularly in Montaigne’s mag­
nificent late essays, free-falls thac sometimes go on for a hundred pages
or more, it is possible for the reader to lose all contact with the ostensible
subject, bearings, top, bottom, until there is nothing to do but surrender
to this companionable voice, thinking alone in the dark. Eventually, one
begins to share Montaigne’s confidence that “all subjects are linked to one
another,” which makes any topic, however small or far from the center,
equally fertile.

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 1

It was Montaigne’s peculiar project, which he claimed rightly or

wrongly was original, to write about the one subject he knew best: him­
self. As with all succeeding literary self-portraits—or all succeeding
stream-of-consciousness, for that matter—success depended on having
an interesting consciousness, and Montaigne was blessed with an undu-
latingly supple, learned, skeptical, deep, sane, and candid one. In point
of fact, he frequently strayed to worldly subjects, giving his opinion on
everything from cannibals to coaches, but we do learn a large number of
intimate and odd details about the man, down to his bowels and kidney
stones. “Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray
the story of my life,” he writes. On the other hand, “No pleasure has any
meaning for me without communication.”
A modern reader may come away chinking chat the old fox still kept
a good deal of himself co himself. This is partly because we have upped
the ante on autobiographical revelation, but also because Montaigne was
wricing essays, noc confessional memoirs, and in an essay it is as permis­
sible, as honest, to chase down a reflection to its source as to admit some
pasc shame. In any case, having decided that “the most barbarous of our
maladies is to despise our being,” Montaigne did succeed, via the proto-
psychoanalytic method of the Essais, in making friends with his mind.
Having taken the essay form to its very limits at the outsec, Mon­
taigne’s dauntingly generous example was followed by an inevitable spe­
cialization, which included the un-Moncaignean split between formal
and informal essays. The formal essay derived from Francis Bacon; it is
said co be “dogmatic, impersonal, systematic, and expository,” written in a
“scately” language, while the informal essay is “personal, intimate, relaxed,
conversational, and frequently humorous” (New Columbia Encyclopedia).
Never mind that most of the great essayists were adept ac both modes,
including Bacon (see, for example, his wonderful “Of Friendship”), it re­
mains a helpful distinction.
Informal, familiar essays tend to seize on the parade and minuciae of
daily life: vanities, fashions, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappoint­
ment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, going to plays, walking in the
screet. It is a very urban form, enjoying a spectacular vogue in eighteench-
and early nineteenth-century London, when it enlisted the talents of such
stylists as Swift, Dr. Johnson, Addison and Sceele, Charles Lamb, Wil­
liam Hazlitc, and a visiting American, Washington Irving. The familiar
essay was given a boost by the phenomenal growth of newspapers and
magazines, all of which needed smart copy (such as chat found in the

iz9...
 Spectator) to help instruct their largely middleclass, parvenu readership
on the manners of the class to which it aspired.
Although most of the feuilletonistes of this period were cynical hacks,
the journalistic situation was still fluid enough to allow original thinkers
a platform. The British tolerance for eccentricity seemed to encourage
commentators to develop idiosyncratic voices. No one was as cantanker­
ously marginal in his way, or as willing to write against the grain of com­
munity feeling, as William Hazlitt. His energetic prose style registered a
temperament that passionately, moodily swung between sympathy and
scorn. Anyone capable ofwritingso bracingly frank an essay as “The Plea­
sures of Hating” could not—as W. C. Fields would say—be all bad. At
the same time, Hazlitt’s enthusiasms could transform the humblest topic,
such as going on a country walk or seeing a prizefight, into a description
of visionary wholeness.
What many of the best essayists have had—what Hazlitt had in
abundance—was quick access to their blood reactions so that the merest
flash of a prejudice or opinion might be dragged into the open and de­
fended. Hazlitt s readiness to entertain opinions, coupled with his open­
ness to new impressions, made him a fine critic of painting and the the­
ater, but in his contrariness he ended by antagonizing all of his friends,
even the benign, forgiving Charles Lamb. Not that Lamb did not have his
contrary side. He, too, was singled out for a “perverse habit of contradic­
tion,” which helped give his “Elia” essays, among the quirkiest and most
charming in the English language, their peculiar bite.
How I envy readers of London magazine, who might have picked up
an issue in 1810 and encountered a new, high-spirited essay by Hazlitt,
Lamb, or both! After their deaths, the familiar essay continued to attract
brilliant practitioners such as Stevenson, De Quincey, and Emerson.
But subsequently, a little of the vitality seeped out of it. “Though we are
mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt,” Stevenson
confessed. And by the turn of the century, it seemed rather played out
and toothless.
The modernist aesthetic was also not particularly kind to this type
of writing, relegating it to a genteel, antiquated nook, belles lettres—a
phrase increasingly spoken with a sneer, as though implying a sauce with­
out the meat. If “meat” is taken to mean the atrocities of life, it is true
that the familiar essay has something obstinately nonapocalyptic about
it. The very act of composing such an essay seems to implicate the writer

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 in humanist-individualist assumptions that have come to appear suspect
under the modernist critique.
Still it would be unfair to pin the rap on modernism, which Lord
knows gets blamed for everything else. One might as well “blame” the
decline of the conversational style of writing. Familiar essays were fun­
damentally, even self-consciously, conversational: it is no surprise that
Swift wrote one of his best short pieces on “Hints Toward an Essay on
Conversation”; that Montaigne tackled “Of the Art of Discussion”; that
Addison and Steele extensively analyzed true and false wit; that Hazlitt
titled his books Table Talk, Plain Speaker, and The Round Table, or that
Oliver Wendell Holmes actually cast his familiar essays in the form of
mealtime dialogues. Why would a book like Holmes’s The Autocrat At
the Breakfast Table, a celebration of good talk that was so popular in its
time, be so unlikely today? I cannot go along with those who say “The
art of conversation has died, television killed it,” since conversation grows
and changes as inevitably as language. No, what has departed is not con­
versation but conversation-flavored writing, which implies a speaking
relationship between writer and reader. How many readers today would
sit still for a direct address by the author? To be called “gentle reader” or
“hypocritelecteur,” co have one’s arm pinched while dozing off, to be called
to attention, flattered, kidded like a real person instead of a privileged
fly on the wall—wouldn’t most readers today find such devices archaic,
intrusive, even impudent? Oh, you wouldn’t? Good, we can go back to the
old style, which I much prefer.
Maybe what has collapsed is the very fiction of “the educated reader,”
whom the old essayists seemed to be addressing in their conversational
remarks. From Montaigne onward, essayists until this century have in­
voked a shared literary culture, the Greek and Latin authors and the best
of their national poetry. The whole modern essay tradition sprang from
quotation. Montaigne’s Essais and buttons Anatomy ofMelancholy were
essentially outgrowths of the “commonplace book,” a personal journal
in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments were writ­
ten. Though the early essayists’ habit of quotation may seem excessive to
a modern taste, it was this display of learning that linked them to their
educated reading public and ultimately gave them the authority to speak
so personally about themselves. Such a universal literary culture no longer
exists; we have only popular culture to fall back on. While it is true that
the old high culture was never really “universal”—excluding as it did a

131...
 good deal of humanity—it is also true that without it, personal discourse
has become more hard-pressed. What many modern essayists have tried
to do is to replace that shared literary culture with more and more per­
sonal experience. It is a brave effort and an intriguing supposition, this
notion that individual experience alone can constitute the universal text
that all may dip into with enlightenment. But there are pitfalls: on the
one hand, it may lead to cannibalizing oneself and one’s privacy; on the
other hand, much more common (and to my mind, worse) is the asser­
tion of an earnestly honest or “vulnerable” manner without really candid
chunks of experience to back it up.
As for popular culture, the essayists chronic invocation of its latest
bandwagon fads, however satirically framed, comes off frequently as a
pandering to the audiences short attention span—a kind of literary am­
bulance chasing. Take the “life-style” pages in todays periodicals, which
carry commentaries that are a distant nephew of the familiar essay: there
is something so depressing about this desperate mining of things in the
air, such a fevered search for a generational Zeitgeist, such an unctuously
smarmy tone of “we” which assumes that everyone shares the same con-
sumerist-boutique sensibility, that one longs for a Hazlittean shadow of
misanthropic mistrust to fall between reader and writer. One longs for
any evidence of a distinct human voice—anything but this ubiquitous
Everyman/woman pizzazzy drone, listing tips for how to get the most
from your dry cleaners, take care of your butcher block, or bounce back
from an unhappy love affair.
The familiar essay has naturally suffered from its parasitic economic
dependency on magazines and newspapers. The streamlined telegraphic
syntax and homogenized-perky prose that contemporary periodicals
have evolved make ic all the more difficult for thoughtful, thorny voices
to be tolerated within the house style. The average reader of periodicals
becomes conditioned to digest pure information, up-to-date, with its
ideological viewpoint disguised as objectivity, and is thus ill-equipped to
follow the rambling, cat-and-mouse game of perverse contrariety played
by the great essayists of the past.
In any event, very few American periodicals today support house essay­
ists to the tune of letting them write regularly and at comfortable length
on the topics of their choice. The nearest thing we have are talented col­
umnists like Russell Baker, Ellen Goodman, Leon Hale, and Mike Royko,
who are in a sense carrying on the Addison and Steele tradition; they are
so good at their professional task of hit-and-run wisdom that I only wish

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 they were sometimes given the space to try out their essayistic wings. The
problem with the column format is that it becomes too tight and pat: one
idea per piece. Fran Lebowitz, for instance, is a very clever writer, and not
I
afraid of adopting a cranky persona, but her one-liners have a cumulative
sameness of affect that inhibits a true essayistic movement. What most
column writing does not seem to allow for is self-surprise, the sudden
deepening or darkening of tone, so that the writer might say, with Lamb:
“I do not know how, upon a subject which I began treating half-seriously,
I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful__ ”
From time to time I see hopeful panel discussions offered on “The
Resurgence of the Essay.” Yes, it would be very nice, and it may come
about yet. The fact is, however, that very few American writers today are
essayists primarily. Many of the essay collections issued each year are es­
sentially random compilations of book reviews, speeches, journalism, and
prefaces by authors who have made a name for themselves in other genres.
The existence of these collections attests more to the celebrated authors’
desires to see all their words between hardcovers than it does to any real
devotion to the essay form. A tired air of grudgingly gracious civic duty
hovers over many of these performances.
One recent American writer who did devote himself passionately to
the essay was E. B. White. No one has written more consistently grace­
ful, thoughtful essays in twentieth-century American language than
White; on the other hand, I can’t quite forgive his sedating influence on
the form. White’s Yankee gentleman-farmer persona is a complex bal­
ancing act between Whitmanian democratic and patrician values, besc
suited for the expression of mildness and tenderness with a resolute tug
of elegiac depression underneach. Perhaps this is an unfair comparison,
but there is not a single E. B. White essay that compares with the gamy,
pungent, dangerous Orwell of “Such, Such Were che Joys...” or “Shoot­
ing an Elephant.” When White does speak out on major issues of the day,
his man-in-the-street, folksy humility and studiously plain-joe air ring
false, at least to me. And you would never know that the cute little wife
he describes listening to baseball games on the radio was the powerful
New Yorker editor Katharine White. The suppression or muting of ego as
something ungentlemanly has left its mark on The New Yorker mice with
the result that this magazine, which rightly prides itself on its freedom
to publish extended prose, has not been a particularly supportive milieu
for the gravelly voice of the personal essayist. The preferred model seems
to be the scrupulously fair, sporting, impersonal, fact-gathering style of

133...
a John McPhee, which reminds me of nothing so much as a colony of
industrious termites capable of patiently reducing any subject matter to
a sawdust of detail.
The personal, familiar essay lives on in America today in an interest­
ingly fragmented proliferation of specialized subgenres. The form is very
much with us, particularly if you count the many popular nonfiction
books that are in fact nothing but groups of personal essays strung to­
gether, and whose compelling subject matter makes the reading public
overlook its ordinary indifference to this type of writing. Personal essays
have also appeared for years under the protective umbrella of New Jour­
nalism (Joan Didion being the most substantial and quirky practitioner
to emerge from that subsidized training ground, now largely defunct);
of autobiographical-political meditations (Richard Rodriguez, Adrienne
Rich, Vivian Gornick, Marcelle Clements, Wilfrid Sheed, Alice Walker,
Nancy Mairs, Norman Mailer); nature and ecological-regional writing
(Wendell Berry, Noel Perrin, John Graves, Edward Hoagland, Grctel
Ehrlich, Edward Abbey, Carol Bly, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard); literary
criticism (Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Seymour Krim, Cynthia
Ozick, Leslie Fiedler, Joyce Carol Oates); travel writing and mores (Mary
McCarthy, V. S. Naipaul, Joseph Epstein, Eleanor Clark, Paul Theroux);
humorous pieces (Max Apple, Roy Blount, Jr., Calvin Trillin); food
(M. F. K. Fisher). I include this random and unfairly incomplete list
merely to indicate the diversity and persistence of the form in American
letters today. Against all odds, it continues to attract newcomers.
In Europe, the essay stayed alive largely by taking a turn toward the
speculative and philosophical, as practiced by writers like Walter Benja­
min, Theodor Adorno, Simone Weil, E. M. Cioran, Albert Camus, Ro­
land Barthes, Czeslaw Milosz, and Nicola Chiaromonte. All, in a sense,
are offspring of the epigrammatic style of Nietzsche. This fragmented,
aphoristic critical type of essay-writing became used as a subversive tool
of skeptical probing, a critique of ideology in a time when large, synthe­
sizing theories and systems of philosophy are no longer trusted. Adorno
saw the essay, in fact, as a valuable counter-method: “The essay does not
strive for closed, deductive or inductive construction. It revolts above all
against the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and
ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy; against that ancient injustice to­
ward the transitory, by which it is once more anathematized, conceptu­
ally. The essay shies away from the violence of dogma— The essay gently
defies the ideals of [Descartes’] clara etdistincta perceptio and of absolute

...134
 certainty.... Discontinuity is essential to the essay... as characteristic of
the form’s groping intention The slightly yielding quality of the essay­
ist’s thought forces hint to greater intensity than discursive thought can
offer; for the essay, unlike discursive thought, does not proceed blindly,
automatically, but at every moment it must reflect on itself.... Therefore
the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the
orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it
is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible.”
This continental tradition of the self-reflexive, aphoristically subversive
essay is only now beginning to have an influence on contemporary Ameri­
can writers. One saw it first, curiously, cropping up in ironic experimental
fiction—in Renata Adler, William Gass, Donald Barthelmejohn Barth.
Their Active discourse, like Kundera’s, often resembles a broken essay, a
personal/philosophical essay intermixed with narrative elements. The
tendency of many postmodernist storytellers to parody the pedantry of
the essay voice speaks both to their intellectual reliance on it and to their
uneasiness about adopting the patriarchal stance of the Knower. That dif­
ficulty with assumption of authority is one reason why the essay remains
“broken” for the time being.
In a penetrating discussion of the essay form, Georg Lukacs put it this
way, “The essay is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining
thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system), but the pro­
cess ofjudging.” Uncomfortable words for an age when “judgmental” is a
pejorative term. The familiar essayists of the past may have been nonspe­
cialists—indeed this was part of their attraction—but they knew how to
speak with a generalist’s easy authority. That is precisely what contempo­
rary essayists have a hard time doing, in our technical age we are coo aware
of che advantage specialises hold over us. (This may explain the current
confidence the public has in the physician-scientist school of essayists like
Lewis Thomas, Richard Selzer, Stephen Jay Gould, F. Gonzalez-Crussi,
Oliver Sacks: their meditations are embedded in a body of technical in­
formation so that readers are reassured they are “learning” something, not
just wasting cheir time on belles lettres.) The last of the old-fashioned gen­
eralists, men of letters who seemed able to write comfortably, knowledge­
ably, opinionatedly on everything under the sun, were Edmund Wilson
and Paul Goodman; we may not soon see their like again.
In The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby has pointed out the reticence
of writers of che so-called generation of the sixties—my generation—to
play the role of the public intellectual, as did Lionel Trilling, Harold

135 - - -
Rosenberg, C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell,
Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Abel, etc., who judged cultural and political
matters for a large general readership, often diving into the melee with
both arms swinging. While Jacoby blames academia for absorbing the
energies of my contemporaries, and while others have cited the d rying up
of print outlets for formal polemical essays, my own feeling is that it is not
such a terrible thing to want to be excused from the job of pontificating to
the public. Ours was not so much a failure to become our elders as it was
a conscious swerving to a different path. The Vietnam War, the central
experience of my generation, had a great deal to do with that deflection.
As a veteran of the sixties, fooled many times about world politics because
I had no firsthand knowledge of circumstances thousands of miles away
(the most shameful example that comes to mind was defending, at first,
the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia), I have grown skeptical of taking
righteous public positions based on nothing but simpatico media reports
and party feeling. As for matters that I’ve definitely made up my mind
about, it would embarrass me, frankly, to pen an opinion piece deploring
the clearly deplorable, like apartheid or invading Central America, with­
out being able to add any new insights to the discussion. One does not
want to be reduced to scolding, or to abstract progressive platitudes, well
founded as these may be. It isn’t that my generation doesn’t think politics
are important, but our earlier experiences in that storm may have made us
a little hesitant about mouthing off in print. We—or I should say I—have
not yet been able to develop the proper voice to deal with these'large social
and political issues, which will at the same time remain true to personal
experience and hard-earned doubt.
All this is a way of saying that the present moment offers a remarkable
opportunity for emerging essayists who can somehow locate the moral
authority, within or outside themselves, to speak to these issues in the
grand manner. But there is also room, as ever, for the informal essayist
to wrestle with intellectual confusion, to offer feelings, to set down ideas
in a particularly direct and exposed format—more so than in fiction,
say, where the author’s opinions can always be disguised as belonging co
characters. The increasing willingness of contemporary writers to try the
form, if not necessarily commit themselves to it, augurs well for the sur­
vival of the personal essay. And if we do offend, we can always fall back
on Papa Montaigne’s "Qtiesfayje'i"-, What do I know?

AgainstJoie de Vivre, 1989

...136
 G
er ald early (1952-) was born in Philadelphia but has lived
for many years in St. Louis, where he is the Merle Kling Pro­
fessor of Modern Letters at Washington University. A prodi­
giously active scholar and essayist, he has published on topics as various
as sports, jazz, parenthood, boxing, beauty pageants, Shirley Temple
movies, and the music of Motown. His collection of essays on prize­
fighting, The Culture ofBruising, won the 1994 National Book Critics
Circle Award for criticism. He has also edited collections of essays about
Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr., and Miles Davis, as well as the im­
portant two-volume anthology Speech and Power: The African American
Essay and Its Cultural Contentfrom Polemics to Pulpit, and has recently
launched the Best African American Essays series. In the excerpt from
his introduction to Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture that
follows, Early describes the particular situation of the African American
essayist as being “anthropological” in the paradoxical sense that she or
he is always both participant and observer. “The black essayisc,” writes
Early, “is caught between acting and writing,” between being “mascot
and scribe.”

From che Introduction to Tuxedo Junction

Any decent black essayist, and Douglass was often as essayistic as fic­
tional in his autobiography (indeed, I posit that the peculiarly black lit­
erary form of the essay grew from Douglass’s autobiographies and from
black autobiography generally, although it is certainly related to the black
sermonic tradition as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail” and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, two of the famous black essays of
the last thirty years, attest), is not, in effect, literary, or trying to be literary
merely, but is trying quite self-consciously to be anthropological. He (or
she, as the case may be) cannot help but be anthropological, as there can
be no mistaking that for the African-Americans, the place where they live
never ceases to be a prison-house of culture (not necessarily a bad prison

137
 as prisons go, and sometimes confinement can be strengthening), and in
prison one is forced constantly to think about writing as theater. All black
essayists, ultimately, with either resolution or resignation, write, as Doug­
lass stated he did, “from sound.” It is through sound, uncertain though it
may be, that the anthropologist understands his work. The essays in this
volume are filled with sound. They talk of little else. They try to repli­
cate nothing so much as the sound of other things, of language bouncing
oft the prison-house walls. But, for the black essayist, sound must always
try to be subversion, the slaves language is always undermining the mas­
ter’s tongue even as it imperfecdy replicates it, even as it aspires to be the
master’s tongue. The perfect image of the black writer is Jim trapped in
his prison that is not really a prison in the last chapters of Mark Twain’s
novel while Huck and Tom cover the walls with language and invent
signs for Jim’s white captors, all of which has no meaning except that the
language and signs refer to novels, romances, literary conventions—that
verisimilitude, in this instance and perhaps in all instances, is not a term
describing how art is related to life but how life is related to books (and
artistic vision), which are, in effect, more real than life. Nothing is more
real than our fantasies, Twain’s novel tells us. Jim, through his displays
of common sense, rebels against being an instrumentality of white con­
sciousness while succumbing to it for lack of anything better to do. I hope
this singular dilemma becomes clearer as I go along. But how can one
distinguish, in the case of Jim, for instance, subversion from simulation
in this vastness of verisimilitude?
Consider how Douglass, in My Bondage and My Freedom, appropri­
ates the terms “Nature” and “Nurture” from mid-i8$os American pop-
scientific, anthropological discourse and uses them to illustrate the slave’s
humanity, in direct opposition to their contemporary use in the herme­
neutical language of the nineteenth-century white intellectual as absences
of both a civilizing environment and proper genetic properties (ah, the
slave, being property in a world where property was the touchstone of
reality, was completely without property, and so was not only completely
unreal himself but was forced to see the world as unreality). Douglass
achieves this without ever using the words themselves but by appropri­
ating the cultural symbol that compresses and decomposes both terms:
mother. Douglass tells two elaborate stories of his mother, who was
largely absent from his life: firsc, how she rescued him from a cruel black
“Auntie” and gave him bread, and second, how his literary turn of mind
was directly inherited from his maternal (black) side (Douglass always

...13S
believed his father to be white). So, with Douglass, the absent mother (not
“Mammy” or “Auntie,” that lover and rearer of white sons and daughters
and beloved of them) becomes the presence that repudiates the cultural
absences that have been assigned the black. There is a lesson in that bit of
fabrication by Douglass (literal fabrication because he could not possibly
have remembered the bread incident and how does anyone know, in most
instances, which source of genes produced whac talents, especially in the
case of someone who did not know his father as Douglass did not); a les­
son that would stand any black essayist in good stead about playing with
language in the prison-house of culture. For Douglass, after all, bread,
the staff of life, becomes both nature and nurture and, in effect, Douglass
proves the two terms are essentially interchangeable and absolutely mean­
ingless as they both signify “mother,” and everyone has one of those, as
Douglass demonstrates—you can make of her whatever you wish.
But in the matters of anthropology and language on and reverberating
within the prison-house walls no black writer can be more instructive
than Zora Neale Hurston, a trained anthropologist/ethnographer in her
own right and a novelist of some distinction. In her 1941 autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road, a marvelously and shrewdly fabricated book, she
tells of three successive incidents concerning language that occur when
she joins a white theater company as a teenager:

In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had the map of Dixie
on my tongue. They [the theacer company] were all Northerners
except the orchestra leader, who came from Pensacola. It was not
that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms. They did not know
of the way an average Southern child, white or black, is raised on
simile and invective. They know how to call names. It is an everyday
affair to hear somebody called a mullet-headed, mule-eared, wall­
eyed, hog-nosed, gator-faced, shad-mouthed, screw-necked, goat-
bellied, puzzle-gutted, camel-backed, butt-sprung, battle-hammed,
knocked-kneed, razor-legged, box-ankled, shovel-footed, unmated
so-and-so!... Since chat stratum of the Southern population is 110c
given to book-reading, they take their comparisons right out of the
barnyard and the woods. When they get through with you, you and
your whole family look like an acre of totempoles.

