The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay 9781474486033

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio

The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Edited by Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Edited by Joe Bray and Hannah Moss

The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion Edited by Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Edited by Anna Barton and James Williams The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Edited by Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pająk, Catherine W. Hollis, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Edited by Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay Edited by Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies Edited by Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Edited by Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Edited by Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Edited by Catherine Gander The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Edited by Suzanne Hobson and Andrew D. Radford The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M.-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Edited by Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Edited by Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Edited by Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay

Edited by Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack 2022 © the chapters their several authors 2022 Cover image: Symphony of Stories, Marie Louise Kold Cover design: Jordan Shaw Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8602 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8603 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8604 0 (epub) The right of Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgments

viii ix

Introduction1 Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack Part I: Theories and Definitions 1. Affinities and Contestations: The Self and the Other in the Essay Mario Aquilina

17

2. The Birth of the English Essay Alan Stewart

37

3. The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles Thomas Karshan

50

4. The Thing of the Essay Erin Plunkett

68

5. Essay, Fiction, Truth, Troth Jason Childs

82

6. The Essay as Resistance Kara Wittman

98

7. ‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay Douglas Hesse

114

8. The Essay and the Advertisement R. Eric Tippin

130

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

Rebecca Solnit

145



Claudia Rankine

155



Brian Dillon

160

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vi contents Part II: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories   9. On Reading and the Essay Nicole B. Wallack 10. Heretical Hearts and the Infinite Game: Why Teaching the Essay (Still) Matters Bob Cowser Jr

167

180

11. The Essay and the Episteme: A Genealogy for Modern Classroom Use Kevin Rulo

191

12. Commonplace Mysteries: Soaring on the Wings of Desire Pat C. Hoy

204

13. Politics and the English Essay Bruce Robbins

217

14. The Postwar American Essay, the Liberal Imagination and the Contemporary Essay Phillip Lopate 15. Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet Briallen Hopper 16. Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment Jenny Spinner 17. The Essay in Asian (American) Contexts Louise Kane 18. Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present Sarah Allen

232 245

261 276

292

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

Leslie Jamison

309



Robert Atwan

316



Kaitlyn Greenidge

322

Part III: Form and Genre 19. On the Interface between Philosophy and the Essay: Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos Kurt Borg

327

20. The Essay as Brinkmanship: Cioran’s Fragment, Aphorism and Autobiography343 Arleen Ionescu

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contents vii 21. Science Essays Dirk Vanderbeke

358

22. Columnism and Essayism Ivan Callus

374

23. The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation Beth Peterson

391

24. The New Seesaws of the Digital Visual Essay: Genre Provocations, Definitions and Tensions Beyond the Age of Print Elizabeth F. Chamberlain

405

25. Archival Materials: Essayism as a Process of Witness, Care and Reckoning Julija Šukys

422

26. The Essay as Trans Body Glenn Michael Gordon

434

27. Why the (Animal) Essay Matters Paolo Bugliani

448

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

David Shields

465



Jamaica Kincaid

469

Notes on Contributors

475

Index480

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Figures

Figure 7.1 Three analytic axes for nonfiction 118 Figure 24.1 In Erin Davis’s ‘Sweet & Slim, Greasy & Grim’, her personal anxieties fuel the research questions for her data analysis. Illustrations by Liana Sposto 410 Figure 24.2 In Robin Sloan’s ‘Fish’, images and short looping videos sometimes appear behind the text, as a kind of multimodal punctuation414 Figure 24.3 In Nicky Case’s ‘Adventures with Anxiety’, you play as a rather essayistic anxiety-wolf trying to break down a character’s defenses. You cite your sources, of course 416

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Preface and Acknowledgments

T

he idea for this book developed around an April 2019 conference about the essay at the University of Malta. As editors, we wanted The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay to be a highly collaborative project and to offer a space of discussion for writers and scholars with distinctive interests and sensibilities around the essay. We wanted to provide readers with a sense of the heterogeneity of the essay, and we believe that the thirty-five contributors to this volume, individually and collectively, explore the various facets of the form and, especially, its contemporary significance. At over 250,000 words, this volume was completed through the work and dedication of many people over a period of around three years. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their professionalism and for their willingness to work within the collaborative and rigorous dynamics we established for the book. We are also grateful to our commissioning editor, Jackie Jones, and the team at Edinburgh University Press (Susannah Butler, Fiona Conn and Bekah Dey). Their guidance and support throughout the whole process was fundamental to the conception and completion of this project. Thanks are also due to the University of Malta for granting Mario Aquilina a one semester sabbatical in 2021 as well as funds for the compilation of the index, to St. Lawrence University for granting Bob Cowser Jr a one semester sabbatical in 2020 and additional leave in 2021, and to Columbia University for providing Nicole B. Wallack with funding to support the manuscript’s preparation. Nicholas Patrick Osborne, Anirbaan Banerjee and Eliza Wright were instrumental in helping the editors proofread and copyedit the manuscript, while Marie Louise Kold kindly provided an image of her art for the cover of the book.

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Introduction Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack

The Contested Space of the Essay

L

et us begin – or assay to begin – with matters of definition. What is this thing that the thirty-five contributors to The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay discuss? It is fair to assume that most readers coming to this volume would be able to provide some kind of answer to this question, because the term ‘essay’ is used widely. However, the matter is nowhere near as straightforward as it might initially seem. One reason is that the term ‘essay’ might be generally known, but it carries different meanings in the different contexts in which it appears. Students and writing instructors in universities and colleges, for instance, might think of an essay as a short piece of writing used in myriad ways in various educational contexts. Here, what an ‘essay’ is expected to be may vary considerably in terms of style, structure, subject and voice. For some academic writers, an essay is an impersonal form with a relatively rigid structure based on the accumulation and presentation of research and knowledge for a readership of scholars. For others, the essay might be a freer textual space in which to explore and reflect on their observations of the world and life experiences. The essay, however, has a long history predating and exceeding its contemporary pedagogical uses. Here – in its literary, political and theoretical contexts – defining the essay is perhaps even more problematic. Take, for instance, the following definition of the essay in a popular introduction to literature, which was widely used as a textbook for undergraduate students in English Studies in the late 1980s and 1990s: ‘The essay is at last a very flexible form. . . . Essays may be long or short, factual or fictional, practical or playful. They may serve any purpose and take any form that an essay wants to try out.’1 To someone not familiar with the essay, this definition will seem unhelpfully vague because it suggests that the essay can be basically anything. Two observations can provide context for the – admittedly somewhat extreme – cautiousness shown by Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus and Michael Silverman in this definition. Firstly, the problem of defining the essay is an issue that keeps reappearing – decades later – in the initial pages of books on the essay. To take one recent example, Brian Dillon begins Essayism (2017) with a wonderfully assembled list of the eclectic topics that essays have explored. He then proceeds to ask us to ‘[i]magine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial’.2 We find that the attempt to define the essay, and while doing so acknowledging the difficulty or impossibility of the task, is arguably one of the conventional tropes of essays about the essay.3 Secondly, when the essay is actually defined, it paradoxically tends to be described as genre-defying or even as an ‘anti-genre’,4 with ‘indefinability’,

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‘wandering’, ‘open-endedness’ and ‘experimentation’ being some of the qualities commonly attributed to it.5 As Klaus puts it, ‘the essay has yet to find its Aristotle’.6 There is no definitive poetics of the essay, and some would argue that the essay’s resistance to delimitation means that there will never be or cannot be a comprehensive poetics of the essay.7 Nonetheless, this form lends its name to an ever-increasing range of anthologies, books and critical studies, as well as texts appearing in magazines, newspapers or websites, suggesting that while the essence of the essay is open for discussion, ‘essayists have often written about it with the certitude of a poetics’.8 In other words, the essay may not be easy to define but this does not stop essayists from writing essays, publishers from publishing them, and scholars from writing about them.9 An alternative way to introduce the essay is to recount the history of its origins and development, thus outlining the contours of the form by referring to notable examples of it rather than to abstract conceptions that would seek to capture all of its different instantiations.10 The narrative recounted by most historians of the essay is that the essay more or less begins with Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (Essays), first published in 1580. A French statesman and philosopher, Montaigne is often identified as the ‘father’ of the essay for being the first writer to formally describe their writing as ‘essais’, meaning ‘tests’ or ‘attempts’. Through more than one hundred essays about a fascinatingly eclectic range of subjects – thumbs, cruelty, books, glory, coaches, death, drunkenness, illness, cannibals, desire, solitude and more – Montaigne establishes the idea of the essay as a ‘self-portrait’. Montaigne’s essays are held together by the essayist’s study of himself. Irrespective of the ostensible topic in the specific essays, Montaigne admits that he is invariably the ‘declared matter’ of his writing, and this conceives the essay as a form of personal exploration and reflection in relatively conversational language. As a thinker and writer, Montaigne has significance beyond the essay for the way his essays are seen as marking – along with the work of humanist contemporaries such as William Shakespeare – the beginning of modernity in the late sixteenth century, with the human self being central to our conception of the world and with the mundane and private becoming more amenable to aestheticization than ever before.11 From Montaigne – the figure whose dominance over the history of the form is rarely questioned – historians of the essay typically draw a long line of influence that first runs through the English essay between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and then, from the nineteenth century on, the essay’s flourishing in the United States and other places around the world, especially France. An exhaustive and uncontested genealogy cannot be delineated here – partly due to space restrictions and partly because the idea of a canon of the essay is itself a contested issue. In an article published in 1999, Lynn Z. Bloom discusses the various processes of canonization of the essay, particularly in the United States, through the inclusion of essays in readers and anthologies and through their use by composition teachers in ‘the American university’s most common course’: freshman composition.12 Drawing on the work of Barbara Hernstein Smith in Contingencies of Value, Bloom distinguishes between ‘critical canons’ – largely established through evaluative judgments by literary critics – and the ‘teaching’ or ‘pedagogical’ canons, which ‘live and die in anthologies, curricula, syllabi, and reading lists’.13 Bloom’s empirical analysis of readers used in American universities yields a fascinating list of the most frequently anthologized and reprinted essays up until 1999. Essays by George Orwell, E. B. White, Joan Didion,

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introduction

3

Lewis Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King Jr, James Thurber and Mark Twain make the top ten. If one were to move beyond the American classroom to other parts of the world where the essay is afforded critical attention – if not the pedagogic value it has traditionally had in the United States – and if one were to consider the ‘critical canon’ of the essay apart from the ‘teaching canon’, one might add names such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Annie Dillard and David Foster Wallace, among others. Zora Neal Hurston, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Christopher Hitchens, Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith and a number of contemporary essayists would also have a strong claim for inclusion in this non-exhaustive list. Both within this line of essayists and also outside of it, however, we find alternative claims for the essay, its origins and its development. Some critics, like John D’Agata, argue that the essay, or at least essayistic writing, predates Montaigne, and they go as far back as Seneca and Plutarch to search for the origins of the form.14 Others make claims for the more sustained recognition of the importance of a kind of essay that departs from its reliance on the personal prioritized by Montaigne – here, Francis Bacon is often presented as an alternative ‘father’ of a more formal, less personal and more argumentative kind of essay whose genealogy would include essayists such as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot and Susan Sontag. More recently, others are questioning the intrinsically problematic nature of the idea of an essay canon and the consequent exclusion, with few exceptions, of marginalized voices. One example is Jenny Spinner, who, in Of Women and the Essay, provides an alternative anthology that ‘pull[s] women writers from the cutting room floor of essay scholarship and return[s] them to their rightful place in the essay canon’.15 Spinner’s anthology recovers essayists like Margaret Cavendish, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Judith Sargent Murray, Margaret Fuller, Agnes Repplier, Vernon Lee and Rebecca West, and it groups them with the more frequently anthologized women essayists mentioned above as well as better-known recent women essayists whose works are certainly influential, such as Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Diski, Jamaica Kincaid and Elizabeth Hardwick. Another example of scholarship that problematizes the essay canon as outlined above is Brian Norman’s The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, which outlines a tradition of essaying that includes – apart from James Baldwin – essayists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, June Jordan and several others whose essays go beyond the primarily personal and make strong claims for political intervention through the essay. Cheryl Wall’s On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay focuses specifically on the essay as the genre in which African American writers from the nineteenth century to the present day have made their most significant and lasting contributions to literary life and to literary language itself. The ‘will to adorn’ – a phrase gleaned from Zora Neale Hurston – refers to the writer’s desire to make out of words something beautiful and lasting.16 This volume recenters the discussion of the essay’s history and development and follows several threads within it. In a way that distinguishes it from other valuable anthologies, histories and studies of the essay, The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay attempts to reflect this heterogeneity and complexity by bringing together essayists and scholars of the essay with significantly different stakes and interests in the form. As editors of this volume, we thought it would be fruitful to think of the essay less as a genre with a clearly delineated

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genealogy and more as a contested space in which different essayists, literary scholars, writing instructors and readers look for different things when they look for ‘the essay’. What the essay is, what it does, who writes it and what its future might be are just some of the issues that are open to debate in contemporary discussions about the form. Readers of this volume should expect to find a wide-angle shot of what we might call ‘essay studies’ today. While many key moments and names in the history of the essay are discussed in different ways, a sustained focus on the contemporary accentuates the scholarship and discussion in this volume. In inviting the contributors and editing the chapters, as editors, we were guided by several questions: • • • • •

What is the essay today? How do we speak about the essay today? What is a contemporary understanding of the history of the essay? What is the future of the essay as a literary form as well as a cultural object? How does the essay relate to fundamental questions of our time, such as climate change, the impact of digital media, or the political issues of race, gender and identity? • And, finally, how do we attempt to answer these questions while allowing for the different conceptions of the essay to feature – the essay as craft, the essay as a literary form, the essay as a pedagogical tool, the essay as political intervention and more? To broach these questions, we adopted a collaborative approach in our work, allowing for continuous dialogue, conversation and, where needed, contestation, both in our editing style and in the contents of the volume itself. As editors with common interests but also different areas of expertise and writing histories, we collectively and individually challenged and were challenged by the contributors to the volume who, as it will be seen, are engaged in essay studies in different ways – they are essayists, teachers, theorists, philosophers, scholars and historians of the essay. Their chapters also reflect significant intersections among these approaches. While editing these contributions, we sought to preserve the integrity of each individual chapter – its being marked by specific questions and contexts – while at the same time trying to orchestrate a common concern with the questions we identified above as determining the direction of the volume. No single book – even of 250,000 words, like this one – can say everything that can be said about the essay, but the following chapters and contributions present what we believe is a substantial and wide-ranging overview of the key questions and issues in the study and writing of the essay today, while covering, in different ways, the important moments and essayists in the history of the essay.

Outline of the Volume A key feature of The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay is that it includes eight experimental texts presenting the thoughts of important contemporary writers about the essay. Grouped under the heading ‘Contemporary Essayists in Focus’ and interspersed in between the three main parts of the book, these eight texts – featuring Robert Atwan, Brian Dillon, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Leslie Jamison, Jamaica Kincaid, Claudia

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introduction

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Rankine, David Shields and Rebecca Solnit – are collaboratively edited versions of interviews that the editors conducted with the writers in 2020 and 2021. The interviews are presented in the form of a series of more or less essayistic interventions about the form of the essay, the writers’ own essayistic work, and other significant aspects of being a writer today. Apart from being a window to the writing-world of these essayists, these texts offer valuable insights into the nature of the essay and its importance in contemporary cultural and political contexts. The rest of the book includes twenty-seven chapters about a wide range of topics and written in different styles, ranging from the academic to the more essayistic but always guided by the aspiration for scholarly rigor. These chapters are grouped into three parts: ‘Theories and Definitions’; ‘Publics, Pedagogies and Histories’; and ‘Form and Genre’, which we will introduce briefly in the rest of this chapter.

Part I: Theories and Definitions What is an essay? What does an essay do? How does the essay relate to the world ‘out there’? What does it mean for an essayist to write in an ‘essayistic’ way? These are some of the questions addressed in Part I of this volume, which includes chapters that, in different ways, engage with what may be described as theoretical aspects of the essay. Mario Aquilina’s contribution discusses one central aspect of the essay: the way it constructs and performs the relationship between the self and the other. The ‘I’ of the essay – the speaking voice of the essayist – is intrinsic to the idea of the essay as selfportrait. Through a discussion of the work of Michel de Montaigne, Claudia Rankine and Brian Dillon, among others, Aquilina argues that while the ‘I’ of the essayist is fundamental to our reading and writing of essays, the self in the essay is inevitably engaged in relations of affinity and contestation with others. In this sense, we can think of the ‘I’ of the essay as collaborative rather than simply expressive, and as engaging in communal spaces rather than being exclusively immersed in individual concerns. This has implications for how we think of the essay, both as a literary form as well as a form that may be significant in cultural and political exchanges. Alan Stewart shares a similar interest in thinking of the essay as collaborative. Stewart focuses on Francis Bacon in an attempt ‘to recapture the vexed and unsettled early years of the English essay’ and its development in the seventeenth century.17 In so doing, Stewart provides a ‘counter-history’ to the prioritization of Montaigne in the history of the essay. This, though, is not an attempt to depose one king to establish another. Through close readings of different versions of some essays by Bacon and by others writing in Bacon’s vein, Stewart argues that the texts discussed point ‘to an understanding of the genre very different from what we have inherited: an essay invested less in unmistakable authorial essence and more in a future-oriented and collaborative mode’. Aquilina and Stewart introduce the essay to the readers of this volume by thinking about the relationship between self and other and by focusing, among others, on important early essayists like Montaigne and Bacon, respectively. Thomas Karshan’s chapter also plays an introductory role by dwelling on the relationship between the text of the essay and that which frames it for readers: its title. Claiming that ‘[t]itles are

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a problem for the essay; in fact, “the essay” comes late as the title of a genre’, Karshan gathers a wide and eclectic range of titles and texts in order to identify some defining characteristics of the essay. Karshan surveys the origins and development of the term ‘essay’ in Montaigne and his followers but also in the contemporary essay and, in so doing, lays bare the protean qualities of the genre. Karshan finds contradiction and ambiguity to be formative, with the term ‘essay’ covering ‘thematically focused discourses’ as well as ‘their near-opposite, digressive rambles’. The essay, Karshan shows, is ‘a very mixed stew’ and may contain an infinitely varied choice not only of subjects but also of approaches, moods and dispositions. Indeed, Karshan suggests, such is the variety included under the term ‘essay’ that, perhaps, the essay’s resistance to simple categorization and definition might be one of the most essential aspects of the form. Moving away from the essay’s relation to the self discussed by Aquilina and from the textual characteristics of the genre that interest Stewart and Karshan, but still focusing on what makes an essay an essay, Erin Plunkett reminds us that ‘[t]he essay begins with something. It is occasional. It is about something.’ Plunkett theorizes ‘the essay’s attitude toward things’ or, more precisely, the ‘recalcitrance of a thing or a phenomenon, a thereness that stubbornly asserts itself . . . to which the essay bears witness in its mode of presentation’. Engaging with the thinking of Søren Kierkegaard, Stanley Cavell, Theodor W. Adorno, György Lukács, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and several other philosophers, Plunkett thinks about the presence of things in the essay but also their resistance to our gaze. This characteristic of the essay, Plunkett shows, has important philosophical but also political implications, because it is associated with the essay’s ‘visionary potential’ to defamiliarize the world for us. The essay sees the world differently. Like Plunkett, Jason Childs explores the relationship between the essay and the world. To do so, Childs problematizes one of the very few generally agreed upon definitions or categorizations of the essay: its being classifiable as a form of nonfiction. Childs argues that thinking of the essay as ‘nonfiction’ is paradoxical in view of another frequently identified characteristic of the essay, its indeterminacy. Childs thus proposes thinking of the essay in terms of the ‘as if’, a way of conceiving writing that we tend to associate with fiction. However, for Childs, relating the ‘as if’ – whether in the essay or in that which we unproblematically associate with fiction, like the novel – is not to be understood in terms of something ‘sealed off’ from ‘the real world’ but as something central to ‘human thought and knowledge’ and thus fundamental to the world. Kara Wittman sees the relation between the essay and the world in terms of resistance. While acknowledging the force of protest movements and of essays whose subject matter is overtly political, Wittman argues that there is also a formal capacity to resist in the essay – irrespective of its political intentions – that can complement other forms of resistance. Wittman starts from Montaigne and highlights the way his essays and the tradition he established resist through, among other things, their ‘rendering of the transient’, ‘attention to the particular’, inconclusiveness and fragmentation. The essay, then, is presented as a genre whose formal radicality makes it particularly apposite for interventions with ‘sociopolitical consequence’, including contemporary interventions on climate change, the humanitarian crisis of immigration and racism. Douglas Hesse’s chapter keeps us interested in the essay’s relation to the world – explored by Plunkett, Childs and Wittman – but it does so by pursuing a primarily formalist approach. Hesse proposes a theoretical schema upon which we can locate the

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introduction

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essay and its differences from other genres. The schema comprises three continuums, which Hesse plots on a two-dimensional figure: that of ‘lived experience’ and ‘sought experience’; ‘self-full’ writing and ‘self-less’ writing; and ‘reflection’ and ‘report’. The essay, for Hesse, tends toward self-full writing inspired by lived experience and aspiring to reflection, but Hesse’s chapter shows the ways in which this definition of the essay, while serving as a useful model for definitional purposes and in pedagogic contexts, is subject to exceptions and qualifications that are illustrative of the slipperiness of the form. Like the other contributors to this part of the volume, R. Eric Tippin attempts to answer the question, ‘What is an essay?’ His take is through the original claim that not only does the essay have an ‘overlooked, productive historical and aesthetic partnership’ with the advertisement but, more radically, ‘the essay is a kind of advertisement’. This gambit might seem counterintuitive since the advertisement is often thought of as a form of deception, while the essay is conceived in terms of honesty, sincerity and as a ‘generator of truth-content’. However, through a close reading of Virginia Woolf and E. B. White, Tippin illustrates the ways in which the essay might be seen as fulfilling the ideals of the advertisement: the first person offering ‘its present wares to those who have a parallel desire to receive them’. Therefore, for Tippin, at the heart of the essay is not only its ‘privileged relationship with the first person’ but also the ‘gift economy’ that it establishes with the reader through a human rather than instrumental exchange.

Part II: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories What are the contexts in which the essay is written, read and circulated? Beyond definitional concerns, what can we say about the essay’s effects on its readers and on the social environments in which it operates? And how is the essay, as a form, affected by the institutional and political circumstances around it, such as the classroom or the publications in which it appears? These are some of the questions that are addressed by the contributors in this part of the volume who shift our focus from what an essay is to where an essay appears, who writes it and who reads it. Nicole B. Wallack opens this section by suggesting we think of the essay primarily in terms of the reading contexts it evokes and appears in. Essayists enact, theorize and trouble readings of texts and experiences, both their own and others’. In essays, writers represent themselves not solely as individual readers, but as situated within publics – as John Dewey framed the term – and counterpublics, as theorized by Michael Warner. Wallack argues that reading is the central activity of essays, regardless of subject, but suggests that analyses of reading and readerships in essays are only beginning to become a focus for essay studies. This chapter contextualizes readings of work by Patricia Williams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin and others, within both theories of reading and publics theory. Wallack argues that the act of reading in essays is a reciprocal process: the essayist orchestrates a reading of materials, and their essay returns the favor, providing its own reading of the writer. Essays tell their writers hard and necessary truths – about the stakes of our ideas, the limits of our language, and our sense of responsibility to our possible publics. All of this has implications for how the essay is taught. At least as far back as Adorno, advocates for the classical Montaignian essay have worried about its place in a university increasingly bent toward empirical truth and

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the compartmentalization of knowledge and away from what Adorno thought of as the ‘whole truth’ available via the informal essay. The contemporary neoliberal American university, with its marketization and commodification of everything, feels like the low ebb, according to Bob Cowser Jr, who takes the essay’s current temperature in terms of his own classrooms, sharing the challenges and impediments to teaching the essay to undergraduates, successful strategies he has collected from nearly thirty years of doing so, and finally arguments in favor of continuing to work with the essay for the sake of the tradition, the sake of students and for his own. Kevin Rulo’s chapter keeps us in the ‘intellectual space’ of the American university and college classroom in order to outline ‘how the praxis of essay writing is conditioned and normed’ when the essay is used to assess students and to prepare them for the working life beyond academia. Rulo argues that the essay in the classroom cannot be understood without due consideration being given to the ideological assumptions that underpin its use, such as the valuing of qualities of ‘standardization, regularity, rationality, clarity and efficiency’. Against these ‘neoliberal’ values and the ‘modern episteme’ in which they are rooted, Rulo proposes the essay as ‘an alternative, counteractive space that resists and even overturns the market and colonial logics long at work in our academic institutions’. Pat C. Hoy’s pedagogy-focused chapter draws on Hoy’s experience in writing programs in which the essay is a central component of the curriculum. Hoy reflects on the ways the essay can allow the mind to ‘keep yearning’ and to avoid the pressure to tame thinking into the linear argumentation privileged elsewhere in the university. ‘The essence of essaying itself’, Hoy writes, ‘is nothing more nor less than the pursuit of desire, the attempt to capture a specter, to hold it in the mind and transform it into language, to make it known.’ In this context, Hoy asks, how does the writer or the student-writer move from idea to essay in a way that allows them to be attuned to ‘the mind’s enabling mysteries’? With Bruce Robbins’s chapter on politics and the English essay, we move outside of the writing classroom and beyond considerations about pedagogy toward thinking of the political and social contexts in which the essay arises and by which it is determined. Focusing primarily on George Orwell’s writing about the theme of atrocity, but also referring to several other historically important as well as contemporary political writers, Robbins investigates the seeming contradiction in the idea of an essay being political when it is usually expected to be ‘tentative, modest, provisional – anything but absolutist’. This may initially seem like an unsurpassable challenge, Robbins concedes, but ‘politics’ and ‘good writing, essayistic or not’ are by no means irreconcilable. Indeed, the essayistic, which often provides context and complexity while pushing the writer toward self-scrutiny, can help steer us away from the ‘ignorance’ of firmly holding on to certain political positions as if they were absolute truths. In the hands of good writers, then, the essay can certainly contribute to ‘the large question of how well society is constituted – the question of politics’. For Phillip Lopate, the essayistic qualities of ‘skepticism (including self-skepticism), thinking against oneself, open-ended speculation, freedom, adaptability, avoidance of system and refusal of dogmatism’ align the essay with the values of liberalism. Lopate argues that the essay comes to the fore in several specific moments in history, and one such moment is the period between the end of World War II and around 1970. The proliferation of publication contexts, the rise of the figure of the public intellectual and

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the spread of liberal ideology contribute to making these decades an ideal flowering bed for the essay. At the same time, the contemporary essay, while still occasionally showing the effects of this liberal essayism, tends to be characterized by a different ‘tone and stress’. Lopate expresses a sense of nostalgia for the ‘benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority’ that is often absent in contemporary essays that prefer to focus on the assertion ‘of wounded virtue and a claim of victimhood at society’s insensitivity’. Briallen Hopper’s chapter discusses, more favorably, a selection of contemporary essays that aim to be political. Hopper focuses on ‘personal protest essays’ – often written by women – that employ the ‘mix of narration and reflection’ of the personal essay to explore ‘intersections between individual experience and structures of injustice’. Starting from an outline of the American context for the personal protest essay, Hopper then focuses on essays by Rebecca Solnit, Kiese Laymon, Chanel Miller and Seo-Young Chu. Hopper describes these essays as belonging to ‘a less celebrated but more widely read subgenre . . . “everybody’s protest essay” – a mashup between the protest essay’ and the ‘ubiquitous, clickable, confessional first-person’ form we often find on the internet. These essays show the potential of the essay to be ‘dynamic and relational in unprecedented ways’ as well as to form ‘connections that can coalesce into a community or a movement’. Continuing the focus on contemporary women essayists, Jenny Spinner’s chapter takes the widespread idea of the current moment’s being a ‘golden age’ for women essayists, especially American women essayists, as a starting point for her argument. Spinner acknowledges that in the twenty-first century, ‘we find a nearly unprecedented season in the history of the essay, a veritable and broad bloom of women essayists springing forth’, and that, for some, this might instill the hope for a future of the essay in which ‘essayists write and are celebrated without the weight of gender qualifiers’. However, Spinner reminds us, ‘gender has always mattered in the essay tradition, heretofore dominated by male writers and critics’, and it still does. The chapter surveys the ways in which women essayists have been marginalized in what is essentially a ‘privileged white male’ canon that tends to focus on the essay’s formal freedom while ignoring the context in which it is written. Against this, Spinner insists on the idea that when we read an essay, ‘who is behind the wheel matters as much as the ride’ and that, in this context, to aim at a future in which the identity of the writer is unimportant is to ‘detract from the realities, the hardships, of real life’. Several chapters in this part of the volume take the bulk of their examples from contemporary American essays. This is so for many reasons, including the relative importance of the essay in the classroom and contemporary publication contexts in the United States as well as the fact that scholars and essayists there have tended to show a heightened interest in and awareness of the political contexts of the essay as a form. Louise Kane’s contribution is an example of a kind of research that can give further depth and nuance to the understanding of the essay in the United States because it focuses on essayists whose identity is marked by American but also Asian origins and culture. Kane argues that ‘more global consideration of the genre enables us to see how the form evolved in different contexts and with sometimes different purposes’. Specifically, Kane discusses Asian American essayists writing in English who ‘played a central role in the emergence of Asian migrant writing and transnational aesthetics’. Essayists like Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far and Zhang Ailing ‘explore betweenness as

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a state of being in its own right, one in which rootlessness, movement and cultural exchange are treated with celebration as well as consternation’. The essay, with its specific formal qualities, provides an ideal space for them to ‘negotiate the complex identity politics of belonging and being in the context of migration and movement’. Sarah Allen closes Part II of this volume with a chapter that considers the essay in a somewhat different context to those discussed in the previous chapters. Indeed, Allen’s chapter presents a significantly more distant perspective by thinking of the essay in relation to ‘the posthuman turn [that] problematizes the privileging of the individual and, indeed, of the human more generally’. The essay has been described as a ‘human’ form in its celebration of individual personality. What happens to the essay, then, in the context of a climate crisis that seems to call into question the very viability of the human? Nature has always been an ideal setting for the essayist’s meandering thought, but how does the essayist relate to questions that are ‘so huge and pervasive’ that they problematize the human aspiration to rationally make sense of the world around them? Allen looks at a number of contemporary essayistic works that focus on such issues to argue that ‘all that essayists think and write might be anthropocentric, but the essayist today is well positioned to respond to and even intervene in that anthropocentrism precisely because of the essay’s long tradition of thinking about’ experiences of change and becoming.