As much as the white company liked young Hurstons own colorful lan­
guage, they enjoyed even more having her saying things which she did
not understand:

139...
 Another sly trick they played on my ignorance was that some of the
men would call me and with a very serious face send me to some
of the girls to ask about the welfare and condition of cherries and
spangles. They would give me a tip and tell me to hurry back with
the answer. Some of the girls would send back word that the men
need not worry their heads at all. They would never know the first
thing about the condition of their cherries and spangles. Some of
the girls sent answers full of double talk which went over my head.

Finally, this incident with written discourse:

I got a scrapbook, and everybody gave me a picture to put in it. I

pasted each one on a separate page and wrote comments under each
picture. This created a great deal of interest, because some of the
comments were quite pert. They egged me on to elaborate. Then
I got another idea. I would comment on daily doings and post the
sheets on the call-board. This took on right away. The results stayed
strictly mine less than a week because members of the cast began to
call aside and tell me things to put in about others. It got to be so
general that everybody was writing it. It was just my handwriting,
mostly. Then it got beyond that. Most of the cast ceased to wait for
me. They would take a pencil co the board and set down their own
item. Answers to the wisecracks would appear promptly and often
cause uproarious laughter. They always started off with either “Zora
says” or “The observant reporter of the Call-board asserts”—Lord,
Zora said more things! I was continually astonished, but always
amused.

The passages, taken together, constitute a highly complex rendering of

the political realities of blacks and language in the prison-house of cul­
ture, explicating and dramatizing all the various issues that a black es­
sayist might think about in relation to what he or she does—for here,
to borrow a Roland Barthes phrase, language literally becomes theater.
First, there is a political reversal occurring here as Hurston moves from
being mascot to becoming something like a scribe to, in fact, something
like an anthropologist; moving from being a totem of animal imagery and
ritual insult language to serving as a liaison for double entendres about
cherries and heads to being a headmistress of a kind of school for scandal
or a gossip exchange. Literally, once she controls the call board, the ac­
tual script of the lives of the company, she becomes the one who has not

...140
only recorded the dialect but actually shaped its creation. That a black
should become the central controlling figure for the discourse of whites
is, ironically, both a remarkable political feat of assertion-subversion and
something genuinely ignominious if we remember Jim as the central
and “controlling” figure of the whites at the end of Twain’s novel. The
method of ritual insulting, which she describes at first as being Southern,
she describes later in the book as being particularly female and Negro
and refers to it as “specifying.” The shift is extremely important because
specifying occurs when she is in the all-black southern towns collecting
data (folk stories, i.e., oral language) for her books. Among the blacks,
she is purely the scientist (the objective subject), evacuating and saving a
culture. Among the whites, she is purely the exhibitionist (the subjective
object) signifying the tricks and trumps of language. In effect, among
the whites, Hurston makes the transition from taboo to totem (which is
exactly what Jim does in Huckleberry Finn)-, for Hurston, the writer is the
totem who enables the language of others (“the Other”) to have meaning.
That Hurston should be able to write about this in such a way that she so
disguises her seizing the essential instrumentality of an acting company
(its language and its script), becoming not simply its conduit for discourse
but its source as well while seemingly remaining an instrumentality of
the whites themselves (in essence, while still remaining a creation of the
white imagination: a folksy innocent) is a masterful stroke of the trickster
(although it is the very strength of her trickster dissimulation that is her
final undoing—because as the folksy innocent she can do nothing more
than either be an exhibitionist or an observer, wavering between the an­
thropologist as actor to the anthropologist scribe). It is simply the prob­
lem of both being there (author) and being here (participant) that black
nonfiction writers face as a kind of peculiar hazard of their game. In very
stunning ways, the black nonfiction writer as anthropologist exemplifies
the point of Clifford Geertz’s essay “Being There: Anthropology and the
Scene of Writing” better than any academic anthropologist ever could.
For Hurston and Douglass—and, by extension, for most black nonfiction
writers—“being there” is an ontological conundrum.
The black essayist is caught between acting and writing, between seiz­
ing the instrumentality and being trapped by the fact that he is inescap­
ably an instrumentality; as he uses language he becomes both mascot and
scribe, an odd, ambivalent coupling of the purloined and the purposeful.

Tuxedo Junction-. Essays on American Culture, 1989

141...
N
ANCY mairs (1943-) is an American poet, essayist, and mem­
oirist. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was twenty-
eight, Mairs has written about her experience with MS, her
chronic depression, her agoraphobia, and her marriage in the arrestingly
frank and vividly detailed essays of Plaintext (1991) and Carnal Acts
(1996), as well as in her memoirs Ordinary Time (1994), Remembering
the Bone House (1995), and Waist High in the World (1997). Her irrepress­
ible wit and self-deprecating humor are also on display in her more recent
works A Troubled Guest (2.002.), Essays Out Loud (2004), and A Dynamic
God (2008), which focus primarily on aspects of mortality and spiritual­
ity. In the following reflections on the essay, Mairs offers a sustained con­
trast of Montaigne and Bacon, exploring in particular the contemporary
implications of their different essayistic modes.

From “Essaying the Feminine”

Like the French feminists, I subscribe to the premise that the world we
experience is itself an immense text that in spite of its apparent complex­
ity has been made in Western thought to rest on a too-simple structural
principle opposing reason to emotion, activity to passivity, and so on,
every pair reflecting the most basic dichotomy—“male” and “female.”
Like them, I seek to disrupt the binary structure of this text, or Logos,
through Tecriture feminine, which “not only combines theory with a
subjectivism that confounds che protocols of scholarly discourse, it also
strives to break the phallologic boundaries between critical analysis, essay,
fiction, and poetry.
Hence I write essays in the Montaignesque sense of the word: not the
oxymoronic “argumentative essays” beloved by teachers of composition,
which formalize and ritualize intellectual combat with the objective of
demolishing the opposition, but tests, trials, tentative rather than conten­
tious, opposed to nothing, conciliatory, reconciliatory, seeking a mutual-

...142
 ity with the reader which will not sway her to a point of view but will
incorporate her into their process, their informing movement associative
and suggestive, not analytic and declarative.
“If my mind could gain a firm footing,” writes Montaigne, “I would
not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprentice­
,
ship and on trial.” In fact, the details of Montaigne’s life demonstrate
that he was fully capable of making decisions; in his essays he sets aside
that capacity. “Thus his starting points are not intended to engage a war
of opinions,” says John O’Neill of the Montaignesque writer, “they are
rather subjunctive alliances for the sake of exploring what hitherto had
been shared terrain. By the same token, the conclusions reached are not
meant to be absolute, but only what seems reasonable as a shared experi­
ence.” And, as O’Neill points out, “Montaigne found thinking difficult
because he rejected the easy assembly of ph ilosophy and theology careless
of man’s embodied state,” aware that the “loss in scholastic abstractions is
that they can be mastered without thought and that men can then build
up fantastic constructions through which they separate the mind from
the body, masters from slaves, life from death, while in reality nothing
matches these distinctions.”
Preference for relation over opposition, plurality over dichotomy, em­
bodiment over cerebration: Montaigne’s begins to sound like a feminist
project. Which is not co say that Montaigne was a feminist. (“You are too
noble-spirited,” he was able to write to the Comtesse de Gurson when she
was expecting her first child, “to begin otherwise than with a male”) But
whether intentionally or not, Montaigne invented, or perhaps renewed,
a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription of
human experience as no other does. The importance of this contribu­
tion has been largely overlooked, perhaps because many of Montaigne’s
statements, as well as his constant reliance on prior patriarchal authority,
strike one as thoroughly masculine, and also because che meaning of essay
has traveled so far from Montaigne’s that the word may be used to de­
scribe any short piece of nonfiction, no matter how rigid and combative.
“Thus, reader, I am myself che matter of my book,” Montaigne wrices
in his preface co the essays. “You would be unreasonable to spend your
leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” In claiming this plural sub­
jectivity, he is clearly aware that he has made writing do something new:
“Authors communicate with people by some special extrinsic mark; I am
the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a

143...
 grammarian or a poet or a jurist.” Noc much later, Francis Bacon, the first
English writer of “essays,” would shape modern scientific method thus:
“Generally let every student of nature take this as a rale—that whatever
his mind seizes and dwells upon is to be held in suspicion, and that so
much the more care is to be taken in dealing with such questions to keep
the understanding even and clear.” How differently Montaigne perceives
the human psyche in essays chat are, as Virginia Woolf notes, “an attempt
to communicate a soul... to go down boldly and bring to light those hid­
den thoughts which are che most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend
nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them
know it.”
This image of descent and retrieval echoes Woolf’s description else­
where of the experience of the woman writer as a dreaming fisherman
whose imagination sweeps “unchecked round every rock and cranny of
the world that lies submerged in che depths of our unconscious being,”
seeking “che pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slum­
ber,” until it smashes against the rock of “something, something about
the body, about the passions, which it was unfitting for her as a woman
to know.” This problem, “telling che truth about my own experiences as
a body, I do not think I solved,” says Woolf. In such an adventure, Mon­
taigne has the advantage, his embodiment and his awareness of it owning
at least marginal cultural acceptability. Even so, his task is hardly easy,
Woolf writes, for he must be “capable of using che essayists most proper
but most dangerous and delicate tool,” the self: “that self which, while it
is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist.”
It is this quality in Montaigne that Woolf admires, and often imi­
tates in her own essays, despite her self-doubt: “this talking of oneself,
following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and
circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection.”
Not command of the mind and the world, but communication with the
mind and its world forms Montaigne’s purpose. “I do not portray being:
I portray passing,” he states, characterizing his project as “a record of vari­
ous and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls,
contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold
of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects.” By embracing con­
tradiction, Montaigne never permits himself a stance sturdy enough for
gaining sovreignty over himself, his fellow creatures, or any of the other
natural phenomena objectified by scientific discourse.

...144
 Unlike Montaigne, Bacon had no qualms about his footing. All a man
need do was dislodge the idols of his mind—rooted in human nature, id-
iosyncracy, social intercourse, and philosophical dogma—and he would
see plain the objective world, the world “out there,” the world of prin­
ciples uncontaminated by human flux and context. Human nature being
pretty much as Bacon thought it was, “prone to suppose the existence of
more order and regularity in the world than it finds,” Bacon’s detached
view prevailed over Montaigne’s messy, shifting, “domestic and private”
engagement with “a life subject to all human accidents.” For the past
four hundred years, people may have read Montaigne for delight, even
for wisdom, but most have turned to Bacon for direction to “the truth.”
And now, from the very products of Baconian practice, chose trained in
“scientific objectivity,” we are learning that one cannot observe reality
without changing it and that even physics, that quintessential exercise in
intellectual aloofness, is not actually the impartial scrutiny of phenomena
“out there” but is rather “the study of the structure of consciousness.”
In rejecting the concept of himself as a self-consiscent entity, purged of
peculiarity, coherent chrough time and separate from the external pro­
cesses he observes and records, Montaigne seems curiously contemporary,
capable of grasping as Bacon would probably not what Michael Sprinker
describes as “a pervasive and unsettling feature in modern culture, the
gradual metamorphosis of an individual with a distinct, personal identity
into a sign, a cipher, an image no longer clearly and positively identifiable
as ‘this one person.’” “We are all patchwork,” Montaigne writes, “and so
shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays
its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves
as between us and others.” His use of the essay form reflects this sense of
fragmentation.
Montaigne’s essays are not strictly autobiographical if we accept che
conventional definition of autobiography, the story of a person’s life writ­
ten by himself, wherein “story” is a narrative, that which has a beginning,
middle, and (problematic) end: linear, continuous, coherent, chronologi­
cal, causal. But insofar as the “life” in autobiography—selflifewriting—is
a construct of the wricing/written self, it has at least submerged narrative
elements that may be read even when they are not explicit in the autobio­
graphical text. With its “‘stuttering,’ fragmented narrative appearance,”
Montaigne’s form helps him to avoid “the original sin of autobiography,”
the use of hindsight to render his narrative logically consistent, as well as

145...
to mitigate the “split intentionality” between Montaigne the man and the
discursive “I.” A collection of personal essays literally stutters—begins,
halts, shifts, begins anew—in a partial and piecemeal literary enterprise
that may go on, as Montaigne’s did, for twenty years, ending or, more
precisely, reaching “not their end but their suspension in full career” only
with death.
Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 1994

...146
 I A achel blau DUPLESSIS (1941-) is a feminist poet, critic,
scholar, and essayist who teaches at Temple University in Phila-
JL delphia. She was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York
in a nonreligious family with a strong Jewish heritage. One grandfather
was a rabbi and essayist, and her father was a professor of philosophy
and religion at Columbia. She earned her BA at Barnard and her PhD at
Columbia, where she became involved in a feminist group that included
Kate Millet. DuPlessis’s main project since 1985 has been a long “life-
poem” titled Drafts, which she has described as a kind of “essay-in-verse.”
She has written and edited several collections of essays, most of them
focusing on modern poetry and political thought. The following excerpt
from her 1996 tour de force “f- Words: An Essay on che Essay” focuses
on che difficulties ofdefiningthe “overloaded” antigenre thac is the essay
and showcases DuPlessiss theoretical acumen, stunning erudition, and
punning, poetical style.

From “f- Words: An Essay on the Essay”

Piling so many names, so many varieties of moxie, and so many direc­
tions onto one overloaded genre has a couple of effects. It tends co blur
the concept, leaving the essay expiring in a hiss of other explanations, or
going into overdrive. Faced with all that, one might say, “Essay? It’s shore
but personal writing thac speaks from the heart” (wherever chat is). Essays
tend co call the genre into question, as theory about genre also does. Yec
it sometimes seems as if the essay is lots of modes, a set of intersections
of intention: some essays, but not all, are “autobiographical”; some, but
not all, are discursive; some, but not all, are heceroglossic-, some, but not
all, are theoretical—and on and on. Indeed, Reda Bensmai'a argues that
the essay is not a genre, nor even several mixed genres, but “a moment of
writing before the genre, before genericness—or as the matrix of generic
possibilities.”1
What an aura of specialness—the essay as the universe at the second

147...
 before its dispersion, an impacted point prior to the flying off of mat­
ter into planets, fragments into texts, and over all a sense of volatile in­
cipience. It’s not that the essay is unsusceptible to genre “definition”; it’s
rather that the nature of the essay asks one to resist categories, starting
with itself. Here the essay will be treated according to its functions (fis
the symbol for function), presenting some activities of force, crying out
some features in a trying fashion. There is some frank provocation within
that function, essay being (think of Pater and Emerson and Thoreau and
Du Bois, then think of Woolf and Audre Lorde) the genre of spiritual
provocation, of social mourning, of political fury as a kind of melody and
the sense of a new day dawning. This nexus of provocation, fury, pas­
sion, and hope, along with cunning scrutiny of social and cultural texts, a
practice learned, to say it too bluntly, through the scrutiny of official lies,
should tell us again why this essay function was reborn ouc of (loosely)
the long reverberations of the sixties in U.S. chought. This generally ethi­
cal definition affronts a post- or non-humanist articulation of discursive
practices and apparatuses—visual, verbal, kinecic. The contemporary
essay occurs in the seam becween sociality and textuality.
Is it possible to synthesize these vectors—to offer any major lines
around which these writings converge—even in a fully unsystematic
study?2 Given that the array of names above—incomplete but suggescive
—is strangely dazzling, one wants simply to point: Look! Look! It is
also probably true that I have missed important manifestations of this
form; the fault is inadvertent, but mine. I do not, for example, discuss the
generic crossings between fiction and essay, a blank spot that could be
filled by someone else. (Not to speak of the comic abyss that results from
concentrating only on the quite contemporary or on the, mainly, United
States American; one begins muttering Montaigne, Oscar Wilde, Mon­
taigne, Christa Wolf, Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Primo
Levi, Montaigne. The sensation is vertiginous.) Critically, there is plea­
sure in variety, even when these works may be conflicting, differently mo­
tivated, and uneven in impact. (One can “like” what one does not “like.”)
This is exactly the kind of mindset that makes me write along facets in
my own essays, getting a variety of views and claims, panning in on (for
instance) Duchamp’s “Etant Donnes” again and again, not settling on
one way of seeing it, on one judgment of it. Speculation best be just that.
Skepticism too.
But what unites essays, if it is possible to say, is probably a defining
attentiveness to materiality, to the material world, including the matter

...148
of language. The essay is currently born (and borne) in some relation to
a cultural moment centering on difference, on articulations of specific,
local, and topographical being, on the stating of the material meanings
of individual choices, practices, options, and needs, on political and social
locations for identity talcing shape within language as language, within
form as form. While this attention to materiality can also sometimes
split into two tendencies—an emphasis on cither textual or biographical/
historical materiality—the real interest comes when these emphases are
fused: when textuality (scylc, rhetoric, image, resistant diction, insoucient
[sic] tone, weird page space, ploys opening out the book, visual text, multi­
plex of genres) is presented as a social practice. So while there are probably
essays in all periods (certainly journalism writes them every day, affable,
kindly, vaguely analytic), it only feels like a moment for The Essay when
there is some materialist adhering of meaning to mode, when critique
joins with passion in language that materializes that passion as rhetoric,
when interested and situated knowledge is exposed in its vibrancy, when
people have undergone changes chat resonate in all felt areas—ethical, in­
tellectual, emocional, visceral—and when these areas are a nexus, mixed
and unsortable. For subject position is language position. What are all che
cones in which you are fluenc? Add the tones in which you stucter. You’re
beginning to get it. The essay is elementally nontranscendent, for when it
goes up, it comes back down again. The essay is both a mode of and meta­
phor for this nexus. The essay ruptures the conventions—especially the
scientistic echos of objectivity—of critical writing. When a sicuated prac­
tice of knowing made up by the uncransparenc situated subject explores
(explodes) its material in unabashed textual untransparency, conglomer­
ated genre, ambidextrous, switch-hitting style—as if figuring out on the
ground, virtually in the time of writing—that’s it:/words. The essay.

i. Reda Bensmaia, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, trans. Pat Fed-
kicw (Minneapolis: U ofMinncsota P, 1987): 91.
1. An alphabetical list of more systematic studies follows: Theodor W. Adorno,
“The F.ssay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German
Critique 31 (Spring-Summer 1984): 151-71; also translated by Shierry Weber Nich-
olscn in Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 3-13;
Adorno’s essay was originally written between 1954 and 1958; G. Douglas Atkins,
Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing (Athens: U of Geor­
gia P, 1991); James Bennett, “The F.ssay in Recent Anthologies of Literary Criti­
cism,” Sub Stance 18, no. 3 (1989): 105-11; Reda Bensmaia, cited above; Ruth-F.llcn
Boctcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman, The Politics ofthe Essay: Feminist Perspec-

149...
 fives (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993)—a comparativist perspective with special
strengths in German, French, and Hispanic materials; Alexander Butrym, cd„ Es­
says on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989); Robert Case-
rio, “The Novel As a Novel Experiment in Statement: The Anticanonical Example
of H. G. Wells,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “Brit­
ish” Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991), 88-109;
Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routlcdgc,
1988); Anne Herrmann, “The Epistolary Essay: A Letter,” in The Dialogic and Dif­
ference: "An/Other Woman" in Virginia Woolfand Christa Wolf (New York: Co­
lumbia UP, 1989); Georg Lukacs, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” in Soul
and Form, stuns. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MITP, 1971); Laurent Mailhot, “The
Writing of the Essay,” trans. Jay Lutz, in The Language ofDifference: Writing in
Qjtebec(ois), cd. Ralph Sarkonak (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983): 74-89. (author’s note]

American Literature 68.1 (March 1996)

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c YNTHIA OZICK (1928-) is an American novelist, short story
writer, and essayist whose immigrant Russian parents imbued
her with a deep knowledge of and reverence for Jewish and Yid­
dish cultural traditions. Ozick in turn has written extensively about Jew­
ish life, drawing in part on her childhood years in the Bronx, where she
attended a Yiddish-Hebrew school, in part on her extensive reading of
Jewish literature and history, and in part on her irrepressible concern
with the Holocaust, which occurred when she was coming of age. She
is known not only for the intellectually distinctive heroines she has cre­
ated in such novels as The Cannibal Galaxy and The Puttermesser Papers
but also for her wide-ranging collections of essays, which touch on her
personal experience and engage with cultural and literary issues such as
those she deals with in the following piece on the captivatingly feminine
quality of the essay.

“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body”

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay,
it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the
long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopoliti­
cal use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in
prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a
genuine essay is made out oflanguage and character and mood and tem­
perament and pluck and chance. And if I speak of a genuine essay, it is be­
cause fakes abound. Here the old-fashioned term poetaster may apply, if
only obliquely. As the poetaster is to the poet—a lesser aspirant—so the
article is to the essay: a look-alike knockoff guaranteed not to wear well.
An article is gossip. An essay is reflection and insight. An article has the
temporary advantage of social heat—what’s hot out there right now. An
essays heat is interior. An article is timely, topical, engaged in the issues
and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month.
In five years it will have acquired che quaint aura of a rotary phone. An

151...
article is Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. An essay defies its date of
birth, and ours too. (A necessary caveat: some genuine essays are popu­
larly called “articles”—but this is no more than an idle, though persistent,
habit of speech. What’s in a name? The ephemeral is the ephemeral. The
enduring is the enduring.)
A small historical experiment. Who are the classical essayists that
come at once to mind? Montaigne, obviously. Among the nineteenth-
century English masters, the long row of Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey,
Stevenson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Harriet Martineau. Of
the Americans, Emerson. It may be argued that nowadays these are read
only by specialists and literature majors, and by the latter only when they
are compelled to. However accurate the claim, it is irrelevant to the ex­
periment, which has to do with beginnings and their disclosures. Here,
then, are some introductory passages:

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey, but I

like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than
when alone.—William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey”

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber

as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium eater;
and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance,
from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings
which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this prac­
tice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable ex­
citement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case.—Thomas
De Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is
composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men
who lend.—Charles Lamb, “The Two Races of Men”

I saw two hareems in the East; and it would be wrong to pass them
over in an account of my travels; though the subject is as little agree­
able as any I can have to treat. I cannot now think of the two morn­
ings thus employed without a heaviness of heart greater than I have

...15Z
 ever brought away from Deaf and Dumb Schools, Lunatic Asylums,
or even Prisons.—Harriet Martineau, “From Eastern Life”

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is

worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an
ever and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not
an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a
received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.... But for
poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine
illusion.—Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final,

and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing
stands alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It
outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes
it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a
regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years.
And when the business is done, there is a sore havoc made in other
peoples lives, and a pin knocked ouc by which many subsidiary
friendships hung together.—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex”

It is recorded of some people, as of Alexander the Great, that their

sweat, in consequence of some rare and extraordinary constitution,
emitted a sweet odor, the cause ofwhich Plutarch and others investi­
gated. But the nature of most bodies is the opposite, and at their best
they are free from smell. Even the purest breath has nothing more
excellent than to be without offensive odor, like that ofvery healthy
children.—Michel de Montaigne, “Of Smells”

What might such a little anthology of beginnings reveal? First, that

language differs from one era to the next: there are touches of archaism
here, if only in punctuation and cadence. Second, that splendid minds
may contradict each other (outdoors, Hazlitt never feels alone; Emer­
son urges the opposite). Third, that the theme of an essay can be any­
thing under the sun, however trivial (the smell of sweat) or crushing (the
thought that we must die). Fourth, that che essay is a consistently rec­
ognizable and venerable—or call it ancient—form. In English: Addison
and Steele in the eighteenth century, Bacon and Browne in the seven­
teenth, Lyly in the sixteenth, Bede in the eighth. And what of the biblical
Koheleth—Ecclesiastes—who may be the oldest essayist reflecting on
one of the oldest subjects: world-weariness?

153...
 So the essay is ancient and various: but this is a commonplace. There is
something else, and it is more striking yet—the essay’s power. By “power”
I mean precisely the capacity to do what force always does: coerce assent.
Never mind that the shape and inclination of any essay is against coer­
cion or suasion, or that the essay neither proposes nor purposes to get you
to think like its author—at least not overtly. If an essay has a “motive,”
it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven
will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a
broadside. Thomas Paines “Common Sense” and Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”
are heroic landmark writings; but to call them essays, though they may
resemble the form, is to misunderstand. The essay is not meant for the
barricades; it is a stroll through someone’s mazy mind. Yet this is not to
say that there has never been an essayist morally intent on making an
argument, however obliquely—George Orwell is a case in point. At the
end of the day, the essay turns out to be a force for agreement. It co-opts
agreement; it courts agreement; it seduces agreement. For the brief hour
we give to it, we are sure to fall into surrender and conviction. And this
will occur even if we are intrinsically roused to resistance.
To illustrate: I may not be persuaded by Emersonianism as an ideology,
but Emerson—his voice, his language, his music—persuades me. When
we look for superlatives, not for nothing do we speak of “commanding”
or “compelling” prose. If I am a skeptical rationalist or an advanced bio­
chemist, I may regard (or discard) the idea of the soul as no better than a
puff of warm vapor. But here is Emerson on the soul: “when it breathes
through [man’s] intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it
is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.” And then—well,
I am in thrall, I am possessed; I believe.
The novel has its own claims on surrender. It suspends our partici­
pation in the society we ordinarily live in, so that—for the time we are
reading—we forget it utterly. But the essay does not allow us to forget
our usual sensations and opinions; it does something even more potent: it
makes us deny them. The authority of a masterly essayist—the authority
of sublime language and intimate observation—is absolute. When I am
with Hazlitt, I know no greater companion than nature. When I am with
Emerson, I know no greater solitude than nature.
And what is most odd about the essay’s power to lure us into its lair is
how it goes about this work. We feel it when a political journalise comes
after us with a point of view—we feel it the way the cat is wary of the
dog. A polemic is a herald, complete wich feathered hat and trumpet. A

...154
 !
cract can be a trap. Certain magazine articles have the scent of so-much-
per-word. What is indisputable is that all of these are more or less in the
position of a lepidopterist with his net: they mean to catch and skewer.
They are focused on prey—i.e., us. The genuine essay, in contrast, never
thinks of us; the genuine essay may be the most self-centered (the politer
word would be subjective) arena for human thought ever devised.
Or else, though still not having you and me in mind (unless as an ex-
emplum of common folly), it is not self-centered at all. When I was a
child, I discovered in the public library a book that enchanted me then,
and the idea of which has enchanted me for life. I have no recollection
either of the title or of the writer—and anyhow very young readers rarely
take note of authors; stories are simply and magically there. The charac­
ters included, as I remember them, three or four children and a delightful
relation who is a storyteller, and the scheme was this: each child calls out
a story-element—most often an object—and the storyteller gathers up
whatever is supplied (blue boots, a river, a fairy, a pencil box) and makes
out of these random, unlikely, and disparate offerings a tale both logical
and surprising. An essay, it seems to me, maybe similarly constructed—if
so deliberate a term applies. The essayist, let us say, unexpectedly stumbles
over a pair of old blue boots in a corner of the garage, and this reminds her
of when she last wore them—twenty years ago, on a trip to Paris, where
on the banks of the Seine she stopped to watch an old fellow sketching,
with a box of colored pencils at his side. The pencil wiggling over his sheet
is a grayish pink, which reflects the threads of sunset pulling westward
in che sky, like the reins of a fairy cart... and so on. The mind mean­
ders, slipping from one impression to another, from reality to memory to
dreamscape and back again.
In the same way Montaigne, in our sample, when contemplating the
unpleasantness of sweat, ends with the pure breath of children. Or Ste­
venson, starting out with mortality, speaks first of ambush, chen of war,
and finally of a displaced pin. No one is freer than the essayist—free
to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought, to begin
with the finish and finish with the middle, or to eschew beginning and
end and keep only a middle. The marvel of it is that out of this apparent
causelessness, out of this scattering of idiosyncratic seeing and telling, a
coherent world is made. It is coherent because, after all, an essayist must
be an artist, and every artist, whatever the means, arrives at a sound and
singular imaginative frame—or call it, on a minor scale, a cosmogony.
And it is into this frame, this work of art, that we tumble like tar ba-

*55 • • •
 bies, and are held fast. What holds us there? The authority of a voice, yes;
the pleasure—sometimes the anxiety—of a new idea, an untried angle, a
snatch of reminiscence, bliss displayed or shock coiweyed. An essay can be
the product of intellect or memory, lightheartedness or gloom, well-being
or disgruntlement. But always there is a certain quietude, on occasion a
kind of detachment. Rage and revenge, I think, belong to fiction. The
essay is cooler than that. Because it so often engages in acts of memory,
and despite its gladder or more antic incarnations, the essay is by and large
a serene or melancholic form. It mimics that low electric hum, sometimes
rising to resemble actual speech, that all human beings carry inside their
heads—a vibration, garrulous if somewhat indistinct, that never leaves us
while we wake. It is the hum of perpetual noticing: the configuration of
someone’s eyelid or tooth, the veins on a hand, a wisp of string caught on
a twig, some words your fourth-grade teacher said, so long ago, about the
rain, the look of an awning, a sidewalk, a bit of cheese left on a plate. All
daylong this inescapable hum drums on, recalling one thing and another,
and pointing out this and this and this. Legend has it that Titus, em­
peror of Rome, went mad because of the buzzing of a gnat that made her
home in his ear; and presumably the gnat, flying out into the great world
and then returning to her nest, whispered what she had seen and felt and
learned there. But an essayist is more resourceful than an emperor, and
can be relieved of this interior noise, if only for the time it takes to record
its murmurings. To seize the hum and set it down for others to hear is the
essayists genius.
It is a genius bound to leisure, and even to luxury, if luxury is mea­
sured in hours. The essay’s limits can be found in its own reflective na­
ture. Poems have been wrested from the inferno of catastrophe or war,
and battlefield letters too: these are the spontaneous bursts and burnings
that danger excites. But the meditative temperateness of an essay requires
a desk and a chair, a musing and a mooning, a connection to a civilized
surround; even when the subject itself is a wilderness of lions and tigers,
mulling is the way of it. An essay is a fireside thing, not a conflagration
or a safari.
This may be why, when we ask who the essayists are, it turns out—
though novelists may now and then write essays—that true essayists
rarely write novels. Essayists are a species of metaphysician: they are
inquisitive—also analytic—about the least grain of being. Novelists go
about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else

...156
 they send them to sea, or to Africa, or (at the least) out of town. Essayists
in their stillness ponder love and death. It is probably an illusion that men
are essayists more often than women (especially since women’s essays have
in che past frequently assumed the form of unpublished correspondence).
And here I should, I suppose, add a note about maleness and femaleness as
a literary issue—what is popularly termed “gender,” as if men and women
were French or German tables and sofas. 1 should add such a note; it is
the fashion, or, rather, the current expectation or obligation—but there
is nothing to say about any of it. Essays are written by men. Essays are
written by women. That is the long and the short of it. John Updike, in
a genially confident discourse on maleness (“The Disposable Rocket”),
takes the view—though he admits to admixture—that the “male sense
of space must differ from that of the female, who has such an interesting,
active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer.”
Except, let it be observed, when men write essays: since it is only inner
space—interesting, active, significant—that can conceive and nourish
the contemplative essay. The “ideal female body,” Updike adds, “curves
around the centers of repose,” and no phrase could better describe che
shape of the ideal essay—yet women are no fitter as essayists than men.
In promoting the felt salience of sex, Updike nevertheless drives home an
essayists poinc. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensacions of the
self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies; the novelist can inhabit not only a
sex not his own, but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads
and beasts; while che essay is, as we say, personal.
And here is an irony. Though I have been incent on distinguishing
the marrow of the essay from the marrow of fiction, I confess I have been
trying all along, in a subliminal way, to speak of che essay as if it—or
she—were a character in a novel or a play: moody, fickle, given on a whim
to changing her clothes, or che subject; sometimes obstinate, with a mind
of her own; or hazy and light; never predictable. I mean for her to be
dressed—and addressed—as we would Becky Sharp, or Ophelia, or Eliz­
abeth Bennet, or Mrs. Ramsay, or Mrs. Wilcox, or even Hester Prynne.
Put ic that it is pointless to say (as I have done repeatedly, disliking it every
moment) “the essay,” “an essay.” The essay—an essay—is not an abstrac­
tion; she may have recognizable contours, but she is highly colored and
individuated; she is noc a type. She is too fluid, too elusive, to be a cat­
egory. She may be bold, she may be diffident, she may rely on beauty, or on
cleverness, on eros or exotica. Whatever her story, she is the protagonist,

i57
the secret self’s personification. When we knock on her door, she opens to
us, she is a presence in the doorway, she leads us from room co room; then
why should we not call her “she”? She may be privately indifferent to us,
but she is anything but unwelcoming. Above all, she is not a hidden prin­
ciple or a thesis or a construct: she is there, a living voice. She takes us in.
Qttarrel & Qttandiy: Essays, 2.000

...158
s ara levine (1981-), director of the writing program at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a novelist, short story
writer, and essayist who describes herself as “a big fan of a certain
kind of littleness: essays the size of handkerchiefs, novels the length of
nosebleeds, philosophies reduced to paragraphs, conclusions detached
from tedious arguments, epics scribbled on the back of a hand, tall tales,
but only in bare feet.” Widely known for her satiric novel Treasure Is­
land!!!, which she refers to as “essayistic” by virtue of its being about “a
mind in motion,” Levine wrote her doctoral dissertation on the nature
of the essay and has also published three essays on the essay. Her reflec­
tions on the essay are especially concerned with the ways that essayists
create an impression of themselves — a concern that is central to the fol­
lowing excerpt from “The Self on the Shelf.”

From “The Self on the Shelf”

Consider the academic article, to which self is nothing. You come to the
academic article like dentist to tooth: to extract. You pilfer the bibliogra­
phy, you fill up the file cards, you go for the gist and the rub and the fact.
If the writers style doesn’t suit you, what do you care? You’re not there
to gain a better sense of who he is but a better sense of the discipline to
which he contributes. He’s a cog in the wheel, a pixie of a pixel, a thread
in the fabric of the discipline’s crotch.
But to the essay you come — you should come, I’m telling you — with
the hope of confronting a particular person. In places the freshly painted
person still shows cracks. An underdeveloped paragraph here, a broken
sentence there. Still you surrender to the dream of personhood, you
quicken the clusters of sound. You leave the essay feeling as if you have
met somebody.
The worst thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression.

159...
What I want to do in this essay is talk about how an essayist makes an
impression.
It is often supposed that essayists make great use of the first person
singular and that an essayist may be spotted by the frequent flash of his
“I.” Joan Didion worries a bit about that “I" and its moral implications in
the beginning of “Why I Write”:

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One
reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write.
There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound,
and the sound they share is this:
1
I
I
In many ways writing is this act of saying I, of imposing oneself
upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your
mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its ag­
gressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and quali­
fiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with
the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding
rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that set­
ting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an im­
position of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

This passage sidles up to you like a salesperson in the perfume depart­

ment, splashingyou with candor. Writers are a tricky bunch; they seem to
come in friendship but instead they come in force. To distinguish herself
from the wily crowd, Didion gives the reader rhetoric as rhetoric. Thus:
the sentence that warns of “subordinate clauses and qualifiers and ten­
tative subjunctives” is followed by all of these; they are planted for the
reader’s enjoyment, like Easter eggs in the garden. The buried egotism
of words like “Why” and “Write” is flung onto the page, and three para­
graphs are indulgently cut from the sound. “I, I, I,” says the essayist, with
irony too big to store in the attic, and perhaps we think her crafty days are
over, the deceit is done.
Or (why should we be fooled all of the time?) perhaps we notice that
when Didion catalogues the tactics of the secret bully, she says nothing
about pronominal tactics. See how the “I” disappears, as if into a large fur
coat. First it becomes a “you”: this may be Didion speaking to herself or
Didion speaking to the reader. What matters is her choice to detach her-

... 160
self, through pronominal choice, from the person who is behaving badly
in her sentence: “You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want,” as if,
until now, the naive reader had been exhaustinghimselfwith deceptions.
Next the “I” slips into the misty neutrality of “oneself,” so it’s not “my”
thick and intimate body that gets into the readers space, but the vapor of
a more ethereal “one.” Then a list of egotistic pronouns appears glisten to
me, see it my way, changeyour mind"), but these appear in italics and as di­
alogue— something other people say, so that Didion herself is distanced
from the egotistic chant. In the last sentence, “setting words on paper"
appears in the subject position, so that the actor is replaced by action. And
finally, when the curtain comes down, no pronoun at all appears to take a
bow, but “the writer” — a noun fresh out of the box to show that Didion
does not speak of her self so much as her profession.
I guess I should make it clear thac I admire Didion for her modulation
of pronouns. She comes off'as a fair person, and ultimately what matters,
in an essay, is how the essayist comes off. If she is not fair — or rather, if
her skillful oscillation of pronouns encourages us to think she is more fair
than she is, that is unfortunate for her as a thinker and for us as readers:
but it is not something over which we should tear our hair. She need not
be fair, just, balanced, or dispassionate; as an essayist she need not even be
reliable. What matters (and how frightening it is to say this) is how all the
linguistic choices — such as where to use “you” and where to use “I,” or
how closely to set a formal term like “tentative subjunctives” alongside an
informal word like “bully” — what matters is how these linguistic choices
combine to make a self of interest. A thoroughly egotistic persona, whose
self-absorption might be measured, say, by her inability to modulate pro­
nouns, by her refusal to flex her puny point of view, will fail to create the
illusion of an intelligent, complex, dynamic self, one who can look inward
and oueward. Because even though the essayists self is a fiction, we want it
to be a complex fiction, with thoughts as well as second thoughts, a psyche
that catches fire occasionally; a self chat moves. If the essayist refuses to
move, and usually, as Phillip Lopate explains, the direction we want him
to move is downwards —

So often the “plot” of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, con­
sists in watching how far the essayist can d rop past his or her psychic
defenses toward deeper levels of honesty.

— then we deem him lousy. When Didion slides between pronouns, she
does not move down, but she moves something. Above I rallied meta-

161...
phors in order to describe this, saying she gets into a coat, goes into the
mist, suggesting that the “I” disappears. On second thought (essayists do
have second thoughts) what’s important is not that the “I” disappears but
that it moves at all. Imagine the page as a stage, every pronominal shift
an exit or an entrance.

In a book I am looking at (this is hardly an understatement; the prose is

dense and I tend to read a page or two, then place it on my desk and give it
a long, ill-natured stare), the author says: “the essay is definable neither by
what it says nor... by how it says what it says__ [W]hat is crucial is that
the essay says: utterance for the sake of utterance —‘voicing.’”
This is noc the usual view. The essay has long been understood to be a
prolix genre, and ever since Montaigne, it has been understood to allow
free choice of topic: “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all
equally good to me.” But to say it doesn’t matter how the essay says what
it says is to unscrew the legs from the essayist’s table. It is style that allows
the essayist to make a self, to make, as I said, an impression. The essay­
ist Scott Russell Sanders famously puts it like this: the essay is “a haven
for the private idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble.” That
seems right, although when you think a minute you see that the essayist
writes his private voicefor the public, so perhaps private isn’t the word for
it at all. Edward Hoagland suggests: “the style of the essay has a ‘nap’ to
it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends
that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can’t be brushed flat.”
This description is lovely, and yet what makes the nap — and why when
the essay is made of words are we talking about wool anyway? Well, we
are talking about wool because we are on the page of an essayist; he has
no obligation to make us a textbook of technique. But suppose you and
I want to understand how an essayist makes an impression; suppose you
and I (who have become conscious of pronouns) want to think more clini­
cally about how the textual heart beats?
Essayists do not have “more” style than anyone else, but as a group,
when compared to other groups of prose writers they tend to be more
interested in style-as-deviance. How they say it can often be answered,
“Differently.” Neither of these concepts (style, style-as-deviance) has any
meaning outside of a historical context, obviously. If an entire generation
of essayists grows up reading The White Album and imitates it, the sense
that Joan Didion’s style is suitably idiosyncratic will disappear. (One can

...i6x
see this principle ac work in Joan Didion’s prose. She has stopped writing
like Joan Did ion, who wrote like Ernest Hemingway, and now writes like
Henry James.)

In 1994, Stanley Elkin published a piece in Harper’s Magazine narrating

a brief episode of madness caused by an overdose of prednisone. He called
the essay “Out of One’s Tree”— the pronoun an ironic choice, since it’s
not a generalizable “one” who goes bonkers, nor a well-mannered “one”
who screams “Lick my dick!” to one’s son who has just entered the room.
Stanley Elkin is the biggest egotist of an essayist in town. He will be
our experimental animal. How to summarize Elkin’s style?
We might start by identifying him with the colloquial side of the
family — those familiar essayists — since he writes without the formal
elegance of, say, Baldwin, or Vidal. Elkin ain’t constricted by the rules
of formal composition. He begins his sentences with “Because” and
“Which.” He signals his poincs long before chey come in: “It’s like this,”
he says; “It’s this”; “Suppose we do this.” He writes “ain’t.” He uses italics,
whereas other writers rely on syntax or the reader’s intelligence to get the
emphasis across.
Colloquial is misleading, though. Elkin disobeys conventional pre­
scriptions about writing, and can be friendly when he wants to (“Gee,
I haven’t told you,” he writes), but unlike other colloquial essayists (Sam
Pickering, for example, or Scoct Russell Sanders) he is rhetorically over­
blown and flashy. I have it from a book called Anything Can Happen that
an editor once struck a few clauses from Elkin’s manuscript on the prin­
ciple that “less is more.” How Elkin objected! “I believe more is more,” he
told an interviewer. “Less is less, fat is fat, thin thin, enough is enough.” I
think he changed editors.
His rhetorical repertoire is too large to catalogue, but I will run off a
few of the trends here.
Whole phrases — commonplaces — are yoked into playing the role of
adjective or noun. Here he is, insulting Fred Astaire: “So take that, Fred
Astaire ... take that and that on your fey, heel-toe, heel-toe bearings in
your smug, noli-me-tangerc aloofness and look-ma-no-hands gravity de­
nials.” And, coincidentally, here he is insulting the Mona Lisa: “See her
there in her cat-who-ate-the-canaries, her smug repose and babushka of
hair like a face on a buck.”
Syntactically, he furnishes obstacles (embedded clauses, parentheti-

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 cal remarks, displacement of heavy material to the left of the sentence)
that make the would-be-speeding reader slow down or — as some readers
point out — give up; you can’t fly your eye over Elkin and expect to get the
kernel of sense. There is no kernel; in fact the whole over-the-topness of
Elkin’s style (you read too much of him and you begin co create your own
hyphenated monsters) suggests an eschewal of the ordinary, including an
eschewal of the practice of reducing works to their basic point. He will
not be reduced — but more on that later.
Elkin’s style is associative, meaning he says a word and then the next
word seems to come of it. “From the echo of one word is born another
word,” to borrow a phrase from Woolf.
He also uses cliche, buc most of the time it acts as a solid backdrop
against which he can perform his fabulously patterned language. For ex­
ample, in his foreword to the second edition of Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitz­
ers & Criers, he suggests his stories have stood “the test, as the saying goes,
of time.” Another writer might have said, “as the saying goes, the test of
time,” or “the test of time, as the saying goes,” or avoided the cliche alto­
gether. Elkin disrupts the cliche by marking it as such right in its middle.
In this same essay you see him unbuckle the phrase “this ain’t much” by
inserting “of course” in between the “ain’t” and “much.” The attentive
reader wonders, why would he do that? Does anyone really speak like this?
This answer ain’t, “of course,” scientific — it’s probably based on my own
speech habits — but I’d say nobody speaks like this; when Elkin imitates
a colloquial style, his colloquial style is hyper-literary, over-the-top. He
works for a kind of chumminess (which he achieves, by the way, through
interjection —“oh, say”— and parenthetical address —“we’re talking very
fragile book years, mind”) but he doesn’t aim for realism, because he as­
sociates verisimilitude with an easy kind of writing; too clear, too passive,
too sedate. In realism, he says, “style is instructed not to make waves but
merely to tag along.” Realism, of course, has its own rhetoric, just as Mon­
taigne’s spontaneous style has its wardrobe planned out the night before.
But for Elkin what matters is that the reader should tag along and that
his — Stanley Elkin’s — linguistic efforts should be appreciated as such.
Not language as a medium to express a character’s dilemma, but language
as itself, showing what language can do.
Elkin doesn’t want you to get used to Elkin; his reputation as a “seri­
ous” writer depends upon your inability to skim his page. Although he’s
intent on keeping you in his service, he also flatters you with a familiar ad-

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dress (were talking... book years, mind”) and undercuts his syntactical
demands by dropping in, from time to time, a startlingly easy, comforting
lexical item (“doggie years”), as if to say, “see, I’m a regular old person like
you,” or “I’m not as sophisticated as I appear”—or maybe, on the other
hand, “I’m more sophisticated than you even knew; see how fearlessly
I move between high and low diction; the rules of formal composition
never scared me.”
And then there is the simile. Not unusual for an Elkin sentence to
be packed with two or three — in some there are six or seven. No object
stands alone in Elkin’s world; it can always be likened to something else.
Even concepts have cousins who smell the same, or sound the same, who
resemble them in attitude, history, shape.
And in listing the following, I feel as if I’m pulling down the author’s
underwear, revealing this — his secret — his favorite syntactic shape:

all the little humiliations of purchase [on shopping]

all the battering-rammed intent of obsession [on character]
all the comfy, invisible bondages of flesh [on women’s underwear]
all the purring sacreds of biology [on singing to a girl].