Part III: Form and Genre The chapters in the final part of this volume explore the form or forms of the essay as well as the relations of similarity and difference between the essay, other forms and other genres such as the philosophical essay, the column, the lyric, the digital visual essay and the science essay. In so doing, they describe and outline with some precision what the formal and generic qualities of the essay may be and what distinguishes the essay in formal terms. We begin with two chapters that share a concern with the philosophical potential of the essay form. The literary genealogy of the essay is well documented, but the essay has also long been associated with philosophy, and Kurt Borg’s chapter traces this lineage. Philosophy and the essay share a concern with the plural faces of truth, and Borg considers this mutual concern in light of self-transformation, whereby both traditions can partake in askesis – an exercise through which the self experiences and transforms itself. Borg draws on the work of Michel Foucault, especially as Foucault reads the work of Montaigne. The essay, argues Foucault, ‘is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still . . . an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’. Montaigne’s self-disclosure can be read through a confessional register, yet by reading Montaigne alongside Foucault, Borg emphasizes a further dimension of truth, namely its entanglement with subjectivity, its power to constitute and authenticate the self, and its risks and dangers in the practice of parrhesia, or risky ‘truthtelling’, which unites philosophy and the essay as an embodiment of ‘the courage, the audacity, to know’. Arleen Ionescu shows how the Romanian philosopher-essayist Emil Cioran ‘intertwine[s] the essay with the philosophical, . . . cultivating the essay as a hybrid form of brinkmanship that goes beyond any fixed genre’. Cioran never theorized the

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essay (he avoided any such systematic thought, opting instead to deal in aphorism and personal experience) but Ionescu regards his essayistic refusal of systematicity to be his original contribution to the practice of philosophy in and through the essay. Cioran’s essays can be read as an endeavor to inscribe his uncertainties presented as personal experiences, a very essayistic gesture. Ionescu is especially keen to challenge the characterization of Cioran as a nihilist; his essays often resort to rhetorical figures that deface the author and that dramatize his self for the reader, who becomes a spectator in this staging of the ‘idea’ of suicide. The next two chapters explore important areas in which the essay or the essayistic has had a significant presence but which, perhaps surprisingly, have not been written about extensively: science writing and the newspaper column. Dirk Vanderbeke explores another way in which the essay relates to truth beyond the philosophical: scientific truth. The essay has always been an important vehicle for scientific debate, supplementing research articles and serving other functions exceeding the pursuit of unconventional ideas or the transfer of scientific knowledge to laypeople. Scientific writing strives for objectivity, presenting evidence-based facts not requiring rhetorical forms of persuasion, shunning linguistic artfulness and the intrusion of personal perspectives. But even early modern scientists employed diverse genres to present their theories, each including essayistic features. Vanderbeke suggests three major areas in which the science essay is of particular relevance: times of crisis and paradigm change, personal reflections and memoirs of scientists, and work for the public understanding of science. The science essay is not merely a unidirectional instrument for the education of a lay audience but one of the most important genres in the discussion of the role of the sciences in our societies, their discoveries and achievements, and their impact on our lives. Ivan Callus explores what might seem like a clear area of overlap between the essay and the column, or more accurately, essayism and columnism, but which, interestingly enough, is rarely written about. Callus acknowledges that in writing about the column in relation to the essay, he wishes to challenge an implicit bias which holds that the essay is more venerable than the column – older, more authentic, self-doubting, timeless and detached from politicking and topicality. Callus also questions the binarism of the comparison; by focusing on correspondences between the essay and the column as more interesting than the distinctions, Callus establishes that ‘column’ can claim a share of ‘essay’. Surmising that the column is perhaps more journalism than literature, Callus nonetheless highlights the significance of the work of several columnists past and present: Samuel Johnson, George Orwell, Langston Hughes, Jamal Khashoggi and assassinated Maltese columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Column and essay, Callus writes: ‘to each their time and space (they are intersected anyway and often coincide, subsuming and refracting the other)’. Beth Peterson’s and Elizabeth F. Chamberlain’s chapters discuss the specific qualities of two contemporary forms of the essay: the lyric essay and the digital visual essay, respectively. Peterson asks what it means to label an essay ‘lyric’ and makes a case for why the lyric essay is both distinct and essential in the nonfiction canon. Though the term ‘lyric essay’ has been in wide circulation for over twenty years, Peterson explains that, not unlike the larger genre of the essay itself, ‘the subgenre has had a complicated and sometimes contentious history’. She begins with the history of the term ‘lyric essay’, locating it in both lyric poetry and the traditional essay traditions. She ascribes

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a list of formal qualities and conventions to lyric essays: ‘a move towards poetic rather than fictional techniques; juxtaposition and association in lieu of direct denotation; and the use of form to mirror and inform content’. Finally, offering a range of textual examples, she argues for the lyric essay as ‘particularly generative of truth-telling when there are complex and fragmented situations; when there are gaps in knowledge, memory or experience; and when the reader’s perceptions, rather than the writer’s, must be centered’. In a chapter focusing on the digital visual essay, Elizabeth F. Chamberlain explores what happens to the essay and essayism when it is shaped by the internet and other aspects of visual and digital culture. Chamberlain argues that ‘the digital visual essay has increasingly blurred essay genre lines – between formal and personal essays, essays and games, essays and documentaries’. Chamberlain provides a discussion of this form by tracing its affinities with and differences from the internet personal essay; digital literature such as hypertext fiction and interactive fiction; scrollytelling (a mode of interaction in which pictures, data points, labels and code snippets rise to meet your cursor); and data journalism. The digital visual essay, for Chamberlain, is a contemporary example of the inevitability of genre change, and one possible consequence of this phenomenon is the way the ‘essay form at large’ might be pollinated by the characteristics of ‘these new strange digital beasts’. Julija Šukys’s chapter takes us from the digital spaces outlined by Chamberlain to the physical and symbolic spaces inhabited by the archival essayist. Šukys quotes an important distinction made by Terry Cook between the singular ‘archive’, the recorded memory production of a person, group or culture (historical, documentary and fragmentary in nature), and the plural ‘archives’, the history of such documents over time, wherein the researcher’s orientation is metaphorical and philosophical. Šukys argues that it is not enough merely to find order among the various texts; to achieve meaning, the essayist must look beyond the dusty documents into the realm of ideas, the singular archive. And it is in the tension between these two registers that the archival essay has its life; it was Graham Good who called an essay ‘the inscription of a self and the description of an object’. Šukys traces the trajectory of her own career, from a staid comparative literature background through trauma theory and, finally, led by her own curiosity, into the brave new world of creative nonfiction, where she embraced an unmethodical method, reading omnivorously and dwelling in the contradictory, the fragmentary, the subjective and the idiosyncratic. Glenn Michael Gordon’s approach to the perennial question of the form of the essay is through a concern with the body. Essayists have taken the body as subject at least since Montaigne’s ‘Of Thumbs’, gradually evolving to write bodies into essays and finally to acknowledge the essay itself as a body. Gordon suggests that if to trans is to cross and to essay is to try, then both are movements of the body that bend toward self-expression, and Gordon claims the form enables trans writers to foreground their authentically felt sense of the body. Trans body-essays present opportunities for expanding readers’ conceptions and writers’ expressions of bodies that transgress the normative binaries or those that claim a binaristic gender in non-normative ways. The essay can be the means by which both constituencies move through important questions: ‘[how] does an essay account for a body, or even count as a body? How might readers’ conceptions of a body change over the course of reading an essay that is, itself, a body?’ Though we may ‘read the trans body-essay’ carefully, ‘we can only inhabit it

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through our own body’, and only then can we ‘reimagine . . . our own felt sense’ of the physical experience of being human. We conclude the volume with a chapter that explores the essay at the limits of its relation to the human. Paolo Bugliani’s chapter offers a theoretical reflection on how two of the most recognizable features of the essay are affected by the encounter with the radical alterity of the animal. ‘Human–animal encounters provide a suitable terrain for the essay, . . . appeal[ing] to the genre’s constitutive in-betweenness and hybrid nature’, Bugliani writes. ‘Freed from the bounds of zoological objective research, the essay’s hybrid treatment of a hybrid matter celebrates the explorative spirit recognized as the hallmark and historiographic inheritance of the essay.’ While essay animals ‘have lost most of their biological matter-of-factness, . . . [they] retain enough of it to preside over essayists’ musings as fiercely undomesticated witnesses’. Furthermore, the essay’s tone of relaxed meditation and recollection, Bugliani argues, ‘allows writers to transpose their . . . self-referential drive towards the animal kingdom’.

Notes   1. Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus and Michael Silverman, eds., Elements of Literature: Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 4.   2. Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 12.  3. For instance, see Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, eds., Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), an anthology that shows how frequently the issue of definition becomes central to essayists.   4. For instance, see Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, trans. Pat Fedkiew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90ff.   5. For examples of attempts to define the essay, see Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), 1–25; Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1–64; Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), xxiii–liv; G. Douglas Atkins, On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–30; Robert Atwan, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of an Essay’, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 14, no. 1 (2012): 109–17; and Mario Aquilina, ‘Introduction: Thinking the Essay at the Limits’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 1–17.   6. Carl H. Klaus, ‘Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay’, in Essayists on the Essay, xv–xxvii.   7. In his introduction to The Essay at the Limits, Mario Aquilina discusses the ‘paradox at the heart of the essay . . . : the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is’ (9, emphasis in original).   8. Klaus, ‘Toward a Collective Poetics’, xv.  9. We limit ourselves only to some notable studies in book form published from 2017 onwards: Nicole B. Wallack, Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017); Jenny Spinner, ed., Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in NineteenthCentury Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, eds., On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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mario aquilina, bob cowser jr and nicole b. wallack Press, 2020); and Aquilina, The Essay at the Limits. We also note the yearly publication of The Best American Essays series, edited by Robert Atwan, as well as a healthy presence of essay scholarship in journals such as Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, as well as in magazines such as The New Yorker, Aeon, Slate and many others. Some notable anthologies that contribute to the establishment of this narrative are Robert Cochrane, ed., The English Essayists: A Comprehensive Selection from the Works of the Great Essayists from Lord Bacon to John Ruskin (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1880); John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Denise Gigante, ed., The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Lopate, Art of the Personal Essay; Joyce Carol Oates, ed., The Best American Essays of the Century, coedited by Robert Atwan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); John D’Agata, The Making of the American Essay (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2016); and Phillip Lopate’s three recent edited collections: The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 2020), The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945–1970 (New York: Anchor Books, 2021) and The Contemporary American Essay (New York: Anchor Books, 2021). For example, see Ann Hartle, Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘The Essay Canon’, College English 61, no. 4 (1999): 401–30 (402). Ibid., 403. John D’Agata, ed., The Lost Origins of the Essay (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009). Jenny Spinner, introduction to Of Women and the Essay, 1–34 (1). Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Quotations in these synopses are taken from the corresponding chapters in this volume.

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Part I: Theories and Definitions

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1 Affinities and Contestations: The Self and the Other in the Essay Mario Aquilina

The Essay as Self-Portrait The essay performs the individual essayist’s attempt to reflect upon their own thoughts and experiences and to express this process of thought in language that captures the fluidity of thinking.

T

o many readers of this volume, this characterization of the essay will seem unoriginal.1 Edward Hoagland is one of many contemporary essayists who have said something similar about the form: ‘Essays . . . hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am.’2 An ‘essay is like the human voice talking, its order the mind’s natural flow’.3 Hoagland’s words – bringing together the ‘I’, the mind and the individual voice (the individual, their thinking and their language) – echo and are echoed by many others. Scott Russell Sanders tells us that ‘the essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and at play’.4 Indeed, for Sanders, this association between the individual and the essay is not only constitutive of the essay but also fundamental to understanding readers’ fascination with the form. Part of the pleasure of reading essays, he suggests, comes from ‘relish[ing] the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos’.5 Sara Levine concurs. We have learned to expect the individual to shape an essay to the extent that ‘to the essay you come – you should come, I’m telling you – with the hope of confronting a particular person’.6 In short, to use Phillip Lopate’s words, the essay is for many a ‘rich . . . vehicle for displaying personality in all its willfully changing aspects’.7 Presenting the essay as primarily expressive of individual thought and personality is a well-rehearsed move in essay criticism to the extent that today it might read, at best, as uncontroversial and, at worst, as platitudinal. In this chapter, I first interrogate some of the assumptions on which this conception of the essay is based and then explore what happens to the essay and to its potential both as a literary and political form when the ‘I’ of the essay is understood as being intrinsically marked, in different ways, by its relations to ‘the other’. I will think of these relations in terms of affinities and contestations that on the one hand allow the gathering and construction of an individual ‘I’ in the essay and, on the other hand, make that ‘I’ multiple, dispersed and inevitably engaged with alterity and difference.

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Allow me first to propose a second unoriginal but arguably necessary move in this chapter by referring to Michel de Montaigne, who almost invariably makes an early appearance in and haunts essays about the essay. Montaigne famously announces that the subject of his essais – which literary history would later canonize as genrefounding – is always himself: 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.8 Despite his wonderfully eclectic interests, for Montaigne, the sole subject of his essays is ultimately nothing but the self of the essayist. His essays are self-portraits that ‘portray a particular [man], very ill-formed’, somewhat changeable, ‘befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness’.9 Over the centuries, Montaigne’s words, intended to account specifically for his own writing, have accrued the force of a self-evident claim about the essay as a genre. Virginia Woolf, for instance, speaks about the self-centeredness of the essay as constitutive of the form: ‘[I]f you say that an essay is essentially egoistical you will not exclude many essays and you will certainly include a portentous number’, she writes in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’.10 In other words, like the contemporary essayists I cited at the beginning of this chapter, Woolf takes a firmly Montaignian position and hints there can be no real essaying without the centrality of the self. Seeing the essay in full publication and circulation bloom around her, Woolf suggests that ‘the essay . . . owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full’.11 Indeed, Woolf argues, ‘[w]hether a first-rate essay has ever been written which is not the ripe fruit of egoism may be doubted’.12

The Essay as a Secondary Form The way Woolf describes the intertwining of the essay with its author suggests one of the reasons why the essay, in various points in its history, might have been deemed a secondary form that is not worthy of too much attention, but also why it thrives in other moments and contexts. For Woolf, writing in 1905, the historical moment we now associate with the birth of Modernism is fertile ground for the essay’s individualism. Sixty years later, Michael Hamburger claims that the essay ‘has been a dead genre’13 since G. K. Chesterton and Virginia Woolf, precisely because the individualism of the essay and its ability to saunter without design are now (in 1965) too often frowned upon as ‘shameless, egoistic and insolent’.14 For Hamburger, the ‘point of an essay’, or of what he calls a ‘genuine’ essay, ‘always lies in the author’s personality’.15 In a society that presumably no longer enjoys free individualism because it cannot forget the ‘factories, barracks, offices’ and, more crucially, the ‘prison yards and extermination camps’,16 the essay becomes ‘outmoded’.17 In retrospect, Hamburger’s fears about the demise of the essay due to the perceived tolerance for individualism seem to have been premature, judging by, for instance, Laura Bennett’s (2015)18 and Jia Tolentino’s (2017)19 denunciations of ‘the first-person industrial complex’ that they deem to have been prevalent in personal

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essays with an excessively confessional bent for the best part of the previous decade. What Tolentino and Bennett identify is yet another cultural context – this time marked by the Internet and its modalities of production and circulation, as well as by gender and race relations – in which self-focused and self-revealing essayism is very popular: ‘the personal-essay boom’, mainly characterized by ‘so many women’ writing ‘about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and receiv[ing] not much in return’.20 Tolentino’s intervention in the debate about the contemporary personal essay announces another death or at least a radical change in the genre. Tolentino follows a long line of commentators who have written about several deaths and rebirths that the essay is seen as having gone through. Her contribution primarily focuses on the relationship between the personal and the political in contemporary times. She argues that ‘this sort of writing’ – the personal essay ‘made . . . worse’ by the Internet – has fallen victim to ‘a broader shift in attitudes’.21 While self-centered essayism, even before the Internet, ‘always endured plenty of vitriol’, the arrival of Trump and Trumpian politics makes ‘individual perspectives’ less tenable as ‘a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject’.22 For Tolentino, the 2016 US election and what happened later showed that ‘personal stories’ could be used ‘as explanations for a terrible collective act’, and this called for a countermove away from the personal in journalism.23 Tolentino’s point – built on observations of contemporary American journalistic essaying – aligns with philosophical claims about the way pathos and affect overwhelm logos in a post-truth society.24 ‘Put simply’, Tolentino writes, ‘the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was.’25 The essay’s professed dependence on the peculiarities of the individual frequently exposes it to disapproval or at least to a downplaying of its aesthetic or literary value. One way of looking at this is to suggest that the ebb and flow of the popularity of the essay as a genre seems to be tied to the cultural acceptance or disapproval of certain ways of expressing individuality. In other words, whether the essay is peculiarly personal or individual is not just a definitional matter but often becomes decisive in the evaluation of the aesthetic and cultural significance of the form. Indeed, the essay has been subject to accusations of excessive narcissism since its very inception. Montaigne, at a historical juncture in which writing primarily about oneself is still anomalous and profoundly unorthodox, pre-empts this critique by offering a justification for why he is the sole subject of his essays: ‘At least I have one thing according to the rules: that no man ever 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.’26 What his essays lose through the ‘indiscretion in talking about oneself’, they gain in honesty, sincerity and fidelity to truth.27 Around four centuries later, E. B. White confronts this problem too: ‘Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays’, he admits.28 Lopate interprets White’s defensive strategy of assuming a ‘self-deprecating air’ as a way of ‘ward[ing] off potential charges of vanity or self-absorption’.29 In a note ‘To the Reader of the Essais’, Montaigne writes that the subject of his essays is ‘frivolous’ and ‘vain’.30 Echoing him, while adding a consideration of the contemporary literary world, White writes: The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on

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mario aquilina 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 undisciplined existence.31

One route taken by those addressing the self-styled egocentrism of the essay has thus been to understate its literary credentials. For White, the essay can afford to be selfcentered because it does not have lofty literary ambitions. There are, however, other ways of addressing this concern, some that have particular value in the contemporary world. The depreciation of the exceedingly personal in the essay by essayists like White, but also by Tolentino and Bennett, might be read – has recently been read – as a critique rooted in a form of white privilege that assumes the freedom to conceive literature as not determined by its situatedness. Namrata Poddar, for instance, denounces Tolentino for lining up a series of ‘white’ or ‘white-passing’ writers against the Internet confessional essay, a form that is often concerned with trauma or racial injustice in America.32 Poddar also disagrees with Merve Emre, who criticizes Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood for prioritizing ‘ethical and subjective’ judgments over ‘aesthetic judgments . . . about the formal or stylistic features of prose’.33 In other words, Poddar suggests that Tolentino, Emre and others can hanker for the elegance of style and dismiss the aesthetic validity of the exceedingly personal only by forgetting that ‘every text is context’ and that ‘any aesthetic is a construct’.34 I will return to the thorny complexities of the relation between the personal and the political – the ‘I’ and ‘them’/‘us’ – particularly in the contemporary context of race and privilege. Before doing so, let me attempt to add a few more layers to our thinking of the ‘I’ of the essay.

Rethinking the ‘I’ of the Essay The idea that the essence of the essay is what happens between the ‘I’ and the process of thinking as manifested in language is a dominant thread that runs from Montaigne to contemporary essayism, but this view is not uncontested. Competing conceptions in essay criticism prioritize other aspects of the essay, such as its formal qualities as a genre or ‘anti-genre’, its essayistic gestures of trial and attempt, or its relation to the world ‘out there’.35 In The American Protest Essay and National Belonging, Brian Norman does not so much dismiss the centrality of the ‘I’ in the essay but associates it primarily with the essay in its European origins and its uptake in only some American traditions. Norman writes that ‘the epicenter of the modern essay [with its prioritization of the self] is the property of those who already have access to full citizenship’.36 He argues that, on the contrary, one of the defining characteristics of what he terms ‘the American Protest Essay’ is that it ‘concerns itself more with the publics it addresses than the speaking self’.37 Essayists like W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and others may often ‘give voice to a group, more so than an individual’.38 They ‘seek a “we”: a collective space to speak among and across lines in a divided audience. This “we” is often more interested in the experience of others’39 and in ‘speak[ing] on behalf of the disenfranchised’40 than in the creation and exploration of ‘an autobiographical “I”’.41 Such approaches to the essay do not prioritize concerns involving the ‘I’ of the individual essayist. Nonetheless, in this chapter, I do not wish to question the importance of the ‘I’ of the essayist in the essay by proposing another center in which the essence

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of the form may supposedly be located. To do so would be to ignore one of the core narratives through which the essay has persistently defined itself and through which it has been and continues to be read. Arguably, even in ‘protest essays’, while ‘the speaking self is not always the cornerstone’, the ‘I’ remains there in some form.42 Perhaps it might be in the form of ‘a simultaneously personal and representative speaker’43 or, to follow Du Bois’s influential insights on the ‘two-ness’ of the Black American essayist, an ‘I’ that is marked by a ‘double-consciousness’ that gives it the ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’.44 Even when the essay form is employed for political purposes, the ‘I’ remains central to the essay and perhaps one of the reasons why, as Norman puts it, ‘[l]iterary figures who serve as political advocates turn again and again to the essay’.45 In this chapter, I preserve the idea that the ‘I’ of the essay is ineluctable but add to this a focus on the ‘I’ as fluid, fragmented and marked by the inevitable trace of ‘the other’ in a way that questions our thinking of the essay as primarily self-centered. I would like to show how the ‘I’ that we, as readers, encounter in the essay is collaborative in various ways, including with readers themselves. The ‘I’ of the essay is not an absolute singularity or a self-contained unity but depends on relations of contestation and affinity with others that simultaneously establish and problematize – without erasing – its insistence on individuality and singularity. Within this context, essays that might be associated with the ‘protest essay’ tradition are not presented as a radically ‘new’ tradition to be conceptualized ‘outside’ the traditional history of the essay but as a development that, in bringing together a different conception of the ‘I’, not only serves as a critique of certain theories of the essay but also highlights the already-existing formal potential in the essay to conceive of the ‘I’ differently. In other words, I argue, to problematize the singularity of the self and the ‘I’ in the essay is not to run counter to the spirit of the essay but to bring to the fore – in different ways and for different reasons – a significant potential in the poetics of the essay that might have been previously downplayed. The ‘I’ and the ‘other’, then, are not here seen as belonging to opposite sides in a rigid dichotomy between the personal and the social, the bourgeois and the radical, the traditional and the revolutionary but as always co-implicated in the essay. As such, the formal qualities or possibilities of the essay and its political force are not easily separable.

Montaigne’s Windowed Library The story of Montaigne retreating to his tower in Périgord to devote himself to his project of writing and contemplation – what Philippe Desan calls the ‘myth of the lord retired to his estate and to his tower’ – is well established in the mythology of the origins of the essay.46 We know that on the wall of a study next to his famous library, Montaigne had an inscription done in Latin that, in translation, reads: In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.47

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In ‘Of Three Kinds of Association’, Montaigne gives a detailed account of his home, his ‘place of retirement’, and especially of his library: The shape of my library is round, the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers rich and free views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter.48 It is in these rooms – now a tourist attraction – that, as Donald Frame puts it, Montaigne ‘develop[ed] fully the concept of the Essays as a self-portrait, as the trials or tests of his judgment and his natural faculties’.49 This place of retirement, though, ‘this corner’ that Montaigne, in ‘That Our Desire’, says he ‘withdraw[s] . . . from the public tempest’, is never as solitary as one might think.50 The wording is revealing here. His tower is not simply a place ‘to which’ he retires but something that he ‘withdraws from’ the public – Montaigne thus presents the physical space in a metonymic relation to his own body. He withdraws the tower just as he withdraws his body. In ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne writes that his ‘house has long been open to men of learning’.51 And this openness is both literal – his father, he tells us, ‘sought with great diligence and expense the acquaintance of learned men’52 – and figurative. The library, where he spends his time alone, is a personal space in which he writes about himself, but it is also an outward-looking space. ‘Solitude of place’, he tells us in ‘Of Three Kinds of Association’, ‘rather makes me stretch and expand outward; I throw myself into affairs of state and into the world more readily when I am alone.’53 This openness to the outside is also borne in his signature style of writing, he admits. Plutarch and Seneca are major influences, but the classical authors whose books surround him on the rows of shelves in his library and about whom he writes in ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’ make their way into his texts – just as they mold him as a person – assiduously: ‘Anyone I regard with attention easily imprints on me something of himself.’54 I read the image of a library teeming with books and framed by windows giving open views in different directions as a metonymic extension for the ‘I’ marked by ‘the other’. Montaigne, who inaugurates the idea of the ‘essay’ as self-portrait, does so with a kind of writing that is heavily intertextual and full of quotations from a room that gives him solitude while being open to and thirsty for the world. Montaigne’s writing constantly confronts ideas both internally – in the sense of the essayist questioning and transforming his own views in and across essays – and with tradition (historical, literary and philosophical). Through all this, Montaigne is aware of the singularity of his writing: ‘Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.’ His writing identifies him in a singular way. And yet, he admits, ‘I have an aping and imitative nature.’55 As O. B. Hardison argues, Montaigne formalized the idea that ‘[w]riting an essay is an exercise in self-fashioning’.56 Essaying, with Montaigne, becomes synonymous with the writing or construction of the self, so that one of Montaigne’s prominent successors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, can then famously declare, ‘I dare; I also will essay to be.’57 However, this self-fashioning can only occur through the use of language that, as Montaigne himself is aware when he reflects on his reliance on classical authors in his writing, is never simply something that one owns absolutely. Even more radically, we can say that to simply say ‘I’ is to resort to a language that always already exceeds us.

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In Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter, from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida, Kuisma Korhonen develops the implications of understanding language as allowing the ‘I’ to perform its self-construction only through relations with ‘the other’ for our thinking of the essay. As he puts it, in the essay ‘every sentence can be read as a part of a vast dialogic intertext where the word always already belongs to the Other’.58 He identifies different ways in which the ‘I’ of the essay is engaged in relations of ‘textual friendship’ with the other: ‘There are always others – other voices, other readers – from which, with which, and to which the essayist writes.’59 The essayist’s voice does not arise in a vacuum but is marked by ‘numerous references to their predecessors, by the intertextual love binding them together, by the anxiety of influence tearing them apart’.60 The essayist’s voice is not a voice in the desert, but something that is open to the reader via ‘the “dangerous perhaps” of the future’.61 The future reader, whose encounter with the essay might ‘be friendly or violent’ is not simply an afterthought but essential to the essay that, in fact, is often in itself an act of reading of the other and of the self.62 This ineluctable openness of the ‘I’ to ‘the other’, of course, is not exclusive to the essay as a literary form. When Korhonen refers to the ‘dialogic intertext’ of the essay, he is clearly alluding to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the novel,63 while the idea of a future reader to which the essay is addressed recalls Jacques Derrida on the poetic ‘event’ and its dependence on the countersignature of the reader to come.64 However, this point is worth stressing here for two main reasons. First, as we have already seen, it runs counter to potentially reductive conceptions of the essay that in highlighting the essay’s potential for self-construction and expression might forget how the ‘I’ of the essay is always relational rather than simply singular. Second, the relational nature of the ‘I’ is at least as central to the poetics of the essay as to the poetics of any other genre. This is because the essay, in its being a ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’, its propensity for the swerve, the experimental and the self-reflexive, is dependent, in different ways, on a movement of the ‘I’, its shifting or deepening of understanding. The sliding and splitting of the ‘I’ in the essay – its moving outside of itself, if only to observe itself – is arguably one of the form’s most distinctive characteristics.