Why “all the blank of blank”? It isn’t just slang he’s slinging (although
he is; and when I was a teenager we talked like this, too). He’s making
some attempt at community, or if that’s too sentimental a word, some
attempt at unity; just as he finds things like other things, he finds, or,
through a twist of language, makes, trends out of singularity. He wants
to encompass as much as he can, and through these all's he suggests that
there is some great collective mass out there that was waiting to be named.
You thought you were che only one uncomfortable shopping? Or: you
thought it was just your corset that was uncomfortable? He sweeps peo­
ple, things, thoughts together. And this democratic spirit is strange to
the literary landscape, or seems strange to me because I am coming off a
long study of Nabokov. In one of his novels, Nabokov suggests: “what the
artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vidgar
who note their resemblance.”
Briefly, that’s how Elkin makes an impression, that’s how he makes a
persona, period, and we can see that there is a motion involved in all this
(just as there is motion involved in the way Didion juggles her pronouns).
Elkin’s linguistic invention does not simply refuse cliche but makes use
of it, plays with it for a while and then takes aim. In general, the essayist’s

165...
strategies suggest a mind that is working dialectically with the dominant
culture. Anxious to distinguish itself from disciplinary dialects — the
stock phrases of English, say, or philosophy — anxious to avoid all the
commonplaces of popular expression, the essayist shuttles back and forth
between linguistic registers.
Southern Humanities Review, 2.000

...i66
V
ivian gornick (1935-) was born in the Bronx, where her
parents were socialist, working-class Ukrainian immigrants,
and she has remained a New Yorker all her life. She attended
City College and New York Universicy, worked for years as a staffwriter
at the Village Voice, and has taught at several universities in the New
York area. Gornick sees her writing as shaped by the experience of being
“twice an outsider,” for she is both Jewish and a woman. She has writ­
ten essays, memoirs, biography, and criticism and has contributed to the
Nation, the New York Times, Tikkun, the Atlantic, and several antholo­
gies. In the following excerpt from The Situation and the Story: The
Art ofPersonal Narrative, Gornick explores the problem of persona in
the essay, what she calls “the twin struggle to know not only why one
is speaking but who is speaking.” The narrator of an essay is “an unsur­
rogated one,” for the essayist must confront “those very same defenses
and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from.”

From The Situation and the Story

The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in es­
sence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subjecc at hand.
The connection is an intimate one; in fact, it is crucial. Out of the raw
material of a writers own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned
whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This nar­
rator becomes a persona. Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm
of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen
to serve the subject; yet at the same time the way the narrator—or the
persona—sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen.
To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing.
A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices thac
acc as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all
that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defen­
sive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve

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 i

felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one.

Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and
embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from. It’s
like lying down on the couch in public—and while a writer may be will­
ing to do just that, it is a strategy that often simply doesn’t work. Think of
how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without
all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and the selfjustification
that make the analysand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The un­
surrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level
self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required ofa piece ofwrit-
ing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.
Yet the creation of such a persona is vital in an essay or a memoir. It is
the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor
story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essays undergoes an appren­
ticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin
struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.
The Situation and the Story: The Art ofPersonal Narrative, 2.001

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J
ohn d’agata (1974-), who deplores the term “creative nonfiction”
and prefers to speak of himself as devoted to the essay, in particular
“the lyric essay,” is a professor at the University of Iowa, where he
teaches courses in the art of the essay. D’Agata also serves as associ­
ate editor of the Seneca Review, where in collaboration with its former
editor, the poet Deborah Tall, he first outlined his idea of the lyric essay
in 1997. “The lyric essay parcakes of the poem in its density and shapeli­
ness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It parcakes of
the essay in its weight, in its overc desire to engage with facts, melding
its allegiance to the actual with ics passion for imaginative form.” Since
then, he has not only exemplified those ideas in two book-length works,
Halls of Fame and About a Mountain, but also developed and illustrated
them at length in two scriking anthologies: The Next American Essay,
from which the following piece is excerpted, and The Lost Origins ofthe
Essay.

r «
rrom 2003»
The lyric essay, as some have called the form, asks what happens when an
essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What hap­
pens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling
in blank spaces, or—worse yec—leaving the blanks blank? What happens
when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for
image, emotion, expressive transformation? In this year, as we continue
to wade slowly through the start of a new century, our anxiety, either
real or imagined, needles us over the crest of the rest of whac s left. The
afterward of postmodernism waits for us there. There are now questions
being asked of facts that were never questions before. Whac, we ask, is a
fact these days? What’s a lie, for that matter? What constitutes an “essay,”
a “story,” a “poem”? Whac, even, is “experience”? In the words of Wallace
Stevens, we have co find what will suffice. For years writers have been
responding to this slippage of facts in a variety of ways—from the frag-

169...
nicntary forms of LANGUAGE poetry that try to mimic this loss, to
the narrative-driven attempts by novelists and memorises [mc] to smooth
over the gaps. But the lyric essay takes another approach. The lyric essay
inherits from the principal strands of nonfiction the makings of its own
hybrid version of the form. It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay
and the objectivity of the public essay, and conflates them into a literary
form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, ru­
mination and argumentation, human faith and human perception. What
the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of
solutions to problems, while from the personal essay what it takes is a
wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. The result of this ironic
parentage is that lyric essays seek answers, yet seldom seem to find them.
They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case,
or may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet
“the other.” They may start out as travelogues that forget where they are,
or begin as prose poems that refuse quick conclusions. They may origi­
nate as lines that resist being broken, or full-bodied paragraphs that start
slimming down. They are unconventional essays, hybrids that perch on
the fence between the willed and the felt. Facts, in these essays, are not
clear-cut things. What is a lyric essay? It’s an oxymoron: an essay that’s
also a lyric; a kind of logic that wants to sing; an argument that has no
chance of proving anything.
The Next American Essay, 2.003

... 170
P AUL graham (1964-) is an American computer programmer,
entrepreneur, painter, venture capitalist, and essayist. After earn­
ing a PhD in computer science from Harvard, he studied painting
for five years. Then, in collaboration with a Harvard friend, the noto­
rious hacker Robert Morris, he developed an e-commerce application
called Viaweb and sold it to Yahoo! in 1998 for $49 million. Since then,
Graham has pioneered the field of spam filtering, developed the venture
capital firm Y Combinator, and begun writing essays, which he posts on
his Web site: http://www.paulgraham.com/. In the excerpt from “The
Age of the Essay” that follows, Graham discusses in clear, familiar lan­
guage why he writes essays. He emphasizes their origins in the skepticism
and tentativeness of the scientific method. “An essay,” writes Graham, “is
something you write to try to figure something out.” An essay prompts
a conversation, meanders like a river, and, at its best, takes “off in an
unexpected but interesting direction.”

From “The Age of the Essay”

Trying
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history
again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580
published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something
quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in
the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an
attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a the­
sis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesnt
begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don t take
a position and defend it. You notice a door chat’s ajar, and you open it and
walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write

171...
anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is
Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed,
helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only
thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining
yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re
thinking out loud. But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to
clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read
forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things
I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I
run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then
drift off to get a cup of tea.
Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort
written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to
supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline
toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel
obliged to write something “balanced.” Since they’re writing for a popular
magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions,
from which—because they’re writing for a popular magazine—they then
proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one
thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a
complex one. (But don’t get mad at us. We didn’t draw any conclusions.)

The River
Questions aren’t enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They
don’t always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question
and get nowhere. But those you don’t publish. Those are like experiments
that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader
something he didn’t already know.
But what you tell him doesn’t matter, so long as it’s interesting. I’m
sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that
would be a flaw. There you’re not concerned with truth. You already
know where you’re going, and you want to go straight there, blustering
through obstacles, and hand-wavingyour way across swampy ground. But
that’s not what you’re trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be
a search for truth. It would be suspicious if ic didn’t meander.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect,
it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path
it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.1

...171
 The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essay­
ist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose
the most interesting. One can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. I
always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific
conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas
take their course.
This doesn’t always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a
wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in
this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran ouc of ideas.
I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought—but a cleaned-up train
of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real
conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You
need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator
inking over a pencil drawing. But don’t change so much that you lose the
spontaneity of the original.
Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not
something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you
don’t find it. I’d much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected
but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a pre­
scribed course.

i. Trevor Blackwell points out that this isn’t strictly true, because the outside
edges of curves erode faster. [Graham’s note]

First published on-line, September 1004

I 173...
s USAN ORLEAN (1955-) is an American cultural observer and es­
sayist who has lifted journalism to the level of literature. She grew
up in Cleveland, graduated from the University of Michigan, and
started out writing music reviews for an alternative weekly in Portland,
Oregon. She has been a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, the Village
Voice, and since 1992, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her first
book, Red Sox and Blnefish (1987), is a collection of pieces about New
England oddities. She has since published several essay collections and
other books, including Saturday Night (1990), about Saturday nights she
spent in towns across the United States; The Orchid Thief{1998), which
inspired the movie Adaptation-, and Rin Tin Tin: Tlte Life and the Leg­
end (2011). In the following piece, originally her introduction to The Best
American Essays, 200$, Orlean, in her clear, concise, humorous manner,
utilizes an educational toy, the Visible Cow, to explore the essays singu­
lar “jumble of guts and skeleton and plumbing.”

Introduction to The Best American Essays, 200s

Not long ago, I went to New Hampshire to watch some dogsled races,
and during a break in the action I wandered into a hobby shop on the
main drag of the town. It was a dusty old store, dim and crowded, the
shelves loaded with the usual array of hobby gear—Popsicle sticks, model
railroad switches, beads and buttons and toxic glue. I have no use for Pop­
sicle sticks once the Popsicles are eaten, and no wish to build miniature
railroads or embellish the surfaces of the objects in my home, so it seemed
there was nothing in the store for me. But as I was about to leave, a large
box behind the cash register caught my eye. It was, according to the label,
the amazing Skilcraft Visible Cow, an anatomically accurate model kit
featuring “highly detailed parts representing the structures of the skel­
eton and vital organs.” The picture on the label showed a big cow — a
Guernsey, perhaps? or maybe a Milking Shorthorn? — made of some
sort of clear glossy plastic. The exterior of the Visible Cow was invisible.

...174
The visible part of it was its innards — the major bones, the most popular
organs, the spine, the ribs, the tongue. It was a marvelous construction,
a complete inversion of the usual order of things: everything you usu­
ally expect to see of a cow was see-through, and everything you usually
can’t make out was there, plain as day. The insides of the cow were held
together by its transparent shell, which gave order and structure to the
jumble of guts and skeleton and plumbing. I purchased the Visible Cow,
and putting it together (which, according to the label, will allow me to
“Study Anatomy As You Build Your Visible Cow Model”) is on my long­
term To Do list. In the meantime, I keep the box in my office so I can
look at it every day.
Which brings me, more directly than it might seem, to the subject of
essays. Anytime I read an essay, write an essay, or, as is the case here, sort
through and select the very best of a year’s essays, I find myself wonder­
ing what an essay is — what makes up the essential parts and structure of
the form. What I like to do (with a nod here to the Skilcraft company)
is study the essay’s anatomy as I build it. Is an essay a written inquiry? A
meditation? A memoir? Does it concern the outside world or just probe
the writer’s interior world? Can it be funny? Does it have answers or does
it just raise questions? Does it argue a point or is it a cool, impartial view
of the world? Does it have a prescribed cone or is it absolutely individual
— a conversation between the writer and reader, as idiosyncratic as any
conversation might ever be?
As near as I can figure, an essay can be most of the above — it can be
a query, a reminiscence, a persuasive tract, an exploration; it can look in­
ward or outward; it can crack a lot of jokes. What it need not be is objec­
tive. An essay can certainly present facts and advocate a position; but that
seems quite different from objectivity, whereby a writer just delivers in­
formation, adding nothing in che process. Instead, essays take their tone
and momentum from the explicit presence of the writer in them and the
distinctiveness of each writer’s perspective. That makes essays definitely
subjective — not in the skewed, unfair sense of subjectivity, but in the
sense that essays are conversations, and they should have all the nuances
and atticude that any conversation has. I’m sure that’s why newspapers so
rarely generate great essays: even in the essay-allowed zone of a newspaper,
the heavy breath of Objective Newspaper Reporting is always blowing
down the writer’s neck. And certainly there is no prescribed tone that is
“correct” for essays. Sometimes it seems that they have a sameness of man­
ner, a kind of earnest, hand-wringing solemnity. Is this necessary? I don’t

175...
 chink so. Many of the essays that intrigued me this year were funny, or
unusually structured, or tonally adventurous — in other words, not typi­
cal in sound or shape. What mattered was that they conveyed the writer’s
journey, and did it intelligently, gracefully, honestly, and with whatever
voice or shape fit best.
So essays can range in content, tone, structure, and approach. It’s a
loose construct. I happen to love essays that cake a small notion and find
the universe inside it. As Emerson advised, “Put the argument into a con­
crete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball,
which chey can see and handle and carry home with chem, and the cause
is half won.” An essay spun out of nothing but ideas feels coo wifty to me;
one that’s all observation doesn’t seem to have enough soul. What moves
me most is an essay in which the writer turns something over and over
in his or her head, and in examining it finds a bit of truth about human
nature and life and the experience of inhabiting this planet. For a reader
to follow along as a writer examines the nature of long-term love through
the experience of removing a boil on his back, or comes to understand her
sexuality by questioning the history of her mother’s cooking—two of the
pieces I’ve chosen to include here — is to read a wonderful essay and to
appreciate the elasticity of the form. In many ways, it’s the most intimate
of reading experiences, in which the reader is invited to eavesdrop as the
writer works through a thought or excavates a memory. The writer can
be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind the
words, but he or she is absolutely, powerfully present. It’s as if, for those
few thousand words, we are invited deep inside someone’s mind.
Which brings me, after some rumination, back to my Visible Cow. I
know it’s ultimately impossible and probably unnecessary to define what
an essay is, but I think the Visible Cow offers an interesting and tangible
analogue. What holds an essay together — the cowhide, so to speak —
should be nearly invisible. The best kind of structure should be organic,
revealing only the very natural way a smart person’s mind works through
a topic, making connections and forming conclusions as chey occur. And
an essay can contain many thoughts and observations (chose organs!
those bones!) that might not seem to fit together, but in the end lead to a
satisfying whole — a cow.
And if you’ll allow me to torture this poor cow — the Visible one and
now all the real, live cows on the planet — for one more moment: just as
each cow is individual, each of these essays is, too, though they are idenci-
fiably part of the same species. I realized only after the face that I’d chosen

...176
to include a number of essays that deal with the same subject — cooking,
for instance. What’s notable is that they deal with their subject so differ­
ently that they stand as a perfect example of how singular an essay is, and
how they reflect the thinking and emotions of the writer, rather than
merely recording a subject.
It’s that singularity that makes essays so marvelous. That they continue
to be written and read is enduring proof that, all indications to the con­
trary, our voices matter to each other; that we do wonder what goes on
inside each other’s heads; that we want to know each other, and we want
to be known. Nothing is more meaningful — more human, really — than
our efforts to tell each other the story of ourselves, of what it’s like to be
who we are, to think the things we think, to live the lives we live.
The Best American Essays, 200s

177...
 A nder monson (1975—), an experimental writer working in mul-
tiple genres and media, reaches creative writing at the Univer-
JL JL sity of Arizona. He is not only a fiction writer (Other Electrici­
ties), poet (Vacationland and The Available World), and essayist (Neck
Deep and Other Predicaments and Vanishing Point), but also an edi­
tor and designer of books, journals, and Web sites, always pushing the
conventional boundaries of whatever form is at hand. “Most stuff I do
comes out of this basic desire to play, to hack, to open things up, whether
it’s language or new technologies, or the ways in which they intersect.”
Monson’s desire to open things up is strikingly on display in the essays
that compose his recent collection Vanishing Point (1010). These essays
not only exist in the form of a printed text but also contain dagger-like
symbols referring the reader to additional and expanded thoughts of
Monson that can be found on his Web site: http://otherelectricities.com,
which contains the following excerpt on the essay as an embodiment of
mind in action.

From “The Essay as Hack”

The essay tries hard to solidify the motions of thought. It—more than
most other forms of writing—is not as beholden to tradition, restriction.
Sure, it’s, like, old. Totally A ARP. We can date it back to Montaigne, or, j
trying harder, Seneca. I have to admit that Montaigne bores me. Seneca,
too, really, and most ofwhat we call the moral essayists, publicly thinking
about individual behavior as part of a society, offering suggestions for bet­
ter living, and so on. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s that I want to sex it up.
The essay does not rely on narrative arc (though it can). It does not rely
on lyric motion (though it can). It can potentially incorporate anything,
draw from anything, in search of the range of motion of human thought
that it attempts to present.
It is a sticky ball. It is the video game Katamari Damacy. It accom­
modates. Like the brain.

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 Each essay we read is as close as we can get to another mind. It is a simu­
lation of the mind working its way through a problem. This is not to sug­
gest that every essay is good, revelatory, successful, fruitful, interesting. But
stepping into an essay is stepping into the writer’s mind. We are thrown
into the labyrinth, a huge stone rolling behind us. It is a straight shot of
the brain in all its immediacy, its variety, strands of half-remembered text,
partly-thought-through ideas, images below the surface of memory. We
are thrown into process: of thin king, which is like an algorithm, a machine
for replicating or simulating thought:
So, a quote to add to our ball, a line to add to our algorithm, one strand
of thinking: “ ... the essay is decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a con­
vincing tradition; that its strenuous requirements have only rarely been
met: all this has been often remarked upon and censured.” The quote is
from Theodor Adorno’s essay, “The Essay as Form.”
Here we find ourselves. We find ourselves plucked out of our lives and
are transplanted in the middle of a mind. A plot, really, strung together
of thought. Of a linguistic situation. An argument. Given that the essay
lacks tradition, what then? And later:
“Luck and play are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam
and Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it says what is at issue and stops
where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say.”
Adorno tries to describe what the essay does. It thinks. It plays. It dis­
cusses. It cuffs ac ideas as if they were a ball. It is discursive. It cures noth­
ing. It might occasionally curse. Naturally it is subjective, but it owns
that subjectivity and strives to comprehend and transcend it. It has its
stated subject (in Adorno’s case, trying to work out the form of the essay
in the historical situation he finds it in), but all essays’ implied subjects
are the essay itself, the mind of the writer, the I in the process of sifting
and perceiving, even if the I is itself only implied, never apparent, hidden
underneath the shroud of formal argument. Who argues, we ask. A pause.
Silence. Awkward moment. Then: I do, it responds weakly.
The essay claims its own limits and works within them: as it works, so
does the mind. As the argument shifts, cuts back, or redoubles, uncover­
ing something the essay did not know it knew (for that is every essay’s
purpose, to wend, explore, to sidetrack as it must), so goes the processes
of the mind. It freezes thought for us. Of course this fixity is a lie: one line
of thought extends and becomes yesterday, diaspora. The second time
through an essay in revision we are not the same combination of brain
and body; the network has shifted and what we thought we thought is

179...
no longer what we think. And by thinking we erase or redouble thought,
confirming or denying it. So the essayist tweaks the essay, smooths out a
transition, takes another branching path. And that version of thought is
fixed and left, a pathway in the brain, graphite trace on the page. And on
and on until the essayist gets up and gives it up. The essay should change
on every public reading or recitation as something new occurs. But it’s
impossible in art. Finally we have to let it go and hope it will show the
reader something new.
Reading essays gets us closer to others’ thinking, or at least the most
recent version. Writing them gets us closer to our own. It at least allows
us to interrupt the constant motion of our minds to put something down
and consider it, think about it from a year removed, or from space on the
shuttle, or in a different space, overlooking another view from a new hotel
in a different city.
And what about the lyric essay? Have we forgotten it? It proceeds in
chunks, disconnected fragments. It pauses, tacks around the subject or
dead-end through white space.
In some ways the lyric essay is the most essay sort of essay.
Our lyric variety of the essay is a polyglot. It is pansexual. If the essay is
a ball, the lyric essay is a super sticky power ball. But calling the essay lyric
doesn’t add all that much. It specifies, I guess, that this essay is a lyric one.
It closes down some of the dimensions through which essay might move.
Essay itself is already polymorphic. It is oversexed in its potential union
with anything: polemic, story, treatise, argument, fact, fiction, lyric.
But lyric has freshened up the essay world, it seems, so we should be
grateful.
First published on-line, 1008

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J
OHN BRESLAND (1970-) works in radio, video, and print. His
radio essays have aired on public radio, and his print essays have
appeared in magazines such as the North American Review, Hotel
Amerika, and Minnesota Monthly. His video pieces are available on­
line at Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and Requited, as well as at his own Web
site: http://bresland.com. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Creative
Nonfiction Program, Bresland currently teaches at Northwestern Uni­
versity. An earlier version of Bresland s piece on the video essay serves
as the introduction to an inaugural suite of video essays he edited for
Blackbird. In it, Bresland traces the lineage of the video essay from Mon­
taigne, author of the term essai, to Chris Marker, seminal filmmaker of
the French New Wave, to Phillip Lopate, who heralded a “centaur,” the
essay-film, before the Internet made the distribution of such work viable.
Bresland celebrates the new opportunities for the essay offered by the
now-ubiquitous medium that is video.