Dillon on the Essay as a Gathering of Affinities To explore how these ideas are manifested in the contemporary essay, I will now turn to the Irish writer, editor and critic Brian Dillon, and to the American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine. The pairing of Dillon and Rankine might seem odd given their different interests, styles and social contexts, but they have been chosen not only because of their both being widely read and prominent contemporary essayists but also because they reflect upon and perform the relational nature of the ‘I’ and ‘the other’ in their essays in different ways. As we shall see below, Dillon’s essays frequently reflect upon and perform the collaborative construction of an ‘I’ in the essay through the voices that are gathered in his essays. Rankine’s essays do this too, but they also illustrate the political potential of the relational ‘I’ in the essay and the active engagement of the reader in the construction of the collaborative or confrontational space of the essay. Dillon’s and Rankine’s essays will allow us to reorient our attention away from the caricatural idea that the essay is simply narcissistic or solipsistic towards an understanding of the essayist’s ‘I’ as fundamentally relational, collaborative or contestatory. Such a

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reorientation also allows us to see more sharply the specific poetics of the essay and its aspirations. The formation of the ‘I’ in language and, specifically, the language of the essay, is a central theme in Dillon’s ‘Energy and Rue: An Essay on Essays’ (2012): In an essay, everything exists to pass – maybe only exists when it has thus passed – through a scrim of authorial ego and curiosity. Which is not to say that all essayists project (or better invent) and voice this inquiring or narrating ‘I.’ But it’s always implicit, and it’s always ambiguous and on the verge of evanescing because it runs up constantly against the reality and diversity of subjects and stories the essayist’s ego wants to compass.65 In this essay, whose title is a direct allusion to Susan Sontag, Dillon presents an idea that is recurrent in his essayistic oeuvre. On the one hand, he tells us, ‘the essayist’s personality’ is what binds the ‘disparate stuff’ that is ‘scattered over numerous more or less focused essays or flung into implausible proximity as part of a single work’.66 It is the center of the work, that which makes it possible through a form of gathering. On the other hand, and at the same time, there is always a centrifugal ‘sense of a self dispersing or disporting itself’ which creates tension with the centripetal force of the essayist’s ‘I’.67 This tension is at work in Dillon’s essays, which combine what Dillon calls a ‘montage of voices’ coming from elsewhere with a distinct and recognizable style.68 The individual ‘I’ is markedly present in Dillon’s essayism, but this ‘I’ is formed through relations of affinity with several others, perhaps no one more clearly than Roland Barthes. In ‘RB and Me: An Education’ (2010), an essay in which Dillon reflects on the ways in which Barthes has had a formative effect on him, Dillon identifies what he sees as Barthes’s central idea: ‘much, possibly all, of what we imagine to inhere in Nature is in fact a veiled emanation of Culture’.69 This insight permeates Barthes’s writing, such as, for example, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Fragments d’un discours amoureux), an essayistic text in which Barthes shows how the language of love – of that which is deeply intimate and deeply felt – is always already and inevitably the language of culture and tradition. In a book full of quotations (‘pieces of various origin have been “put together”’, says Barthes70) and communal figures of language (‘absence’, ‘adorable’, ‘affirmation’, ‘alteration’, ‘anxiety’, just to name a few), Barthes suggests that our experience of love happens through our immersion in language; that is, what we have ‘read, spoken, heard’.71 ‘To try to write love’, we read, ‘is to confront the muck of language.’72 Barthes’s work – A Lover’s Discourse but also other texts that are personal while questioning the assumptions of autobiography, such as Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes – is, to use Adam Phillips’s words, a ‘celebration of language as possibility’, language as that which can allow ‘life stories’ to be told.73 But this possibility is to be understood in the context that these are ‘text[s] with uncertain quotation marks’74 where, Phillips explains, ‘no one would be quite sure whose words were whose’.75 In Dillon’s work, the scene of the writer’s own entry into the language of writing – the language that makes Dillon a memoirist and an essayist, sometimes both at the same time as with In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory (2005) and Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (2017) – is often scripted through his encounter with Barthes’s

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work in his mid-teens, so that Barthes almost comes to stand in for that language which Dillon immerses himself into as he grows into an essayist. In Essayism, Dillon writes about how after the death of his mother he finds in Barthes ‘a passage out of the dismal place in which [he] found [himself]’ through ‘some assurance that the world could not only be recast in words but had been made of language in the first place’.76 Of course, the world is not made only of language but also, as Dillon puts it, ‘grubby reality’. But what Barthes or language gives him is a way of dealing with the ‘hard truths’ of reality.77 Dillon names several sections (or essays) in Essayism ‘On Consolation’, and it is a consolatory function that he attributes to our immersion in language. Indeed, it may be said that the essay form, with what Joan Didion describes as the ‘attempt to make sense’, often performs a consolatory function.78 It does this through placing the essayist in a community of others (other essayists, other writers, other people, future unknown readers included) with whom the essayist finds affinities and confronts ideas while attempting to make sense of their own peculiar experiences. And sometimes, those peculiar experiences are confronted vicariously, through an engagement with others and their writing, precisely because to confront them directly would be too painful or, possibly, too revealing. As Dillon puts it in an interview published in this volume, ‘the affinity is a way of avoiding the intimate. It’s a way of swerving from confession into something else.’79 Dillon develops the subject of the writer’s self being constructed through textual encounters with other writers in ‘On Talking to Yourself’, an essay in Essayism in which he discusses, among others, Sontag, another essayist haunting Dillon’s work. As he often does when grappling with the core of the writers he writes about, Dillon chooses to focus on style: Readers of Sontag’s essays in the 1960s, and for some decades after, could not know that the precision with which she addressed her themes . . . was the pro­ duct of an emotional and creative life raging with ambition and anxiety. Though she was for decades the most recognizable Anglophone critic in person and on the page, Sontag was an impersonal writer, even (or especially) when writing about subjects that bore on her own life, such as gay culture or the meanings of cancer.80 Dillon looks at Sontag’s literary diary for clues about her growth as an essayist and what he finds is the realization that the journal is a working ground not for the expression of a self but for the creation of one. ‘I create myself’, Sontag writes about the practice of keeping a journal.81 ‘And of course what she creates’, Dillon suggests, ‘is an essayist.’82 Sontag hints that the self created in the journals – anticipating its manifestation in the essays – is an ‘invention’: ‘I don’t believe a word I’m saying.’83 The self she creates arises from the accumulation of word lists of various kinds and from affinities with other writers and thinkers she admires – Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick and William H. Gass (a list of essayists that is uncannily evocative of some of Dillon’s own declared favorites). The dissatisfaction with her own writing – which she often felt was too driven by ideas and not enough by language itself – or her admiration for different styles that she longs for in her diaries is, for Dillon, central to Sontag’s essayism, a way of ‘com[ing] apart most productively, if also tormentedly’.84 Sontag’s ‘I’ in her essayistic writing, then, is not

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simply an expression of a self as an essayist but a construction of that self through a confrontation with other writers and also with her own writing as an ‘other’ to be reflected upon. Something similar may be said about Dillon’s own writing – its being in many ways a creation of an essayistic self through relations of affinity and confrontations with other writers. If ‘Sontag thinks of her essays in terms of exemplars provided by other writers’, Dillon often does the same.85 Apart from Barthes, there is, for instance, Hardwick: ‘When I cannot find the right tone and tenor in my writing . . . I turn to the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick.’86 With Barthes, however, he tells us ‘I had found . . . my writer’,87 and Camera Lucida is ‘the book that made me’.88 Barthes as a writer has a formative role for Dillon beyond his self as a writer and he expresses this in a sentence that playfully emulates Barthes’s impressive handling of punctuation: If Bowie invented my adolescent ‘I’ – I thought it at the time: I fell hard for his often stated belief that the self was a thing concocted from one’s influences – it was Barthes who nourished my fantasies about who or what I wanted to be as an adult.89 A self is a textile of influences and gathering of affinities. Dillon often dwells on how the essay is made of fragments or, more precisely, a gathering of fragments. Essayism is a learning ‘to live with fragments, with ruins, with the aggregate, particulate, dusty motion between past and future’.90 The essay is ‘filled with new and disparate aspects or elements, it ranges these new possibilities in series, or better in some curious arrangement’.91 The poetics of the essay in Dillon’s work is then a poetics of affinities and aggregation: ‘I like the idea of the essay as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things.’92 This, however, does not happen at the cost of the specific, whether the specific is an object or an experience: I want the detail, and I want the halo of affinities and correspondences that surrounds it. I want this point in space that is irreducible, but I cannot help admiring the way it sets off all these other points. . . . The detail is only a detail because of what it implies about the rest.93 Dillon uses the image of the essay as an ‘aggregate’94 to refer to that which the essayist writes about – the essay as a collection of subjects and objects – but the poetics of the gathered fragments can be extended to the essayist too: ‘This “I” [of the essayist] is both contained and provisional – just as important, it is dispersed.’95 The essay is a container of fragments held together by the writing ‘I’, but the ‘I’ itself is a ‘patchwork’ of others.96 Language in the essay, then, is conversational in the etymological sense of a ‘dwelling with’ or a ‘turning together’ with ‘the other’. It is a collaborative space that the essayist inhabits, attempts to orchestrate, but ultimately does not own.

Rankine on the Essay as Conversation Like the idea of the essay as an expression of an individual personality, the motif of the essay as a form of conversational speech is well established. Emerson, for instance,

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speaks about Montaigne’s essays as showcasing the ‘language of conversation transferred to a book’: The Essays . . . are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head, treating everything without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. . . . 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 conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.97 Emerson is here describing, above all, Montaigne’s ‘style’, which is conversational in the sense that it has the ease and flow of spoken language and does not seem overly ornate or ‘written’. Style, here, is the embodiment of the man in conversation – language as body or, as per Buffon’s maxim: ‘The style is the man himself.’98 When we read Montaigne, we hear him conversing with us, but Emerson, revealingly, thinks of Montaigne’s essays as a form of ‘soliloquy’ – an act of talking to oneself that may or may not be overheard by others. The suggestion is that the essayist’s style might seem conversational, but the essay is ultimately a monological address with its potential reading being secondary to its status as an essay. Identifying somewhat similar aspects of Montaigne’s conversational style, William Hazlitt thinks of the way the reader is positioned by Montaigne’s writing: 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.99 Readers of Montaigne’s essays can ‘pass through’ life with Montaigne by reading his essays. Unlike in Emerson’s thinking of Montaigne’s essays as ‘soliloquies’, the reader’s experience is taken into account by Hazlitt, but what we do not find in Hazlitt either is the idea of the essay as a genuinely dialogic conversation. The reader experiences what Montaigne recounts experiencing and, in this, they are arguably accessories rather than essential to Montaigne’s conversational essays. Another essayist who thinks of the essay in terms of conversation and the implications this has for reading is the political writer Hilaire Belloc who, in a 1955 essay, writes: These modern essays of ours may be compared to conversation, without 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 alternative outlook – the reply. That cannot be helped. But I fancy the reader supplies this somewhat in his own mind, by the movements of appreciation or indignation with which he receives what is put before him.100 Belloc’s intervention is interesting because while it reiterates the claim that there is little space for the reply in the essay itself (that reply happens in the reader’s mind as they ‘receive’ the essay), Belloc notes that the reader’s response is not necessarily

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appreciative of the essayist but might also be confrontational and full of ‘indignation’. In other words, while ideas about the essay as conversational tend to think of the reader’s engagement with the essay in terms of affinities and mutuality – the essay as table talk among friends – Belloc rightly suggests that the engagement can be contestatory. And indeed, the voices that the essayist collaboratively engages with in the essay do not always form relations of affinity with the ‘I’ of the essayist. Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) illustrates what may be termed the essayistic poetics of affinity and contestation and, in so doing, problematizes the thinking of the essay as a solipsistic and innocuously self-absorbed form of self-expression and self-formation. Instead, Rankine attempts to conjure up a deeply collaborative thinking of the ‘I’ in the essay marked by both affinities and contestations as she navigates, conversationally, deeply dividing issues in contemporary America: namely, racism and white privilege. Just Us is the third book of a trilogy that, among other things, explores different ways in which the relation between the self and the other can be postulated in a contemporary world characterized by specific political and social realities. Don’t Let Me be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) is primarily written in a first-person lyric voice, while Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) problematizes the lyric ‘I’ with the experimental use of the second-person ‘you’. As Ismail Muhammad puts it, in Citizen, Rankine asks how far ‘Black citizens [can] claim the expressive “I” of lyric poetry when a systemically racist state looks upon a Black person and sees, at best, a walking symbol of its greatest fears and, at worst, nothing at all’.101 Just Us, with its emphasis on ‘conversation’ rather than expression, attempts to construct a language of the first-person plural, a more collaborative and communal ‘us’. In doing this, Rankine attempts to overcome something that Belloc identifies as a limit to the essay: Rankine not only includes the ‘alternative outlook’ or the ‘reply’ that Belloc considers to be central to conversation and that he thinks the essay lacks, but also makes that reply constitutive of the voice of the essayist in the book of essays. Indeed, for an ‘us’ to exist in Just Us, Rankine demands engagement, even if only for the other to disagree. This book of essays, which could be fruitfully read in relation to the tradition of the American protest essay, presents a series of somewhat uncomfortable encounters and conversations with white people that seek to open new possibilities for ‘just us’ or what Rankine calls, in an opening poem that frames the essays, ‘a swerve in our relation and the words that carry us, / the care that carries’.102 In this verse, Rankine echoes and adapts Paul Celan’s last verse in ‘Vast, glowing vault’ – ‘The world is gone, I must carry you’ – to suggest the need for a caring relation between the one and the other.103 More specifically, she asks, how do we change the ‘You say and I say’ to we converse?: . . . I am here, without the shrug, attempting to understand how what I want and what I want from you run parallel – justice and the openings for just us.104 Rankine figures this relationship of care in terms of dialogue, thinking of language as that which can help in bringing justice in the real world. Just Us is, then, an attempt at

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enacting this ‘just us’ through conversation between the essayist and a series of white people – husband, friends, strangers. It presents a series of confrontations that often fail to but occasionally lead to an ‘us’, which is dependent on the other acknowledging white privilege and the impact of racism. In ‘liminal spaces i’, which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine both online and in print,105 Rankine presents an airplane encounter in which a white man declares that he does not ‘see color’.106 The essayist retorts that ‘If you can’t see race, you can’t see racism’,107 which leads to a rare opening up of ‘conversation – random, ordinary, exhausting, and full of longing to exist in . . . less segregated spaces’.108 As Katy Waldman puts it, for Rankine the ‘acknowledgment of inequity’ is a prerequisite for any kind of community.109 Rankine’s ‘us’, which Waldman describes as ‘crossracial, a seed planted in the dead land between Self and Other’, is a voice marked by contestation that seeks to find conversational affinities.110 Rankine uses a range of techniques to initiate and establish this difficult conversation in her essays. One of the strategies is to incorporate a multitude of texts and images that make the essays richly polyvocal and intertextual. Rankine’s sources include articles that provide evidence and further details about claims made; infographics; Facebook and Twitter posts; stills and transcripts from videos in the public domain; personal exchanges, including with the essayist’s therapist and with her husband; images of artwork; excerpts from interviews and books by other writers; privately owned as well as historically renowned photos; and much more. Some of these sources are meant to reinforce or ‘Fact Check’ Rankine’s claims.111 Others are chosen for their affinities with Rankine’s thought – such as Bruce Springsteen’s line from ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’: ‘No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin.’112 Others appear from Rankine’s attempt to keep the conversation open even with that which is radically antithetical to her position – a notable example of this is her reproduction of an extract from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which Rankine simply reframes under the title of ‘notes on the state of whiteness’ in Just Us.113 William H. Gass argues that ‘[t]he essay convokes a community of writers. . . . It uses any and each and all of them like instruments in an orchestra.’114 The essay, as we have already seen with Montaigne and Dillon above, often depends on gathering multiple voices into its textual space, but what Rankine’s essays in Just Us show is the potential of the essay to move forward through not only affinity but also contestation. Hence the inclusion of the Jefferson text – which reads as racist – in Just Us but also a range of different voices of ‘the other’ that modulate the ‘I’ constructed here. I find Korhonen’s insights about the predicament of the essayist to be somewhat pertinent here: The essayist cannot escape his/her mental library, the intertextual cosmos organizing his/her living-world, and so the essayistic voice is always haunted by the voices of the dead, by the discourses that precede the possibility of saying ‘I.’ Neither can one avoid the fact that one always writes for someone else, even in a self-portrait or in a diary. It is always someone in the future, someone who has not yet come into being, who is thought to read the words. There are always others – other voices, other readers – from which, with which, and to which the essayist writes. The essayist works within the field occupied and defined already by others, and can never claim to construct a textual self upon a free and independent cogito in the Cartesian sense.115

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‘From which’ voices, ‘with which’ voices and ‘to which’ voices does the ‘I’ of the essay write? Resonating with the protest essay tradition outlined by Norman in which the essayist often seeks to ‘perform the democratic public for which they call’116 and in which the essayist might perform a ‘movement across – but not erasure of – the color line’,117 Rankine experiments in ‘liminal spaces i’ with the essay form and voice in order to attempt to construct a different ‘us’. Rankine’s conception of identity echoes Du Bois’s thinking about ‘doubleconsciousness’ and is based on the idea that the self is radically determined by relations to the other: ‘who I am is in part a response to who [others] are’.118 The form of Rankine’s essays in Just Us is not only an acknowledgment of this but an attempt to intervene within these dynamics. In line with the essay’s tendency to present thought in action, Rankine’s Just Us presents a self turning on itself for answers in the way it recounts the essayist’s various twists and developments in her thinking: ‘I tried to imagine what my presence was doing to him [the white man she converses with]’;119 ‘Why was that thought in my head?’120 But to understand oneself and one’s thoughts is to open oneself to and actively work towards an understanding of ‘the other’ because that other always already marks the self and, of course, one’s conception of one’s own self. ‘The other’ in Just Us and in Rankine’s essays is not simply other people but specifically people implicated in different ways in systemic racism and constructions of identity determined by social conceptions of race. Indeed, it is often argued that to be able to forget this both about oneself and about others is one of the signs of white privilege. To say ‘I don’t see color’, like one of Rankine’s interlocutors in ‘liminal spaces i’, may well be a consequence of being well meaning but it also exposes the fact that one does not really see the way ‘the other’ is often constructed as other in a society marked by repressed or uninhibited racist attitudes. A genuine conversation, then, depends on an acknowledgment of the way ‘the other’ is othered in society but also of the self as other; for example, as marked by white privilege in relation to other people with a different skin color. It is the other man’s acknowledgment of this that leads to the possibility of an ‘us’ in the essay: ‘I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation.’121 The opening of the conversation leads to the inclusion of a text written by the man himself after he was invited by the essayist to respond to her own essay about him. The man, through his ‘reply’ to the essay, is no longer simply a reader of essays but becomes, to a certain extent, a co-writer with Rankine. The man writes he has ‘thought a lot about [their] conversation since that flight’ and that made him notice he had misrepresented something about racism in his hometown.122 The conversation he had with Rankine ‘made [him] realize’ that racism ‘was all around’ him in his childhood.123 In turn, Rankine recounts having ‘read and reread this response’ – something that affects her own thought processes – thus somehow turning herself from a writer to a reader within her own essay.124 The conversational poetics of this essay include but extend beyond the incorporation of voices ‘from which’ and ‘with which’ the voice of the essayist evolves. The voices ‘to which’ the essay is addressed are fundamental, too, and these do not only include the white man whose response is incorporated into the essay but also, for example, mine, as I write about Rankine’s essay now. Indeed, a peculiar quality of Just Us is the force with which it brings about ‘the disturbance of my reality’. Reading the

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essay more than once to write about it for this chapter, I keep being confronted by the necessity to position myself in specific social relations around race and to recognize my engagement as a reader in relation to the text. In different ways from Dillon’s essays, the interplay between the self and the other in Just Us shows the potential of the essay to go beyond self-centeredness and solipsism. Just Us is a response to what Rankine describes as ‘the call for change’.125 It begins from the premise that if we could rethink our ways of being ‘us’ in conversation, then change in the world can happen. Within this context, readers are not expected to, as Sanders puts it, simply ‘relish the spectacle’ presented by the essayist, but to engage with the essay, the essayist and the multiplicity of voices in the essay with an openness to dialogue, confrontation and change. Of course, the essayist has the final word, and although Rankine’s essay is impressively welcoming of other voices, the orchestrating hand in the execution of the essay is hers. Nonetheless, the way she tries to construct a collaborative voice for the essay – even through contestation – shows the political potential of the essay as a form, contrary to Cynthia Ozick’s famous assertion that ‘a genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use’.126 Rankine has often spoken about the way her work marries the personal and the political.127 In the context of Tolentino’s claim that ‘the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was’, Rankine’s attempt to use the personal as a bridge to the political has attracted criticism. Is interpersonal intimacy, the question goes, enough for social solutions? ‘Has the radical tone of our racial politics since [the 2020] uprisings outpaced her?’, Ismail Muhammad asks.128 Is conversation enough, or does change require something entirely different? In an interview published in this volume, Rankine expresses an admiration for people whose work brings about policy changes in the real world.129 What the essay can do, though, she tells us, is allow us to envisage the change that we can then work for: The role of culture in the world, which is where I position myself, is hugely important because it opens up the possibility of change in the mind. If people don’t encounter things that allow them to think past and imagine past those things, we’re not going to get anywhere.130 Just Us presents the possibility of an ‘us’ beyond the ‘I’ and ‘you’. The voice in the essay, then, starts representing something to strive for. As José Felipe Alvergue argues, Rankine’s work offers ‘an innovative poetics . . . [that] provides a semiotic model for an alternative democratic possibility’.131

To Conclude I began with a claim that I then sought to untangle. Let me conclude by trying to tie up some of the loose ends, of which there are many. The ‘I’ of the essayist is constituted by relations of affinity and contestations with the other. The essayist inhabits a language that they do not own. Reliant on other voices and open to future readings, the essay is a conversational and collaborative form that weaves affinities and navigates contestations among readers and writers.

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What this chapter has sought to do is to think of the essay in terms of an individual but necessarily collaborative intervention in the communal by the ‘I’ of the essayist. ‘The other’ modulates the ‘I’ through the voices of other texts and other writers, as well as through the essay’s openness to future readers. This has several implications for our thinking of the essay. If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value – literary or communicative – is not simply expressive. And when the form is used to broach obviously political questions, thus urging us to reconsider the relationship between the ‘I’ and the other in the essay, the essay does not automatically abandon its claim for aesthetic value because the political becomes also a question of form and a question of voice. Rather, the relational collaborative nature of the ‘I’ makes us think of the form as having communal value, irrespective of whether the essayist seeks to make a political or social intervention, as in the case of Rankine, or whether the essayist is writing about the self and the world with less obviously political aims, as in the case of Dillon. Indeed, as we have seen in this chapter, the essay conceives of the individual ‘I’ as central to the form but also marked by relations of affinity and contestation with a multiplicity of other texts, other writers, other people and other readers. To playfully end in the spirit of conversation, we could say then that a third and fourth ‘pole’ should be added to the two Hoagland envisages as establishing the two poles of the essay. ‘This is what I think’ and ‘this is who I am’ are affected, co-determined even, by ‘this is what we think’ and ‘this is who we are’. Or, to echo Sanders, the essay often performs a ‘consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos’, but this consciousness, because of the very language it inhabits but does not own, is always more than ‘single’ and always more than ‘mine’.

Notes  1. I would like to thank Kurt Borg, Ivan Callus, Jason Childs, Bob Cowser Jr, Nicholas Osborne, Nicole B. Wallack and Kara Wittman for their generous and insightful feedback on this chapter.   2. Edward Hoagland, ‘What I Think, What I Am’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 101–3 (102).   3. Ibid., 102.   4. Scott Russell Sanders, ‘From “The Singular First Person”’, in Essayists on the Essay, 124–6 (124).   5. Ibid., 124.   6. Sara Levine, ‘From “The Self on the Shelf”’, in Essayists on the Essay, 159–66 (159).   7. Phillip Lopate, ‘What Happened to the Personal Essay?’, in Essayists on the Essay, 127–36 (128).   8. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Practice’, in The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel, Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 267–75 (273).   9. Montaigne, ‘Of Repentance’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 610–21 (610). 10. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 1:24–7 (25). 11. Ibid., 26.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Woolf, ‘A Book of Essays’, in Essays of Virginia Woolf, 2:212–14 (213). Michael Hamburger, ‘An Essay on the Essay’, in Essayists on the Essay, 91–3 (92). Ibid., 93. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 92. Laura Bennett, ‘The First-Person Industrial Complex’, Slate, September 14, 2015, http:// www.slate.com/articles/life/technology/2015/09/the_first_person_industrial_complex_ how_the_harrowing_personal_essay_took.html?via=gdpr-consent. 19. Jia Tolentino, ‘The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over’, The New Yorker, May 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. For discussions of post-truth, see James Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017) and Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 25. Tolentino, ‘Personal-Essay Boom’. 26. Montaigne, ‘Of Repentance’, 611. 27. Ibid., 611. 28. E. B. White, foreword to Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999), ix–xi (ix). 29. Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), xxiii–liv (xxxi). 30. Montaigne, ‘To the Reader of the Essais’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 2. 31. White, foreword to Essays of E. B. White, ix–x. 32. Namrata Poddar, ‘Report from the Field: Of Myopia, White Supremacy and the Personal Essay’, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, June 4, 2018, https://www.vidaweb.org/reportfrom-the-field-of-myopia-white-supremacy-and-the-personal-essay/. 33. Merve Emre, ‘Two Paths for the Personal Essay’, Boston Review, August 22, 2017, https:// bostonreview.net/literature-culture/merve-emre-two-paths-personal-essay. 34. Poddar, ‘Report from the Field’, emphasis in original. 35. For an overview of competing theoretical approaches to the essay, see Mario Aquilina, ‘Introduction: Thinking the Essay at the Limits’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 1–17. 36. Brian Norman, The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 39. 37. Ibid., 17. 38. Ibid., 18. 39. Ibid., 17. 40. Ibid., 29, emphasis in original. 41. Ibid., 27. 42. Ibid., 15. 43. Ibid., 25. 44. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, Atlantic Monthly, August 1897, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negropeople/305446/. 45. Norman, American Protest Essay, 155. 46. See Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 574.

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47. As reproduced in Donald M. Frame, introduction to Complete Works of Montaigne, v–xiv (ix). 48. Montaigne, ‘Of Three Kinds of Association’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 621–30 (629). 49. Frame, introduction to Complete Works of Montaigne, x. 50. Montaigne, ‘That Our Desire Is Increased by Difficulty’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 463–8 (467). 51. Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 318–457 (319). 52. Ibid., 319. 53. Montaigne, ‘Of Three Kinds of Association’, 625. 54. Montaigne, ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, in Complete Works of Montaigne, 638–84 (667). 55. Ibid., 667. 56. O. B. Hardison Jr, ‘Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay’, in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 11–28 (25). 57. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Literary Ethics: An Oration Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 95–116 (103). 58. Kuisma Korhonen, Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter, From Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (New York: Humanity Books, 2006), 397. 59. Ibid., 20. 60. Ibid., 16. 61. Ibid., 18. 62. Ibid., 18. 63. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 64. For a lucid survey of relevant ideas in Derrida’s work, see Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 124–57. 65. Brian Dillon, ‘Energy and Rue: An Essay on Essays’, in Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 348–59 (351). 66. Ibid., 351. 67. Ibid., 351. 68. Ibid., 352. 69. Brian Dillon, ‘RB and Me: An Education’, in Objects in This Mirror, 320–47 (325). 70. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (1978; repr., London: Vintage, 2002), 8. 71. Ibid., 9. 72. Ibid., 99, emphasis in original. 73. Adam Phillips, foreword to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), v–xv (xiv). 74. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 106. 75. Phillips, foreword to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, xiii. 76. Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 92. 77. Ibid., 93. 78. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005; repr., New York: Vintage International, 2007). 79. Brian Dillon, this volume, p. 163.

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 80. Dillon, Essayism, 95.   81. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries, 1964–1980, ed. David Reiff (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), cited in Dillon, Essayism, 99.  82. Dillon, Essayism, 99.   83. Sontag, cited in Dillon, Essayism, 99.  84. Dillon, Essayism, 102.   85. Ibid., 99.   86. Ibid., 47.   87. Dillon, ‘RB and Me’, 326, emphasis in original.  88. Dillon, Essayism, 108.   89. Dillon, ‘RB and Me’, 326.  90. Dillon, Essayism, 136.   91. Ibid., 137.   92. Ibid., 68, emphasis in original.   93. Ibid., 80.   94. Ibid., 85.   95. Ibid., 18.   96. Ibid., 32.  97. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Montaigne, or the Skeptic’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4, Representative Men: Seven Lectures, ed. Wallace E. Williams and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 85–105 (95).   98. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Discours sur le style: A Facsimile of the 12th Edition (Hull: Hull French Texts, 1978), xvii.   99. William Hazlitt, ‘On the Periodical Essayists’, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), 177–207 (181–2). 100. Hilaire Belloc, ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’, in Essayists on the Essay, 51–4 (52). 101. Ismail Muhammad, ‘Claudia Rankine’s Quest for Racial Dialogue’, The Atlantic, October 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/claudia-rankines-quest-forracial-dialogue/615502/. 102. Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (London: Allen Lane, 2020), 11. 103. Paul Celan, ‘Grosse glühende Wölbung’, in Atemwende, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert with the assistance of Rolf Bücher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 97. 104. Rankine, Just Us, 11. 105. See Claudia Rankine, ‘I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.’, New York Times Magazine, June 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/07/17/magazine/white-men-privilege.html. 106. Rankine, Just Us, 49. 107. Ibid., 51. 108. Ibid., 51. 109. Katy Waldman, ‘The Burdened Insights of Claudia Rankine’s “Just Us”’, The New Yorker, September 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-misspent-insightsof-claudia-rankines-just-us. 110. Ibid. 111. Rankine, Just Us, 20. 112. Ibid., 49. 113. Ibid., 107–17. 114. William H. Gass, ‘Emerson and the Essay’, in Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 9–49 (27). 115. Korhonen, Textual Friendship, 20.

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116. Norman, American Protest Essay, 23. 117. Ibid., 16. 118. Rankine, Just Us, 21. 119. Ibid., 25. 120. Ibid., 37. 121. Ibid., 51. 122. Ibid., 51. 123. Ibid., 53. 124. Ibid., 53. 125. Ibid., 5. 126. Cynthia Ozick, ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’, in Quarrel & Quandary: Essays (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 178–87 (178). 127. See the interview in this volume and, for example, David L. Ulin, ‘Poet Claudia Rankine Ruminates on the Body Politic in “Citizen”’, Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2014, https:// www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-claudia-rankine-20141012-story.html. 128. Muhammad, ‘Claudia Rankine’s Quest’. 129. Claudia Rankine, this volume, p. 159. 130. Ibid. 131. José Felipe Alvergue, ‘Lyric Redress: The Racial Politics of Voice and American Personhood’, Criticism 60, no. 2 (2018): 221–45 (222).

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2 The Birth of the English Essay Alan Stewart

I

n 1615, Nicholas Breton dedicated his new book, Characters vpon Essaies Morall, and Diuine, to the Attorney General, Sir Francis Bacon.1 ‘Worthy Knight’, he wrote, ‘I haue read of many Essaies’ but ‘when I lookt into the forme, or nature of their writing, I haue beene of the conceit, that they were but Imitators of your breaking the ice to their inuentions’.2 Bacon had broken the ice when he published his collection of Essayes eighteen years earlier, in 1597: ten short pieces of largely aphoristic assertions on studies, discourse, ceremonies and respects, followers and friends, suitors, expense, regiment of health, honor and reputation, faction, and negotiation.3 Since then, there had indeed appeared ‘many Essaies’, as the essay collection, in many forms, both prose and verse, became a veritable vogue. Samuel Daniel published his Poeticall Essayes in 1599, and Sir William Cornwallis his two books of Essayes in 1600.4 Robert Johnson’s Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers in 1601 was followed by John Florio’s translation of The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne in 1603, Alexander Craige’s Poeticall Essayes in 1604 and John Davies’s Wittes Pilgrimage, (by Poeticall Essaies) in 1605.5 Within a decade, these would be joined by D. T. Gent.’s Essaies Politicke, and Morall (1608) and Essayes, Morall and Theologicall (1609), the minister Thomas Tukes’s New Essayes: Meditations, and Vowes (1614), George Wither’s Abvses Stript, and Whipt. Or Satirical Essayes (1613), a collection of Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others (1615) by John Stephens the younger of Lincoln’s Inn, and a revised set by Bacon (1612).6 But it was to Bacon’s 1597 volume that Breton looked as the great innovator of the genre. To modern critics, however, the priority of Bacon is by no means a given. Chronologically, the icebreaker for the essay collection – and the title Essays – was clearly not Bacon, but Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais were first published a full seventeen years earlier and had appeared in revised editions in 1588 and 1595.7 Claire de Obaldia, in her influential study The Essayistic Spirit, is typical in referring to Montaigne as ‘the official founder of the genre’, who laid down the parameters of what the essay might be. When Montaigne describes his Essais as the ‘only book of its kind in the world’, she argues, he is writing not just in the sense of being referable to one unmistakable author but in the sense of being the expression of the author’s essence (‘a book of one substance with its author, proper to me and a limb of my life’), an indissociable extension of himself.8 Bacon’s Essayes are a long way from fitting this Montaignian model. Joshua Scodel pits Montaigne’s ‘distinctively self-revelatory compositions’ against Bacon’s ‘impersonal

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didactic essays’,9 while Michael Kiernan, the editor of the Essayes for The Oxford Francis Bacon, concludes that ‘there is little in style or thought to link Bacon’s stark observations . . . with Montaigne’s personal ruminations’.10 The terms in which this comparison is made may also explain why Montaigne is central to twentieth-century conceptions of the essay, with his personal self-revelation corresponding far more directly to the personal nature of the modern genre. The continued centrality of Montaigne is easily adduced from the titles of recent collections such as Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time and On Essays: Montaigne to the Present,11 and there is little room in a study like de Obaldia’s for Bacon, who is mentioned only in passing and does not appear in her bibliography.12 Yet even de Obaldia admits at one point that ‘the essay is usually seen to have two founders, the Frenchman (or Continental) Montaigne and the Englishman Bacon’,13 and recent years have seen a series of attempts to unsettle Montaigne’s primacy with what Mario Aquilina calls ‘alternative histories of the essay’.14 Some of these excavate a longer history of the essay in which classical writers like Seneca, Plutarch and Aulus Gellius are recovered as crucial models.15 Others return to the late sixteenth-century emergence of the Montaignian essay to complicate the given narrative.16 In this chapter, I add to this latter inquiry by attempting to recapture the vexed and unsettled early years of the English essay, drawing on the debates by Bacon’s contemporaries – many of them essayists themselves – as to what the essay was, and should be. I shall suggest that it was the Baconian model that took precedence in England in the early seventeenth century – to the extent that Montaigne was on occasion castigated for not writing proper essays in the Baconian vein. And from that starting point, I shall offer a counter-history of the early English essay that points to an understanding of the genre very different from what we have inherited: an essay invested less in unmistakable authorial essence and more in a future-oriented and collaborative mode. *** As John Jeremiah Sullivan has recently pointed out,17 perhaps the earliest attempt to explain the ‘essai’, just four years after Montaigne published his first collection, came from François Grudé, sieur de la Croix du Maine: In the first place, this title or inscription is quite modest, for if one takes the word ‘Essay’ in the spirit of ‘coup d’Essay’, or apprenticeship, it sounds very humble and self-deprecating, and suggests naught of either excellence or arrogance; yet if the word be taken to mean instead ‘proofs’ or ‘experiments’, that is to say, a discourse modeling itself on those, the title remains well chosen.18 Grudé here establishes the two definitions of ‘essai’ – what Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French–English dictionary will render as ‘[a]n essay, proofe, tryall, experiment’ versus ‘an offer, attempt, a tast or touch of a thing to know it by’19 – and is insistent that Montaigne’s Essais are proofs or experiments rather than attempts. But, as I shall suggest, this was not the only verdict on what essays should be. In his collection of fifty essays published in 1600–1, Sir William Cornwallis includes a substantial meditation ‘Of Essayes and Bookes’.20 Earlier in his book, Cornwallis praises Montaigne, claiming that – like Plato for philosophy and Tacitus

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for history – ‘[f]or profitable Recreation, that Noble French Knight, the Lord de Montaigne is most excellent’.21 Despite his praise for Montaigne as a moral philosopher, however, when he attempts to define the essay, Cornwallis explicitly excludes Montaigne’s: I Hould neither Plutarches, nor none of these auncient short manner of writings, nor Montaignes, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed Essayes, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure the sharpest triall.22 While Grudé sees Montaigne’s essays as (strong) experiments, Cornwallis by contrast insists on essays as ideally (weak) attempts: ‘mine are Essayes’, he claims, since he is ‘but newly bound Prentice’ – a newly indentured apprentice – ‘to the inquisition of knowledge’.23 Cornwallis is here evoking James VI of Scotland’s 1584 debut with The Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie, which deployed the conceit that the king was a poetic novice trying out his ‘essayes’ or attempts in verse: one poet in a dedicatory verse, taking his cue from the title, dutifully rhapsodizes how James ‘doeth in tender yearis essay / Aboue his age with skill our arts to blaise’.24 Cornwallis develops that ‘prentice’ understanding here through a series of similes, claiming an essayist ‘vse[s] these papers as a Painters boy a board, that is trying to bring his hand and his fancie acquainted’,25 or ‘like a Scriuenour trying his Pen before he ingrosseth his worke’ (that is, before he embarks on attempting the large, formal hand required by certain legal documents).26 Yet this is not merely about the essayist being an untried writer: it also points to the contents and form of the essay, which are incomplete and imperfect. In Cornwallis’s description, the essay is a manner of writing well befitting vndigested motio[n]s, or a head not knowing his stre[n]gth like a circumspect runner trying for a starte, or prouidence that tastes before she buyes: for it is easier to thinke wel then to do well, and no triall to haue handsome dapper conceites runne inuisibly in a braine, but to put them out, and then looke vppon them: If they proue nothing but wordes, yet they breake not promise with the world, for they say but an Essay.27 It is this sense of ‘vndigested motio[n]s’ or ‘handsome dapper conceites’ brought into the light prematurely that links many of the collections of Essayes published at this time. Bacon claims that he is publishing this volume to pre-empt illicit circulation of his work (a charge Cornwallis also makes), writing to his brother Anthony that ‘I doe nowe like some that haue an Orcharde ill neighbored, that gather their fruit before it is ripe, to preuent stealing.’28 His Essayes are fruit yet to ripen, ‘fragments of my conceites’,29 ‘like the late new halfe-pence, which though the Siluer were good, yet the peeces were small’.30 In the same spirit, Robert Johnson subtitles his 1601 collection as ‘imperfect offers’.31 A satirical echo of this assessment can be found in the drama of the period: Ben Jonson’s foolish Sir Politic Would-Be (in Volpone) is exposed as having written nothing more than ‘notes, / Drawne out of Play-bookes--- . . . / And some Essayes’,32 while his Jack Daw (in Epicœne) condemns Plutarch and Seneca as ‘Graue Asses! meere Essaists! a few loose Sentences, and that’s all.’33 Elsewhere Jonson, clearly no lover of essays, attacks people ‘that write out of what they presently find or meet,

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without choice . . . raw, and undigested’, including in his volley ‘all the Essayists, even their Master Mountaigne’.34 To say that essays are undigested and imperfect, however, is not to suggest that they will not improve: rather, it is an insistence that they are always works in progress. As Scott Black notes in a perceptive reading, ‘Cornwallis announces his own Essayes are properly essays because they are registers not of successful thought but of a process of thinking.’35 That process, Black suggests, lies in Cornwallis’s injunction ‘to put them out, and then looke vppon them’; in other words, he ‘shift[s] the terms from books (writing) to persons (reading)’.36 I would add that the reading that the essayist has in mind is not, however, as passive as ‘looke vppon them’ might suggest. When D. T. (usually identified as Daniel Tuvill37) published his first collection in 1608, he made no attempt to hide his inspiration in Florio’s Montaigne: he ostentatiously gave it the same title, Essaies Politicke, and Morall, and dedicated it to the lead dedicatee of Florio’s book: Anne, Lady Harrington. But, like Cornwallis, he stressed the immature quality of his work, going a step further by reducing the newly bound apprentice to a newborn infant. The desire to serve his patron, he claims, ‘begot this young and tender Infant; whom I presum’d, vpon his birth (beeing yet an Embrio in his fathers braine) to devote, & consecrate wholly to your honourable Selfe, as to the chiefe and finall end of his beeing’.38 At that age, ‘His yeeres deny him that length of breath, which should enable him to holde out in a continued, and long discourse’ – and therefore ‘Essaies are the things hee vttereth.’39 Although still a tender infant, however, Essaies has potential: ‘[h]is capacitie is not of the weakest’, and so ‘by conversing with your Ladiship’, D. T. assures Lady Harrington, ‘his ruder ignorance may be reduced to a better forme’.40 Here the recipient is not merely a reader of a previously written text, as we might expect, but someone with whom the essays enter into a future conversation. It is this notion of the essay that we find in a fleeting but telling allusion in a 1611 text by Bacon’s friend, Fulke Greville. Greville writes of letting his own writings ‘take their fortunes (like Essayes) onely to tempt, and stir up some more free Genius, to fashion the whole frame into finer mould for the worlds use’.41 Not only do these ‘Essayes’ need to find a future fashioner (a ‘more free Genius’), but that secondary fashioning is then intended ‘for the worlds use’ – in other words, the reworking of essays continues. In what follows, I want to take seriously these metaphors of essays conversing with and being fashioned by their future readers, and argue that the seed is present in Bacon’s 1597 volume. Although Bacon’s 1597 book is remembered for the Essayes, they were in fact only one element of three, as the title page announced: Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. While Bacon would later publish his expanded Essayes alone, he seems to have insisted on this initial arrangement, quashing a previous attempt to publish the Essayes accompanied by a different text.42 In this printing, then, we are asked to consider the relationship between the essays, the religious meditations, and the places of persuasion and dissuasion. There are twelve Religious Meditations in Latin on theological topics,43 and these work very differently from the Essayes. Rather than simply a collection of commonplaces on a topic, each meditates on a verse of scripture. To take one example: ‘De Spe terrestri’ (‘Of earthly hope’) features a number of phrases that relate to the topic ‘Spes’ (‘hope’), but as the printed page’s typography betrays, the important line is the first one, a variation on Ecclesiastes 6:8 which the Bishops’ Bible renders as ‘The cleare sight of the eye, is better then that the soule shoulde walke after desires of the lust’;44 the

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remainder of the entry meditates on the opposition of ‘the cleare sight of the eye’ and ‘desires of the lust’ to expatiate on earthly hope. In a later dedicatory epistle to Henry, Prince of Wales, Bacon would tellingly describe essays as ‘dispersed Meditacions’: here we see the two forms side by side, the essays with their dispersed thoughts, the meditations with their focus.45 The third form in the 1597 volume, the ‘places of perswasion and disswasion’, now known as the Colours of Good and Evill, represents a third way of developing a topic, providing rhetorical ‘colours’ to strengthen an argument, both pro and con. As Bacon revealed in a letter to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, these were based on book one of Aristotle’s Rhetoric – a work he found both hugely important and strangely lacking: the man being a Grecian and of a hasty wit, having hardly a discerning patience, much less a teaching patience, hath so delivered the matter, as I am glad to do the part of a good house-hen, which without any strangeness will sit upon pheasants’ eggs.46 Bacon here is a future reader of Aristotle, but also a rewriter, the hen who will bring a pheasant’s eggs to hatch. Not that he is confident that he has done the job fully: he suggests that its ‘full understanding and use’ would be ‘best pleasing the tastes of such wits as are patient to stay the digesting and soluting unto themselves of that which is sharp and subtile’.47 And so Bacon hands on that task of digesting and soluting to the dedicatee Lord Mountjoy – another future reader. Elsewhere in the Colours of Good and Evill, Bacon claims that ‘many inceptions [beginnings] are but as Epicurus termeth them, tentamenta, that is, imperfect offers, and essayes, which vanish and come to no substance without an iteration’.48 He again sees ‘essayes’ as ‘imperfect offers’ – but Bacon also points to the crucial importance of the further ‘iteration’. Here, then, through the three different genres (essays, meditations, colors), we are also introduced to three different modes or moments of dealing with materials, but in each case Bacon’s emphasis is on the process going forward. There is early evidence that Bacon’s first readers intuited this emphasis on process, especially revision. The first explicit reference to the Essayes in print comes in John Willis’s 1602 shorthand manual, The Art of Stenographie, in a section explaining the use of ‘The note of Interlineation’, ^, ‘whose vse is to direct vs to that which is written aboue the line, or in the margine’.49 His example quotes from ‘F. Bacon in his Essayes’, specifically ‘Of Discourse’: Some in their Discourse, desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to holde all arguments, then of iudgement in discerning what is true. ^ Some haue certaine Common-places and Theames, wherein they are good, and want varietie: which kind of pouertie is for the most part tedious, & now and then rediculous.50 Between the two sentences, he inserts his ‘note of Interlineation’ (^) to signal the need to include the text that is printed in the right margin: ^As if it were prayse to knowe what might be said, and not what should be thought.51 Here Willis is simply reinserting a sentence that has been omitted from his quotation, but the choice of Bacon’s Essayes to display the mechanics of interpolation is highly

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suggestive. For Bacon published his Essayes in the full expectation that they would be not only read, but rewritten, both by himself and collaboratively by others. And it is in this last point that Bacon’s model diverges so strongly from Montaigne’s. Montaigne famously engaged in major revisions of his Essais – taking a printed copy of his book, like any other reader, and elaborating his revisions as responses in the margins of the book. But Bacon’s work not only allows but actively calls for other future readers to rewrite his work. To explore this further, I shall look in more detail at the first essay of the 1597 volume, ‘Of Studies’, which sets the tone for the collection. Only 254 words long, in it can easily be seen the ‘loose sentences’ that the essayists’ critics deride, a feature that the pilcrows dividing the sentences only serve to accentuate. This is not to say that the essays are random jottings: indeed, they display a very tight construction controlled by what Brian Vickers has analyzed as ‘syntactical symmetry’.52 The opening sentences lay out a series of assertions about studies: Studies serue for pastimes, for ornaments & for abilities. Their chiefe vse for pastime is in priuatenes and retiring; for ornamente is in discourse, and for abilitie is in iudgement. For expert men can execute, but learned men are fittest to iudge or censure.53 Even in this opening section, Bacon presents what will become his characteristic techniques. Subjects are elaborated through their multiple aspects, almost always grouped in threes, so studies here serve for pastimes, ornaments and abilities. Then for each of those three possibilities is designated its chief use: pastime in privateness and retiring, ornament in discourse, ability in judgment. In Bacon’s hands, each pilcrow designates a new thought, albeit one that is linked to what has gone before. So the second sentence hints at the three previous scenarios (privateness and retiring, discourse, judgment) to develop another thought: ‘¶ To spend too much time in them is slouth, to vse them too much for ornament is affectation: to make iudgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a Scholler.’54 In the third sentence, Bacon characterizes various people’s reaction to studies: ¶ Craftie men contemne55 them, simple men admire them, wise men vse them: For they teach not their owne vse, but that is a wisedome without them: and aboue them wonne by obseruation.56 Another brief injunction follows – ‘¶ Reade not to contradict, nor to belieue, but to waigh and consider’ – before Bacon moves to the different types of book: ¶ Some bookes are to bee tasted, others to bee swallowed, and some few to bee chewed and disgested: That is, some bookes are to be read only in partes; others to be read, but cursorily, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention.57 The earlier set of scenarios (privateness and retiring, discourse, judgment) may still be lurking behind the essay’s most famous pronouncement: ‘¶ Reading maketh a full man, conference a readye man, and writing an exacte man.’58 Bacon then develops the negative version of this state of affairs:

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And therefore if a man write little, he had neede haue a great memorie, if he conferre little, he had neede haue a present wit, and if he reade little, he had neede haue much cunning, to seeme to know that he doth not.59 The essay ends with a thumbnail sketch of the qualities of individual ‘studies’, what we might now call disciplines: ‘¶ Histories make men wise, Poets wittie: the Mathematickes subtle, naturall Phylosophie deepe: Morall graue, Logicke and Rhetoricke able to contend.’60 Despite the certainty of the formulations, this was hardly Bacon’s last word on studies. Bacon famously returned to his Essayes throughout his lifetime, revising and expanding early essays, while adding others.61 In the second printed version of 1612, ‘Of Studies’, which has slipped from first to twenty-ninth place in the essays, now opens: Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability; their chief vse for delight, is, in priuatnesse, and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse, and for abilitie, is in iudgement. For expert men can execute, but learned men are fittest to iudge or censure.62 The changes here are slight: ‘pastime’ has become ‘delight’, and the plural ‘ornaments’ and ‘abilities’ are reduced to the singular ‘Ornament’ and ‘Ability’. By the time the third printed English version appears in 1625, however, when it is the fiftieth of fiftyeight essays, Bacon has expanded his thoughts quite considerably: Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability. Their Chief Vse for Delight, is in Priuatenesse and Retiring; For Ornament, is in Discourse; And for Ability, is in the Iudgement and Disposition of Businesse. For Expert Men can Execute, and perhaps Iudge of particulars, one by one; But the generall Counsels, and the Plots, and Marshalling of Affaires, come best from those that are Learned.63 ‘Iudgement’ is now much more specifically ‘Iudgement and Disposition of Businesse’; expert men can execute but also ‘perhaps Iudge of particulars, one by one’, but it is left to learned men not only to judge or censure, but to take responsibility for ‘the generall Counsels, and the Plots, and Marshalling of Affaires’ (thus bolstering Bacon’s estimation of learned over expert men). Here we can see Bacon’s ‘interlineation’ – to borrow Willis’s term – at work, as essays are revisited, tweaked, expanded, revised. But rather than Bacon being intent on producing any form of teleological final text, his goal is to continue the process of essay writing. It was not only Bacon rewriting his essays. Throughout the seventeenth century, we find reworkings of ‘Of Studies’ (to stick with just this one essay) in a bewildering variety of texts – political, religious, educational, professional and medical. Some of these are wholesale liftings, as in the 1640 Ros Cœli or William Freke’s Select Essays,64 but others show varying levels of adaptation. In 1622, the Protestant polemicist Thomas Scott used Bacon’s sentence to exhort his English readers to study ‘the Belgicke pismire’, or United Provinces: As one saith very well, that Reading makes a full man, writing a perfect man, and speaking a ready man: so say I heere: consider the Pismire as a Naturalist, it will

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alan stewart make thee a great scholler; consider her as a Moralist, it will make thee a good and diligent man; Consider her as a Politician, it will make thee a good Citizen, a good Common-wealths-man.65

Here, Scott implies that the phrase is the work of an individual author, ‘[a]s one saith’. But in many other cases, Bacon’s line is lifted without comment, or treated as if it were proverbial or universal wisdom. Thus in a 1613 exegesis of Matthew 18:21, in which ‘Peter said vnto Iesus, Lord, how oft shall I forgiue my brother if he sinne against mee, &c.’, John Boys praises ‘Peters diligence questioning and arguing with his Master about that hee taught a little before, vers. 15’,66 noting ‘it is a commendable practise, for as reading maketh a full man, so conference a ready man’.67 In exhorting ‘[m]inisters, of all men, to be painfull in their Calling’, John Spencer in 1658 asserts that ‘thou must read diligently, confer often, observe daily. Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.’68 William Higford’s 1658 ‘advice to his grandson’ described how the Jesuits, after lectures in their colleges and schools, meet together, hold disputation, whet their wits by discourse, and rivet what they have heard, adding thereunto writing the heads for the helps of fallible memory: thus the work is done. Reading maketh an able man, Discourse a ready man, and writing a perfect man.69 Silently adapting the sentence to his profession, the Buckinghamshire minister William Foster wrote in 1631 that ‘Reading in time may make one learned, writing Iudicious, and often preaching a ready man.’70 A 1678 treatise on ‘preternatural tumours’ adapts the sentence to bear out the author’s contention that the foundations for a life in physic consisted in ‘Judgment and Experience: for as reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; so also doth Experience give us the liveliest character of a knowing man’.71 In 1675, George Townesend recommends to a young clerk of the Court of Common Pleas that he ‘take Notes of his Reading of the Law under fit Heads and Titles’, since a clerk ‘ought not to trust so to his memory. Reading makes a full Man, Conference a ready Man, Writing an exact Man.’72 This kind of adaptation seems to have got underway even before Bacon’s Essayes appeared in print. In 1596, Edward Monings published an account of the diplomatic visit that year of Henry Clinton, second earl of Lincoln, to the court of the Landgrave of Hesse. In it, he includes a passage in praise of the Landgrave’s education, in which Bacon’s ‘Of Studies’ – presumably read in manuscript – can be heard clearly: His education prince-like, generally knowen in all things, & excellent in many, seasoning his grave & mor important studies for ability in iudgment, with studies of pastime for retiring, as in poetrie, musike, and the Mathemitikes [sic] and for ornament in discourse in the languages, French, Italian, & English, wherein he is expert reading much, conferring and writting much[,] he is a full man, a readie man, an exact man.73 My examples thus far have all been from printed texts, but they were probably massively outnumbered by the adaptations of the Essayes in personal manuscript collections. An astonishing variety survive:74 by the book collector John Morris,75 the commonplace

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bookkeeper Edward Pudsey,76 the Oxford scholar Simon Sloper,77 the Durham attorney Christopher Mickleton,78 the lawyer and politician William Drake,79 the royalist playwright Sir Samuel Tuke,80 the translator and poet Sir Edward Sherburne,81 the antiquary Francis Cherry82 and Robert Marsham, fourth Baronet Marsham.83 Many others are now anonymous.84 Sometimes these manuscript versions could be misleading. On her death in 1697, Grace, Lady Gethin left to her relatives ‘a collection of choice discourses, pleasant apothegmes, and witty sentences / written by her for the most part, by way of essay, and at spare hours’; her relatives published the collection posthumously, without realizing that Lady Gethin had indeed ‘collected’ her discourses and done the minimum to adapt them: her essay ‘Of Reading’ is simply Bacon’s ‘Of Studies’, with ‘studies’ substituted throughout by ‘reading’.85 And even the earliest manuscripts circulating of the Essayes show this habit. The library of Trinity College, Cambridge, contains a manuscript version of the Essayes that probably predated the 1597 print publication: but after the ten familiar essays, the same scribe has added others – ‘Of Hope, Envie, Hatred, Feare and Contempt’, ‘Of Time’, ‘Of Solitariness’ – that scholars have judged not to be Bacon’s.86 It may be, then, that the scribe moved, almost seamlessly, from copying Bacon’s essays to writing their own. My point in recovering this long history of borrowing is not to claim that all these writers are necessarily alluding to the authorial figure of Francis Bacon when they copy or rewrite or continue his essay writing. Instead, I suggest they take part in the specific kind of intellectual work that Bacon imagined for his essays back in 1597. While Montaigne presents the Essais as ‘a book of one substance with its author’, Bacon’s Essayes present themselves as only the first step in an ongoing, collaborative conversation of reading, writing, rereading and rewriting. This might suggest an alternative tradition for the early English essay collection – a tradition that has become lost, as we invest so heavily in the personal and the expressive essay inspired by Montaigne’s. But what would it mean to look back to Bacon as the founder of the English essay tradition, rather than to Montaigne? His Essayes – tender infants of a newly bound apprentice, fragments of conceits, raw and undigested, imperfect offers, pheasants’ eggs looking for a good house-hen to do her part – valorize the work-in-progress over the final product; future possibilities over present knowledges; the communal and collaborative over the individual and solipsistic. Their built-in dialogism means that Bacon’s Essayes are not solely the published work of a particular historical figure at a particular historical moment – those are just the ‘essays, or imperfect offers’ – but an entire tradition that sees knowledge as future-oriented collaboration, with all the open-ended possibility that entails.

Notes   1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2021 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. I am grateful to Andrew Gordon, Kathryn Murphy and Angus Vine for their comments then, and to Mario Aquilina and Nicole Wallack for their insights (and patience) in reading successive drafts.  2. Nicholas Breton, Characters vpon Essaies Morall, and Diuine (London: John Gwillim, 1615), A3v–A4r.

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 3. Francis Bacon, Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion (London: Humfrey Hooper, 1597).   4. Samuel Daniel, The Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyel (London: Simon Waterson, 1599) and William Cornwallis, Essayes (London: Edmund Mattes, 1600).   5. Robert Johnson, Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers (London: John Barnes, 1601); Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1603); Alexander Craige, The Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane (London: William White, 1604); and John Davies, Wittes Pilgrimage, (by Poeticall Essaies) (London: John Browne, 1605).  6. D. T., Essaies Politicke, and Morall (London: Mathew Lownes, 1608); D. T., Essayes, Morall and Theologicall (London: Eleazar Edgar, 1609); Thomas Tuke, New Essayes: Meditations, and Vowes (London: William Bladon, 1614); George Wither, Abvses Stript, and Whipt. Or Satirical Essayes (London: Francis Burton, 1613); John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others (London: Roger Barnes, 1615), revised as Essayes and Characters, Ironicall and Instructiue (London: Phillip Knight, 1615); and Francis Bacon, The Essaies of S[i]r Francis Bacon Knight, the Kings Solliciter Generall (London: John Beale, 1612).  7. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essais (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1580); Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1588); and Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1595).  8. Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1, emphasis in original.  9. Joshua Scodel, ‘The Early English Essay’, in A Companion to British Literature, vol. 2, Early Modern Literature 1450–1660, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 213–30 (213). 10. Michael Kiernan, introduction to The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall, by Francis Bacon, vol. 15 of The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), xix–cviii (xlviii). For earlier attempts to link Bacon and Montaigne, see Pierre Villey, Montaigne et François Bacon (Paris: Revue de la Renaissance, 1913) and Jacob Zeitlin, ‘The Development of Bacon’s Essays: With Special Reference to the Question of Montaigne’s Influence upon Them’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 27, no. 4 (1928): 496–519. 11. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, eds., Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012) and Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, eds., On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 12. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 2, 7n22, 13. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Mario Aquilina, ‘Introduction: Thinking the Essay at the Limits’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 1–17 (1). Aquilina cites John D’Agata, ed., The Lost Origins of the Essay (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009) and Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 5–39. 15. For example, see Warren Boutcher, ‘The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century’, in On Essays, 56–78. 16. See John Lee, ‘The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne and Bacon’, in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 2, ed. Michael Hattaway, 2nd ed. (Chichester: John Wiley, 2010), 437–46; Scodel, ‘Early English Essay’, 213–30; John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Introduction: The Ill-Defined Plot’, in The Best American Essays 2014, ed. John Jeremiah Sullivan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), xvii–xxviii; and Aquilina, ‘Thinking the Essay’, 3–4. 17. Sullivan, ‘Ill-Defined Plot’, xxv.