“On the Origin of the Video Essay”

Beginning with this Spring zoio edition, Blackbird is featuring a new
form of creative nonfiction we’ve chosen to call the video essay. In its in­
tent the video essay is no different from its print counterpart, which for
thousands of years has been a means for writers to confront hard ques­
tions on the page. The essayist pushes toward some insight or some truth.
That insight, that truth, tends to be hard won, if at all, for the essay tends
to ask more than it answers. That asking—whether inscribed in ancient
mud, printed on paper, or streamed thirty frames per second—is central
to the essay, is the essay.
So it’s been, since shortly after Christ, when a Delphic priest named
Plutarch wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg. A thousand
years later in Japan, Sei Shonagon compiled a list in her Pilloiv Book of
“Hateful Things” and “Things That Give a Hot Feeling.” These early

181...
works of nonfiction were meditations, lists, biographies, diary entries, ad­
vice. But it took an amateur in the time of Shakespeare—a French civil
servant in midlife crisis who quit his job to become a writer—to attach a
name to the act of exploring the limits of what we know. He called these
works Essais. Attempts. Trials.
Michel de Montaigne drew thematic inspiration from Plutarch, but
his meditations could be associative, rambling, prickly, polyvalent. Like
Shonagon’s. Which isn’t to say a personal assistant to the Japanese empress
during the Heian dynasty shaped the work of Montaigne. She didn’t, so
far as we know. But Shonagon’s essay, “Things That Quicken the Heart,”
is the central, soulful motif of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982.), one of
the first great film essays of our time. In Sans Soleil Marker channels his
medication on truth and memory through Sandor Krasna, an offscreen
personage whose letters (in the English-language version) are voiced by
Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart. Dcspice the fictional scrim, Sans
Soleil remains solidly an essay, a work of nonfiction that casts multiple
lines of inquiry—among them, how images rewrite memory—and ren­
ders them as poetic evocations of lived experience. Watching Sans Soleil,
you can almost hear Chris Marker whisper, Here is the problem ofbeing
alive right now.
I suspect the heart-quickening now of sound and image is what drew
the otherwise reclusive Marker to film. And by reclusive I don’t mean
he was a poet and novelist wich a promising literary career ahead of
him—though he was, too, that kind of recluse, a writer, before he was
anything else. Today, on the eve of his 90th birthday, Marker is still mak­
ing films, yet less than a dozen photographs of the man exist. He avoids
media, rarely gives interviews. When Marker appears in Agnes Varda’s
video essay The Beaches of Agnes (1008), he does so in the guise of a calk­
ing cat. Filmmakers who let their work speak for itself, who hold their
audience in high esteem, do exist. But they’re rare. And how like an es­
sayist to refuse to explain his work. How like a poet to granc his audience
a lasting measure of imaginative space.
Chris Marker grew up in Neuilly, on the posh rim of the Bois de Bou­
logne outside Paris. Probably he read Montaigne as a boy—not from any
precocity we know of, but rather because French kids read their Mon­
taigne, just as they memorize the poems of Hugo and La Fontaine. After
World War II, in which he fought for the resistance, he published a col­
lection of poetry and, in 1949, his first novel. Then, like so many other
wricers and cricics seduced by the French New Wave—Godard, Rohmer,

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Truffaut—Marker turned to celluloid, and so, for that matter, did the
rest of the world.
Alongside Jean Cayrol, Marker wrote uncrcditcd for Alain Resnais’s
Night and Fog (1955), a film essay about the Holocaust, a work that welds
haunting visuals (and a color scheme Spielberg later cribbed for Schindler’s
List) to a refreshingly human voiceover. In a brilliant essay he wrote for
Threepenny Review, Phillip Lopate describes that voiceover as worldly,
tired, weighted down ivith the need to make fresh those horrors that had so
quickly turned stale. It was a self-interrogatory voice, like a true essayist’s,
dubious, ironical, wheeling and searchingfor the heart of its subject mat­
ter. Thac voice, I suspect, is Markers. And it’s the lone voice, decidedly
unobjective, that resides at the heart of the visual essay. Or film essay. Or
video essay.
What do we name it, anyway—this thing, this half-essay, half-film?
Lopate calls this hybrid literary form a centaur. I have an urge to see
these two interests combined, he writes, through the works offilmmakers
who commit essays on celluloid. The essay-film, as he terms it, barely exists
as a cinematic genre. And this confounds Lopate. He puzzles over che rar­
ity of personal films that track a person’s thoughts as she works through
some mental knot. Why, he asks, aren’t there more of these things?
Lopate cites “promiscuity of the image” as one reason for the rarity of
essay-films—che tendency of the motion piccure, owing to its density of
information, to defy clear expression of a filmmaker’s thoughts. And he
gestures toward the belief, widely held in commercial film circles, that the
screen resists language in higher densities. Even if an artist were to beat
the odds, che chinking goes, even if she were to combine powerful visu­
als with an artful text and weave it all together with economy and grace,
who’d pay twelve bucks at the cinema to see an essay?
That the image resists the precision of language is indeed a complica­
tion for the essayist. Much in the way, I would argue, that pianos compli­
cate singing. That is to say another skill is called for but the payoff can be
sublime. Images and sound are visceral stimuli that even animal sensoria
can tap into. When my mother’s Italian Greyhound sees another dog on
TV, he lunges for it, cries to maul the Samsung. And when a fish takes its
last dying gasp on a sunlit pier in Ross McEhvee’s Time Indefinite (1993),
I’m consumed with sadness over our capacity for cruelty. Looking that
creature in the eye while a young boy stomps on ic, I find myself wanting
to save the fish and stomp che boy. A canny essayist, McElwee knows that
a literary eexe—the lone voice confronting hard questions—is only che

183...
 beginning. Images and sound, chose engines of emotion, have their own
story to cell. Promiscuity of the image isn’t a weakness of the essay-film.
It’s a feature. A volatile one, sure. And it’s changing the way we write,
changing our conception of what writing means.
Film is visual; the essay is not. Film is collaborative; the essay is not.
Film requires big money; the essay costs little and makes less. Essays and
film, Lopate notes, are two different animals, and I agree with him on
one condition: chat it’s 1991. That’s when Lopate wrote “In Search of the
Centaur” for Threepenny. The internet was just a baby then, nursed by
dweebs. Then, financial considerations reigned. If you wanted your film
made, you first needed grants, financing, distributors. Today, to make a
small-scale personal film, you can shooc the thing on an inexpensive digi­
tal camera and upload it to any number of free video sharing sites. In ’91
you had co hustle for eyeballs. Now, of course, the artist still hustles (post
a video in the middle of a digital forest, there’s no guarantee it’ll make a
sound) but those once formidable barriers to entry—obtaining the gear
to shoot your film, and getting it in position to be seen—have been lev­
eled by digital technology. As more literary magazines migrate online,
editors are discovering that the old genre categories—fiction, nonfiction,
poetry—which made perfect sense on che page, no longer do. The Inter­
nee is a conveyance for images and sound as well as text, and print media
is scrambling co catch up.
Today artists have access co video editing cools that ship free on com­
puters. A generation ago, such capability didn’t exist at any price. Now all
it takes for a young artist to produce a documentary is an out-of-the-box
Mac, a camera, and the will co see an idea through to its resolution. The
act of writing has always been a personal pursuit, a concentrated form of
thought. And now filmmaking, too, shares that meditative space. The
tools are handheld, affordable, no less accessible chan a Smith-Corona.
You can shoot and edit video, compelling video, on a cell phone.
Brave new world, right? But what do we call it?
We’re calling it the video essay. Because most of us experience the mo­
tion picture as video, not film. Film is analog. Film requires a shutter to
convey motion. That shutter, Chris Marker told Liberation in Z003, is
what distinguishes film from video: Out ofthe two hours you spend in a
movie theater, you spend one ofthem in the dark. It’s this nocturnal portion
that stays with us, thatfixes our memory ofa film in a different way than
the samefilm seen on television or on a monitor. Video, on che other hand,
from the way it’s acquired (on small, light digital cameras with scarcling

...184
image quality) to the way it’s consumed (on mobile devices, on planes, as
shared links crossing the ether) is now being carried everywhere, the way
books and magazines once were. And there’s a certain texture to video, a
telltale combination of compression artifacts, blown-out whites and noisy
blacks that isn’t pretty. But it’s not ugly, either. It’s real. (It may also be, as
Don DeLillo once described it, realer than real.) The video essay. Video in
the Greek sense, from the verb videre—to see. Essay in the Greek sense,
meaning to ask. In the Japanese sense, to quicken the heart. In the French
sense, to try. I can think of no better way to take on the problems of being
alive right now than to write this way, with a pen in one hand and a lens
in the other.
First published in Blackbird9.1 (Spring 1010); revised for this collection

185...
J
eff porter (1951—) is a specialist in contemporary literature and
culture, radio and film studies, and literary nonfiction. A profes­
sor at the University of Iowa, he teaches classes on radio and video
essays, new media, literary journalism, history of the essay, and post­
modernism. His film and radio work includes The Men Who Dance the
Giglio, Writing on Rock: N. Scott Momaday, Dublin USA, Herby Sings
the Blues, and Mother ofInvention (an experimental sound collage). He
is the author of Oppenheimer Is Watching Me (University of Iowa Press,
2.007), a personalized cultural history of the Cold War. His essays have
appeared in Antioch Review, Isotope, Northwest Review, Shenandoah,
Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson (Quarterly, Contemporary Lit­
erature, Blackbird, and other journals. His current book project focuses
on the history and practice of radiophonic literature. He is coeditor of
Understanding the Essay, forthcoming from Broadview Press. Porcer’s
detailed interest in the evolution of American radio art is reflected in the
following piece on the radio essay.

“Essay on the Radio Essay”

A quirky voice, some music, a few sounds, a spoken text. That’s the im­
probable formula for what’s often understood as a new genre, the radio
essay. Since the 1990s, the airwaves have been filled with fresh voices
—cranky humorists, charming eccentrics, wry critics—that have opened
up a space on radio for creative nonfiction. The radio essay got a huge
boost in 1995 when, with his debut as host of This American Life, Ira
Glass turned the genre into a national art form and created what at the
time seemed to be the coolest thing ever to happen to words on the radio.
Putting one’s finger on an exact point of origin for the radio essay is
difficult, but it would be wrong to think that This American Life invented
the form. Original as Glass’s show may have seemed, the radio essay harks
back to a much older tradition that grew out of broadcast radio’s thriving

... 186
 partnership with literary culture from 1936 to 1950. It was a time when
radio freely experimented with narrative formats, when its narrators and
commentators had so much appeal that networks were encouraged co
push the expressive power of the human voice in bold and imaginative
ways. Far from being an innovation of the late twentieth century, the
modern radio essay is in fact a survivor of an older aural culture that was
significantly more daring—and literary—than most listeners of public
radio might suspect.
It is impossible to grasp this culture without understandingsomething
of radio’s remarkable past. Radio came of age during the Depression and
soon dominated other media, including newspapers. While ic had relied
on music and discussion shows early on, by the mid-1950s radio embraced
short fiction and then drama, taking its lead from pulp magazines and
other serial genres that drove pop culture. Before the advent of televi­
sion, the evening ritual of gathering around the big wooden radio in the
living room was a national custom, with families tuning into The Jack
Benny Show, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Burns and Allen, You
Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx, and The Firestone Hour. Radio was
at the heart of popular culture and its appetite for compelling characters
and diverting stories could not be satisfied.
Perhaps the mosc interesting development during the short span of
radio’s boom years was the emergence of radio drama. If much of the nar­
rative programming serialized during radio’s heyday—a wild potpourri
ofcomedy, mystery, and melodrama—was drawn from pulp fiction, radio
drama was a different life form. It flirted with greatness, with high liter­
ary art, and for a moment achieved it. In part, this was the result of bold
programming at CBS with the creation of the experimental Columbia
Workshop. But it was also an effect of World War II and the uncommon
sense of common purpose the war provoked, something that proved a
catalyst for serious writers such as Archibald MacLeish, Norman Cor­
win, and Arch Oboler.
Drama was such a dominant form during radio’s peak years that even
the news included theatrical reenactments of world events. Part journal­
ism, part soap opera, the March of Time, for instance, featured over-the-
top reenactments of historical events (such as the Spanish Civil War) that
drew on professional actors, sound effects, and a full studio orchestra.
There was Agnes Moorehead impersonating Eleanor Roosevelt, Art Car­
ney playing Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Weist imitating Adolf Hitler.

187...
Like other newsreels of the day, the show was built around a commanding
announcer, often called the “voice of time,” who guided listeners through
a cycle of events that had already played out.
Genre-blurring, which grew out of broadcast radios thriving partner­
ship with literary culture, seemed to have been the rule rather than the
exception. Documentary devices and essaylike tropes appeared where you
least expected them. MacLeish’s stylized radio plays were powered by stu­
dio announcers, on-location commentators, and reporters who evoke the
presence of radio personalities such as H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R.
Murrow. Orson Welles’s The War ofthe Worlds would have been a stun­
ning flop rather than a shocking hoax without the help of radio verite.
The radio genius who profited the most from genre-mixing was Nor­
man Corwin. On May 8, 1945, 60 million Americans (nearly half of all
the nation) tuned in to hear On a Note of Triumph, Norman Corwin’s
masterpiece marking the beginning of the end of World War II. The play
opens with Bernard Hermann’s brassy score and the brusque words of the
narrator, played by Martin Gabel—

So they’ve given up?

They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the
Wilhelmstrasse.
Take a bow, GI,
Take a bow, little guy.
The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of
this afternoon.
This is It, kid, this is The Day, all the way from Newburyport to
Vladivostock.

A landmark in radio, the hour-long program saluted America’s GIs in

high colloquial style and went on to raise several questions concerning
the larger meaning of victory. As expressed by the Everyman character of
the GI, these questions (who did we beat, how much did it cost, what have
we learned, what do we know now, what do we do now, is itgoing to happen
again?) are delivered in an earnest, humble voice that contrasts markedly
with the booming accents of the narrator. The play is memorable for such
contrasts and mood swings. On a Note of Triumph progressed by sud­
den turns that transformed the exhilaration of victory into something
more emotionally fraught and intellectually challenging. Corwin did not
allow the listener the luxury of forgetting, in the joy of the moment, the
human cost of war or the reluctance of Americans to get involved in the

...188
first place. In addition to the narration, other voices are introduced via
remote pickup from around the nation and abroad and from miniature
dramatizations, including interviews with fictional Nazis, a glimpse of
the mother whose son died in the war, and an impersonation of Haile
Selassie.
Corwin’s play may sound like a piece of American propaganda, indulg­
ing in Nazi baiting and flag waving, but its mosaic form deepens the com­
memorative work it undertakes. A mix of newsreel, commentary, narra­
tion, drama, and poetry, On a Note of Triumph conjures up the entire
history of radio in its broad effort to imagine the enormity of a war the
likes of which no one had seen before. The play ends not with cheers
and confetti but with a secular prayer (“Lord God of Trajectory and blast
whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent so it withers in the sun for
the just to see, sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of
nations writ on it, and assist in the preparation of the ploughshare”), a
burst of neobiblical prose reminiscent of the heightened writings ofjames
Agee and Pare Lorentz.
What held all of this together was not only the vernacular lyricism of
Corwins script but also the heart-stirring zeal of Martin Gabel’s remark­
able narration. The voice of the narrator, rising and falling from pan­
oramic heights to close-up intimacy, is the strong force that contains and
unifies all the disparate parts of the play. It was an “unflinching voice,”
as Philip Roth remembers it in his novel I Married a Communist, the
voice of “common man’s collective conscience,” an image of the national
character inscribed in sound (40).
Where did this voice come from? Gabel’s narrator wasn’t created from
scratch but evolved from the tradition of the radio commentator. Before
the outbreak of political tension in Europe, network radio employed only
a handful of commentators such as Boake Carter, but afterward hun­
dreds of new voices were heard around the country in this role. Along
with Kaltenborn came Gram Swing, Dorothy Thompson, and Lowell
Thomas. And of course there were Murrow and his team. Few commen­
tators had formal backgrounds in journalism, but many shared the same
literary inclinations as essayists and columnists such as George Orwell
and H. L. Mencken.
The appeal of the commentator was surely a sign of radio’s rising star.
By the late 1950s, radio was preferred by a wide margin to newspapers and
thought to be more credible and more personal. The voice seemed to be
what mattered for most listeners, as if it held the promise of authenticity.

189...
The commentator could be trusted. His spoken words not only bore wit­
ness to history but signaled an affirmation in the face of fear and dread.
The radio commentator, as one might expect, did not survive the ar­
rival of television or radio’s own dwindling resources in the 1950s. If not
for National Public Radio, the radio commentator would now be all
but forgotten, an obscure footnote in the history of the wireless. NPR
brought him back to life during its innovative first decade in the 1970s,
chough in a very different guise. Telling a good story should have little to
do with varnishing your vowels or disciplining your diphthongs, NPR
thought. Nobody, after all, really wants to sound like Ted Baxter, the
infamously pompous newsman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. An un­
proven entity itself, NPR had the good sense back then to develop the
appeal of outliers.
It was in the spirit of outreach that NPR’s All Things Considered went
searching for voices with regional or foreign inflections, voices that, like
that of Susan Stamberg (famous for her New York accent and giggle),
could break through the sound barrier. There were Andrei Codrescu,
who began his weekly commentaries in 1983, a foreign-born poet as re­
nowned for his thick Romanian accent as for his ironic view of American
culture; Baxter Black, the “Cowboy Poet” and humorist from Las Cruces,
New Mexico, master of the southwestern drawl and homespun essays on
cow bloat, barbed wire, manure, and the daily ups and downs of ordinary
folks in close proximity to large, messy animals; Bailey White, from rural
Georgia, who told wry tales about eccentric characters and provided vivid
descriptions of small-town southern life, including her oddball mother’s
recipe for road kill; and Daniel Pinkwater, from Hoboken, New Jersey, a
writer of children’s books turned humorist, on being fat or weird. These
were not detached broadcast voices, orotund and transcendent, but fully
embodied voices, incarnated in a talking-self that turned its own physi-
cality into an expressive force that was inseparable from the writing. So
it is with Sarah Vowell, who sounds like a disaffected teenager scheming
revenge from the basement of a library; or with David Sedaris, the man-
boy whose self-ironic hilarity plumbs the joyful absurdities of his dysfunc­
tional family; or with David Rakoff, whose sardonic, world-weary voice is
as wry as the snarkiest of bloggers.
Even though the immensely popular Sedaris speaks to a younger gen­
eration than Codrescu or White (who are popular with Boomers), he is
cut from the same cloth. For the most part, the success of NPR’s com­
mentators depended on the charm of their radio personae, on-air person-

... 190
alities that listeners grew fond of, even identified with, in the same way
an earlier generation bonded with Jack Benny and H. V. Kaltcnborn, not
to mention the ventriloquized Charlie McCarthy. It is little wonder that
Garrison Keillors A Prairie Home Companion has succeeded for so long
with legions of listeners (chirty-five years and running). The radiophonic
personality of Keillor, America’s resonant raconteur, not only sells a lot
of coffee mugs but keeps alive the idea of character-based radio at a time
when NPR has abandoned its interest in voice as an expressive medium.
As cultural programming lost ground to hard news coverage, NPR’s
short radio essays eventually began to seem irrelevant, a postscript to an
aural culture chat no longer existed. Throughout the 1990s, NPR moved
steadily away from ics commitment to sound as an evocative medium,
and its dedication to hard news narrowly defined what made a good story.
Often this boiled down to the sheer authority of the voice behind the
news—chat middle-aged, aloof, and highly educated (if somewhat self-
satisfied) anchoresque sound anyone familiar with the network knows
so well.
The radio essay acquired a life of its own in the mid-1990s, when Glass
saw beyond the littleness of NPR’s “commentaries” and gave the radio
essay its own sixty-minute venue. No more three-minute stories about
grandmas shoofly pie recipe salvaged from the ruination of rural farm
life. With This American Life, Glass alrnosc single-handedly rescued a
serious kind of radiophonic literature.
Fans of This American Life know its format well. A fairly typical epi­
sode, “Sissies” described effeminate guys and the troubles they face—a
variation on the metrosexual theme popular at the time. Ic consisted of
five different voices, counting the hosts, and included Nancy Updike
on che downfall of a family made up of sissies, John Connors on how
to avoid behaving like a sissy, Dave Awl on avoiding a beating, and Dan
Savage on the disdain even gay men have for sissies. Segues between the
stories are helped out by music from Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris,
Barbra Screisand, and the Aluminum Group. The four-acc format was a
throwback to an older genre, the splendid tradition of drama on old-time
radio (it was originally called Your American Playhouse), when literacure,
sound, voice, and music all came together in an acoustic outburst of ra­
diophonic pop culture. Ira Glass no doubt had in mind a time when radio
was more hospitable to literature and art.
Today, This American Life seems vulnerable to the same kind of com­
plaints raised against NPR several years ago when critics grumbled about

191...
 its lack of innovation, which is of course ironic but perhaps inevitable. Is
the show, like All Things Considered before it, becoming monotonous,
with the stories and voices all beginning to sound alike? As the Onion
suggested in a recent send up of TAL, the show has run its course: “There
is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has
been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that [has not been]
exhaustively documented and grouped by theme.”
Where do we go from here? It is not clear that public radio, with the
exception of Radiolob and Studio 360, is taking advantage of emerging
technologies or listening to the mood of the times. New forms of radical
editing, layering, montage, depth of field, and sound modeling could and
should support an aural culture at least as interesting and demanding as
that of old-time radio. Add to this recent experiments in the essay and
a new generation of edgy writers, and you have to wonder how public
radio could become so tone-deaf. Perhaps Boomers arc content with the
staid voice of NPR, but others are craving something more interesting
and complicated.
When oral historian John Lomax recorded the twelve-string guitar
player named Huddie Ledbetter, later known as Lead Belly, at the Loui­
siana State Penitentiary in 1933, he had to haul a 350-pound acetate disk
recorder out of the trunk of his Ford sedan. In searing heat. Of course,
things have changed radically since then. Elvis is dead, and 3M (the larg­
est maker of analogue audio tape) shut down its facility in 1996. Everyone
knows to what extent digital technology has revolutionized the making
of media. Affordable, pocket-size recording gadgets have as much fidel­
ity, if not more, than professional audio gear from the days of bulky and
expensive recorders. And then there is computerized editing, which is
all about cutting and pasting and laying down tracks, something anyone
with a laptop probably learned how to do at the age of four. Anyone who
has fiddled with GarageBand knows that making sound is significantly
cheaper and easier than at any time in the past. With a small investment,
there is nothing preventing you from becoming the next Antonin Artaud
or at least the next Ira Glass. But writing with sound requires finesse. You
will need a good ear to know when the radiophonic parts of your essay
(voice, sound, music, ambience) are in tune, when its meaning is more
than the sum of its tracks, and this may take greater knowledge of radio’s
literary and artistic past. A radio essay can be more than a mix of alterna­
tive music, a quirky story, and a deadpan voice.
The importance of the aurality of language should never be taken for

...192.
granted. Unless on the poetry slam circuit or rehearsing Shakespearean
tragedy, we do not usually think of our voices in the literal sense when
writing. We have been effectively schooled in sophisticated ways to reduce
the idea of voice to its message, to the elaborate process of signification
through which we create form and content. The idea of voice thus gets
lost in notions of textuality, and when this happens we forget that the
voice is a medium in its own right.
The musicality of the vocal: words, sound, voice, aurality. These are
things that reach across time, across technologies. As the poet Tristan
Tzara wrote, “thought is made in the mouth.” Radio essays deal with the
uniqueness of sounds, and that uniqueness is grounded in the human
voice. Because we fetish ize the printed word in all of its glorious silence,
privileging the phonic element in writing is a radical thing to do. Mixed
with music and sound, the voice becomes an excess that wakens in our
minds the forgotten listener in all of us, that part of aural imagination
capable of finding meaning beyond the code of language—in pure sound,
in music.
Written for this collection, ion

193 ...
 w

OBERT ATWAN (1940-) is founding editor of the Best Ameri­

K can Essays series, and in that capacity he has been taking stock
of American essay writing every year since the inaugural vol­
ume of the series in 1986, offering his reflections on the essay in prefaces
to each of the annual collections. He is one of the most knowledgable
commentators not only on the contemporary essay but also on the his­
tory of the essay. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, loiva Review, Denver Qiiar-
terly, Kenyon Review, River Teeth, and other publications. He has edited
several textbook anthologies of essays, and in collaboration with Joyce
Carol Oates edited The Best American Essays ofthe Century. Given his
wide-ranging editorial experience, Atwan’s “Notes towards a Definition
of the Essay” offers a unique perspective on the way that conceptions of
the essay have been shaped not only by the influence of Montaigne and
other major essayists but also by textbook collections of the essay.

Notes towards the Definition of an Essay

Anyone who has attempted to write about the essay knows how difficult
the genre is to define. Yet essayists over the centuries have sought some
sort of definition, despite the fact that the first modern essayist, Mon­
taigne, the writer who gave the form its name, had the good sense to avoid
defining the strange sort of prose he was in the process of inventing.
I’m not saying that poetry, fiction, and drama are any easier to define
than the essay. My point is simply that anyone writing about these forms,
unless of course the goal is explicitly critical genre theory, will not feel
under a similar obligation to propose definitions. So, what is it about es­
says in particular that makes us nervous?
Before I boldly and perhaps foolishly propose a definition of the essay,
I want to explore why the form seems to demand one. The reasons are
historical, critical, and educational. I’ll begin with a brief examination of
these, and then focus on the practical problems I face as the editor of the

...194
annual Best American Essays series and of numerous college anthologies
that feature essays.
First, the historical problem. As most readers know, the origin of the
essay is usually traced to one writer, Montaigne, who began composing
his peculiar prose pieces in the 1570s. At first, he has no literary category
to describe whac he is doing, nor does he appear to even possess conven­
tional rhetorical aims. In nearly all previous prose compositions, the act
of writing remained in the background; Montaigne is perhaps the first to
foreground the writing process. In his prose, he refused to adopc, as did
his sixteenth-century contemporaries, a professional, scholarly, clerical,
or judicial authority. He allowed himself no authoritative posture — only
that of being an author.
As his pieces accumulated, Montaigne settled on the word essai to
characterize his literary efforts. The word was an ordinary term that at
the time had no literary resonance. Like mosc common words it carried
a broad range of connotations. The etymology of essai can be traced to
the late Latin exagium, which meant “to weigh” or “a weight.” By the
fourth century, the term had spread to the Romance languages with the
additional and modern meaning of “to attempt” or “to try.” Though we
normally translate the title of Montaigne’s book as Essays, suggesting only
the genre, we should remember that in his time the term suggested no
literary genre and would be read as “attempts” or “trials,” or, since the
verb essayer had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest: to
sample, taste, practice, take a risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out,
to sound — and these are only a few ways we might understand the term.
As Hugo Friedrich says in his splendid book on Montaigne, the word
also implied modest beginnings and a learners first attempts. The word
essay, then, served as a caution not to take the work too seriously; these
weren’t, after all, airtight arguments or conclusive treatises. The essays
had an unfinished quality; I hear in the original use of essay something
akin to a sketch or rough draft.
Montaigne deliberately pursued an anti-systematic and anti-rhetorical
method of composition. He purposefully defied the formal conventions
of classification, division, logical progression, etc. that characterized seri­
ous prose. And he thus established an ironic authorial posture: the art
of his essays would be grounded in the illusion of their artlessness. His
essays would reflect the mind in process. The writer will not worry about
main points and thesis statements, as digressions lead to further digres­
sions and his thematic destination disappears. A practicing Catholic, he

195...
 doesn’t even try to avoid the mortal sin of inconsistency. For Montaigne,
the essay essentially came to represent a compositional subversion of the
established rhetorical order, as his fluid thoughts appear to be generated
solely from the act of writing and not from a preconceived plan. From
this brief description of Montaigne’s method we can see how far first-year
college writing programs, with their emphasis on clarity, coherence, and
rhetorical patterns, have distanced themselves from the original meaning
of an essay.
No sooner had Montaigne launched this new literary form than imi­
tations appeared throughout Europe at an astonishing rate. The English
philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon would be the first to take Mon­
taigne’s casual term and use it as a label for a distinct genre. But Bacon was
reluctant to give his French rival full credit for the literary innovation. In
1597, Bacon noted that though the term essay came late (he was careful not
even to allude to Montaigne), the form Bacon pointed out was ancient,
going back to such works as Seneca’s Epistles, which, he claimed, were
really essays, or “dispersed meditations.” Yet, despite Bacon’s decision to
cite the essay’s prehistory and to downplay Montaigne’s founding role, the
essay by the beginning of the seventeenth century had clearly come to be
recognized as an independent — and modern — literary genre.
Throughout the next two centuries, the English essay in particular
would enjoy great popularity with an expanding reading public; the essay,
in fact, not news reporting, was one of the chief reasons for the rapid
development of the daily newspaper. It was a favorite form of such gifted
authors as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Gold­
smith, and Samuel Johnson. Henry Fielding admitted that he introduced
various chapters of TomJones with essays because he wanted to discourage
imitations of his fiction by proving he could also write in a more diffi­
cult and intellectually challenging genre. The essay’s literary significance
would last roughly until the end of the First World War, reaching perhaps
its apex in the Victorian era, that great age of critical and intellectual
prose.
Now to my second point. Although the essay attracted many talented
practitioners and was highly regarded as a literary form, it drew little seri­
ous critical attention: what little it did receive was largely biographical
and impressionistic. To make matters difficult, Montaigne — as I said —
had never formally defined his creation, and had used the word essay with
so many different shadings that the term seemed applicable to all sorts of
literary productions. It was not long before philosophers, scholars, scien-

... 196
cists, naturalists, critics, and even poets would title their various works
essays. When earlier writers did attempt to study the typical essay, they
usually did so with a Moncaignean disdain for fastidious, scholarly dis­
tinctions. This situation did not change amidst the explosion of criticism
in the twentieth century. As a vast body of professional, academic criti­
cism rose to meet the challenges of modernist fiction, poetry, and drama,
the essay found itself merely a quaint, middlebrow genre, a holdover from
Victorian times. The newspapers and magazines chat had flourished as
a result of the essay now abandoned it in favor of hard journalism and
informative articles. In fact, it is no coincidence that the rise of objective
and detached journalism went hand in hand with the decline of the sub­
jective and familiar essay.
And in che academy the New Criticism, led by John Crowe Ransom,
was busy developing a special definition of imaginative licerature chat de­
liberately excluded essays and ended once and for all the bellecristic tradi­
tion that had nourished previous generations of readers. Certainly by the
1960s, the essay was an endangered literary species, hanging on here and
chere, but increasingly defined in nonliterary terms along with journalism
and commentary. Americas most popular modern essayist, E. B. White,
often considered one of those middlebrows, would legitimately complain
around this time that the essayist had become a second-class cicizen in
the Republic of letters.
Now to the essays pedagogical problems. Neglected by publishers and
marginalized by literary studies, the essay managed co find a home in the
expanding field of university writing instruction, which for a time made
a lasc-ditch efforc to continue the bellecristic tradition. In general, it was
decided fairly early in the development of such programs that students
would be required to write essays — not translate classical chestnuts or
compose stories or poems — and they would write their essays by adher­
ing to models of good prose.
The high-school (many early anthologies were assembled by high-
school department heads) and college courses that sponsored essay writ­
ing did so primarily to stimulate and improve student prose for purposes
of practical communication. Understanding the essay as a creative liter­
ary genre rarely entered into the picture. Even today, my guess is that
the essays used in first-year courses are taught primarily for content,
relevant issues, and rhetorical models — but rarely for the appreciation
and analysis of their literary form. Though loosely called essays, they
could also be termed “themes” or “compositions —words that perhaps

197...
more accurately characterize their instructional nature. A few of the early
leaders in the field of writing seemed to avoid the term essay, apparently
not wanting to suggest that students were being asked to produce liter­
ary prose. Certainly, with their emphasis on unity, coherence,and orga­
nization, these compositional pioneers knew that introducing an essay
such as Montaigne’s “On Coaches” would drastically undermine their
educational objectives. Still, the models supplied by early textbooks and
anthologies were more often than not chosen from the best essayists of
the past and present. That selection standard invariably led to a discon­
nection between what students were asked to read and what they were
required to write. In short, they were asked to read essays but required to
write compositions.
As the status of the essay declined in mid-century (and I would argue
that one indication of its decline can be seen in its disappearance from
literature courses and its emergence in composition studies) so did the
critical standards by which the genre could be identified and evaluated.
The scholar Lynn Bloom pointed out a decade ago that as freshman essay
anthologies proliferated with the growth of writing courses over the past
several decades, the traditional sense of what constituted an essay was
stretched to its limits. Briefly put, freshmen anthologies will include any
sort of nonfiction prose and call it an essay: speeches, manifestos, editori­
als, criticism, snippets from larger nonfiction works, scientific analysis,
academic papers, and so on. I should note that I’m not speaking here
of the few freshman collections designed explicitly to offer an in-depth
treatment of major essayists. I’m referring instead to the large, all-purpose
thematic readers, the rhetorical textbooks, and the cross-curricular col­
lections that usually for editorial convenience classify nearly all of their
nonfiction selections as essays, regardless of the work’s original genre or its
author’s intentions. But editorial convenience isn’t the only reason; there’s
a historical reason as well. As I mentioned earlier, the essay’s literary iden­
tity was almost totally lost early in the century and the word has, as Lynn
Bloom aptly noted, become a catchall for any sort of nonfiction prose.
A collection designed for a short-story course, for instance, would not
contain memoirs and creative nonfiction, nor would a poetry anthology
feature journalism and reportage. But in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion,
an essay can be whatever anyone claims it is.
My central point is that the essay today does get taught in composition
courses but it does not get taught as literature. For the most part, the essay
remains largely undefined and un-discussed as a literary medium. I doubt

... 198
 chat instructors are even using the nonfiction mix offered by most collec­
tions to help students discriminate between real essays and other varieties
of nonfiction. Surely, there’s a qualitative difference between a work de­
liberately conceived and composed as an essay and a series of paragraphs
excerpted from a nonfiction book and given an arbitrary title. Yet many
anthologies don’t even differentiate between the two; they casually label
both selections essays, to the artistic detriment of the true essay and to
the confusion of the student. In fact, by using the term essay indiscrimi­
nately, many anthologies perpetuate the genre’s diminished and nonlit­
erary status. This is an important issue in the relationship between the
literature and composition divisions of English departments. By continu­
ally neglecting the literary qualities and history of the essay, composition
programs have lost a significant educational opportunity, one that would
have allowed them to establish a critical and theoretical foundation for
the revitalization of the essay as a literary genre.
Now I come to my own personal stake in formulating a definition of
the essay. Back in 1985, when I decided to launch an annual series that
would celebrate the contemporary essay as a literary form, I realized I
would need to develop some practical criteria by which I could filter out
genuine essays from all the other sorts of nonfiction that crowded our
current periodicals. I quickly discovered that this would not be an easy
task. The difficulties arose mainly from magazine-publishing practices,
which rarely distinguished essays from other nonfiction, and from the
increasing use of hybrid literary forms that blurred conventional generic
distinctions. Though I found plenty of writers back then who wrote
essays that were undeniably essays (Joan Didion, Elizabech Hardwick,
Joseph Epstein, Phillip Lopate, to name just a few), I also came across
j
a growing number of emerging writers who grafted elements of fiction,
poetry, reportage, criticism, and especially personal memoir onto the fa­
miliar essay, creating some wonderful works of mixed or impure forms
!
that back then I personally considered the “New Essay," (as in the “New
Journalism”), since these writers use various literary and nonliterary re­
sources to reshape the essay rather than the other way around.
A definition draws boundaries between the included and excluded
characteristics of the encity in question. So what types of prose do I see
as falling outside the boundaries? I usually omit most dominant types of
newspaper and magazine journalism: news reports; informative articles;
interviews; profiles that are heavily based on interviews; editorials and
commentary; book, film, theater, music and arc reviews; service articles

199...
 (every men’s and womens magazine published in America contains a
monthly article on ways to spice up your sex life). I also eliminate any
excerpt from a nonfiction book. As you can guess from these exclusions,
I can usually go through an entire year of Americas popular magazines
and find at best only one true essay per periodical a year. This is because
Americas major periodicals are mainly in the service, news, and informa­
tion business and are reluctant to publish personal or reflective literary
prose.
You can find genuine essays in che literary and intellectual quarter­
lies, and, with few exceptions, those are my primary sources. I should
add, however, that many of the quarterlies show a marked preference for
fiction and poetry — often devoting entire issues to these genres — and
will very frequently lump literary criticism, book reviews, and interviews
within their essay departments, if they have one. Though I don’t auto­
matically exclude writing about literature and the arts, or other forms of
intellectual writing, I do find that in its art and craft most literary criti­
cism or critical commentary falls short of genuine essayistic standards.
So what is an essay? Back when I started the Best American Essays
series I worried mainly about an operational definition that would help
me sift through the perplexing variety of nonfiction I found everywhere
in the literary marketplace. In the first few volumes of the series, I haz­
arded a few critical distinctions. I wanted to privilege essays that were
not merely responses to occasions or assignments but that grew out of
what Annie Dillard nicely called the writer’s “real work,” essays that met
a literary challenge and demonstrated individual craft and style, and that
transcended the daily press or monthly magazine and left a permanent
impression. My primary concern then, as now, focused on the distinction
between an essay and an article, a distinction that has had a fairly long
critical history. As I continue to see it, the article is a piece of nonfiction
in which a timely topic takes precedence over everything else; style is sub­
ordinate to subject, craft to coverage. But when the writer’s reflections on
a topic become as compelling as the topic itself, when he or she searches
for the larger theme behind an isolated issue or event, or when the craft
and handling of material reveal a keen sense of a subject’s true complex­
ity, then I believe “essay” is the most accurate designation. I don’t mean
to foster an invidious comparison here. I read informative articles all the
time and the good ones perform the way they should, with their own
generic formulations. Their main limitation, from my perspective, is that
they are created with a sort of built-in obsolescence. They are made for the

...zoo
month, not the years. As a rule of thumb, I know that I’m inside an ar­
ticle when I find a large proportion of interview quotations, names in the
news, catchy subheads, teasers, call-outs, bulleted lists, statistics — plenty
of statistics — abbreviations, and acronyms. In this sense, essayists are just
like poets, novelists, and playwrights — none of them, regardless of their
celebrity or obscurity — deliberately sets out to compose works that are
by their very nature perishable.
I’m sure I’ll come to regret this, but I’ll conclude with the definition I
promised at the start. I’ve come to think that the genuine essay has cer­
tain persistent core features that have helped distinguish it over centuries,
from its late sixteenth-century inception to its most recent post-modern
examples. The essay has always been experimental, experiential, explor­
atory, and open-ended. It is hardly ever categorical, dogmatic, systematic,
or conclusive. It resists narrow professionalism and academicism. In try­
ing to summarize all of these features into a one-sentence definition that
embraces the essay’s essential literary characteristics as I understand them,
I would say, ideally: “The essay, whether long or short, narrative, exposi­
tory, or polemical, is a literary genre that enacts the processes and pos­
sibilities of thought and self-disclosure in a distinctive prose style.” But
don’t quote me.
Note: This essay was delivered as the keynote address at the first River Teeth
Nonfiction Conference on May 18, ioiz.
River Teeth, Volume 14, Number 1,1011

zor...
V

I
 Bibliography
COMPILED BY NED STUCKEY-FRENCH

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Russell Sanders, Secrets ofthe Universe: Scenesfrom the Journey Home. Boston:
Beacon, 1991.187-104.
Scholcs, Robert, and Carl H. Klaus. Elements ofthe Essay. New York: Oxford UP,
1969.
Scott, Gail. Preface. Spaces Like Stairs: Essays. Toronto: Women’s P, 1989. 9-12.
Sheed, Wilfred. “Program Notes.” Essays in Disguise. New York: Knopf, 1990.
vii-xvii.
Sherman, Stuart. “An Apology for F.ssayists of the Press.” Points ofView. New
York: Scribner’s, 1914.173-8$.
Shields, David. “Reality, Persona.” Truth in Nonfiction: Essays. P.d. David Lazar.
Iowa City: U of Iowa P. 1008.77-88.
Sontag, Susan. Introduction. The Best American Essays, 191)2. F.d. Susan Sontag.
Scries cd. Robert Atwan. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991. xiii-xix.
Squire, J. C. “The F.ssay." Flowers ofSpeech, md cd. New York: Books for Libraries
Press, Inc., 1967.108-1$.
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Starobinski, Jean. “Peut-on definer l’cssai?” Cahierspour un temps. Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1985.185-96. Originally published as “Lcs enjeux dc l’cssai."
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Strunsky, Simeon. “The Lssay of Today.” English Journal 17.1 (January 1928): 8-16.
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... 116
Thematic Guide to Entries in the Bibliography
COMPILED BY NED STUCKEY-FRENCH

The Essay

The essay as an embodiment of consciousness or of mind in the process of thought:

Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Montaigne, i, 108-9,178-79, 504, 595-96,
610-u, 667, 7x0-11; Temple; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Stephen;
Zabriskic; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1005); Canby,
“The Essay as Barometer”; Gass; Gold; Kazin; Klaus, “Essayists on the Essay,” Lit­
erary Nonfiction, “Montaigne on His Essays: Toward a Poetics of Self,” “Embody­
ing the Self: Malady and the Personal Essay,” “Excursions of the Mind: Toward a
Poetics of Uncertainty in the Disjunctive Essay," The Made-up Self, Lopatc, Intro­
duction; Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva”; Monson,
“Essay as Hack”; Musil, [On the Essay); Ozick, “Introduction: Portrait of the Essay
as a Warm Body”; Repplicr, “The American Essay in Wartime”; Strunsky; Woolf,
“The Modern Essay.”

The essay as an embodiment of personality or projection of self: Eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries: Buhver-Lytton; Goldsmith, “A Preface to a Scries of Liter­
ary Essays”; Hazlitt, “On the Indian Jugglers”; Henley; Jenks; Jones; Mabie, “The
Essay and Some Essayists” (Parts I and II); Matthews; Smith; Stephen; Thackeray,
“Ogres”; Wells; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1995),
Foreword (1001); Benson, “The Art of the Essayist”; Burton, “The Essay as Mood
and Form,” “The Essay: A Famous Literary Form and Its Conquests”; Daichcs;
Early, “Dispersion, Dilation, Delation”; Eaton; Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing
the Essay,” Introduction to The Best American Essays, rppj, “Introduction: 1 he
Personal Essay as a Form of Discovery”; Fadiman, Clifton; Foster; Freeman; Gass;
Gillctt; Hamburger; Hewett; Hoagland, “Introduction: Writers Afoot”; Howells;
Huxley; Kirkland; Klaus, “On Virginia Woolf on the Essay," The Made-Up Self,
Kriegcl; Krutch; Le Galliennc; Levine, “The Self on the Shelf”; Lopatc, The
Essay Lives—in Disguise," “What Happened to the Personal Essay? Introduction
to The Art ofthe Personal Essay, “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film ; Love-
man, “Arm Chair Philosophy,” “A Disappearing Art”; Mabie; Mehta; Murdoch,
“The Essay”; Nicolson; Perry; Priestley, “On Beginning ; Sanders, Introduction
to The Paradise ofBombs, “The Singular First Person”; Starobinski, “Les enjeux
de 1’cssai”; Van Dorcn, “Day In and Day Out: Manhattan Wits, A Note on the
Essay"; Weeks; White; Wolff; Woolf, “The Decay of Essay-writing,” “A Book of
Essays,” “The Modern Essay.”
The essay as mode of discovery: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Montaigne,
ioo, 141,171-74,415-16,711; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Steele, The
Tatler, No. 171; Brown, “The Man at Home”; Buhver-Lytton; Pater, “Dialectic”;
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Early, Introduction (1989); Eiselcy; Epstein,
Introduction (1993), “Introduction: The Personal Essay as a Form of Discovery”;
Graham, Paul, “The Age of the Essay (Sept. 1004)"; Hoagland, “To the Point:
Truths Only Essays Can Tell”; Howarth; Klaus, “Montaigne on His Essays: To­
ward a Poetics of Self”; Kricgcl; Lopatc, “Notes Toward an Introduction”; Mairs,
“Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva”; Oates, “Introduction:
The Art of the (American) Essay”; Ouellette; Ozick, Foreword (1983); Scott.

Essay as personal or intimate expression: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Montaigne, 503,595-96, 750-51; “D. T. Gent” [Daniel Tuvill], “Dedicatory
Epistle"; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “Constantina” [Murray, Judith
Sargent], Preface; Dennie, “The Farrago,” No. 1; Henley; Jenks; Stephen; Twen­
tieth and twenty-first centuries: Crothers; Gillett; Klaus, “On Virginia Woolfon
the Essay”; Levine, “The Self on the Shelf”; Macy; Orlean, “Introduction”; Woolf,
“The Decay of Essay-writing,” “A Book of Essays," “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as an open, unmethodical genre: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Hall,

“To the Reverend Mr. John Arrowsmith, Master of St.John’s Colledge in Cam­
bridge” [Dedication], “Of Dissimulation”;Jonson; Montaigne, 16-17,107.135,
119,119, 481-84,494-96,734-37,761; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Ad­
dison, The Spectator, Nos. 114,149, 476; Bulwer-Lytton; Dennie, “The Farrago”
No. 14, “The Lay Preacher” No. 1; Hazlitt, “On the Indian Jugglers”; Johnson, The
Rambler, No. 184; Lamb, “Imperfect Sympathies”; Matthews; “Mr. Town, Critic
and Censor-General” [George Colman and Bonncll Thornton], The Connoisseur,
No. 71; Pater, “Dialectic”; Thoreau; Watson; Zabriskie; Twentieth and twenty-first
centuries: Adorno; Anderson, “Life and the Essay Compared to a Forest"; Arthur;
Atwan, Foreword (1990), “The Essay—Is it Literature?”; Atwan, “Notes towards
the Definition of an Essay”; Benson, “On Essays at Large”; Chesterton, “On Es­
says,” “The Essay”; Depp; Dillard; DuPlcssis; Fadiman, Anne; Faery; Frazier;
Gopnik; Graham; Hamburger; Hardison; Holliday; Howells; Huxley; Karshan,
“What Do They Know?”; Kazin; Klaus, “Essayists on the Essay,” “The Chameleon
T: On Voice and Personality in the Personal Essay,” “Excursions of the Mind:
Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty in the Disjunctive Essay”; Lopate, “The Essay
Lives—in Disguise,” “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film”; Lukacs; Mairs,
“Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva”; Matthews, Introduction to
The Oxford Book ofAmerican Essays; Musil, [On the Essay], [F.ssayism]; Nicolson;
Oates, Introduction (1991); Orlean, “Introduction”; Sanders, “The Singular First
Person”; Sontag; Squire, “An Essay on Essays”; Strunsky; Van Doren, “A Note on
the Essay”; Wallace; Weeks; White; Williams, “An Essay on Virginia.”

Essay as pointed and purposeful genre: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Montaigne, 11; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Zabriskie; Twentieth and
twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1991); Erdman; Gass; Gcrould, “An

...118
 Essay on Essays”; Hoagland, “To the Point: Truths Only Essays Can Tell,” “What
I Think, What I Am” Huxley; Karshan, “What Do They Know?”; Klaus, “Essay­
ists on the Essay,” “On Virginia Woolf on the Essay"; Kostclanctz; Lukacs; Oates,
“Introduction; The Art of the (American) Essay”; Sontag; Van Doren, “A Note on
the Essay”; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as pleasurable rather than polemical genre: Eighteenth and nineteenth cen­
turies: Wirt, The Old Bachelor, No. 5; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Ben­
son; Bourne; Brooks, “Lazy Ink-Pots"; Daichcs; Gerould, “Information, Please!”
Hall; Holliday; Klaus, “On Virginia Woolfon the Essay,” “Embodying the Self:
Malady and the Personal Essay”; Loveman, “Arm Chair Philosophy"; Malinowitz;
McCord; Monson, “Essay as Hack"; Murdoch, Preface to Collected Essays, “The
Essay”; Ozick, “Introduction: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body."