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18. ‘En premier lieu ce tiltre ou inscription est for modeste, car si on veut pre[n]dre ce mot d’Essaiz, pour coup d’Essay, ou apprentissage, celà est for humble & rabaissé, & ne resent rien de superbe, ou arrogant: & si on le pre[n]d pour Essaiz ou experie[n]ces, c’est à dire discours pour se faço[n]ner sur autruy, il sera encores bie[n] pris en cette faço[n].’ François Grudé, sieur de La Croix du Maine, Premier volume de la Bibliothèque du Sieur de la Croix du Maine (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1584), 2E2v. Translation in Sullivan, ‘Ill-Defined Plot’, xxv. See E. V. Telle, ‘A propos du mot “essai” chez Montaigne’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 30 (1968): 225–47 (especially 228). 19. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), 2L5r. 20. Cornwallis, Essayes, 2G8v–2I8v. 21. Ibid., H3v. 22. Ibid., 2G8v. 23. Ibid., 2G8v. 24. James [VI of Scotland], The Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh: Thomas Vautrollier, 1584), *3v. James laid out a path that was followed by Samuel Daniel and Alexander Craig ‘Scotobritane’, who published their Poeticall Essayes in 1599 and 1604 respectively, as well as the collection of ‘diverse Poeticall Essaies’ on the subject of ‘the Turtle and Phoenix’ appended to Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr or, Rosalins Complaint (London: E. B., 1601), Z1r. This subgenre of ‘poetical essays’ deserves further study. 25. Cornwallis, Essayes, 2G8v. 26. Ibid., 2H1r. 27. Ibid., 2G8v–2H1r. 28. Bacon, Essayes (1597), A3r. 29. Ibid., A3r. 30. Ibid., A3v. 31. Johnson, Essaies, title page. 32. Ben Jonson, Volpone or the Foxe (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1607), M2r. 33. Ben Jonson, The Silent Woman. A Comœdie (London: William Stansby, 1620), D3r. 34. Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London: n.p., 1641), N1r–R4v (N4r). 35. Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 30. 36. Ibid., 31. 37. See Daniel Tuvill, Essays Politic and Moral and Essays Moral and Theological, ed. John L. Lievsay (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971). 38. D. T., Essaies Politicke, and Morall, A3r–v. 39. Ibid., A3v. 40. Ibid., A3v. 41. Fulke Greville, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (London: Henry Seile, 1652), N1r. I am grateful to Timothy Lundy for alerting me to this passage. 42. See Kiernan, introduction to Essays or Counsels, lxvii–lxviii. 43. ‘1 De operibus Dei, & hominis 2 De miraculis Seruatoris 3 De columbina innocentia, & serpentina prudentia 4 De exaltatione Charitatis 5 De mensura curarum 6 De Spe terrestri 7 De Hypocritis 8 De impostoribus. 9 De generibus Imposturæ. 10 De Atheismo. 11 De Hæresibus. 12 De Ecclesia, & Scripturis.’ Bacon, Essayes (1597), C6v. For a translation, see Bacon, Essaies. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion (London: Humfrey Hooper, 1598), B2v. It is likely not by Bacon himself. 44. The Holie Bible (London: Richarde Jugge, 1568), H8v.

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45. British Library, London [hereafter BL], Add. MS 4259, fol. 155r, quoted in Bacon, Essays or Counsels, 317. 46. BL Harley MS 6797, fol. 53r­–v. 47. BL Harley MS 6797, fol. 53v. 48. Bacon, Essayes (1597), G6v. 49. John Willis, The Art of Stenographie (London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1602), D8r. 50. Ibid., D8r. 51. Ibid., D8r. 52. Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 132–40. See also Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 227–48. 53. Bacon, Essayes (1597), B1r. 54. Ibid., B1r–v. 55. The 1597 edition reads ‘continue them’, but all manuscript versions and subsequent printed versions read ‘contemne’. 56. Bacon, Essayes (1597), B1v. 57. Ibid., B1v. 58. Ibid., B1v. 59. Ibid., B1v. 60. Ibid., B1v–B2r. 61. I here treat only the 1612 and 1625 English printed versions. A full comparison would need to take into account the manuscript version (also 1612) designed for presentation to Henry, Prince of Wales; multiple French and Italian versions, printed from 1617 onwards, in which Bacon had a certain input; and the Latin version, published in 1638. 62. Bacon, Essaies (1612), M3r–v. 63. Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall (London: Hanna Barret and Richard Whitaker, 1625), 2P2v. Here and in subsequent quotations, italics in the original unless otherwise stated. 64. Ros Cœli. Or, A Miscellany of Ejaculations, Divine, Morall, &c. (London: Richard Herne, 1640), L2v–L4r and William Freke, Select Essays Tending to the Universal Reformation of Learning (London: Thomas Minors, 1693), O8v. 65. Thomas Scott, The Belgicke Pismire Stinging the Slothfull Sleeper ([The Netherlands: pub. unknown], 1622), F3r. 66. John Boys, The Autumne Part from the Twelfth Sundy [sic] After Trinitie, to the Last in the Whole Yeere (London: William Aspley, 1613), N2r. 67. Ibid., N2v. 68. John Spencer, Kaina Kai Palaia Things New and Old (London: John Spencer, 1658), 2F2r. 69. William Higford, Institutions, or, Advice to His Grandson in Three Parts (London: Edmund Thorne, 1658), D4r–v. 70. William Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus: Or, a Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-Salve (London: John Grove, 1631), A4r. 71. John Browne, A Compleat Treatise of Preternatural Tumours, Both General and Particular (London: R. Clavel, 1678), B4r. 72. George Townesend, A Preparative to Pleading Being a Work Intended for the Instruction and Help of Young Clerks of the Court of Common Pleas (London: Israel Harrison, 1675), B6r. 73. Edward Monings, The Langrave of Hessen His Princelie Receiving of her Maiesties Embassador (London, 1596), D1r. Monings also borrows from Bacon’s ‘Of Followers and Friends’; see Kiernan, introduction to Essays or Counsels, lxvi–lxvii. 74. In tracking these, I am indebted to the work of Peter Beal and his team on the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 [hereafter CELM]: https://celm-ms.org.uk/.

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75. BL Royal MS 12 B. V, fol. 7r (CELM, BcF 205.2). 76. Bodleian Library, Oxford [hereafter Bodl.], MS Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 31r–v (CELM, BcF 205.8). 77. Bodl. MS Eng. poet. f. 10, fos. 2v, 58v–66v (CELM, BcF 205.9). 78. Durham University Library, Mickleton Spearman MS 5, p. 371 (CELM, BcF 206.6). 79. University College London, MS Ogden 7/7, fol. 43r–v; MS Ogden 7/26, fol. 179v–175v rev.; MS Ogden 7/28, fol. 5r–v; MS Ogden 7/30, fos. 110v–141r; MS Ogden 7/38, fol. 115v (CELM, BcF 210.1, 210.3, 210.4, 210.6, 210.8). 80. BL Add. MS 78423, fos. 15v–19v (CELM, BcF 204.4). 81. BL Sloane MS 836, fos. 51r–v, 54r–59v (CELM, BcF 205.3). 82. BL Add. MS 39314, fos. 70v–62v rev. (CELM, BcF 204.3). 83. Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, U1121 Z56/7, p. [1r rev.] (CELM, BcF 206.6). 84. See CELM, BcF 204.2, 204.8, 206.2, 206.7, 206.8, 206.9, 207.2, 207.5, 207.8. 85. Grace Gethin, Misery’s Virtues Whet-Stone. Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (London: D. Edwards, 1699), L3r–v. 86. Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O. 5. 42 (CELM, BcF 206); see the discussion in Kiernan, introduction to Essays or Counsels, lvi–lvii.

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3 The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles Thomas Karshan

Introduction: The Title of ‘Essay’

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itles are a problem for the essay; in fact, it is only late in its history that ‘the essay’ becomes the title of a genre. This book might have been called The Edinburgh Companion to Periodical Writing or to the Paper, two terms under which the essay, as we now understand it, was often known until well into the nineteenth century. The word ‘essay’ was frequently applied to books which may not to us seem very essayistic, such as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), while many works we now call essays preferred to go by some other label: papers, periodical writings, occasional writings, lucubrations, discourses, meditations, gossips, sketches or notes, among other alternatives.1 In Charles Lamb, for instance, we find a ‘Chapter’ (‘on Ears’), a ‘Dissertation’ (‘upon Roast Pig’), a ‘Complaint’ (by ‘A Bachelor . . . of the Behaviour of Married People)’, ‘Detached Thoughts’ (‘on Books and Reading’) and ‘Confessions’ (‘of a Drunkard’), as well as many essays free of any generic tag (‘A Quakers’ Meeting’, ‘Grace before Meat’, ‘The Old Margate Hoy’).2 Montaigne did not mean to found a genre by titling his work Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne: the essai is a description of various acts of living and writing assembled in his chapters, not of any chapter of the book, so that the word ‘essay’ in its contemporary meaning has become a mistranslation of Montaigne’s word essai (‘soundings’, ‘trials’ and ‘assays’ have been proposed instead).3 The first English translator, John Florio, expressed his doubts about ‘essay’ by adding a subtitle: The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses (1603). A similar hesitation marks Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays, subtitled Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion, and the 1626 text, the Essays or Counsels Civil or Moral. In the unpublished introduction to the 1612 edition of his Essays, Bacon wrote that ‘the word is late, but the thing is ancient, for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations’.4 By 1625, he retreated from the word ‘essay’, writing that for the Latin translation he intended ‘a weightier name, entitling it “Faithful Discourses – or the Inwards of things” (Sermones Fideles, sive Interiora rerum)’.5 Bacon’s use of the word ‘essay’ may therefore be seen as an attempt to wrest a tradition of meditative writing away from Montaigne’s errant and irresponsible deviation by occupying and reorienting the word, an early example of the pattern Samuel Johnson would observe in the periodical writings of the English Civil War: ‘when any title grew popular, it was stolen by the antagonist, who by this

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stratagem conveyed his notions to those who would not have received him had he not worn the appearance of a friend’.6 It was Bacon who made ‘essay’ the title of a genre, but in doing so he introduced a contradiction that has ever since bedeviled attempts at defining the term: namely, that ‘essay’ must somehow cover thematically focused discourses such as Bacon’s Essays, but also their near-opposite, digressive rambles after the model of Montaigne’s. In essai, Montaigne had already chosen a word so richly ambiguous as to verge on self-contradiction, translatable as both ‘try’ and ‘trial’, ‘sounding’ and ‘weighing-up’, ‘temptation’ and ‘experiment’, ‘apprenticeship’ and ‘adventure’, ‘assay’ and ‘assault’. An essai can be an act of life, of mind or of writing; a trial of the sword, the soul or the pen. Essai was also the name for school exercises, so that we might loosely translate the title as The Homework of Michel de Montaigne. As such, it is an example of that defensive modesty, often becoming self-mockery, which has since marked the titling of essays. Montaigne’s Essais investigate so many senses of the word essai that the whole book can be seen as a vast enquiring dictionary entry. As Robert de Maria notes, ‘It is telling that several of the principal essayists of the [eighteenth] century . . . Addison, Ambrose Philips, Swift and Pope all proposed dictionaries, and Johnson finished the job in 1755, three years after completing The Rambler.’7 But where a dictionary distinguishes the meanings of a word under subtitles, essayists explore the borders between one meaning and another, peeling away ideal or official sense to discover the jumble of instances concealed within: as Montaigne said in ‘Of Names’, ‘[w]hatever variety of herbs there may be, the whole thing is included under the name of salad. Likewise, under the consideration of names, I am here going to whip up a hodgepodge of various items [‘une galimafrée de divers articles’].’8

The Titles of Essays Not merely the title of Essais but the titles of many essays by Montaigne and his followers are like labels on the pots of a very mixed stew – a gallimaufry or hodgepodge. They are not necessarily reliable indicators of the contents; they may only be starting points, and are sometimes willful deceptions. In 1730, Aaron Hill wrote of Montaigne’s Essays that ‘some of them don’t treat at all of the Subjects proposed, and others might as well have any other Title as those they wear’,9 while in 1860 William Thackeray joked that if you read Montaigne’s essays, you must own that he might call almost any one by the name of any other, and that an essay on the Moon or an essay on Green Cheese would be as appropriate a title as one of his on Coaches, on the Art of Discoursing, or Experience, or what you will.10 Montaigne’s titles have been compared to the joke titles in François Rabelais’s imaginary library, such as ‘The Spur of Cheese’, ‘Of Peas and Bacon, cum commento’ or ‘The Bald Arse of Widows’.11 Rabelais warns his readers, encountering such ‘pleasant titles’, that they ‘may not too easily conclude that they treat of nothing but mockery, fooling, and pleasant fictions’, as these titles are merely deceptive ‘outward signs’, and the contents may be the inverse of their covering, as ‘some wear a monkish cloak who are the very reverse of monkish’.12

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Florio mentions some who complain about Montaigne’s essays, ‘that many times they answere not his titles, and have no coherence together’.13 Early modern readers sometimes sought to correct Montaigne’s titles, annotating their copies with what they considered the true subject.14 In answer, Florio points to Montaigne’s ‘Of Vanity’: The titles of my chapters do not always embrace their matter; often they only denote it by some sign. . . . There are works of Plutarch’s in which he forgets his theme, in which the treatment of his subject is found only incidentally, quite smothered in foreign matter. . . . It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.15 So, the sober scholarly title ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’ conceals from potential censorship a startlingly frank discussion of human sexuality; ‘Of Cripples’ harbors some dangerous material about witchcraft, unmentioned in the title, which refers to a running metaphor that only emerges into a discussion of actual cripples eleven-twelfths of the way through; and ‘Of Coaches’ has been described as ‘three separate essays joined end to end to give life’s incoherence’.16 For Hugo Friedrich, ‘the incongruence of title and content of an Essay is thus a symbol of the core theme of the Essais per se’, that ‘no name can capture the wealth of a thing’.17 For Montaigne, there is not necessarily any true center to a topic; the real subject may be hidden in a corner or scattered across the material: ‘[o]f a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone’.18 The same is true for many essayists who have come after him, some of whom have even imitated his mock titles. Edmund Wilson’s ‘A Preface to Persius’ (1927), like ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, conceals beneath the monkish cloak of its title an expression of some disorderly passions that sober scholarship tends to conceal: political rage in Persius and Wilson, sexual desire in Virgil and Montaigne.19 Thomas de Quincey’s ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849) is, beneath its apparently parochial heading, a hallucinatory fantasy about, among much else, empire and power, as little limited to its title theme as is Montaigne’s ‘Of Coaches’.20 The oblique relationship between title and content persists in contemporary essay periodicals, such as the London Review of Books, which, in an issue current at the time of writing, titles one essay on shipping and capitalism in the Arabian peninsula ‘Gargantuanisation’, a second on a novel about the Internet ‘Eels on Cocaine’, and a third about women, writing and religion in medieval England ‘The Flower and the Bee’.21 Such jokes, teases and evasions are, to be sure, characteristic of only one group of essay titles. Many if not most essays over the last four centuries have carried titles which announce their theme directly. Here Bacon is the model. His essays are about what their titles declare, whether that be ‘Of Truth’, ‘Of Death’ or ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’. The ‘Of . . .’ formula imitates the titles of major ancient antecedents which, as Alastair Fowler says, ‘implied a tractatus or discursive treatise’22 – from Cicero’s De Oratore, De Divinatione and De Officiis, through Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, to such formal philosophical works as Aristotle’s De Anima (in its usual Latin translation). Many of Montaigne’s own titles are in fact equally straightforward: surreptitious and oblique titles are a feature more of the third than of the second books of his writings, and more of the second than of the first, where they barely appear at

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all.23 Some later essayists have made a joke out of the bluntness with which their titles announce their theme. Witness George Eliot’s ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856) or Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (2008), the first a teasing echo of the repetitious female banality it mocks, the second a blank reiteration of entitled male didacticism.24 But even plain titles can ask questions about the differences between a name, a topic and a thing. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Thumbs’ is, in three paragraphs, only about thumbs, but thumbs touch on a lot of other subjects which Montaigne is then able to ramble through: treaties between barbarian kings, the etymological significance of various words for the thumb, Roman signs of approval and exemption from war service, the punishment of schoolchildren in Sparta. Four hundred years or so later, in On Being Blue (1976), William H. Gass, who loved Montaigne, did something similar with the word ‘blue’, and with blueness more generally, exploring how ‘a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects’, and how ‘the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith’.25 For Gass and Montaigne, the ‘De’ or ‘On’ of the title warns the reader not to expect either a comprehensive or a focused treatment of an established topic, nor the pursuit of a premeditated thesis – but promises, instead, that the writer will take them on a stroll around a subject, or will gather together a wild array of topics under the pretext of some name that the culture happens to have assigned them all. Today, titling an essay or book ‘On . . .’ is often a gesture that, behind its apparent modesty, signals that the author aims to transcend the approved topics and methods of their discipline or profession, writing instead on the authority of their idiosyncratic experience, judgment and reading. So, recently, we have Wendy Doniger’s On Hinduism (2014), Angela Leighton’s On Form (2007) or Adam Phillips’s On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993).26 Phillips, an editor of Lamb, is keenly conscious of the history and possibilities of the essay.27 His title tickles against that danger well known to psychoanalysis of getting boringly, deadeningly, stuck on one subject, by hinting at the connections between apparently miscellaneous and contradictory topics and by asking if kissing and being bored are really such different kinds of thing. It also plays on a long-standing titling convention of listing apparently unconnected topics. The fifth number of the Tatler (originally published without any title) is, in Alexander Chalmers’s canonizing edition of The British Essayists (1803), summarized in the table of contents as: ‘Fallen State of Love – Cynthia, the absent Lover – Project for the Advancement of Religion – Continental Intelligence – Story of Unnion [sic] and Valentine – Character of the Duke of Marlborough’.28 Such un-summaries give rise to titles like Leigh Hunt’s ‘The Indicator and Examiner – Autumnal Commencement of Fires – Mantle-Pieces – Apartments for Study’.29

Periodical Titles I: Possibilities and Rejections Few essays enter the world, or survive there, under their own title alone. Some require the secondary shelter of a book title – whether Montaigne’s and Bacon’s Essays, Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers (1860), Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925) or Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955). But most are published first in what is variously called a periodical, paper, magazine, journal or review (or, more recently, a website), all places

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where essays have historically rubbed shoulders with many other kinds of writing: stories, poems, political reports, partisan polemics, informational reprints, archives, translations, reviews, arts and entertainment listings, and more. From the Renaissance until well into the nineteenth century, such ragbags were called miscellanies, and Warren Boutcher has argued that Montaigne’s Essays should also be placed in this genre, an identification that helps explain the many features shared between Montaigne and the eighteenth-century essay, notwithstanding the absence of much direct influence.30 From this perspective, essays are miscellanies digested into a single piece of writing. We can witness this process of digestion in the Tatler, commonly regarded as the first essay periodical. Beginning as a miscellany, in its early numbers it contained a variety of writings on fashion, politics, gossip, theatre and more, presented as if they came from different coffeehouses. Gradually this material was unified, until a single issue contained only one essay, creating a template which then dominated in the first half of the eighteenth century, before yielding back in the later part of the century to the ‘magazines’ – miscellanies under another name – which are still with us today.31 This miscellaneous digest of differing genres is one of the reasons that essay periodicals so often struggle to find or accept a name. ‘Those who attempt periodical essays seem to be often stopped in the beginning, by the difficulty of finding a proper title’, noted Samuel Johnson at the opening of the first number of the Idler (1758–60):32 Two Writers, since the time of the Spectator, have assumed his name, without any pretensions to lawful inheritance; an effort was once made to revive the Tatler; and the strange appellations, by which other papers have been called, show that the authours [sic] were distressed, like the natives of America, who come to the Europeans to beg a name.33 Johnson’s opening raises several significant points. First, what we now call ‘essays’ he also calls ‘papers’, or ‘periodical essays’, terms which blur the distinction between essays and the journals (or papers or periodicals) containing them. Second, those journals often carry the titles of character types, such as the Tatler (1709–11), Spectator (1711–12), Rambler (1750–52) or Idler, or even (as in other eighteenth-century titles) the Lover (1714), Grumbler (1715), Scourge (1717), Parrot (1746), Lounger (1785–87) or Devil (1755), a tradition which continues into the titles of journals, newspapers and websites of the present day, among them the Baffler (1988–), the Believer (2003–), Vulture (2001–) and Intelligencer (2006–).34 Such titles ultimately originate in the seventeenth-century tradition of Theophrastan characters, such as the ‘intelligencer’ (a frequent title of seventeenth-century periodicals, meaning someone obsessed with political news and rumor). Third, these postures have recurred with remarkable regularity over the last three hundred or more years. To take only Johnson’s example, there have been dozens of Spectators, among which Johnson refers to the Universal Spectator (1728–46), Female Spectator (1744–46) and Spectator (1753–54). Later there was the New Spectator (1784) as well as the Spectator that was founded in 1828 and continues to this day. Fourth, this essayistic appeal to tradition and inherited titles is countered, as in Johnson’s extraordinary metaphor about ‘the natives of America’, by a tendency to think of the essay as a wild ungeneric form lingering on the edge of civilization, the naming of which is an act of colonization.

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In the opening number of the Indicator (1819–21), Leigh Hunt asks why it is that essays are so hard to name – in an essay itself named ‘Difficulty of Finding a Name for a Work of this Kind’. ‘A work of this kind’ avoids having to accept the title and taxonomy of ‘essay’, by taking refuge in a studied ambiguity as to whether an essay is a ‘kind’ (that is, the English word for genre) or just some hazily glimpsed kind of thing, to be loosely indicated but never named. Hunt goes on to list some of the clashing criteria for any possible periodical title: It is to be modest: it is to be expressive: it is to be new: it is to be striking: it is to have something in it equally intelligible to the man of plain understanding, and surprising to the man of imagination: – in one word, it is to be impossible.35 But ‘these children of the brain have no godfather ready at hand: and then their single appellation is bound to comprise as many public interests as all the Christian names of a French or a German prince’.36 No godfather, because at the time of writing, Montaigne was yet to be confirmed as the original of the genre. Indeed, he is rarely mentioned in eighteenth-century periodical writing.37 And bound to adjudicate so many different and potentially conflicting interests, because ‘a work of this kind’ must try at a near-impossible reconciliation of its contradictory parents, between – among much else – rambling miscellanies and focused dissertations, individual meditations and sociable conversations, sallies of wit and canons of counsel. As the Mirror (1779–80) said in its first number, the essay must somehow simultaneously please ‘the young and the lively’ and ‘the grave and the serious’.38 Each title is to be rich in unfolding significance, but no title can encompass the variety and contradiction it points towards. Each will therefore require correction by the next, implying a potentially endless sequence – a principle that has inspired the title of one recent influential essay periodical, N + 1 (2004–).39 Hunt fills his first essay with a list of titles considered and rejected, which allude to historical periodical titles while highlighting paradoxical aspects of the essay: Some of the names had a meaning in their absurdity, such as the Adviser, or Helps for Composing; – the Cheap Reflector, or Every Man His Own Looking-Glass; – the Retailer, or Every Man His Own Other Man’s Wit; – Nonsense, To be Continued.40 The essayist is Guardian, Spectator, and self-obsessed egotist, at once a free thinker and a mere retailer or Tatler of borrowed commonplaces. By virtue of such paradoxes, the essay comes close to nonsense, a genre to which it bears affinities; and as it begins wherever it chooses, so it ends without fixing itself to a conclusion, and makes potential for new writing. Hunt goes further: Others were laughable by the mere force of contrast, as the Crocodile, or Pleasing Companion; – Chaos, or the Agreeable Miscellany; – the Fugitive Guide; – the Foot Soldier, or Flowers of Wit; – Bigotry, or the Cheerful Instructor; – the Polite Repository of Abuse; – Blood, being a Collection of Light Essays.41 From Montaigne on, essayists have sought to put themselves on relations of friendship with their reader; the essay is pleasingly miscellaneous; it offers moral guidance;

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it is a garland of wit, a lesson in politeness, a light form rising above the mortal gravity of bores and pedants. Yet the essay is also an expression of violent appetite, of dangerous chaos, of escapism and self-loss, of aggression, prejudice and sanguinary hatreds. That aggression can be civilized at the dining table which is so frequently a focus of the civilization that the essay promotes; for the essay is a taste and thus, in Hunt’s fantasia, ‘the Leg of Beef by a Layman’,42 an allusion back to the introduction to Hunt and Hazlitt’s 1817 collection, The Round Table, celebrating ‘a small party of friends, who meet once a week at a Round Table to discuss the merits of a leg of mutton’.43 Or the essay is a register of passing fashions: ‘the Ingenious Hatband’ or ‘the Boots of Bliss’. Or it is an expression of sickness, as in Montaigne: ‘the Tooth-Ache’ or ‘Recollections of a Very Unpleasant Nature’. And it is ‘The Hippopotamus entered at Stationers’ Hall’. Since to enter something at Stationers’ Hall is to register a work for the purposes of copyright, to introduce a hippopotamus there is to suggest that the essay is a paradoxical and monstrous creature which will blunder into and make a mess of established categories of writing and their rule-bound legislation, as miscellanies do. As such, the essay moves us beyond the common sense that such polite categories enshrine and sustain, taking us abroad into an exotic world of magic and nonsense: for the essay is also the Seven Sleepers at Cards; the Arabian Nights on Horseback: – with an infinite number of other mortal murders of common sense, which rose to ‘push us from our stools,’ and which none but the wise or good-natured would ever think of laughing at.44 Such musing on possible titles had by Hunt’s time become a common feature in the opening issue of periodicals. Hunt’s version stands out for being so like the ultimate source of such lists in the main classical precedent for miscellaneous writing, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, which Hunt would have had access to in the library of his friend Lamb.45 Gellius gives a vast range of contradictory titles, so as to boast of the span of learning and panoply of styles which will be reconciled under the heading finally arrived at. So, ‘[s]ome have used the name “Torches,” others “Tapestry,” others “Repertory,” others “Helicon,” “Problems,” “Handbooks” and “Daggers”’.46 Gellius’s book may be a source of illumination, a weaving together of multicolored threads, a spring of inspiration, a set of puzzles, a handbook or a tool of attack and defense. It may be ‘Topics’, suggesting focus, but it may, conversely, be ‘Miscellanies’. It is ‘Natural History’ but also ‘Universal History’, somehow combining what we would call science with the study of the past. Yet Gellius finally abandons the hunt for any such telling title, falling back instead on the mere accidents of time and place: there are some other titles that are exceedingly witty and redolent of extreme refinement. But I, bearing in mind my limitations, gave my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter’s vigils.47 As Boutcher says, ‘This was the tradition of titling that Montaigne was following when he entitled his book Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (“The trials or tastings of Michael of Montaigne”)’48 – the title of Essais aiming at a note that is, in Gellius’s

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terms, both witty and rustic or, as Hunt says, at once modest and expressive, new and striking, and ‘equally intelligible to a man of plain understanding, and surprising for the man of imagination’.49 Still more, Essais is to be taken as a provisional term implying all the other titles which could otherwise have been chosen, and the often paradoxical range of intellectual activity the reader will find within. By one of those remarkable repetitions of which the history of the essay is full, we can find another such list of rejected titles for essay periodicals in as recent a source as a 2017 issue of Cabinet Magazine (2000–), a leading American periodical which is part of the twenty-first-century resurgence of the essay. In a list entitled ‘By Any Other Name’, Cabinet tells us the journal might have been called by any of seventy-one other names. Some, like Hunt’s, draw attention to fusion and contradiction: the essay is not only ‘Alloy’ and ‘Compound’ but ‘Impurities’ and ‘Chalk and Cheese’; not only ‘Intermodal’ and ‘Collisions’ but ‘Strange Bedfellows’, ‘Mixer’, ‘Suitcase’ and ‘Omnivore’, squeezing together, churning over, packing in and eating up all possible knowledge and discourse. Medicine for the ills of life, it is ‘The Pill’, the ‘Patch’ and ‘The Pharmacy’; assayer of existence, it is ‘Gauge’ and ‘Thermometer’; challenger of easy concord, it is not only ‘The Friend’ but ‘The Relentless Friend’, and even – martial and militant – ‘March’ and ‘Spur’.50 Whether or not the editors of Cabinet ever read Aulus Gellius or the Indicator is unclear. But they have an unerring instinct for that internal logic of the genre which perennially generates certain sorts of titles. First, they know that the essay is built out of waste, whatever does not fit into existing categories and schemes: it might also have been called ‘Appendix’ or ‘Fill, Landfill, Page-Fill’.51 Second, that it makes a virtue of its abandoned titles and intentions, rambling in and around them and never completely leaving them behind. Oscar Wilde, for one, played on this when he named a volume of essays Intentions (1891), while disdainfully saying that ‘it is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done’,52 and expressing his preference for a miscellaneous, non-methodical view of the world: ‘[n]ature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out’.53 An essay, like art and nature, can never stick to the intentions declared by its title, and should not try to do so. Third, that the essay is miscellaneous, stuffing together a wide range of discourses and modes of knowledge. Fourth, that it is paradoxical – indebted, as Hunt acknowledged, to multiple incompatible interests. It may be ‘Matter’, an ‘Information Van’ or ‘Phenomena’, but it is also ‘Immaterial’, and therefore indifferent to concrete information and the phenomenal world.54 All here is contradiction: as Montaigne said, ‘[o]ur life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things’.55 Fifth, that the essay is not so much a genre as an anti-genre, securing its apparent solidity by suspending itself spiderlike in the negative space of other genres and discourses.56 Neither art nor science, neither scholarship nor fiction, neither epic nor systematic philosophy, neither information nor yet speculation (though it may draw on all these), the essay is ‘Betwixt (and Between)’.57 Sixth, that no name will ever be sufficient for the essay, a genre which is built on a suspicion of titles, categories and definitions, and which can only be understood by studying its evolving past and glimpsing its unfolding future. As Hunt put it, it is ‘Nonsense, To be Continued’.58 Or, as Cabinet might once have been called, ‘Dit Dah’ or ‘Dotted Line’; or, simply, ‘And . . .’.59 And seventh, that for all their insufficiencies, or rather because of them, words and names alone are, as this list demonstrates, extraordinarily vivid, bringing with them a potentially uncontrollable range of associations.

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Periodical Titles II: Virtues into Vices, Vices into Virtues We have already seen one tension in the essay tradition, between Montaigne’s rambles and Bacon’s topical meditations. A second tension enters when, with the Tatler and even before, essays begin to be published in periodicals that take their names from Theophrastan characters. In miscellaneous writing, it is not only genre that is fluid; it is also experience, understanding and the self.60 Character-writing, on the other hand, insists that understanding be embodied in the particular perspective of a recognized persona.61 In the first number of the Spectator, Mr Spectator says: I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life.62 Here the privilege and task of the essayist is to exploit, one after another, the limited range of masks the world makes available, testing their various perspectives. The tension between miscellaneous and character-writing gives rise to a principle in the titles of periodical essays and in the ongoing work of the essay. Where a periodical is named after the character of a vice – such as the Tatler – the periodical then draws out the possible virtues within that vice; while where the character appears to be virtuous – such as the Spectator – the periodical will investigate its hidden vices. As Montaigne wrote, ‘we are, I know not how, double within ourselves’63 and ‘the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice’.64 On the one hand, detached spectatorship is a high virtue which, as Fred Parker sums it up, gives him [the spectator] a ‘speculative’ knowledge of many different modes of life; it allows him, from the sidelines, to see faults and errors which ‘escape those who are in the Game’; and, as he will point out in later papers, it frees him from the narrowness and divisiveness of party politics and of partisanship more generally.65 Yet from the time of its first publication the vices of spectatorship were recognized. There is potential for hypocrisy, for Mr Spectator looks but, being modest, does not wish to be looked upon. Further, Mr Spectator’s acknowledgment that he is ‘a Spectator of Mankind’ more than ‘one of the Species’ can be taken as a horrifying admission of his inhumanity, not as a Stoic ideal. A hostile early pamphlet said that the Spectator, in trying to see the world from no particular human perspective, is a ‘Monster, rather than a Man’.66 The name of the pamphlet, The Spy upon the Spectator, turns the tables, making it dangerously explicit that ‘spectating’ is only an upmarket word for the scandal-mongering ‘spying’ and ‘intelligencing’ which served as titles for many of the Tatler’s seventeenth-century predecessors. (More recently, some of the negative associations which always lingered around the pose of the spectator were flaunted in the title of the website Gawker, which ran from 2002 to 2016.) A subtle maze of ironies opens out from the title of the journal which directly succeeded the Spectator: the Guardian (1713). Johnson complained of the title that it ‘was too narrow and too serious: it might properly enough admit both the duties and the decencies of life, but seemed not to include literary speculations, and was in some degree

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violated by merriment and burlesque’.67 Still worse, the ‘guardian’ in question is not the watchful if rather sober friend that the title might at best evoke but one Nestor Ironside, a name chosen to suggest the pomposity of Homer’s old sage and the puritanism of Cromwell’s troops. Yet we are asked to see past the superficiality of names and the associations they carry. The young charge and his family are also saddled with an unfortunate surname, Lizard, though they are meant to be good people.68 So, too, we are encouraged to ask about what real guardianship is. Its task is not merely to ‘protect the Modest, the Industrious, [but] to celebrate the Wise, the Valiant, to encourage the Good, the Pious; to confront the Impudent, the Idle, to contemn the Vain, the Cowardly, and to disappoint the Wicked and Prophane’.69 Still more, a good guardian is capable of the modesty implicit in the self-mockery of the title, dissolving distinctions of rank, joining in the wit and humor of his charges, and aspiring to a title that only trust and affection can grant: that of the friend – the only title under which counsel will be accepted, as Johnson noted in his comment, previously quoted, on the stealth surrounding essay titles during the Civil War. The title of ‘guardian’ names not only the figure of the essayist, but the desire of the reader for guardianship, as Steele indicates by his motto from Martial – ‘Ille quem requiris’: He, whom you seek.70 For those journals which assume for themselves the character of a vice, there is a precedent in those seventeenth-century periodicals that called themselves the Intelligencer. So, Roger L’Estrange, who had been appointed as the chief licenser (that is, censor) for the restored monarchy, published the Intelligencer (1663–66), in which he denounced the dangers of the public being recipients of intelligence about their betters, such as the papers of the Civil War had offered.71 A contemporary instance of a journal seizing for its name the vice it deprecates is the Baffler, a journal that ‘was born to laugh at the baffling jargon of academics and the commercial avantgarde, to explode their paralyzing agonies of abstraction and interpretation’. Yet it aims to turn such powers of bafflement against themselves, by arming itself with another sense of ‘baffle’: ‘to defeat anyone in his efforts; to frustrate or confound his plans, to foil’.72 It proposes to ‘[blunt] the “cutting edge” of the creative class gurus, financial journalists, entertainment moguls, cyber-entrepreneurs, and postmodern theorists’.73 The Tatler similarly turns a vice into a virtue. It embraces the charge that was already being brought against periodical writing, and political reporting more broadly, of being mere gossip, scandal-mongering and tittle-tattle, such as idle women exchange, an accusation that had been directed against its predecessors such as Ned Ward’s the London Spy (1698–1700) and Defoe’s Review (1704–13), which ran a Scandal Club, published independently in a monthly supplement as ‘Advice from the Scandal Club – or, A Weekly History of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice and Debauchery’. But Addison and Steele challenge these negative associations by vindicating the value of talk. The Tatler is successor to the Mercury, another title frequently encountered in essay periodicals, from the innumerable journals entitled Mercurius which appear in the seventeenth century, through to the London Mercury (1919–39). Like a Mercury, the Tatler carries messages back and forth between the otherwise alien worlds of entertainment, literature, learning and political news, represented by the various coffeehouses. The essayist, as David Hume says, is an ‘ambassador’, drawing into living conversation the worlds of learning and society, and the diverse discourses which, by being ‘shut up in colleges and cells’, risk becoming ‘chimerical’ by that seclusion.74

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The Nonsense of a Name One alternative to accepting the inadequacy of a title is to evade it altogether by simply calling a periodical a ‘miscellany’. Whereas periodicals named after a character fix a title and then work to expose its ambiguities, in miscellanies we find a nesting of subtitles within titles that matches the concatenation and deferral of themes in the essay itself. So, for example, in the 1707 Monthly Miscellany: or, Memoirs for the Curious, the subtitle immediately signals that uncertainty about titling habitual to the essay. The first essay continues that hesitation. Though titled ‘Of Divinity: Of the Benefit of a Religious Conversation’, within that essay we find a dialogue, out of which still another title seems to rise up – this one more that of a pointed discourse that ‘The Church of England very justly oblige us to the Observation of Ceremonies’.75 There is then a section titled ‘Of Law’, with a new title below the line – ‘A Discourse of Law, with some Reflections on several Acts of Parliament, made for Relief of Insolvent Debtors’.76 The early Tatler’s conceit of dividing its miscellany up under the names of coffeehouses has survived, in adapted form, in the titles of ‘departments’ of magazines. It is found in The New Yorker (whose symbol of a beau holding up a microscope to inspect the butterfly of passing fashion alludes to the Tatler). At the front is ‘The Talk of the Town’, giving way to, for example, ‘Dept. of Exploration’, or ‘Annals of Gastronomy’ or ‘Puzzles and Games Dept’.77 New York magazine now has a website with constituent websites whose titles allude to the names and manner of the early eighteenth-century periodical, with the Intelligencer (covering news), the Cut (fashion and style), Grub Street (food), Vulture (popular culture), the Strategist (shopping) and Curbed (real estate).78 The Awl (2009–18), a website founded by former Gawker editors, sustained sister sites under subtitles: Splitsider (comedy), the Hairpin (women’s issues), the Sweethome (home furnishing) and the Billfold (personal finance). The Awl itself, by its punning title, asks how the miscellaneous elements of life might or might not come together to make an ‘all’. It sets out to gather up all those ‘curios and oddities’ on the Internet ‘ignored in favor of the most obvious and easy stories’, as if taking up a bone awl to pick holes in the illusory universality of the mainstream Internet.79 (As it happens, the Awl had a running question and answer column inspired by the one in Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–97), one of the main sources for the Tatler.80) Similarly, Cabinet has its titled subcategories and departments: ‘The Clean Room’, on science and technology, ‘Ingestion’, ‘on food as a cultural practice with a philosophical dimension’, or ‘Leftovers’, about ‘the cultural implications of various forms of detritus and garbage’.81 These cultural leftovers form the material for the cabinet of the title – an allusion to the Renaissance ‘cabinets of curiosities’ in which diverse objects of scientific, historical, religious or anthropological interest were displayed cheek by jowl, in strange juxtaposition, as in an essay. (There was an earlier journal of the same name, Cabinet Magazine; or Literary Olio, which ran from 1796 to 1797.) But if Cabinet were too explicitly to explain its name and its history, it would no longer be a curiosity, but a recognizable example of a historical category. It therefore dissembles the historical origins of its title, reinventing the metaphor by comparing itself to the ‘emergency telephone booth’ in which Dr Who ‘traveled around the universe’, which from the outside seemed ‘[b]arely large enough for one person’, though ‘an entire alternate universe fit inside’.82

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A similar conceit inspired the title of the American journal Salmagundi (1965–). Though the name knowingly repeats that of Washington Irving’s periodical of the same name, initiated in 1807, its editor Robert Boyers says that he ‘came to SALMAGUNDI principally because that was the name of a popular, bursting at the seams, everything but the kitchen sink, odd and ends shop in uptown Manhattan’.83 Not that Boyers’s Salmagundi explained its title in the opening issue. Nor did Irving’s original Salmagundi (1807–8), which coyly insisted that ‘[a]s every body knows, or ought to know, what a Salmagundi is, we shall spare ourselves the trouble of an explanation’. It is Irving’s game to pretend that everybody knows what a salmagundi is, and yet also that it is so strange and foreign a sound as to deflect any busybodying inquiries: a joke announced by some verses in cod Latin attributed to ‘Psalmanazar’: ‘In hoc est hoax, cum quiz et jokesez, / Et smoken, toastem, roastem folksez, / Fee, faw, fum’.84 This bit of fun touches on an essayistic theme from Montaigne to the present. Essays, being miscellaneous, disrupt the categories of ordinary discourse, indicating the alien within the familiar, the gaps in common sense. They are, in one of Hunt’s rejected titles, ‘Nonsense, to be continued’. ‘Salmagundi’ is one of a series of names for essays, all loanwords, which conjure up a haunting uncertainty around the borders of the language and the boundaries of sense by violating the phonemic patterns of English. Others are ‘gallimaufry’, ‘farrago’, ‘olio’ or ‘hodge-podge’. ‘Essay’ itself, as the name of a genre, had a foreign ring to it well into the seventeenth century.85 ‘Lucubration’, the word the Tatler popularized for essaying, is a piece of incompletely domesticated Latin (in fact it comes from lux, or light, and suggests nocturnal meditations which, one might say, smell of the lamp). Even at the time, some readers liked to pretend they could not understand it or were bound to mishear it amid other English words – as in the Female Tatler of January 1710: ‘I read it a hundred times before I could remember it, and for a good while used to call it Lubrications’ – hinting humorously at some lubricious nocturnal nonsense.86 Trollope is working in the same vein of mock exotic nonsense when, in his Editor’s Tales (1870), he tells a story about a group of young people who settle on the name Panjandrum for the magazine they are planning. The word, which by that time suggested a person of great importance, carried then, as now, a vague and false air of Indian ancestry – in fact, ‘panjandrum’ was a nonsense word first invented by the eighteenth-century actor Samuel Foote for a memory test. Trollope goes on to elicit some etymologically irrelevant inferences from the syllables of ‘panjandrum’, mentioning that ‘we should have been called the “Pandrastic,” but that the one lady who joined our party absolutely declined the name’, while one reformer in the party proposed ‘the “Purge”’.87 In the modern era, such titles are represented not only by Salmagundi but by its rival Raritan (1981–), founded by Richard Poirier. Both are titles which, as essays prefer to do, mask their originating institutions – in this case, the universities at which the journals are based. As Salmagundi might otherwise have been called the Skidmore Review of Books, Raritan could have been the Rutgers Review of Books or, indeed, the Partisan Review, the famous journal Poirier edited before he moved to Rutgers in 1981. Raritan is the name of the river which runs by Rutgers, the county adjacent to it, and a line on the New Jersey Transit that takes you there. Like ‘panjandrum’, it suggests English words to which it is in fact unrelated – rarity and rarefied. As Robyn Creswell says, ‘in addition to naming a state of mind, or set of tastes, it also names an actual community (and says how you get there)’.88 But in fact it derives

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from the Lenape word for the native peoples who were displaced by the settlers. As such it touches on that idea of the essayist as an outsider to settled civilization which Johnson had invoked when he compared periodicals to ‘the natives of America’ and which is embodied in the title of the Noble Savage (1960–62), the journal founded by a previous Partisan Review author, Saul Bellow. The title of Raritan evokes the essay as a wild native, capable of exposing the artificiality of all the languages by which we construct our worlds and the origin stories we read into those languages: as Poirier wrote in his opening statement, ‘the journal is devoted to offering a ‘“reading” of one or another of the languages found in the texts of life, as well as in the texts of art’, so as to uncover ‘in the workings of cultural power, those intricate movements by which ideas or events, canons or hierarchies of preference, minorities or cultural strata come into existence’.89 Among the other names the editors of the Panjandrum considered was that of their publisher. As the narrator of the story says, titles like Blackwood’s (1817–1980) and Fraser’s (1830–82) were the norm at the time; ‘the “Metropolitan” was the only magazine then in much vogue not called by the name of this or that enterprising publisher’.90 Such names, falling back on the publisher’s or editor’s personal name, are a blunt solution to the problem of how to name an essay publication without imposing a single character: Aulus Gellius had resorted to the accidents of place and time by finally naming his book Attic Nights, while Montaigne had included his personal name in the title of his work, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, and Charles Dickens had considered calling the journal that would become Household Words ‘CHARLES DICKENS. A weekly journal designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of readers. CONDUCTED BY HIMSELF.’91 Harper’s (1850–) is a surviving example of such a title. More recently, Lewis Lapham, the celebrated former editor of Harper’s, revived the custom when, in a deliberately anachronistic gesture, he named his new journal Lapham’s Quarterly (2007–). Such titles say that the editor, like the essayist, presents whatever materials and ideas happen to fall under his or her idiosyncratic attention. The essays that are then published serve, finally, to dignify the chance syllables of the author’s or editor’s name by imbuing it with their carefully deliberated meanings. Montaigne becomes the name of his essays, and the title of their monument. As he said in ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, ‘I am hungry for nothing, but I have a mortal fear of being taken to be other than I am by those who come to know my name.’92 For many essayists, however, including Montaigne, there is rarely any lasting certainty about who one is, and personal names have a way of slipping back into the original chaos of language. Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly Journal (1716–28) jokingly renamed itself Fog’s (1728–37) to avoid a government libel action, leading one contemporary periodical to quip that ‘Fog’s Journal, by a natural Progression from Mist to Fog, is now condensed into a Cloud.’93 When Dickens introduced Bentley’s Miscellany (1836–68), he played on the accident that his publisher, Richard Bentley, shared a name with the great early eighteenth-century scholar, commenting that ‘we now sail under the title of our worthy publisher, which happens to be the same as that of him who is by all viri clarissimi adopted as criticorum longè doctissimus, Ricardus Bentleius; or, to drop Latin lore – Richard Bentley’.94 Exploiting one of those happy accidents prized in occasional literature, Dickens is able to dissolve Bentley’s identity back into a verbal mist of false origins and deceiving cognates.

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The type for all such fictional essayistic selves is Isaac Bickerstaff, the persona Steele adopted for himself in the Tatler. Bickerstaff was a character Swift had invented as a hoax against the almanac maker and astrologer John Partridge, the joke being partly that an invented person might be more real and alive than a sleepwalking nobody like Partridge. Bickerstaff breaks up into the phonemic particles of his name: he is one who bickers and wields a staff in assault. There would be many successors to Bickerstaff, among them the Female Tatler’s (1709–10) Phoebe Crackenthorpe or the nineteenthcentury Salmagundi’s Launcelot Langstaff. The most influential publication titled by this kind of mock persona is probably Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732–58), in which Benjamin Franklin donned the mask of a seventeenth-century writer, Richard Saunders, to dispense plenty of sententious wisdom amidst a light flurry of Augustan hoaxing and play. Dave Eggers was making an arch allusion to such titles when in 1998 he named his journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, later contracted to McSweeney’s. Franklin’s Poor Richard had a surprising revival when James Baldwin wove a complex allusion to him into the title of his obituary essay on Richard Wright, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ (1961). Baldwin had made his name by attacking Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), in the opening essay of his first collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), an equally multi-pointed title which implies that Baldwin is Wright’s son and yet the challenger for Wright’s title of native son. It also fuses that allusion to Wright with an opposite one to Henry James, author of Notes of a Son and Brother (1914).95 The first is to a Black author from whose inheritance Baldwin wishes to disburden himself; the second, to a native, and sometimes almost nativist, white author, from whose subtle ironies Baldwin nonetheless elects an affinity and usurps an inheritance. Similarly, in ‘Alas, Poor Richard’, Baldwin mixes two allusions. The first, to Hamlet’s famous words over his jester’s grave, ‘Alas, Poor Yorick’, reduces Richard Wright to a mere fool of fate. The second, to Franklin’s journal, implies that Wright is a sententious moralist like Poor Richard and, as such, the unconscious prisoner of inherited names, categories and labels. For Baldwin, ‘a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching’, notwithstanding the ‘many labels’ the world has for him,96 but protest novels such as Native Son, which deal in crude moral categories, unwittingly collaborate in the oppression they denounce: ‘we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization’.97 Few statements could better sum up the essence of the essay as Montaigne established it. The categories and names of the world are violent artifices from which the essayist flees into irony, paradox and namelessness, as Baldwin did in the title of the collection in which ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ appeared: Nobody Knows My Name (1961). Baldwin here titles himself, paradoxically, by disavowing the names by which others might try to cage him. He would take one final step when he titled a later collection No Name in the Street (1972) – choosing for himself what may be the best name for an essayist and for the essay: that is, no name at all.

Notes   1. See Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, ‘On the Difficulty of Introducing a Work of This Kind’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6–7.

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  2. See Charles Lamb, Selected Prose, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 1985).   3. See Richard Scholar, Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 67–76.   4. Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 677.   5. Ibid., 712.   6. Samuel Johnson, ‘Addison’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets [1779–81], vol. 3, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 7.   7. Robert de Maria Jr, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 525–48 (528).   8. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Names’, in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 243–48 (243).   9. Aaron Hill, Plain Dealer: being Selected Essays on Several Curious Subjects (1730), 1:ii, quoted in Scott Black, ‘Tristram Shandy, Essayist’, in On Essays, 132–49 (139). 10. William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘On Two Children in Black’ [Roundabout Papers, no. 2], The Cornhill Magazine 1, no. 2 (1860), 382, cited in Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (1949; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 347. 11. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1955), 187–89. 12. Ibid., 37–38. 13. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, Everyman’s Library (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910), 1:10. 14. See William M. Hamlin, Montaigne’s English Journey: Reading the Essays in Shakespeare’s Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18. 15. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Vanity’, in Complete Works, 876–932 (925). 16. Robert Griffin, ‘Title, Structure and Theme of Montaigne’s “Des Coches”’, Modern Language Notes 82, no. 3 (1967): 285–90 (285). Griffin attributes this insight to Pierre Villey. See also Henry E. Genz, ‘The Relationship of Title to Content in Montaigne’s Essay, “Des Boyteux”’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 28, no. 3 (1966): 633–35. 17. Friedrich, Montaigne, 347. 18. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’, in Complete Works, 266–69 (266). 19. Edmund Wilson, ‘A Preface to Persius: Maudlin Meditations in a Speakeasy’, in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 267–73. 20. Thomas de Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), 191–247. 21. London Review of Books, April 22, 2021. 22. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 92. For the background to this form of titling before Cicero, see Nicholas Dames, ‘Chapter Heads’, in Book Parts, ed. Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 151–64, especially 153 on the use of the ‘De . . .’ formula for the titles of legal statutes and 159–60 on Arrian’s titles, which ‘seem in fact to be a series of experiments on the relation between title or unit, or initial perception and later understanding’ that aim to challenge preconceptions. 23. Friedrich, Montaigne, 346. 24. George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), 140–64; Rebecca Solnit, ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, in Men Explain Things to Me, and Other Essays (London: Granta, 2014), 1–18.

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25. William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976; repr., New York: New York Review Books, 2014), 9, 11. 26. Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 27. See Adam Phillips, ‘Up to a Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay’, in On Essays, 313–22. 28. Reprinted in Alexander Chalmers, ed., The British Essayists; with Prefaces, Historical and Biographical, vol. 1 (1803; repr., London: 1808), ix. 29. Leigh Hunt, The Indicator (London: Joseph Appleyard, 1822), 9–11. 30. Warren Boutcher, ‘The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century’, in On Essays, 55–77. For some examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers deriving the essay from Aulus Gellius’s example, see Richard Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay: Transatlantic Retrospects (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 21, 32. 31. The first Tatler to contain a single ‘paper’ was no. 28, and the last divided number is 176. See Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (1930; repr., New York: Octagon, 1966), 77. Magazine – meaning storehouse – is a metaphor for miscellany, originating in 1731 in Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, which survived, in various guises, all the way until 1922. See The Gentleman’s Magazine: or, Monthly Intelligencer (London: 1731), 1:1: ‘it often happens, that many things deserving Attention, contained in them, are only seen by Accident, and others not sufficiently publish’d or preserved for universal Benefit and Information. // This Consideration has induced several GENTLEMEN to promote a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces on the Subjects abovementioned, or at least impartial Abridgements thereof.’ 32. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. John M. Bullitt, W. J. Bate and L. F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 3. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. A helpful chronological list – which is not, however, comprehensive – is given in the invaluable George S. Marr, The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (London: James Clarke, 1923), 256–59. 35. Hunt, Indicator, 1. 36. Ibid., 1. 37. See Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment, 43–44. 38. Mirror (Edinburgh), no. 1, January 23, 1779. 39. One of the publication’s founders explained: ‘The name n+1, conceived in a moment of frustration, comes from an algebraic expression. “Keith and I were talking”, Harbach recalls, “and he kept saying, ‘Why would we start a magazine when there are already so many out there?’ And I said, jokingly, ‘N+1’ – whatever exists, there is always something vital that has to be added or we wouldn’t feel anything lacking in this world.”’ Susan Hodara, ‘Intellectual Entrepreneurs’, Harvard Magazine (January–February 2010), https:// harvardmagazine.com/2010/01/harvard-founders-of-n1-literary-magazine. 40. Hunt, Indicator, 2. 41. Ibid., 2. 42. Ibid., 2. 43. William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, The Round Table (1817; repr., Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), 4. 44. Hunt, Indicator, 2. Much of this paragraph has previously appeared in Karshan and Murphy, ‘On the Difficulty of Introducing’, 2–3.

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45. For Lamb’s possession of Aulus Gellius, see William Carew Hazlitt, The Lambs: Their Lives, Their Friends, and Their Correspondence (London: Elkin Mathews, 1897), 65. My thanks to Felicity James for this reference. 46. Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, vol. 1, trans. John Carew Rolfe (London: William Heinemann, 1927), xxix. 47. Ibid., xxix. 48. Boutcher, ‘Montaignian Essay’, 65. 49. Hunt, Indicator, 1. 50. ‘By Any Other Name: The Unchosen’, Inventory, Cabinet 63 (2017): 17. 51. Ibid., 17. 52. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), 213–79 (271). 53. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Soul of Man, 163–92 (163). 54. ‘By Any Other Name’, 17. 55. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Experience’, in Complete Works, 992–1045 (1018). 56. See Karshan and Murphy, ‘On the Difficulty of Introducing’, 7–8. 57. ‘By Any Other Name’, 17. 58. Hunt, Indicator, 2. 59. ‘By Any Other Name’, 17. 60. Boutcher, ‘Montaignian Essay’, 56–57. 61. See Karshan and Murphy, ‘On the Difficulty of Introducing’, 21 and Kathryn Murphy, ‘The Essay’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1640–1714, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 62. Spectator, no. 1, March 1, 1711, in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 4. 63. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Glory’, in Complete Works, 568–81 (570). 64. Michel de Montaigne, ‘We Taste Nothing Pure’, in Complete Works, 619–22 (621). 65. Fred Parker, ‘Addison’s Modesty, or the Essayist as Spectator’, in Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 164–81 (164). See also Manushag N. Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 7. 66. The pamphlet, titled The Spy upon the Spectator, is quoted by Scott Paul Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106. See also Manushag N. Powell, ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 2 (2012): 255–76. 67. Johnson, ‘Addison’, 12. 68. I am grateful to my colleague James Wood, who points me to Spectator 59, May 8, 1711, in Bond, Spectator, 1:250, where Addison refers to the story of Cicero flaunting the ignominious historical meaning of his own name ‘to shew that he was neither ashamed of his Name or Family’. It is presumably in such a spirit that Steele in the Tatler chose the name of ‘Dick Reptile’ for ‘a good natured indolent Man’. Tatler 132, February 11, 1710, in The Tatler, vol. 2, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 266. 69. Guardian, no. 1, March 12, 1713, in The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 42. 70. Ibid., 41. 71. Brian William Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, EighteenthCentury Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 345–66 (349–53). 72. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘baffle, v., 8’, accessed July 12, 2021, https://oed.com/view/ Entry/14597?rskey=shczxf&result=3&isAdvanced=false#eid. 73. History of Baffler, https://thebaffler.com/about/history, quoting ‘[blunt] the “cutting edge”’ from no. 1 (1988), https://thebaffler.com/intros-and-manifestos/introduction-5.

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74. David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–5 (2). 75. ‘Of Divinity: Of the Benefit of a Religious Conversation’, Monthly Miscellany: or, Memoirs for the Curious, no. 1, January 1707, 1–3 (3), italics in original. 76. ‘Of Law: A Discourse of Law, with Some Reflections on Several Acts of Parliament, Made for Relief of Insolvent Debtors’, Monthly Miscellany: or, Memoirs for the Curious, January 1, 1707, 6–11, italics in original. 77. The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. 78. New York magazine, accessed July 6, 2021, https://nymag.com/. 79. Alex Balk, ‘The Awl 2009–2018’, January 31, 2018, https://www.theawl.com/2018/01/ okay-go-be-as-stupid-as-you-want/. 80. Powell, Performing Authorship, 12. 81. ‘Thank You for Opening Cabinet’, Cabinet 1 (2000): 1. 82. Ibid., 1. 83. Robert Boyers, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 84. Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others, no. 1, January 24, 1807, 1. 85. See Karshan and Murphy, ‘On the Difficulty of Introducing’, 5. 86. Quoted in Powell, Performing Authorship, 55. 87. Anthony Trollope, An Editor’s Tales (London: Strahan, 1870), 149–50. My thanks to Sophie Ratcliffe for sending me to this story. 88. Robyn Creswell, ‘Reading Raritan’, Arts & Culture (blog), Paris Review, July 21, 2010, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/07/21/reading-raritan/. 89. Richard Poirier, Raritan 1, no. 1 (1981): 1–2. 90. Trollope, Editor’s Tales, 148. 91. In a letter to John Forster from early 1850. See ‘Household Words’, vol. 1, Dickens Journal Online, https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i.html#_ftn16. 92. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, in Complete Works, 774–831 (780). 93. Common Sense: or, The Englishman’s Journal, no. 1, February 5, 1737, 1. 94. Charles Dickens, ‘Prologue’, in Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), 2–6 (4). 95. On Baldwin saying he meant the title of Notes of a Native Son to fuse Native Son with Notes of a Son and Brother, see David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994), 101. 96. James Baldwin, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’, in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 247–69 (247). 97. James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, in Collected Essays, 11–18 (16).