Essay as skeptical, antidogmatic genre: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Montaigne, 134,151,153; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Hazlitt, “On the
Periodical Essayists"; “Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General” [George Colman
and Bonnell Thornton], The Connoisseur, No. 71; Pater, “Dialectic"; Stephen;
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Adorno; Atwan, Foreword (1003); DuPles-
sis; Gass; Hardison; Karshan, “What Do They Know?” Klaus, “Essayists on the
Essay”; Orlcan, “Introduction”; Ortega y Gasset; Sherman, “An Apology for Essay­
ists of the Press."

Essay as an attempt, trial, or experiment: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Bacon, “Dedication” (1611); Boyle; Cornwallis, “Of Essays and Books”; Culpeper;
Glanville, “An Address to the Royal Society”; Mabic, “The Essay and Some Es­
sayists” (Parts I and II); Scott; Thackeray, “A Leaf Out of a Sketch-Book”; “D. T.
Gent.” [Daniel Tuvill], “Dedicatory Epistle”; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
Lamb, “Imperfect Sympathies”; Zabriskic; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries:
Anderson Imbert; Atwan, “Notes towards the Definition of an Essay"; Berry;
Bloom; DuPlessis; Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay”; Mabie; Ozick, Fore­
word to Art and Ardor, “Forewarning"; Sanders, Introduction to The Paradise of
Bombs-, Starobinski, “Les enjeux dc l’essai.”

Essay as conversational and familiar in style: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Boyle; Montaigne, 117,184-85, 481-84,503, 666; Scott; Eighteenth and nine­
teenth centuries: Dennie, “The Farrago,” No. 1; Goldsmith; Hazlitt, “On the
Periodical Essayists”; Hume; Lamb, “Unpublished Review of Volume One of Ha­
zlitt’s Table Talk (182.1)”; Pater, “Peach-Blossom and Wine," “Dialectic”; Twentieth
and twenty-first centuries: Arthur; Belloc; Benson, “On Essays at Large”; Berry;
Burton, “The Essay as Mood and Form,” “The Essay: A Famous Literary Form and
Its Conquests”; Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay”; Gass; Kirkland; Koste-
lanetz; Klaus, “On Virginia Woolfon the Essay,” “ I he Chameleon I: On Voice
and Personality in the Personal Essay”; Le Gallienne; Lopate, “ The Essay Lives—in
s Disguise,” “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Introduction to The Art ofthe
Personal Essay, Matthews, “Modern Essays," Introduction to The Oxford Book of
»
-
i 119...
-
American Essays', Mcnand; Murdoch, “The Essay”; Nicolson; Percy; Priestley, “In
Defence"; Woolf, “The Decay of Essay-writing,” “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as allusive, intcrtextual genre: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Felt-

ham; Jonson; Montaigne, 818,814; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Smith;
Zabriskic; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Brooks, "The Writing of Essays”;
DuPlessis; Gass; Hardison; Kott; Levine, “The Self on the Shelf”; Lopate, “The
Essay Lives—in Disguise,” Introduction to The Art ofthe Personal Essay, Oates,
Introduction (1991).

The Essayist
The essayist as candid, genuine, and truthful: Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
Montaigne, 31,108-9, 610-11, 641, 644, 677-78,710-11,749,814-15; Eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries: Addison, The Spectator, No. 561; Johnson, The Rambler,
No. 1; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1987,1993); Eisclcy;
Epstein, “Introduction: The Personal Essay as a Form of Discovery”; Hoagland,
“What I Think, What I Am”; Klaus, The Made-up Self, Lopate, Introduction to
The Art ofthe Personal Essay, Ozick, “Forewarning”; Priestley, “In Defence”; Sand­
ers, “The Singular First Person”; Shields, “Reality, Persona"; White; Wolff; Woolf,
“The Modern Essay.”

The essayist’s self as made-up, as impersonation: Sixteenth and seventeenth cen­

turies: Montaigne; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Lamb; Twentieth and
twenty-first centuries: Gornick; Hoagland; Klaus, The Made-up Self, Karshan,
“What Do They Know?" Levine, “The Self on the Shelf"; Lopate, Introduction
to The Art ofthe Persona! Essay, Mairs; Sanders; Shields, “Reality, Persona”;
White; Wolff; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.”

The essayist as possessing a distinctive voice or style: Eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries: Smith; Wells; Zabriskie; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan,
Foreword (1994,1999); Burton, “The Essay: A Famous Literary Form and Its
Conquests”; Daiches; Gass; Hamburger; Hoagland, “What I Think, What I Am,”
“Introduction: Writers Afoot”; Klaus, The Made-Up Self, Levine, “The Self on
the Shelf”; Lopate, “Notes Toward an Introduction”; Lukacs; Mabic; Malinowitz;
Menand; Oates, “Introduction: The Art of the (American) Essay”; Van Doren, “A
Note on the Essay"; Weeks; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.”

The essayist as distinctly male or female, the essay as a gendered form: Eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries: Matthews; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries:
Atwan, Foreword (1004); Braley; Dickson; DuPlessis; Faery; Hewctt; How-
arth; Kirkland; Mairs, “Prelude,” “Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to
Kristeva"; Malinowitz; Ozick, “Introduction: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm
Body”; Scott; Waters.

...110
The Essay in Context
I he essay versus methodical discourse, academic theme, and the article: Sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries: Boyle; Cornwallis; Glanvillc; Montaigne; Eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries: Addison; Johnson; Twentieth and twenty-first cen­
turies: Anderson, “Life and the Essay Compared to a Forest"; Atwan, Foreword
(1987,1990,1998), “Notes towards a Definition of the Essay”; Bloom; Canby,
“Out with the Dilettante," “The Essay as Barometer"; DuPIcssis; Eisclcy; Erd­
man; Foster; Frazier; Gass; Gcrould, “Information, Please!” Gold; Graham; Hall;
Hoagland, “What I Think, What 1 Am”; Howard; Howells; Karshan, “What Do
They Know?”; Kazin; Klaus, “Essayists on the Essay"; Krutch; Levine, “The Self
on the Shelf”; Lopatc, “What Happened to the Personal Essay?”; Loveman, “A
Disappearing Art"; Macy; Mairs, “Prelude"; Malinowitz; Mehta; Oates, Introduc­
tion (1991); Percy; Podhoretz; Priesdey, “On Beginning”; Waters; Weeks.

The “death” (or revival) of the essay: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Jenks;
Jones; Laughlin; Repplier; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Fore­
word (1988); Bralcy; Canby, “The Essay as Barometer”; Eaton; Erdman; Fadiman,
Clifton; Foster; Hamburger; Hardison; Krutch; Lopatc, “The Essay Lives—in
Disguise,” “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Loveman, “A Disappearing
Art”; Percy; Repplier; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as modern: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Emerson; Pater, “Dialec­

tic,” “Peach-Blossom and Wine"; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan,
Foreword (zooo); Chesterton, “On Essays,” “The Essay”; Epstein, Introduction
to The Best American Essays, 1993-, Hardison; Kazin; Lopatc, “In Search of the
Centaur: The Essay-Film”; Williams, William Carlos; Woolf, “The Decay of
Essay-writing,” “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as middle-class or intended for a middle-class audience: Sixteenth and seven­

teenth centuries: Montaigne, 816; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Dennic,
“The Farrago,” No. 1; Drake, “Observations on the Effects of the Tatlcr, Spectator,
and Guardian”; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Hoagland, “What I Think,
What I Am”; Murdoch, Preface to Collected Essays-, Sherman, “An Apology for
Essayists of the Press.”

Essay as genteel, old-fashioned, organic, and quaint, outpaced by the speed of the
modern, mechanistic era: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Dennis; Laughlin;
Repplier; Stephen; Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1988,
1997,1000,1002,2004; Century, 2000), Atwan, “Notes towards a Definition
of the Essay”; Belloc; Bralcy; Erdman; Gould, Stephen Jay; Hall; Lopatc, “What
Happened to the Personal Essay?"; Matthews; Percy; Priestley, “In Defence”;
Sanders, “The Singular First Person"; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.

Essay vis-a-vis magazines, journalism, mass culture, and new media: Eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries: Drake, “General Observations on Periodical Writing ;
Goldsmith, “New Fashions in Learning”; Jones; 1 rumbull, “ The Meddler, No. 1;
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Atwan, Foreword (1996, 2000, 2008),

221...
I

Atwan, “Notes towards a Definition of the Essay”; Belloc; Bourne; Braley; Canby,
“Out with the Dilettante,” “The Essay as Barometer”; Crothcrs; Depp; Early,
Introduction to Tuxedo Junction-, Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay,” In­
troduction to The Best American Essays, 1993, “Introduction: The Personal Essay
as a Form of Discovery”; Frazier; Gerould, “Information, Please!”; Gould, Gerald;
Graham; Hewlett; Hoagland, “Introduction: Writers Afoot”; Holliday; Howard;
Howarth; Kostelanetz; Lc Gallicnnc; Lopate, “The Essay Lives—in Disguise,”
“What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Monson; Norris; Podhorctz; Priestley,
“In Defence"; Sherman; Stuckey-French, “‘My Name Is Ned”; Talcse; Van Doren,
“Day In and Day Out: Manhattan Wits”; Waters; Williams, William Emrys;
Wolff; Woolf, “The Modern Essay.”

Essay as having a lesser status, as the fourth genre, as ephemeral: Sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries: Montaigne, 117; Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
Goldsmith, Preface to Essays by Mr. Goldsmith-, Trumbull, “The Meddler,” No. 1;
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Anderson, “Essay: Hearsay Evidence and
Second-Class Citizenship"; Anderson Imbcrt; Atwan, “The Essay—Is it Litera­
ture?” Foreword (1005,1009), “Notes towards a Definition of the Essay”; Bloom;
Depp; Dillard; Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay,” Introduction to The
Best American Essays, 1993; Gopnik; Hoagland, “To the Point: Truths Only Essays
Can Tell”; Karshan, “What Do They Know?” Klaus, “On Virginia Woolfon the
Essay”; Lukacs; Monson, “Essay as Hack”; Podhorctz; White.

...zzz
Permissions

It is our pleasure to acknowledge a number of authors, publishers and estates for

their permission to reprint the following.
Excerpt from “The Essay as Form” by T. W. Adorno, translated by Bob Hullot-
Kcntor and Frederic Will, in New German Critique 31 (Spring/Summer),
pp. 151-71. Copyright © 1984, New German Critique, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
Excerpt from “In Defense of the Essay” by Enrique Anderson Imbert, from The
Oxford Book ofLatin American Essays, edited by Ilan Stavans and translated by
Jesse H. Lytle. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by per­
mission of Oxford University Press, Ilan Stavans, and Jesse H. Lytle.
“Petite Essayistique” in Surprendre les voix by A ndre Bellcau. Copyright© 1986
by Les Editions du Boreal. Translated as “Little Essayistic" by Lindsey Scott.
Reprinted by permission of Les Uditions du Boreal.
“On the Origins of the Video Essay” byjohn Brcsland is a revised version of an
essay that first appeared in Blackbird 9.1 (Spring 1010). Copyright © 2.010 by
John Bresland. Used by permission ofjohn Brcsland.
“The Essay” by G. K. Chesterton, from Come to Think ofIt. Copyright © 1930 by
Metheun. Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd., London.
Excerpt from “1003" from The Next American Essay byjohn D’Agata. Copyright
© 2002 byjohn D’Agata. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions
Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www
.graywolfprcss.org.
“Los limites del ensayo” by Guillermo Diaz-Plaja. Copyright © 1976. Translated
as “The Limits of the Essay” by David Hamilton. Copyright © 2012, David
Hamilton. Reprinted here by permission of Ana Diaz-Plaja and the Estate of
Guillermo Diaz-Plaja.
Excerpt from the introduction to Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture by
Gerald Early. Copyrighc © 1989 by Gerald Early. Reprinted by permission of
Gerald Early.
Excerpt from “The Age of the Essay" by Paul Graham. Copyright © 2004 by Paul
Graham. Reprinted by permission of Paul Graham.
“An Essay on the Essay” by Michael Hamburger, from Art as Second Nature: Occa­
sional Pieces, iyso-74-Copyright © 1975 by the author. Reprinted by permission
of the Michael Hamburger Trust.
“What I Think, What I Am,” from The Tugmans Passage by Edward Hoagland.
Published by the Lyons Press. Copyright © 1979.1982,1995 by Edward Hoag­
land. Reprinted by permission of Lcscher & Lcscher, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from author’s preface from Collected Essays by Aldous Huxley. Copyright
© 192.3,1925,19x6,1918,1919,1930,1931,1934,1937,1941,1946,1949,1950,1951,
1951,1953,1954,19ss, 1956,1957,1958,1959 by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted by per­
mission of HarperCollins Publishers.
“What Happened to the Personal Essay?” from AgainstJoie de Vivre: Personal
Essays, first published by Poseidon Press, reprinted by University of Nebraska
Press. Copyright © 1989,1008 by Phillip Lopate. Reprinted by permission of
the Wendy Weil Agency, Inc.
“Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva” from Voice Lessons by
Nancy Mairs. Copyright © 1994 by Nancy Mairs. Reprinted by permission of
Beacon Press, Boston.
Excerpt from “The Essay as Hack” by Ander Monson. Copyright © 1008 by
Ander Monson. Reprinted by permission of Ander Monson.
Excerpt from “The Essay" by Walter Murdoch, from Collected Essays. Copyright
© 1945 by Angus and Robertson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins.
From The Man without Qjtalities, Vol. I by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie
Wilkins and Burton Pie, translation copyright © 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
From Meditations on Qitixote by Jose Ortega y Gassett, translated by Evelyn Rug
and Kiego Marin. Copyright © 1961 and renewed 1989 by W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Divagations sur 1’essai" by Fernand Ouellette, from Ecrire en notre temps: essais,
Montreal, Editions Hurtubisc, HMH, “Constantcs” pp. 9-13. Copyright ©
1979 by Editions Hurtubisc NMH (Constantcs). Translated as “Ramblings on
the Essay” by Carl Klaus, Ned Stuckey-French, and Lindsey Scott. Reprinted by
permission of Editions Hurtubisc NMH (Constantcs).
“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” from Qitarrel & Qiiandary by Cyn­
thia Ozick. Copyright © 1000 by Cynthia Ozick. Used by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from “On the Essay” by Mariano Picon-Salas, translated by David Ham­
ilton. Copyright © xon. Reprinted by permission of Universidad Catoiica An­
dris Bello, Caracas, Venezuela.
“Essay on the Radio Essay” by Jeff Porter. Copyright © 1011 byJeffPorter. Used by
permission ofjeff Porter.
Excerpt from “The Singular First Person,” from Secrets ofthe Universe by Scott
Russell Sanders. Copyright © 1991 by Scott Russell Sanders. Reprinted by per­
mission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Excerpt from “Pcut-on definer l'cssai?” in Cahiers pourun temps by Jean Starobin-
ski, composed originally as a public address delivered in Lausanne in 1983 on the
occasion of receiving the Le Prix europecn dc l’cssai Charles Veillon. Copyright
© 1983 by Jean Starobinski. Translated here as “Can One Define the Essay?" by
Lindsey Scott. Reprinted by permission ofjean Starobinski.
Excerpt from E. B. White’s foreword from Essays ofE. B. White by E. B. White.
Copyright© 1977 by E. B. White. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.

... xx4
“An Essay on Virginia," by William Carlos Williams, from Imaginations. Copy­
right ©1931 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions PublishingCorp.
Excerpt from “The Modern Essay," from The Common Reader: First Series by
Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNcillic. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company 1984. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Company.
Excerpt from “La carrctilla alfonsina” by Gabriel Zaid. Copyright © 1988 by
Gabriel Zaid. Translated as “Alfonso Reyes’ Wheelbarrow" by Maria Willstcdt
and Gabriel Zaid. Reprinted by permission of Gabriel Zaid.
Excerpt from “/ Words: An Essay on the Essay,” from Blue Studios by Rachel
Blau DuPlessis. Copyright © 2006 University of Alabama Press. Reprinted by
permission of University of Alabama Press.
Excerpt from “The Self on the Shelf” appeared originally in Southern Humanities
Review 34 (Summer 1000). Copyright © by Sara Levine. Reprinted by permis­
sion of Sara Levine.
“Introduction" by Susan Orlcan from The Best American Essays 200s- Introduc­
tion copyright © 1005 by Susan Orlcan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
“Notes towards the Definition of an Essay," delivered originally as the keynote ad­
dress at the first River Teeth Nonfiction Conference on May 18,1011; reprinted
in River Teeth: AJournal ofNonJiction Narrative 14.1 (1011). Copyright © by
Robert Atwan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

115...
/ -
Index

Abbey, Edward, 134 ingthe Familiar: Toward a Revital­

Abel, Lionel, 136 ized Critical Writing, 149m
Addison, Joseph, xvi-xvii, xxiii, 11-11, The Atlantic, 167,194
13,10-11,34, 45,66, 70,108,119, Atlantic Monthly, 36,167
131-31,153,196; Cato, 11; Spectator, Atwan, Robert, xi, 194-101; The Best
xvi, xxvii, 11-11,18, io-11,36, 66, American Essays ofthe Century, 194;
130; Vision oJMirza, 11 “Notes towards a Definition of the
Adler, Renata, 135 Essay,” 194-101
Adorno, Theodor W„ xviii, xx-xxiii, Augustine, Saint, 75,77; Confessions,
xxvii, 35, 81-87, 95. >34.149m; “The 75.77
Essay as Form,” xxvi, 81-87, '49m, Aurelius, Marcus, 35
179; Noten zur Literatur (Notes to Awl, Dave, 190
Literature), 87,149m
Agee,James, 189 Bach,Johann Sebastian, 111; St. Mat­
Akzente, 93 thew's Passion, 111
ylll Things Considered, 190 Bacon, Francis, xii, xvi, xxi, xxvi, 7, 8,
American Literature, 150 9-10,36, 44,63, 65,66,70,73,81,
Anderson Imberc, Enrique, 68-70; 89,101,106,111,119,141-45.153. '96;
“In Defense of the Essay,” 68-70 New Atlantis, 9; “Of Friendship,”
Antioch Review, 186 119; “Of Riches," 61; “Of Truth," 61;
Apple, Max, 134 The Proftcicncc and Advancement of
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 19,60 Learning, xvi, xxvi, 9-10
Arcinicgas, German, 78-81; “The Baker, Russell, 131
Essay in Our America," 78-81; The Baldwin, James, 101,137; The Fire Next
State ofLatin America, 78 Time, 137
Arguedas, Alcidcs, 81 Barth, John, 135
Aristotle, xv, xvii, 5,11,17,19-30, 69, Barthclme, Donald, 135
97 Barthes, Roland, 107,134,140,149;
Arnim, Achim von, 95 The Pleasures ofthe Text, 107
Arnold, Matthew, 34, 46,61, 88, Baudelaire, Charles, 96-97,108
151-53; Essays in Criticism, 34; “The Beckett, Samuel, 109; How It Is, 109
Function of Criticism,” 61; “The Bede, 153
Study of Poetry,” 153 Becrbohm, Max, 45-47. 66; “A Cloud
Artaud, Antonin, 191 of Pinafores,” 45
Astaire, Fred, 163 Bell, Daniel, 136
Atkins, G. Douglas, xi, 149m;Estrang- Belleau, Andri, 94,116-19; “Little
 P-ssayistic,” 116-19; To Catch the Bostock, Ann, 150m
I'oices, 116 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 79
Belloc, Hilaire, 47, 51-54, 59, 66; “Am Boyle, Robert, xii
Essay upon Essays upon Essays,” Bradbury, Ray, 88
51-54; One Thing and Another, 54 Brady, Maura, xiii
Benjamin, Walter, 55, 86, 93,107,134, Bresland, John, 181-85; "On the Ori­
148; “Unpacking My Library,” 107 gin of the Video Essay,” 181-85
Benn, Gottfried, 73 Brevance, Misty, xiii
Bennett, James, 149m; “The Essay Browne, Sir Thomas, 153
in Recent Anthologies of Literary Bruno, Giordano, 30
Criticism,” 149m Burke, Edmund, “Speech on the Con­
Benny, Jack, 191; The Jack Benny Shout, ciliation of America,” 61
187 Bums and Allen, 187
Bensc, Max, 71-74; An Introduction Burton, Richard, xviii
to Theoretical Aesthetics, 71; Math­ Burton, Robert, 131; Anatomy of Mel­
ematics and Beauty, 71; “On the ancholy, 136
Essay and Its Prose,” 71-74 Butrym, Alexander, 150m; Essays on
Bensmaia, Reda, 147; The Barthes the Essay: Redefining the Genre,
Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, 150m
149m Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 91;
Benson, Arthur, xxiv-xxvi, 40-43; Don Juan, 91; Manfred, 61
“The Art of the Essayist," 40-43
Bcrcsford, Anne, 91 Calderon, Francisco Garda, 81
Bergson, Henri, 111; Time and Free Caldcrdn, Jose Vasconcclos. SceJosiS
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Vasconcelos
Data ofConsciousness, 111 Camus, Albert, 73, 95,134
Berkeley, George, 30 Carlyle, Thomas, 45, 75-76,151
Berry, Wendell, 134 Carney, Art, 187
Bible, 108 Carter, Boakc, 189
Birrell, Augustine, 33, 45; Obiter Dicta, Caserio, Robert, 150m; “The Novel As
33 a Novel Experiment in Statement,”
Black, Baxter, 190 150m
Blackbird, 181,186 Cayrol.Jcan, 183
Blackwell, Trevor, 173m Celan, Paul, 91
Blair, Eric. See George Orwell Cervantes, Miguel de, 77
Bloch, Ernst, 93 Charles the Second, 59
Bloom, Lynn, 198 Chesterton, Gilbert] K[cith], 57-60,
Blount, Roy (Jr.), 134 66,70,73,91; “The Essay,” 57-60
Bly, Carol, 134 Chestov, Lev, 97
Boctcher Jocres, Ruth-Ellcn, 150m; Chiaromonte, Nicola, 134
The Politics ofthe Essay: Feminist Chu, David, xiii
Perspectives, 150m Cicero, Marcus Tullius (“Tully”), xvii,
Bolivar, Simdn, 81 4,11, 61,108
Bonnefoy, Yves, 96 Cioran, E. M., 134
Borges, Jorge Luis, 93,117; Ficciones, 93 Clark, Eleanor, 134

... 12.8
Clemens, Samuel Langhornc. See Dia/.-Plaja, Guillermo, xxi, 99-100;
Mark Twain “The Limits of the Essay,” 99-100
Clements, Marccllc, 134 Diderot, Denis, 115x15; On the Diversity
Codrescu, Andrei, 190 ofOurJudgments, 11505
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70 Didion.Joan, 114,134,160-61,161-63,
Columbia Workshop, 187 165,199; The White Album, 114;
Columbus, Christopher, 79 “Why I Write,” 160-61
Comedie Humaine, 88 Dillard, Annie, 114,134,100
Connors, John, 191 Dilthcy, Wilhelm, 71-73
Constant, Benjamin, in; On the Spirit Dio Cassius, 60
ofConquest and Usurpation, iiz Douglass, Frederick, 137-39,141 ,My
Contemporary Literature, 186 Bondage and My Freedom, 138
Cornwallis, Sir William, xvi, xxvi, Du Bois, W. E. B„ 148
7-8; "Of Alehouses,” 7; “Of Essays Duchamp, Marcel, 148; “F.tant
and Books,” 7-8 Donnes,” 148
Corwin, Norman, 187-89; On a Note DuPIcssis, Rachel Blau, 147-50; Drafts,
of Triumph, 188 147; “/-Words: An Essay on the
Cowley, Abraham, 66, 70 Essay,” 147-50
Croce, Bendctto, 70
Cuadernos, 77,81 Early, Gerald, 137-41; Best African
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 73 American Essays, 137; The Culture
ofBruising, 137: Introduction to
“The Daemon of Socrates,” 4 Tuxedo Junction, 137-41; Speech and
D’Agata, John, xi, xxiii, xvi, 169-70; Power: The African American Essay
About a Mountain, 169; Halls of and Its Cultural Contentfrom Po­
Fame, 169; The Lost Origins ofthe lemics to Pulpit, 137
Essay, 169; The Next American Ecclesiastes, 153
Essay, 169-70 Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,
Dante Alighieri, 70,99 187
Darwin, Charles, 88 Ehrlich, Grctel, 134
Dashwood, Marianne, 34 Elia. See Charles Lamb
Daudct, Alphonse, 65 Eliot, T. S„ 48,73
Dc Quinccy, Thomas, 73,130,151; Elkin, Stanley, 163-66; Criers &
Conjcssions ofan English Opium Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers, 164;
Eater, 151; “On the Knocking at the “Out of One’s Tree,” 163
Gate in ‘Macbeth,’” 61 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xxi, xxiii, 13-
Defoe, Daniel, 73,196 14, 34, 55, 66,75, 89.106-09.115,
DcLillo, Don, 185 130,148,151-54,176; Essays, 66;
Denudes, 3 “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 13-14;
Democritus, 95 “Nature,” 151; “Quotation and
Dempsey, Jack, 61 Originality,” 108; Representative
Denver Qjiarterly, 194 Men, 14
Descartes, Rene, 134 Empcdokles, 19
Dcsidcrius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Epstein, Joseph. 134,199
See Erasmus Erasmus, 76,118

119 • • •
La Eslafeta Literaria, 100 Gossc, Sir Edmund, 67
The Eunuch, 4 Gould, Stephen Jay, 135
GraciAn, Balcasar, 89
Fcdkiew, Pat, 149m Graham, Paul, xxii, xxvi, 171-73;
Fielding, Henry, 196; Tom Jones, 196 “The Age of the Essay,” 171-73
Fiedler, Leslie, 134 Graves, John, 134
Fields, W.C., 130 Gurson, Comtcsse de, 143
The Firestone Hour, 187
Fisher, M. F. K„ 134 Hale, Leon, 131
Flaubert, Gustave, 108,119; Madame Hamburger, Michael, 91-93; “An Essay
Bovary, 108,119 on Essays," 91-93
Florio.John, 111 Hamilton, David, 77, 81,100
Foix-Candalc, Charlotte Diane de. Hamilton, W. G., 73
See Comtessc de Gurson Hardcnbcrg, Georg Philipp Friedrich
France, Anatolc, 61 Freiherr von. See Novalis
Friedrich, Hugo, 195 Hardwick, Elizabeth, xxii-xxiv, xxvi,
Froude, James Anthony, 45 101,118,134,199
Fry, Roger, 108 Harper's, 36, 37.104
Frye, Northrop, 95\ Anatomy of Criti­ Harris, Emmylou, 191
cism, 95 Hazlitt, William, xxi, xxiv-xxv, xxvii,
15-18,19,11,34,37,66,70,107-08,
Gabel, Martin, 188-89 119-31,151-54; “On the Periodical
Galileo, in, 114 Essayists,” 15-18; Plain Speaker, 131;
Gass, William H., xx-xxi, xxiii-xxiv, The Round Table, 131; Table Talk,
xxvi, 106-09, DS; “Emerson and the 15,19,11,131
Essay,” 106-09 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 67,
Gautier, Theophilc, 111 85
Geertz, Clifford, 141; “BeingThere,” Heine, Heinrich, 91; Atta Troll, 91
141 Hemingway, Ernest, 163
Gcrould, Katharine Fullerton, xix, Henley, William Ernest, 46
xxiii, xxvi, 61-64; “An Essay on Heraclitus, 30,95, 97
Essays,” 61-64 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 73;
Gide, AndrA,73,108; Journal, 108 “Letters for the Advancement of
Gladstone, William Ewart, 60 Humanity," 73
Glass, Ira, 186,191-91 Heremann, Ann, 150m; The Dialogic
Godard, Jcan-Luc, 181 and Difference, 150m; “The Episto­
Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 66, 70,196 lary Essay: A Letter,” 150m
Gonzalez-Crussi, F., 135 Hermann, Bernard, 188
Good, Graham, 150m; The Observing Hillebrand, Karl, 73
Self 150m Hitler, Adolph, 91,187
Goodman, Ellen, 131 Hoagland, Edward, xix, xxi, xxiii,
Goodman, Paul, 135 xxvii, 101-03, '34. '61; “What I
Gornick, Vivian, xxv-xxvi, 134, Think, What 1 Am,” 101-03
167-68; The Situation and the Story, Hobbes, Thomas, 107
167-68 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 73

... 130
 Hofmillcr, Josef, 73 Kafka, Franz, 55
Holdcrlin, Frcdcrich, 91, 95,97 Kaltcnborn, H. V., >88,189,191
Holmes, Oliver Wendell ( Sr.), 131; The Kant, Immanuel, 8s
Autocrat tit the Breakfast Table, 131 Kassner, Rudolph, 73
Homer, 97; The Iliad, 96 Kazin, Alfred, 136
Horace, 1,11,16,108 Keillor, Garrison, 191; A Prairie Home
Horkhcimcr, Max, 81 Companion, 191
Hostos, Eugenio Maria de, 78 Kenyon Review, 194
Hotel Amerika, 181,186 Kierkegaard, Soren, 94
Howe, Irving, 136 King, Martin Luther (Jr.), 137; “Letter
Howells, William Dean, xix, xxvii, from a Birmingham Jail,” 137
36-37; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” 36-37 Kirchcr, Cassic, xiii
Hugo, Victor, 181 Klaus, Carl, xv-xxvii, 98
Hullot-Kentor, Bob, 87 Kohcleth. See Ecclesiastes
Humboldt, Alexander von, 79 Kraus, Karl, 73
Hume, David, 73 Krim, Seymour, 134
Hunt, Leigh, 37, 66; “On the Graces Krutch, Joseph Wood, xix-xx, xxvii
and Anxieties of Pig-Driving,” 61 Kundcra, Milan, 13s
Hurston, Zora Neale, 139-41; Dust Kiirnbcrgcr, Ferdinand, 73
Tracks on a Road, 139
Huxley, Aldous, xxi, xxiii, xxvii, 70, La Condaminc, Charles-Marie de, 79
88-91; Brave New World, 88; Doors La Fontaine, Jean de, 181
ofPerception, 88; “Preface to Col­ Lamb, Charles, xii, xvii, xxv, xxvii, 15,
lected Essays," 88-91 19-11,33,37, 44, 45-47. 66, 70,89,
Huxley, Thomas, 88 119-30,133,151; Elia, xviii, xvii, 19,
33,63,130; “Two Races of Men,”
Ioiva Review, 194 ■Si
Irving, Washington, 119 Landor, Walter Savage, 30
Isotope, 186 Lang, Andrew, 33; Essays in Little, 33;
Letters to Dead Authors, 33
Jacoby, Russell, 135-36 Lao Tzu, 97
James, Henry, 163 Las Casas, Bartolomc de, 79
Jefferson, Thomas, 50 Lawrence, D. H., 88
Johannes Scotus Eriugena, 60 Lawrence, Karen, 150m; Decolonizing
Johnson, Samuel, xvii, xxii, xxiv, xxvii, Tradition, 150m
13-14,58, 70,105,108,130,196; Lead Belly. See Huddic Ledbetter
Dictionary ofthe English Language, Lebowitz, Fran, 133
xvii, xxvii, 13; Idler, 13; The Lives of Ledbetter, Huddic, 191
the Most Eminent English Poets, 13; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 71
Rambler, xvii, xxvii, 13-14,18-19,36 Lemaitre, Jules, 61
Jonson, Ben, 111 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 73
Judaus Esuriens, 59 Levi, Primo, 148
Judas Iscariot, 65 Levine, Sara, 159-66; “ The Self on the
Jtinger, Ernst, 73 Shelf,” 159-66; Treasure Island!!!,
159

131 ...

I
I

Liberation, 184 46; Essays Out Loud, 141; Ordinary

Liberte, 94, 98 Time, 141; Plaintext, 141; Remem­
Lichtcnbcrg, Georg Christoph, 71,91 bering the Bone House, 141 \A Trou­
Locke, John, 66, m; Essay Concerning bled Guest, 141; Voice Lessons, 146;
Human Understanding, 66,111 Waist High in the World, 141
Lomax, John, 19a Mallarm6, Stcphane, 94, 97,111
Loos, Anita, 88 Mann, Thomas, 55,73
Lopatc, Phillip, xi, xxi, xxiii, 117-36, Marat, Jean-Paul, 60
161,181,183-84,199; AgainstJoie March ofTime, 187
de Vivre, 117,136; The Art ofthe Marker, Chris, 181-84; Sans Soldi, 181
Personal Essay, 117; Bachelorhood, Martineau, Harriet, 151-53; “From
117; Being With Children, 117; “In Eastern Life,” 153
Search of the Centaur,” 184-85; Marx, Groucho, 187
Portrait ofMy Body, 117 The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 190
Lopez, Barry, 134 Matthicssen, Peter, 114
Lordc, Audre, 148 McCarthy, Mary, 134
Lorentz, Parc, 189 McEhvee, Ross, 183; Time Indefinite,
Los Angeles Times, 194 183
Louis XIV, 59 McPhcc.John, 114,134
Lowell, James Russell, 31,36 Mencken, H. L., 189
Lucas, E. V., 66 Meredith, George, 34
Lucian, 76 Merkur, 74
Lucretius, 19,108 Meyer, Herman, 109; The Poetics of
Lukacs, Georg, xxiv, xxvii, 55, 81,9s, Qiiotation in the European Novel,
107,135; “Longing and Form,” 107; 109
“On the Nature and Form of the Mcyncll, Alice, 58-59
Essay," xxvii; Soul and Form, 95 Millet, Kate, 147
Luther, Martin, 76 Mills, C. Wright, 136
Lutz, Jay, 150m Milosz, Czeslaw, 134
Lyly.John, 153 Milton, John, 63; Paradise Lost, 63
Lytle, Jesse H., 70 Missouri Review, 186
Mittman, Elizabeth, 150m; The Poli­
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 45, 63, tics ofthe Essay, 150m
66, 89,108; “Essay on Milton,” 63 Mona Lisa, 61, 63,163
MacCarthy, Desmond, 105 Monson, Ander, xxiii, xxvii, 178-80;
Macdonald, Dwight, 136 The Available World, 178; “The
MacLcish, Archibald, 187-88 Essay as Hack,” 178-80; Neck Deep
Mahomet, 60 and Other Predicaments, 178; Other
The Maid ofAndros, 4 Electricities, 178; Vacationland, 178;
Mailer, Norman, 134 Vanishing Point, 178
Mailhot, Laurent, 150m; “The Writ­ Montaigne, Michel dc, xi, xii, xv-xvii,
ing of che Essay,” 150m xx-xxiii, 1-6,7, 9,11,15,17-19,
Mairs, Nancy, xxv, xxvii, 134,141-46; 13-14, 30, 34, 36, 46, 61, 63, 65, 66,
Carnal Acts, 141; A Dynamic God, 69, 73. 76. 77. 79. 83, 88, 90, 91,97,
141; “Essayingthc Feminine,” 141- 100,101,101,105,107,108,110-15,

...131
 118-19,131.136.141-46,148,151, 174; Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the
153,155,161,164,171-71,178,181- Legend, 174; Saturday Night, 174
81,194,195-98; Essais/Essays, 1,17, Ortega y Gassctt, Jose, 38-59,72-73.
83,111—14,119,131,143,171,181; “On 100; Meditations on Qiiixote, 38-39;
Coaches,” 198; “Of Practice,” 1-1; The Revolt ofthe Masses, 38
“Of Repentance,” 3-4; “Of Smells,” Orwell, George, 88, 91,115,133,154,
153; “Of Vanity,” 4-6; “On Some 160,189; “Shooting an Elephant,”
Lines of Virgil," 107; “On the Art of 133; “Such, Such, Were the Joys..
Discussion,” 131 133
Moorchcad, Agnes, 187 Ouellette, Fernand, 94-98,117; La
Moser, Justus, 73 mort vive, 117; Les Heures, 94;
Moses, 60 “Ramblings on the Essay,” 94-98
Muller, Adam, 73 Ovid, 108
Murdoch, Walter, 65-67; “The Essay," Oxford Dictionary ofQiiotations, 108
65-67 Ozick, Cynthia, xviii, xxvii, 134,151—
Murrow, Edward R., 188-89 58; The Cannibal Galaxy, 151; The
Musil, Robert, 55-56,93; The Man Puttermesser Papers, 151; Qttarrel &
without Qita/ities, 55-56,93 Qitandary, 158; “She: Portrait of the
Essay as a Warm Body,” 151-58
Nabokov, Vladimir, 165
Naipaul, V. S„ 134 Paine, Thomas, 154; “Common
Nation, 167 Sense," 154
Nero, 60 Parmenides, 19
New Criticism, 197 Partisan Review, 101
New German Critique, 149m Pascal, Blaise, 95,97
New Journalism, 134,199 Pater, Walter, 19-31,33—34. 46, 55.
New York Review ofBooks, 101 61-63,70,81,148; Imaginary Por­
New York Times, 167,194 traits, 19; Marius the Epicurean, 19,
New York Times Book Review, 103 33; “On Dialectic,” 19-31; Plato
New Yorker, 104,133,174 and Platonism, 19-31; Studies in
Newton, Isaac, 76 the History ofthe Renaissance (later
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 71-73, The Renaissance: Studies in Art
85. 91. 97. '34 and Poetry), 19, 61-63
North American Review, 64,181 Pattison, Mark, 45
I
Northwest Review, 186 Payne, Michele, xiii
Norwood, Gilbert, 60; Too Matty Peron.Juan, 68
Books, 60 Perrin, Noel, 134
Novalis, 71, 96-97 Petrarch, 114
Pickering, Samuel, 163
Oates, Joyce Carol, 134 Picon-Salas, Mariano. 75-79: “On the
Oboler, Arch, 187 Essay,” 75-79
O’Neill, John, 143 Pilate, 91
The Onion, 191 Pinkwater, Daniel, 190
Orlean, Susan, 174-77; T/re Orchid Plato, 4. 5.2-9-5'. 42.72. 75-77.83.134:
Thief, 174; Red Sox and Blueftsh, Dialogues, 30,31, 75; Republic, 41

133...
Plutarch, 4, 7,19,155,181-82. Ronstadt, Linda, 191
Poe, Edgar Allan, 73 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 187
"The Poetic Principle,” 62 Roosevelt, Franklin, 187
Polo, Marco, 79 Rosenberg, Harold, 135-36
Pontius Pilatus. See Pilate Roth, Philip, 189;/ Married a Com­
Pope, Alexander, 17, 66,108; Essay on munist, 189
Man, 66 Rougcmont, Denis dc, 113
Porter, Jeff, 186-93; Dublin USA, 186; Rousseau, Jcan-Jacqucs, 110
Herby Sings the Blues, 186; The Men Royko, Mike, 132
Who Dance the Giglio, 186; Mother Ruskin, John, 66, 70,152
of Invention, 186; Oppenheimer Is
Watching Me, 186; Writingon Rock, Sahagun, Bernardino de, 79
186; Understanding the Essay, 186 St. Nicholas Magazine, 105
Pound, Ezra, 48,122 Sainte-Bcuve, Charlcs-Augustin, 34
Presley, Elvis, 192 Sampson, Eugene, 74
Price, John, xiii Sanders, Scott Russell, 124-26,163;
Pythagoras, 29 “The Singular First Person,” 124-26
Sanin Cano, Baldomcro, 78
Radiolab, 192 Santayana, George, 75
Rakoff, David, 190 Sarkonak, Ralph, 15002; The Language
Ransom, John Crowe, 197 ofDifference, I50n2
Repplier, Agnes, xviii, xxvii, 32-35; Saturday Review ofLiterature, xix,
“The Passing of the Essay," xxvii, xxvii, 61
31-35 Savage, Dan, 191
Resnais, Alain, 183; Night and Fog, 183 Schlcgel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von,
La Revue de Belles-lettres, 115 73.91
Reyes (Ochoa), Alfonso, 78,120-22; Scott, Lindsey, 98,115,119
Calendario, 121; El Deslinde: pro- Sebald.W.G.,91
legomenos a la teoria literaria, 122; Sedaris, David, 190
Entre Libros, 122; Marginalia, 122; Sei Shonagon, 181-82; “Hateful
Revista de Filologia Espahola, 122; Things," 181; Pillow Book, 181;
“The Traveler’s Melancholy,” 121 “Things That Give a Hoc Feeling,”
Rich, Adrienne, 134 181; “Things That Quicken the
Richard, Jean-Picrre, 94 Heart,” 181
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 55,108 Selassie, Haile, 189
Rimbaud, Arthur, 72, 97,118; Illumi­ Selzcr, Richard, 135
nations, 72; A Season in Hell, 97 Seneca, xvii, 5,11,178,196; Epistles, 196
River Teeth, 194, 201 Seneca Review, 169
Rivera, Christina, xiii Sewanee Review, 126
Robinson, Ann. xiii Shakespeare, William, 13,19,108,121,
Roche, Dan, xiii 128,182,193; “As You Like It,” 25
Rodo, Jose Enrique, 78 Shaw, George Bernard, 57, 70
Rodriguez, Richard, 134 Sheed, Wilfred, 134
Rohmer, Eric, 182 Shenandoah, 186
Rolling Stone, 102,174 Sierra Mdndez.Justo, 78

...234
Smith, Alexander, xviii, xxi, xxvii, Thackeray, William Makepeace, 59.
2.5-18; Dreamthorp, xxvii, 15, z8; 108; Round-about Papers, 59
Life Drama and Other Poems, 15; Theroux, Paul, 134
“On the Writing of Essays,” 15-18; This American Life, 186,191
A Summer in Skye, 15 This Qitarter, 50
Socrates, 1,4,14,51, 89 Thomas, Lewis, 114,135
Sontag, Susan, 154 Thomas, Lowell, 189
Spcidcl, Ludwig, 73 Thompson, Dorothy, 61,189
Spielberg, Steven, 183; Schindler's List, Threepenny Review, 183-84
.83 Tikkun, 167
Spinoza, Baruch, 19, 44, 83 Titus, 156
Starobinski.Jean, 110-15; “Can One Torquatus, 4
Define the Essay?” 110-15 Toscanclli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 79
Steele, Richard (“Isaac Bickcrstaff”), Trillin, Calvin, 134
11,10, 66, 70,119,131-31,153; Taller, Trilling, Lionel, 135
18,10,36 Truffaut, Francois, 183
Stein, Gertrude, 108 Tully. See Cicero
Stephen, Leslie, xxi, xxiv, xxvii, 45; “A Tunncy, Gene, 61
Cynic’s Apology,” 45 Twain, Mark, 103,138,141; Adventures
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 33, 46, 70, ofHuckleberry Finn, 103,138,141
130,151-53,155; “Aes Triplex,” 153; Tzara, Tristan, 193
“On the F.njoymcnt of Unpleasant
Places,” 61; Virginibus Puerisque, 33 Unamuno, Miguel de, 75,77
Stewart, Alexandra, 181 Upanishads, 60
Stocssl, Otto, 73 Updike,John, 101,157; “The Dispos­
Strachcy, Lytton, 73 able Rocket,” 157
Streisand, Barbra, 191 Updike, Nancy, 191
Strunk, William, 104; The Elements
ofStyle, 104 Vadeboncoeur, Pierre, 117
Stuckey-French, Ned, 98 Valery, Paul, 70,73, 89,97; Dance and
Studio 360,191 the Soul, 97; Dialogues, 89
Styron, William, 117; Sophie’s Choice, Varda, Agnes, 181; The Beaches of
117 Agnes, 181
SubStance, 150m Vasconcclos, Jose, 79
Sulla, 4 Vespucci, Anulrigo, 79
Swift, Jonathan, 61, 70,73,129,131, Vidal, Gore, 163
196; “Hints toward an Essay on Village Voice, 101,167,174
Conversation," 131; “A Modest Pro­ Virgil, ii, 107-08; Georgies, 11
posal,” 61 Voltaire, 77,111; Essay on the Manners
Swing, Gram, 189 ofNations, 111
Symonds, Addington, 34 Vowell, Sarah, 190

Tacitus, 76 Walker, Alice, 134

Taliesin, 98 Walscr, Robert, 91-93
Tall, Deborah, 169 Washington, George, 81

135...
Weeks, Edward, xxv Great American Novel, 48; In the
Weil, Simone, 96,134 American Grain. 48; Paterson, 48
Weist, Dwight, 187 Wilson, Edmund, 155
Welles, Orson, 188; The War ofthe Willstedc, Maria, 113
Worlds, 188 Wilson Qttarterly, 186
Wells, H. G., si, 150m Wodchousc, P. G., 58
White, Bailey, 190 Wolf, Christa, 148,150m
White, E. B., xxii, xxv, xxvii, 104-os, Woolf Virginia, xxi, xxiv-xxvii,
133,197; Charlotte's Web, 104; The 44-47, 51,70, 91,106,108,144,148,
Elements ofStyle, 104; Foreword to 150m, 164; “The Decay of Essay
the Essays ofE. B. White, 104-05; Writing,” 44; “The Modern Essay,"
Stuart Little, 104; The Trumpet of 44-47
the Swan, 104 Wuthering Heights, 61
White, Katharine, 133
Whitman, Walt, 65,133 Yale Review, 109
Wiesengrund, Theodor Ludwig Yoshida Kcnko, xv, xxvii
Adorno. See Theodor W. Adorno You Bet Your Life, 187
Wilde, Oscar, 61-63,148; “The Critic Your American Playhouse, 191
as Artist,” 61
Wilkins, Sophie, 56 Zaid, Gabriel, 110-13; “Alfonso Reyes’
Will, Frederic, 87 Wheelbarrow,” 110-13; So Many
Williams, William Carlos, 48-50; Books, 110
“An Essay on Virginia,” 48-50; The Zola, Emile, 154; “J’accuse,” 154

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