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4 The Thing of the Essay Erin Plunkett

T

he essay is bound to ‘speak “the truth”’ about things, György Lukács declares.1 Expanding on this claim in his own essay on the essay, Theodor W. Adorno contrasts the essay’s truth with scientific or positivistic truth, which, he argues, relies on purging the ‘irritating and dangerous elements of things that live within concepts’.2 Clarity and simplicity – the Cartesian hallmarks of sound philosophical thought and writing – did not disappear as philosophical virtues with the waning of logical positivism.3 On the contrary, they appear so naturally aligned with truth (telling ‘the plain truth’) that one feels rather sheepish about suggesting otherwise. Yet there is reason to question, as Adorno does and Friedrich Schlegel and Søren Kierkegaard did before him, whether truth is properly at home in the clear and simple – especially when these terms are used to endorse or exclude specific ways of writing.4 Henry David Thoreau famously complains of the ‘ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither man nor toadstools grow so.’5 The American poet John Hollander asks of philosophical writing ‘more compelling models of what our moral – and even what our epistemologically and metaphysically wondrous – life is like’.6 Precision may be correct, without touching on the true.7 How can an essay’s truth be understood? When Adorno writes of the ‘dangerous elements of things’, he points to the refusal of objects to be resolved into a system or definition, their refusal to conform neatly to our thinking of them. The recalcitrance of a thing or a phenomenon, a thereness that stubbornly asserts itself, is a feature to which the essay bears witness in its mode of presentation. I would like to suggest in what follows a reading of the essay’s attitude toward things as a commitment to both receptivity and renewal. Essayistic writing attempts to meet and to hold the stubborn complexity of things; in lingering with things as they are found, the essayist is able to draw out of them compelling models of world and self, demonstrating the philosophical value of such writing. Understanding the essay as an experiment in dwelling with things gives body to Lukács’s claim that the essay speaks the truth and perhaps helps to motivate the contemporary relevance of the form. Dwelling with things has a visionary potential to see beyond the narrow horizon afforded by the habitual or orthodox. In times of social, economic and especially environmental crisis, the need to renew the possibility in things becomes urgent.

An Objection A potential objection is too obvious not to mention at the outset: why talk about ‘things’ at all? The essay is the form of writing most bound up with subjectivity. Surely the essay’s ‘truth’, if truth can even be used in such a context, is ultimately a subjective

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one? There is no doubt that modern essay writing has been deeply connected with the project of investigating and writing the self and subjectivity. When Simone de Beauvoir relates in her autobiography that she wishes to give ‘a taste of her own life’,8 she points to one of the chief pleasures of the essay form: the sense of voice, the taste of someone’s life and thought. American essayist Sara Levine delights in the sense that ‘you leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody’.9 But as much as the taste of one’s life comes from experiences and turns of thought personal to oneself, it also is shaped by common features of experience. In the latter sense, subjectivity is a shared structure, albeit with internal variations, rather than something unique to the individual. ‘The essay’s presentation of personal idiosyncrasy is simultaneously concerned with what is common’, writes Kathryn Murphy, and this double existence of the essay – both particular and general, idiosyncratic and common – is one that has been scrutinized by many scholars of the essay.10 In addition to speaking with a particular voice, the essay also reveals the common conditions of life and thinking: perspective, temporality, being-in-language and embeddedness within a particular historical-social matrix. This capacity to expose and preserve, in its mode of procedure, universal features of experience, is what made the essay attractive to so many eighteenth-century philosophers, who turned their attention to experience and attempted to describe it without the scaffolding of previous philosophical systems. In the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard embraced essayistic writing in order to sketch out a philosophy of existence rather than being, while Emerson and Thoreau exploited the essayistic ideals of experience and experiment. In the twentieth century, these same features of the essay were admired by Hannah Arendt, who proposed ‘thinking without a banister’.11 The essay does not take for granted the Cartesian split between subject and object; rather, it places both subject and object under the more immediate rubric of phenomenal experience.12 In experience, subjectivity and objectivity function as poles rather than spatial conceptions of inner and outer. My choice to focus on one of these poles is not an attempt to diminish the importance of the other, much less to exclude it. The essay is not ‘objective’ in the sense of ‘subtracting’ subjectivity and occupying a neutral view from nowhere; that no such view exists is one of the lessons the essay has to teach. In focusing on the objective pole of experience, I follow the advice of G. K. Chesterton: to see something clearly, one has to isolate it.13

A Fidelity to the Occasion The essay begins with something. It is occasional. It is about something. It ‘always speaks of something that has already been given form, or at least something that has already been there at some time in the past’.14 From the beginning, the essay was concerned with the texts of others, taking others’ words as an occasion for reflection.15 At first glance, Montaigne’s frequent use of quotations in the Essais appears haphazard, the manifestation of either a natural or a studied carelessness. He allows himself the liberty of forgetting his precise sources. He is, as he always reminds his reader, writing for himself, and scholarly exegesis is not his primary concern.16 ‘[S]omeone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them.’17 And yet the classical aphorisms carved into the ceiling beams of Montaigne’s library are physical evidence of the extent to which he lived with these words, digested them, returned to them, tested them. Self-effacing claims aside, his

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apparent nonchalance in fact comes from the experience of making the words of another his own, trying them to see where they fit in the web of his own life. Finding the potential for renewed life in existing words, the potential for originality in what has been inherited, is the real significance of Montaigne’s comment that ‘we do nothing but gloss one another’.18 He models a kind of reading that turns into writing, writing about what one has read, and expanding what there is to be read in it. Montaigne’s relationship to the classical texts that occasion many of his essays is illustrative of the wider dynamic in the essay between a receptivity to things and a creative renewal of them. The occasion for an essay could be anything, so long as it is there. War photographs, some lines of Virgil, the color blue. Kierkegaard, a great thinker of the occasion, writes in Philosophical Fragments (1844) that because an occasion is simply that which starts one on a journey, it is a sort of nothing, and the learner need not remain faithful to it.19 The nature of an occasion, what it asks of us, is to be left behind; it is the ladder kicked away after one has climbed it.20 Motivating this account is Kierkegaard’s worry that the occasion, if dwelled upon, if made authoritative, can wrongly direct the attention of the learner to it, as a kind of idolatry or spiritual laziness. If the occasion is a beginning, the beginning is not in the thing, he seems to insist, but in the person who sees the thing as an occasion. Yet the endlessly innovative poetic effort that Kierkegaard puts into his texts, which he describes as a mere occasion for his readers, suggests that he may be protesting too much. In Fragments, to be an occasion, is, after all, the highest relationship one human being can have to another.21 The occasion may indeed become an idol, or an idle diversion. In attending to the object as idol, the essay may become insipid or superficial – fail in its poetic/aesthetic potential.22 Granting with Kierkegaard that the occasion is fulfilled in the spiritual journey of the learner – or in the imagination of the essayist – and so in a sense can be transformed into anything, it also has a brute reality that must be reckoned with. If Kierkegaard’s texts have the good fortune of being an occasion for their readers, they cannot, after all, be made entirely transparent. They are marked by gestures of resistance, full of ironic interruptions, revocations and the tension of heterogenous perspectives and voices.23 Apart from any of these specific textual qualities, they are, like any object, simply there. The existing text or thing as occasion sets the imagination to work, but it also calls the imagination back with its continued existence. The three cows outside Lydia Davis’s window keep standing there, inviting further description, reflection. The work of seeing what is there to be seen in things is never finished. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s direct pronouncements on the matter of the occasion, Lukács stresses that it is precisely because the essay is occasioned by something and is not formed from nothing that it must remain faithful to whatever it is about: [I]t is part of the nature of the essay that it does not create new things from an empty nothingness but only orders those which were once alive. And because it orders them anew and does not form something new out of formlessness, it is bound to them and must always speak ‘the truth’ about them, must find expression for their essential nature.24 This could be simply a description of what good criticism does: one expects an essay on jazz to do justice to the music that occasioned it. (Adorno’s ‘On Jazz’ (1966) famously fails this test.) And yet Lukács does not confine his remarks to cultural or

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literary criticism. An essay occasioned by a person (Socrates, for example, as so many of Kierkegaard’s works are) must ‘find expression for’ that person’s ‘essential nature’ in the manner of a good portrait. Although Lukács does not use ‘essential nature’ in any sharply defined sense, it is clear from his analogy of portrait painting that it can be understood neither as a reduction of complexity nor as an exhaustive list of attributes; understanding essence in this way would be a kind of violence to the living presence of a person or the life of an object.25 The only measure of success at having captured the ‘essential’ is ‘the intensity of the work and its vision’.26 To be faithful, then, is not a matter of correspondence, as if the truth were already out there, or creation from nothing, which would be entirely unbound, but a matter of visionary writing, a writing that sees the potential in things. This dynamic between receptivity to the occasion and ‘ordering anew’ stages the process of thinking as a thinking about. That the essay is not about creation ex nihilo but about ‘finding expression for’ brings to light the subject’s responsibility to the world of things and concepts in which they are embedded. ‘Responsibility . . . respects not only authorities and committees’, Adorno notes with some irony, ‘but the object itself.’27

Things, but Not in Themselves This insistence that faithfulness to the object is a work of aesthetic production, rather than a mirroring of what is there, might appear problematic in light of the reading of the essay I am proposing: namely, as an attempt to move away from the positivistic or scientific error of substituting experience, of what is there, with a model or method. Does the essay make the same mistake, substituting a well-crafted text for the object or phenomenon that occasions it? It is true that the essay does not reveal things ‘in themselves’. Adorno notes that ‘theory and experience’ have always already ‘migrated into the object’.28 Stanley Cavell remarks, ‘Philosophy (as ascent) shows the violence that is to be refused (disobeyed), that has left everything not as it is, indifferent to me, as if there are things in themselves.’29 The essay is a way of writing against the kind of objectivity that sees ‘bare things’, that locates the essential nature of things in isolation from their overlapping lines of significance in human and planetary life. Jean-Luc Godard’s narration in the film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) speaks about this sense of objectivity, and the skewed sense of subjectivity which necessarily attaches to it: Since I can’t get out of the objectivity that crushes me or the subjectivity that exiles me, since I am not permitted to elevate myself to [pure] being, nor to fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must, more than ever, look at the world around me, my likeness, my brother [mon semblable, mon frère].30 The scene of these remarks is a café; the camera moves in for a close-up of the freshly prepared coffee swirling in a cup. The intense scrutiny given to this object seems to function as a visual synecdoche for ‘the world’ the narrator affirms. This kind of looking allows the coffee to become something strange to the viewer, not unlike a tiny universe full of worlds being born. Some new potential in the object has been opened. The essay film’s capacity for being visionary in this sense, renewing vision, is its way of resisting inherited ideologies of subject and object.

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Adorno writes of the essayist’s commitment to retaining the thing as it is found: the essay ‘comes so close to the here and now of the object, up to the point where that object, instead of being simply an object, dissociates itself into those elements in which it has its life’.31 Of course the written essay has only words to bring these elements into view. Aware of the excess of the thing in relation to any thinking or speaking of it, the essayist must ‘make unlimited efforts’.32 The constellation of significance of which any object is a part – personal, historical, cultural, linguistic – is never such that it can be seen all at once, hence the proliferation of perspectives within an essay and the proliferation of essays. In contrast to the purported exhaustiveness of the model or method, the essay ‘becomes true in its progress’, and this progress plays out both within a single essay and as an ongoing dialogue between essays. [T]he essay can neither do without general 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 sacrifices.33 The essay’s commitment to ‘the how of expression’, to style, manifests in myriad ways but is most obvious in reflexive gestures such as irony, interruption and the introduction of multiple perspectives that are never resolved.34 The essay’s impulse to constantly broadcast its own form and its own failure puts it at odds with a certain conception of philosophical rigor.

‘Back to the rough ground!’ I recently attended a talk on the sublime by a pair of analytic philosophers. Arguing against another scholar of analytic aesthetics, they proposed a novel definition and structural account of the phenomenon. They provided a wealth of examples to illustrate the soundness of this new account. No one could deny that it was indeed sound and in fact accounted for a much wider range of sublime experiences than the familiar conceptual frameworks or the contemporary analytic model that they were critiquing. It was exhaustive, in the sense that Descartes recommends in his Discourse on Method: it left nothing out. It was elegantly simple and clear. And yet at the end of the talk, the questions exposed a nagging sense among the audience that this rigorous and comprehensive system did not describe the sublime at all. ‘What makes this structure “the sublime” and not something else entirely?’, someone asked. ‘Why do the experiences corresponding to this structure feel sublime and not simply frightening?’ The authors could only respond that they had, after all, defined the sublime as an instance of this structure. Who is to say that an instance of the sublime has to feel any way at all?35 I cite this as an example of a possible way of relating to an existing thing or phenomenon, one that still prevails in fields like analytic aesthetics or philosophy of mind. Lukács describes this approach, perhaps rather unkindly, as philosophy’s ‘icy, final perfection’.36 Such an approach can begin from the same impulse of exploration and understanding as the essay and yet end up in a very different place, one that seems far from the original object and strangely chilled.37 One of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms expresses a similar insight:

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We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!38 In speaking of ‘ground’, Wittgenstein raises the issue of philosophy’s ground, of what ultimately grounds its claims to truth or rigor. If one is used to it, the slipperiness of ice allows for a satisfying glide, a kind of abstracted motion, even great speed. One could say the same of clear and distinct ideas: they can be mobilized. But such icy perfection also means being unable to walk. The ground, by contrast, receives the walker’s footsteps and resists them, pushing back against the foot. Because the ice offers no such resistance, ‘in a certain sense the conditions are ideal’, but only if we no longer care about walking. Wittgenstein implies that there is, after all, something of value in walking, and he recommends a return to the ground that makes it possible, the rough ground that meets and resists the foot. This ground is not ideal; it has the friction of lived experience, the ‘loose ends’39 of life in time, the complexity of history, of ordinary language use.40 When Adorno criticizes Descartes’s principle of simplicity, he identifies its principal danger – that although the conditions seem ideal, they do not get us to whatever complex phenomenon we set out to understand. Adorno writes, by contrast, of the essay’s ‘texture’,41 of its ‘resistance’ to ‘the idea of a master work that reflects the idea of creation and totality’.42 It is a kind of writing that seems to walk, in Wittgenstein’s sense. The hallmarks of essayistic writing can be read as attempts at creating friction, resistance and texture: at maintaining the resistance and roughness it finds in things.43 The essay’s poetic strategies – multiple perspectives, irony, parataxis, circularity – are ways of lingering with things, preserving their capacity to frustrate and to surprise. Philosophical essays like those of David Hume, Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell (not to mention Lukács and Adorno) tend to circle back on themselves, drawing charges of logical deficiency. Yet it is precisely because there is resistance that things and concepts exceed the bounds of a logical treatment of them and need to be approached again and again. Wandering is a way of staying with things. Lukács compares the essay’s movement to the journey of a knight errant: It is highly questionable whether man should want the precise things he sets out to attain, whether he has the right to walk towards his goal along straight and simple paths. Think of the chivalrous epics of the Middle Ages, think of Greek tragedies, think of Giotto and you will see what I am trying to say.44 Walking, if it is to bring about what Wittgenstein hopes for, is not likely to take one on a journey from premises to conclusions. The essay is guided neither by terminus ad quem or terminus a quo, so its walk is prone to meandering, as in Paul Graham’s ‘The Age of the Essay’,45 or what Thoreau describes as ‘sauntering’.46 But this tendency to drift and circle back has everything to do with the essay’s fidelity to its subject matter. Things do not yield themselves up so easily, and our habits of seeing often keep us from seeing what is there. The choice of indirection seems necessitated by the task of speaking the truth about things. Writing about himself as the subject of his Essais, Montaigne stumbles on a similar insight, noting that ‘[t]his also happens to me: that I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance

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encounter than by searching my judgement’.47 The oblique approach allows space for encounter and discovery, looking at things out of the corner of the eye, or leaving off looking at something in order to see more fully what is there to be seen. Montaigne’s observation also suggests the extent to which we find ourselves in things. For Lukács, the reward of an essayistic approach to things is what he calls life: It is true that the essay strives for truth: but just as Saul went out to look for his father’s she-asses and found a kingdom, so the essayist who is really capable of looking for the truth will find at the end of his road the goal he was looking for: life.48 In the biblical story to which Lukács refers, Saul searches for the lost donkeys and is himself found by the prophet Samuel, who informs him that he will rule over the kingdom of Israel. Such unexpected swerves or meanders are characteristic of the essay. In the non-narrative essay, the closest relative of the narrative swerve in the present example is when a perspective that has been put forward in an essay is suddenly undermined or revoked by the introduction of another perspective. Another significant kind of swerve is one I have already mentioned: the essay’s ability to leap between particular experience and the most sweeping movements of universal experience or of philosophical history – in the case of William H. Gass, from the feel of a piece of cake in one’s mouth to the invention of generic bodies in Galileo.49 It is in part its ability to move in these ways that allows an essay to see the life in things.

The Life in Things What is at stake in staying with things? For Lukács, the faithful essayist is rewarded with a vision of the ‘life’ in things. Martin Heidegger offers an alternative conception of the life in things in his 1950 essay ‘The Thing’, where he develops a conception of ‘thing’ (das Ding) that distinguishes it from an object, a body in space, an artifact, or any of the other ways the term is commonly understood that hide its full potential. For him, the project of staying or dwelling with things runs counter to the prevailing tendencies of modernity. Yet the attitude of dwelling, characterized by an attentiveness and responsiveness, has the potential to break out of this orthodoxy, to disclose unglimpsed possibilities of human and nonhuman being. If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing’s presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing of world. . . . As we preserve the thing qua thing we inhabit nearness.50 Heidegger’s concern for ‘sparing and preserving’ the thing as thing is set against the primary mode of thinking and of truth-seeking in modernity: the intellectual revolution initiated by Galileo and Descartes and consummated in the twenty-first century, with its constant advances in technological means. About the legacy of this revolution, Heidegger remarks dryly: ‘Science’s knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded.’51 Within this scientific framework, things become generic objects or bodies in space, and space is characterized by ‘proximity’, a leveling and

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lack of distance.52 The question of why and how things become manifest or fail to do so is never raised within this framework, which relies on things already being present and available, so ‘the region [of Being] from which [the thing] presences’ likewise remains obscure. For Heidegger, das Gestell, or the framing of modernity, has caused things as things – both the possibility in things and their relationship to our form of life – to recede from view.53 ‘Proximity’ describes the availability of things for use, their perceived characterlessness and their potential to be mobilized as resources.54 The ecological and moral consequences of such a view are clear to Heidegger and even clearer to contemporary readers.55 The central question that guides Heidegger’s essay ‘The Thing’ is whether it is possible, now, to think outside of this framework. Is it possible to think the thing as thing? Could there be a way of thinking (and writing) that would allow us to stay with things as we find them, as part of the structures of meaning they inhabit within our lives and as intimate revelations of the world? Heidegger does not answer these questions, but it is clear that he imagines himself to be attempting the activity of ‘thinging’ in his own writing, or at least clearing a space for its possibility. ‘Nearness’ is his word for this different possibility of relating to things, one that shows our relationship to them without collapsing difference.56 When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means of human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance of mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents – that is, explains – to the thinking that responds and recalls.57 Heidegger rejects the view that things are only such by virtue of human subjectivity. The philosophical notion of the subject’s relationship to things as mere projection, in which mental representations ‘stand in’ for things without reaching them in their essence, is for Heidegger a flawed understanding of mind that necessarily misconstrues the nature of things as well. It is not difficult to see how the violence of such flawed views of the inner and outer leads to a lack of care for the world. For Heidegger, representational thought already involves a substitution of the thing with an outline and misses the phenomenal field that encompasses both thing and human being (Dasein). He is interested in the potential – for human being and for things – that is lost in such thinking. The recovery of this potential is only available, if it is available at all, in an attitude of responsiveness, as opposed to the instrumental reason that most often marks our relationship to things. Heidegger favors metaphors of listening to describe this attitude, following on from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, particularly the theme of listening that runs throughout the Sonnets to Orpheus.58 ‘Vigilance’ here implies that it is difficult to listen to things and respond to them in the way that Heidegger intends – precisely because of the dominance of representational thinking. Given these difficulties, Heidegger is forced to make ‘infinite efforts’ with language, exploiting its symbolic character.59 He continues the above passage: The step back from the one thinking to the other is no mere shift of attitude . . . . [A]ll attitudes, including the ways in which they shift, remain committed to the precincts of representational thinking. The step back does, indeed, depart from the sphere of mere attitudes.60

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Heidegger’s responsiveness then is not a simple shift of perspective or attitude (say, the change to a ‘theoretical’ attitude that Edmund Husserl describes in his idea of the epochē). For Heidegger, such a shift remains problematic. In an essay, things appear in words insofar as they appear at all, a paradox that Kathryn Murphy notes.61 That the problem of staying with things is a problem of writing as much as of thought does not escape Heidegger, who is acutely aware of his words and how he constructs his own texts. It is to poetry, especially Rilke, Hölderlin and the Austrian poet Georg Trakl that Heidegger turns in order to combat the problem of representational thinking. Poetry, he argues in his essay ‘Language’, has the ability to speak the truth about things (as things) because it is both a listening responsiveness and a creative naming that actualizes some potential heard in things.62 The earlier distinction between ‘human making’ and ‘human vigilance’ is helpful here as well, since the poet in Heidegger’s work is not first of all a creator but one who listens. ‘And from this silence arise / New beginnings, intimations, changings.’63 The poet’s careful attention to language reveals something hidden within words that is conceived as a feature of the world, of being, of things, not as an arbitrary projection of the subject. For Heidegger, the word has a theological quality, as it does for Walter Benjamin. This approach to language suggests the degree to which style is integral to Heidegger’s philosophical project. While his style has often been described as bad poetry, the essay framework is a more illuminating frame, especially for his later writings.64 Much to the frustration of some readers, Heidegger does not define his concepts but places them within a web of significance with other concepts; sometimes concepts are aligned because of an apparent relation, often an etymological link, while at other times the association between them is more spontaneous. In ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, he introduces a term, offers a way of understanding it, then moves to another term, circles back, digresses through one or two more key terms, and returns to the initial term again, but only after imbuing it with the halo of the other words he has discussed.65 He exploits the fact, expressed by the essayist and novelist Donald Barthelme, that ‘words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes’.66 By exploring the echoes of words in other words, Heidegger gathers together and attempts to stay with whatever phenomenon he is describing, even when it evades his view or when habitual ways of speaking and seeing make it difficult to name and to recognize. The circular motions and ‘steps back’ in Heidegger’s essays have, for many in the anglophone philosophical tradition, disqualified him as a serious thinker, suggesting the sway that is still held by the Cartesian model. Yet these features of Heidegger’s writing, especially in his later work, argue for their place within philosophical essayism, and I see Heidegger’s writing of the thing as a significant conceptual and stylistic development of this tradition. The placement of Heidegger’s work within the essay tradition is contentious given his tendency toward the oracular, which stands at odds with the tentativeness that typically characterizes essayistic writing. Readers of Adorno will also be familiar with his bitter polemic against Heidegger in Essay as Form and elsewhere. He regards Heidegger as pushing a spurious philosophy of origins and of peddling a mystical, anti-historical view of language in which language is intimately related to Being (whatever that is!). Adorno also derides Heidegger’s suggestion that the possibilities of Being (and of our own Being as Dasein) are inherent in Being itself and waiting to be disclosed by ‘human vigilance’. For Adorno, this amounts to ideology. Yet Heidegger’s characteristic web of

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concepts and the unhurried, circular development of these concepts in his essays is the kind of essayistic logic that Adorno praises in other contexts. Heidegger, as Adorno charges, hears in words and things not only the accretion of subjective and cultural activity but the echo of a field of possibilities that always exceeds such activity. But Heidegger is not ahistorical in the sense that Adorno ascribes to him; even his talk of the ‘primordial’ or ‘original’ or ‘true’ meaning of words cannot be read as statements of chronology. Poetry is a ‘source’ but not because it comes before the corrupting influence of culture. Heidegger’s approach toward language, especially in his etymologies, seems closer to Barthelme’s, who was himself a reader of Heidegger: The prior history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle itself into the work. If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also carry with them into the work trace elements of world which can be used in a positive sense. We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages.67 In Heidegger, the various ways in which a word has been understood amount to a kind of logic, a shared grammar of the world and of the human being. The intimate link between words and world, though it can be contaminated, is something that Heidegger’s etymologies and linguistic innovations both affirm and aim to recover. Barthelme’s depiction of this link between poetic creation and being is illuminating: ‘The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.’68 If different ways of writing open up possibilities for encountering being, then the essayist’s attention to language and style takes on an ethical cast: the responsibility for one’s words is a responsibility – and responsiveness – to the world. Heidegger’s own experiment in attending to things and words leads him to identify the thing qua thing as a ‘gathering’ of four dimensions: humanity and divinity, earth and sky. If this strikes Adorno as a mystical circumvention of history, it can also be heard as a call to rehabilitate the understanding of things and our relationship to them beyond the narrow horizon of proximity and utility. The stress on receptivity in Heidegger’s essays suggests the (for orthodoxy, ‘irritating and dangerous’) presence and resistance of things. Heidegger draws near the familiar to see what remains unfamiliar or unrealized in it, and I take this as symbolic of the essayistic approach in general.

Essays in Public The commitment to staying with things that is performed in essay writing has a particular relevance now when it is clear that present ways of seeing – and failing to see – have led to a nexus of political, social, economic and environmental crises. In her essay ‘Lying in Politics’, written after the Nixon scandal, Arendt warns of the politician’s tendency to fit reality to whatever theory they happen to hold – ‘thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency’.69 Arendt thus exposes the move from contingent experience to representative model as a fundamentally conservative one, not only upholding the status quo but extending it into the past and ensuring that there will be no deviations in the future. This is a move that characterizes much philosophical writing as well as

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the model- and algorithm-driven institutions and policies of the twenty-first century. As Arendt writes: Reason’s aversion to contingency is very strong. . . . Much of the modern arsenal of political theory – the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios written for imagined ‘audiences’, and the careful enumeration of, usually, three ‘options’ – A, B, C – . . . has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions. [Such thinking] hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities.70 The kind of thinking that could shake loose the aversion to contingency and allow for reality to ‘surprise’ is staged in the essay. In one of Eliot Weinberger’s thing-oriented essays, ‘The Stars’, the stars are matter interacting through gravity and electromagnetism and nuclear forces, but they are also ‘daughters of the sun’, ‘nails nailed to the sky’, ‘the souls of dead babies turned into flowers in the sky’; they ‘run errands for lovers’, they portend death and ruin, ‘they never change’ and ‘they are in constant flux’.71 The juxtapositions in Weinberger’s list-like essays keep the thing and our thinking of it in constant motion, leading to a sense of the impossibility of an exhaustive view, since an entirely different way of seeing is always crouching, waiting to spring. Jean Starobinski notes that the term ‘“essay” . . . alerts the reader and makes him wait for a renewal of perspectives, or at least the statement of the fundamental principles from which a new idea will be possible’.72 The radical potential of this kind of writing is equal to the potential that it sees in things, their capacity to be otherwise than we see them; this potential only opens up in an attitude of receptivity. Thomas Karshan describes an example of such a reorientation of vision in Chesterton’s essay ‘A Piece of Chalk’ (1905), in which a young Chesterton finally realises that the writing implement he has been looking for – a piece of chalk – is everywhere beneath his feet on the hills of the South Downs, and – implicitly – that the virtue of experience is also everywhere beneath our feet, requiring only the essayist to take it up and make it visible.73 For Adorno, the essay’s visionary potential is a matter of being able to break through the prevailing doxa: ‘By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible.’74 This perhaps helps to explain the resurgence of the essay form in recent years, with literary essayists like Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit writing public essays to address the crises and contradictions of the moment. With the capacity for visionary seeing in the essay, it is perhaps unsurprising that essayists, rather than academic philosophers, have become the public intellectuals of our time, producing more compelling models of what our life is and could be like.

Notes   1. György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’, in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (1910; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 1–18 (10).

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  2. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (160).   3. These virtues also continue to shape the generic expectations of contemporary philosophical writing, at least in the anglophone tradition.  4. Friedrich Schlegel already takes up this question in his Über die Unverständlichkeit [On incomprehensibility] (1798). See Friedrich von Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 257–72. Similar themes run across Kierkegaard’s work, especially Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).  5. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Conclusion’, in Walden, or, Life in the Woods (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 352–68 (356).   6. John Hollander, ‘Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Reason’, Critical Inquiry 6, no. 4 (1980): 575–88 (582).   7. Martin Heidegger often makes the distinction between correctness and truth, criticizing modern philosophy’s obsession with the correct in much the same terms as Adorno.   8. Simone de Beauvoir, Tout compte fait (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 512, my translation.   9. Sara Levine, ‘The Self on the Shelf’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 159–66 (159). 10. Kathryn Murphy, ‘Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 79–97 (86). 11. Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018). 12. This does not mean that the essay magically does away with the split, which very much informs the way that modernity and modern alienated selfhood thinks itself. See Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 155. 13. ‘To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation.’ G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, in On Tremendous Trifles (London: Hesperus Press, 2009), 27–30 (28). 14. Lukács, ‘Nature and Form’, 10. 15. See Mario Aquilina, introduction to Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics, and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 1–17 (7). 16. Montaigne writes in his preface to the reader that he composed the Essais for ‘only domestic and private aims’. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsalmo, Michel Magnien and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007), 27, my translation. 17. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Physiognomy’, in Essays, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 1505–45. 18. ‘nous ne faisons que nous entregloser’. Montaigne, Essais, 1115, my translation. 19. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 11–12, 24. The context here is the teacher as an ‘occasion’ for learning, though the notion of occasion recurs across Kierkegaard’s works and is sometimes used to describe Kierkegaard’s own texts. For example, see the preface to Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper and Bros., 1948), 27–8. 20. Wittgenstein, a devoted reader of Kierkegaard, speaks of his own work in a similar vein: ‘Anyone who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.) . . . [T]hen he sees the world rightly.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 2001), proposition 6.54, p. 89.

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21. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 10, 24. 22. Adorno writes that in remaining too close to the surface of the cultural artifact, the essayist might simply become part of the mindless and deadening process of cultural production. See Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 153–54. 23. See Erin Plunkett, ‘Possibility in Kierkegaard’s Imaginative Discourses’, in A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience, and Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 111–40. 24. Lukács, ‘Nature and Form’, 10. 25. Ibid., 10–11. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 154. 28. Ibid., 165. 29. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 46. 30. My translation. The end of the monologue mirrors Baudelaire’s poem ‘Au Lecteur’ from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). 31. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 162. Adorno speaks here of the cultural object or ‘artifact’, but later claims that ‘it is clear that every object, above all a cultural object, encloses endlessly many aspects’ (163). 32. Ibid., 165. 33. Ibid., 160, emphasis in original. 34. ‘Style is of course how.’ Donald Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing’, in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), 11–24 (22). 35. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 108. 36. Lukács, ‘Nature and Form’, 2. 37. See Marilynne Robinson’s essay ‘Humanism’, in The Givenness of Things (London: Virago, 2015), 3–16 and William H. Gass, ‘Representation and the War for Reality’, in Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 73–112. For philosophical context, see Edmund Husserl, Crisis in the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970) and Jan Patočka, ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science According to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger According to M. Heidegger’, in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 327–39. 38. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), no. 107, p. 46e. 39. Edward Hoagland, ‘What I Think, What I Am’, in Essayists on the Essay, 101–3 (102). 40. ‘All concepts are already implicitly concretised through the language in which they stand. The essay begins with such meanings.’ Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 160. 41. Ibid., 160. 42. Ibid., 165. 43. ‘The pompous scientific objections to over-sophistication actually do not aim at the impertinently unreliable method but at the irritating aspects of the object which the essay reveals.’ Ibid., 163. 44. Lukács, ‘Nature and Form’, 12. 45. Paul Graham, ‘The Age of the Essay: The River’, September 2004, http://www.paulgraham. com/essay.html. 46. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 5 (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 205–48. 47. Montaigne, Essays, 82. 48. Lukács, ‘Nature and Form’, 12. 49. The essay I have in mind is Gass, ‘Representation and the War for Reality’.

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50. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1971), 161–84 (179). 51. Ibid., 168. 52. ‘Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness.’ Ibid., 164. 53. The problem is not unique to modernity. See ibid., 168. 54. See Heidegger’s discussion of Bestand or ‘standing reserve’ in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3–35. 55. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 141–60 (148). 56. Proximity relies on collapsing difference, while nearness maintains it. See Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, 175. 57. Ibid., 179. 58. For example, see the discussion of calling/pealing and listening in Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘Language’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 185–208 (especially 205–7). 59. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 156. 60. Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, 179. 61. ‘[T]he argument, as Montaigne says in a different context, is of words, and with words it is answered: we do not feel Johnson’s pain, or Zeno’s servant’s, or witness Diogenes walking, but read about it.’ Murphy, ‘Of Sticks and Stones’, 82. 62. Heidegger, ‘Language’. 63. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Christiane Marks (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2019), poem 1:1, pp. 2–3. 64. I have not discovered any sustained critical attention given to Heidegger as an essayist. David Wood mentions Heidegger’s preference for ‘occasional’ formats, though he does not mention the essay explicitly. ‘The provisionality of Heidegger’s later philosophy – most of it is as “on the way” as On the Way to Language – is registered in the many occasional formats he employs – such as the lecture, the address, the dialogue, the conversation.’ David Wood, ‘Style and Strategy at the Limits of Philosophy: Heidegger and Derrida’, The Monist 63, no. 4 (1980): 494–511 (501). 65. Martin Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–68, and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. 66. Donald Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing’, in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), 11–24 (21). He echoes Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘thought is surrounded by a halo’ (Philosophical Investigations, no. 97, p. 44e). 67. Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing’, 22. 68. Ibid., 21. 69. Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’, New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971. 70. Ibid. 71. Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Stars’, in An Elemental Thing (New York: New Directions, 2007), 170–76. 72. Jean Starobinski, ‘Can One Define the Essay?’, trans. Lindsey Scott, in Essayists on the Essay, 110–15 (111). 73. Thomas Karshan, ‘What Is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf’, in On Essays, 32–55 (40). 74. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 171.

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5 Essay, Fiction, Truth, Troth Jason Childs

Essayism, when imagined as a constructive approach to existence, is a blanket of possibilities draped consciously on the world.1

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ight it not strike us as curious, given the defining role of indefiniteness in our thinking about the essay, that we so often encounter the idea that it is a form of nonfiction? ‘[T]he essay belongs, obviously, in the category of nonfiction’, avers G. Douglas Atkins, ‘and from it we expect, certainly, honesty as well as candor and fidelity to historical and biographical truth, in addition to accuracy of representation’.2 Considering the indefiniteness abovementioned, there are no doubt many scholars of the essay who would pause before such an emphatic statement of expectation. In an essay published in the New York Times, Christy Wampole writes: I recently taught a graduate seminar on the topic and, at the end of the course, to the question ‘What can we say of the essay with absolute certainty?,’ all of us, armed with our panoply of canonical essay theories and our own conjectures, had to admit that the answer is: ‘Almost nothing.’3 Similar admissions abound in the critical literature. But even Wampole describes the essay as ‘nonfiction prose’.4 In his introduction to Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace – while acknowledging ‘all the noodling and complication involved in actually trying to define the term “essay”’ – declares a preference for the term ‘literary nonfiction’, implying a significant degree of overlap, if not outright interchangeability.5 Robert Atwan, though conceding that essays ‘emerge from the same creative urgency as do short stories and poems’, clearly labels them ‘nonfiction’.6 That it is nonfiction might be the second-most agreed upon of our certitudes about the essay – right after the fact that we do not really have any. In the following pages, with the hope of deepening our sense of the essay’s categorial ambiguity, I want to lend my voice to recent efforts to problematize this idea. Indeed, I want to invite the reader to consider whether the assumptions implicit in the term ‘nonfiction’ undermine the indeterminacy we often note – and sometimes claim to prize – in the essay as a mode of writing, reading and thinking. This will involve arguing that the kind of thinking the essay embodies or experience it evokes is, as Claire de Obaldia phrases it, ‘closer, in a sense, to the “as if” of fiction’.7 But it will also involve arguing against the naive conception of fiction as standing in simple opposition to ‘the real world’. It will mean, that is, taking seriously the view – perhaps less warmly embraced in the humanities today than it was even a few years ago – that

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fictions are not somehow secondary or parasitic, sealed off in an ontologically remote netherworld, but instead belong to the very fabric of human thought and knowledge. This will create a chance, in the chapter’s final section, to address the question of the essay’s vocation in the so-called post-truth era.

Concerning True Lies In recent years, influential essayists and essay theorists have explicitly challenged the essay’s classification as nonfiction. Indeed, the essay’s relationship to facts has been one of the major themes at issue in its recent renaissance. Perhaps most notably (or notoriously), John D’Agata and David Shields have asked whether there are kinds of truth toward which the essayist is more properly inclined or impelled – and in which the reader of the essay is, or ought to be, more interested – than factual accuracy. In The Lifespan of a Fact, for example, D’Agata – or a character who shares his name – argues: ‘An essay is not a vehicle for facts . . . nor for information, nor verifiable experience’.8 A few years later, D’Agata elaborates on this idea in an interview: When I’m reading a news article about the banking industry, or a medical textbook about how to fix my heart, or a set of instructions on building a suspension bridge, I’m not looking for a literary experience. I want every fact in those texts to have been verified multiple times. We do the literary essay a disservice, however, when we expect from it the same kind of verifiability as we would from a medical textbook.9 Both Shields and D’Agata have suggested that we instead view the essay primarily, as the former puts it, ‘in poetic terms’.10 Indeed, both were early proponents of the now widely used term ‘lyric essay’ as a way of underlining the essay’s distinction from nonfiction as generally understood, rediscovering for it a unique domain of epistemic and aesthetic expectation. Shields writes: When a lyric poet uses, characteristically, the first-person voice, we don’t say accusingly, But did this really happen the way you say it did? We accept the honest and probably inevitable mixture of mind and spirit. . . . We accept that [poetry’s] task is to find emotional truth within experience, so we aren’t all worked up about the literal.11 We should not expect anything different from the essay, these authors contend. I used the word ‘rediscovering’ advisedly a moment ago, for I am not the first to notice that adding the qualifier ‘lyric’ to ‘essay’ results in a kind of tautology. Viewing the essay ‘in poetic terms’, as both these authors recognize, is perhaps not as radical a gesture as the controversies surrounding their work have sometimes made it seem. D’Agata’s line of questioning is by no means without precedent when he asks, ‘What happens, when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or – worse yet – leaving the blanks blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation?’12 Despite significant developments in its history that tether it to journalism, historiography and various scientific disciplines, the essay has, especially in the

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Montaignian tradition, perhaps always been more partial to possibility than actuality. ‘There are some authors whose aim is to relate what happened’, writes Montaigne in ‘On the Power of the Imagination’: ‘mine (if I could manage it) would be to relate what can happen’.13 In the same essay, he tells us: In the study I am making of our manners and motives, fabulous testimonies – provided they remain possible – can do service as well as true ones. Whether it happened or not, to Peter or John, in Rome or in Paris, it still remains within the compass of what human beings are capable of; it tells me something useful about that. I can see this and profit by it equally in semblance as in reality.14 If Montaigne is clear at points that he does intend a kind of nonfictional veracity – ‘I excel all historical fidelity’, he assures us, ‘in my devoted scrupulousness’15 – he nonetheless departs frequently into speculation and imaginative recreation. As de Obaldia puts it: In Montaigne’s Essais, true stories are interspersed with passages in which the essayist invites the reader to imagine a man in this or that situation (often introduced by expressions such as ‘let us consider’) and by extension to speculate with him on the physical or spiritual characteristics of man in general. In a sense, such quasi-fictional compositions are those of a quasi-narrator, sometimes even of a completely fictional narrator.16 Later, this tendency toward the fictional would be carried on with an even greater degree of self-consciousness by the early periodical essayists – in Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s Tatler, for example, or Samuel Johnson’s Spectator. Indeed, as Denise Gigante notes, ‘the English periodical grew up alongside the novel, like it challenging the borders between fiction and nonfiction prose’.17 Gigante points to the work of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne as exemplary of such activity in the formative phase of the modern novel. ‘Later in the nineteenth century’, she writes, ‘as the novel became more plainly fictional and the critical essay more plainly critical, their shared roots in the Enlightenment Republic of Letters withered and were forgotten.’18 Yet as de Obaldia points out, such fictional elements continued to be adopted by later essayists: Charles Lamb’s ‘The Essays of Elia’, for example, first published in the London Magazine, are written from the perspective of ‘a semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional’ narrator.19 William Hazlitt – and Mark Twain, in the United States – among others, deployed similar fictional elements in their essays. It is also worth reflecting briefly, in this light, on the essay-novel, traditionally seen as a marginal subcategory of both the essay and the novel. I am thinking especially of works like Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932), Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and earlier forerunners like Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) or Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34), to offer some well-known examples. But I also have in mind recent hybrid works contemporary with, though yet to be fully recognized in their relation to, the lyric essay – those by Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Geoff Dyer, Rachel Cusk,

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Gerald Murnane, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Hélène Cixous, Valeria Luiselli and others, as well as earlier works by postmodernists like Raymond Federman and Chris Kraus. Critical or theoretical examinations of the essay-novel have tended to focus on how the essay as a discrete form ‘enters’ the epistemic and aesthetic space of the novel, where it is fictionalized and thus made less ‘apodictic’, more ‘hypothetical, playful, or ironic’.20 Yet the provisionality supposedly conferred upon the essay by its placement in a novel already belongs to the essay itself.21 In fact, it might be argued that the realist novel as it developed in the nineteenth century, with its fictionality hypostatized in opposition to the corpus of scientific fact, itself re-enters a more playful or experimental space when subjected to the essayistic, as in the work of Musil. It is not completely clear, then, in what way the epistemic status of these two kinds of prose – novel and essay – are modified by their intermingling. That is to say, they allow us to wonder if the standalone essay is ever far from fiction. Along these lines, we might examine instances where essayists have strayed quite deliberately from the facts. The practice is more common than we may think. Biographer D. T. Max reveals that events and people represented in some of David Foster Wallace’s own best-loved journalistic essays were composites or whole cloth inventions.22 Janet Malcolm, herself occasionally accused of fabulism, celebrates the way Joseph Mitchell ‘travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction’ as ‘his singular feat’, claiming that his ‘impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality’ is what makes his books ‘so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition’.23 The psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips, meanwhile, tells an interviewer, ‘I don’t use clinical vignettes, because I think psychoanalysis is private. So when I do use them, either they’re minimal, anonymous, or I make them up.’24 Following Shields and D’Agata, we might ask whether these works are, for all that, less truthful. By the standards of truth valuation typically applied to a medical textbook, perhaps. Indeed, these authors might well be (and some have been) accused of lying. Yet in such cases, to borrow from de Obaldia, ‘the essayist’s apparent emancipation from mimeticism can actually be said to be motivated by an acute perception of reality’s potential, and therefore ultimately to make possible “a more intense perception of truth”’.25 To exercise fidelity to the standard espoused by Atkins would therefore mean making other, perhaps more grievous kinds of betrayal. Honest adherence to the immanent logic of the essay, to the shaping of an evocative intellectual and imaginative experience for the reader, may supersede adequate reference to what we think lies beyond or outside of it. In Reality Hunger, Shields (or a protagonist/narrator who evokes him) takes these thoughts a step further. Note that D’Agata is careful, at least in the remarks cited above, to reserve a function, a space, for the nonfictional. He is simply suggesting that placing the essay in that space is an error. Shields, by contrast, seeks to do away the category altogether. ‘“Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction’, he writes at one point.26 ‘I recognize no difference along the truth continuum’, he explains at another, ‘between my very autobiographical novels and my frequently fib-filled books of nonfiction.’27 This conflation might be taken to suggest not only that we should eschew certain types of truth valuation for the sentences in an essay (operating in the tradition, say, of Sir Philip Sidney’s contention that ‘the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth’28); nor still that, paradoxically, taking ‘poetic license’ with the facts can make available a truth about nonfictional realities that would be otherwise unavailable, and where

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a ‘stricter’ adherence to fact might itself provide the reader with what David Lazar calls ‘false experience’.29 More radically, the implication throughout Reality Hunger is that nonfiction should be conceived of as itself a mode of fiction; indeed, that it is perhaps only nonfiction’s disavowal of fiction that constitutes the difference between the two. In one of many relevant passages, Shields writes: There’s a good case for arguing that any narrative account is a form of fiction. The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. The words themselves begin to suggest patterns and connections that seemed at the time to be absent from the events the words describe.30 The composing essayist may continue to feel bound by a sense of mimetic constraint, but the acts of selection and combination involved in assembling any text might be said to render it fictional. We might here recall the enigmatic roots of the word ‘fiction’ in the Latin fingere, which can indeed connote dissembling, pretending and deceiving, yet also intends creation and invention in a less pejorative sense, calling to mind notions of shaping and fashioning, of forming and formation.

The Reality of Fictions The view of fictionality in contrast to which this etymological ambiguity may sound odd or unsettling is, obviously, a historical construction, albeit one reasonably long in the tooth. It belongs to what Thomas G. Pavel, in Fictional Worlds, calls ‘segregationism’. In philosophy, Pavel tells us, segregationists have long been preoccupied with ‘establishing sharp boundaries between fiction and nonfiction’.31 Lubomír Doležel summarizes the main tenets of segregationism like this: ‘[f]ictional entities do not exist, fictional terms lack reference (are “empty”), and fictional sentences are false’.32 Whereas the term ‘nonfiction’ – with its negative and thus dependent character – may appear to reflect a certain amount of anxiety, a desire to differentiate its referent from something with which it fears it might get confused or by which it hopes not to be contaminated, for the segregationist it is fictions that are derivative; indeed, they are parasitic upon normal or literal uses of language. They might even be considered a species of lie: not only false but, with all the moral freight of the word, wrong. For the latter-day segregationist John R. Searle, who puts the case somewhat more generously, fictions are ‘pseudoperformances’ in which we ‘use words with their literal meanings without undertaking the commitments that are normally required’.33 Such segregationists carry forward, in various ways, the project of empiricism that, though begun in a spirit of skepticism, helped give rise to the triumphalist scientism of the nineteenth century. One of this movement’s progenitors was Francis Bacon. As described by Wolfgang Iser, Bacon argues in his Novum Organum that, in pursuing knowledge of the material world, ‘the human mind . . . is its own obstacle’.34 The data of the senses are adulterated by what Bacon calls the Idols of the Mind (Idola mentis), which range from generalizations and analogies to institutionalized codes of religious and scholastic dogmatism. Idols, for Bacon, are ‘the debris of the old cosmology’, having once upon a time explained our difficult place in a hostile world.35 Yet in the dawn light of modernity, explanation becomes valuable to the extent that it facilitates

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self-preservation. With the recognition that our chances of survival are increased and our chances of misery decreased by our accurate comprehension of patterns in nature, and the insight that this accuracy can be achieved only via thoroughgoing scrutiny of received ideas and traditional authority, the first task of the philosopher becomes a critical one: Bacon considers it the primary task of his nascent science to debunk idols – that is, to unmask fictions – such that ‘a more perfect use and application of the human mind and intellect [can] be introduced’.36 Advances in science and technology in the ensuing centuries served to buttress narratives of humanity’s increasing knowledge and mastery of nature via segregationism. For the dominant intellectual culture of the modern West, the fictional became something remote and parasitic, misleading and delusional, alien to truth. The implications of this conception were, on the one hand, the reification of supposedly ‘literal’ discourse and, on the other, the progressive disqualification of literature (increasingly considered synonymous with fiction) from the sphere of truth and knowledge. We might speculate about the effect this had on the traditional conception of the essay, which many of its leading theorists continued to insist participated in the spheres of both literature and science. The nineteenth century saw the gradual reification of both the realist novel and the space of fiction (considered a zone distinct from empirical reality) with which it was identified. As this identification gained ground, the respective purview of novel and essay perhaps became more narrowly defined, even oppositional: one primarily ‘creative’, the other primarily ‘critical’ – indeed, one a vehicle for commentary on and judgment of the other; and, of course, one on the side of fiction, the other in opposition to it. Throughout modernity, however, there have been alternative accounts of the role of fictionality in human knowledge – for different degrees of what Pavel, in contrast to segregationism, calls an ‘integrationist’ position.37 Among the many proponents of the latter, Hans Vaihinger stands out as an important historical example, if only for the explicitness of his formulations and for the emphatic contrast of his position to that of the segregationist. Vaihinger outlines a ‘conceptual realism’ in his The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, in which fictions are considered the substance of cognition, rather than an impediment to it. In contrast to both rationalist and empiricist realisms for which consciousness is, as Iser puts it, an ‘epistemological court of appeal’, for Vaihinger it ‘is itself the source of feigning’.38 As Vaihinger puts it: fictions are mental structures. The psyche weaves this aid to thought out of itself; for the mind is inventive; under the compulsion of necessity, stimulated by the outer world, it discovers the store of contrivances that lie hidden within itself.39 Our cognitive models of the world, on this view, derive their value from that which they make available to us through their exclusions and reductions: we never perceive things according to a neutral view from nowhere, but instead psyche works over the material presented to it by the sensations . . . on the one hand cutting away definite portions of the given sensory material, in conformity with the logical functions, and on the other making subjective additions to what is immediately given.40

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Our minds furnish us with ‘as if’ constructions, Vaihinger argues, that allow us to take hold – perhaps only momentarily, perhaps for an epoch – of the elusive world beyond them. Vaihinger attributes the fact that we usually do not realize the fictive nature of cognition to a process through which, over time, useful fictions are naturalized. According to his ‘Law of Ideational Shifts’, our dogmatic self-deceptions usually fall victim, eventually, to bouts of skepticism (à la Bacon), allowing us to recognize them for the organizing fictions they were all along.41 This is a view that radically undermines certain Enlightenment hopes about knowledge, yet also perhaps rekindles them in a new recognition of our creativity and self-consciousness. For Vaihinger, to understand the nature of knowledge, its pragmatism must not be dissembled, as it has been by various hubristic positivisms. Cognition and language amount to tools for manipulating reality, not means of knowing it with any certainty or finality. Reality must be considered an open-ended process in which our language and consciousness play a constitutive role, rather than as a pre-existing substance ‘out there’ that we might ever encounter. Human cognition and knowledge, according to this view, are themselves inherently experimental, even essayistic. This view of knowledge, in other words, is arguably implied by the claim that the essay thinks experimentally. It is not merely that the essay, as de Obaldia puts it, ‘disclaims all responsibility with regard to what is after all only “tried out”’.42 In its fictive character – its self-consciousness about its own historicity and artifactuality – the essay does not shirk but rather shoulders epistemic responsibility; it ‘quietly puts an end to the illusion that thought could break out of the sphere of thesis, culture, and move into that of physis, nature’, as Theodor W. Adorno puts it.43 The essay is therefore, as Brian Dillon writes, ‘not a provisional instance of something that might otherwise attain the solid status of a truth’.44 Indeed, its truth ‘gains its force from its untruth’, as Adorno writes, and inheres precisely ‘in the essay’s mobility, its lack of the solidity the demand for which science transferred from property relations to the mind’.45 Such themes are echoed, of course, in a wide variety of more recent and familiar attempts – most obviously associated with European theory and American pragmatism, but also with contemporary analytic philosophy and post-positivist science studies – to rethink relationships between mind, language and reality. Whereas fictions have usually been considered remarkable exceptions to a stable and readily identifiable literal norm, to be studied, if at all, as a kind of theoretical sideshow, more recent theories have taken fiction as at once a far more important and a far more quotidian phenomenon.46 Postmodernist and poststructuralist thought, meanwhile, have often been described (or decried) as pan-fictionalist, their theorists attending to the performative and productive character of discourse and language games, often in determined opposition to correspondence theories of mind or language (and therefore endorsing, their critics have worried, a nihilistic relativism about facts). Daniel Punday, in a recent commentary, notes the overlap between such technical postmodernist views of fiction as a distinctly modern ‘thinking about truth and the knowability of the world’47 and the emergence of a sense, in both cultural studies and ‘popular perception’, that the world ‘is becoming more fictional than it used to be’, that fiction ‘has somehow wormed its way into spheres of contemporary life where it traditionally was not welcome’.48 Yet on the integrationist view, it could hardly be otherwise; indeed, it was ever thus. For Nelson Goodman, another notable integrationist, fictions

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are our ‘ways of worldmaking’. Indeed, going beyond the Kantian view underpinning Vaihinger’s work, Goodman rejects the assumption that there is a single world ‘out there’ for representation to correspond to: ‘there are only versions of worlds, without “something solid underneath”’.49 This constructivism represents a fundamental shifting of philosophical coordinates ‘from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making’.50 With ‘false hope of a firm foundation gone’ – ‘with the world displaced by worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and with the given acknowledged as taken’ – fiction is no longer to be considered a substance or entity or structure opposed by or added to reality.51 Instead, fiction dissolves into the process from which fact emerges, indexing the movement of inventive and experimental minds. We might say that where once fiction was almost something, here it becomes almost nothing: fiction is differential, impossible to separate from – but also impossible to reduce to – the worlds between which it establishes relations, both conditioning world versions and potentiating the emergence of each from another. Viewed thus, the irony of attempting to define and ontologically ground fiction is clear: fiction is already at work within such efforts. As Timothy O’Leary points out, in the English language we have the noun ‘fiction’ where in fact we might be better served by a verb.52 The development of the philosophical counter-discourse on fiction reveals a gradual transition away from the noun and toward the verb, away from thing and toward act, a shift ‘from fiction as representation to fiction as intervention’.53

From Informative to Formative Where the segregationist, as I have suggested, may ascribe a diminished value to the work of literature, the integrationist finds it a valuable resource, even an exemplary instance of worldmaking. This amounts to a reversal of the traditional cognitive disenfranchisement of literature: where art’s artificiality was once grounds for dismissing it, here it is precisely what merits attention. ‘Cervantes and Bosch and Goya, no less than Boswell and Newton and Darwin’, writes Goodman, ‘take and unmake and remake and retake familiar worlds, recasting them in remarkable and sometimes recondite but eventually recognizable – i.e. re-cognizable – ways.’54 This view – in which ‘making is a remaking’,55 thinking rethinking – seems immediately to endorse the essayist’s habit of beginning, as Joan Retallack puts it, ‘in medias mess’:56 that is, taking up and working with the (non)fictions he finds. This offers us a somewhat different slant on Adorno’s claim that the essay is ‘always directed toward something already created, [and therefore] does not present itself as creation, nor does it covet something all-encompassing whose totality would resemble that of creation’.57 Goodman might agree with Shields when the latter writes (or cites) that ‘[e]verything is always already invented’.58 Such making-as-remaking also coheres with the critique of authorial originality advanced in Adorno’s work on the essay: the essayist, Adorno observes, ‘has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him’.59 Indeed, fiction as intervention, rather than as creation ex nihilo, sponsors the sampling and collaging practices so common among contemporary lyric essayists. ‘In collage’, writes Shields, ‘writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading.’60

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Among the most compelling adoptions of integrationism in literary theory have been precisely those within reception theory. Likewise, it is here that we find some of the most interesting theorizations of what D’Agata calls ‘literary experience’. In Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, for example, all literary texts are essentially collages, assembled through ‘fictionalizing acts’ that comprise subordinate acts of selection and recombination.61 Iser refers to the repertoire on which these acts draw as ‘reality’, yet his sense of this term includes ‘thought systems, social systems, and world pictures as well as other texts with their own specific organization or interpretation of reality’ – what an integrationist might call fictions.62 In fictionalizing acts, these bits and pieces are ‘lifted out of the systems in which they fulfill their specific functions’ and transplanted into the tissue of a text. In more or less novel rearrangements, the transposed elements prompt a process of readerly cognition in which relations other than those established in the pragmatic contexts from which they are drawn are realized qua possible: ‘existing relations’ are thus ‘extended into new patterns’.63 The text, writes Iser, ‘becomes a kind of junction where other texts, norms, and values meet and work upon each other’.64 It is important to note, however, that the literary work is not, in this picture, identical to its text. For the reader is not treated here as the passive recipient of a communication, but instead as an active participant in the production of the text’s meaning. The work itself is the realization or, to borrow a term from Roman Ingarden, the ‘concretization’ of the performance, of the synthesis prompted by the text and carried out by the reader, who brings their own repertoire of fictive world-stuff and interpretive knack to bear on the task.65 ‘In brief’, writes Iser, ‘the sentences set in motion a process which will lead to the formation of the aesthetic object as a correlative in the mind of the reader.’66 Since the reader’s production or inscription of meaning is accomplished by following the guidelines offered by the text, understanding this active production involves focusing on the way in which we attend to the text. According to Iser, a distinctive processual mode of understanding is the defining feature of such attendance. In reading, one cannot perceive or understand the text all at once. Rather, one must read its sentences in an intended sequence. To understand these sentences, furthermore, one must grasp the states of affairs they represent – what Ingarden calls ‘the intentional sentence correlates projected by them’.67 Moment by moment, the work gradually forms as an intentional object in the reader’s mind. For Iser, the absence within literary experience of what would normally count as a referent ‘adumbrates the conditions under which the not-yet-existing may be conceived’.68 That is to say, the repurposing of pragmatic fictions within the fictionalizing act gives rise to a textual map for which a possible or imaginary territory emerges. Reading, then, becomes a way in which we change our minds, imaginatively opening a gap between the actual and the possible that, in the same moment, inscribes each within the other: the possible takes on definition while the actual is made potential. In this picture of literary experience, works are irreducible to their content, especially to the communication of a message or univocal argument. They are to be judged not in terms of communication, nor even in terms of their powers of evocation per se, but in terms of their ability to potentiate effects. ‘Writing and reading . . . are trajectories or traversals’, writes Martin Harrison, in a paper on the composition of essayistic works. ‘To write is to open up a plurality of actions, heading off into the future.’69 Yet the effects of literary reorganizations of our cognitive models, the consequences

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of imaginative actions they afford the reader a chance to carry out, are never fully knowable in advance – including for their authors, who are also readers of what they write. In fact, ‘effects’ is perhaps a misleading word here, for there is never really a predictable causal linkage between an individual reader’s encounter with a text and the outcome of that encounter. The fictionalizing act of literary reading is less a gazing into the mirror than a playful excursion away from actuality – what Dieter Wellershoff calls a ‘Probierbewegung’, a testing movement.70 While Iser primarily has novels in mind, this model of the cognitive interaction between reader and text, as well as the implication of reading in the writing process, are clearly no less apt to elucidate our experience of essays. Indeed, following Rachel Baldacchino, we might instead suggest that the ‘essayistic space’ of literary reading ‘offers “interesting objects for contemplation” but not “propositions to the understanding” that follow in the manner of rhetoric understood as stating your case and proving it’.71 Joan Retallack points out that ‘the essay text, like the poem, like the musical score, is nothing other than notations for performance’.72 De Obaldia, too, reflects on the implication of an ‘interaction model’ within the essay’s processual mode of thinking: Instead of leading the passive reader ‘step-by-step, in a logical and orderly manner, to an already established point of certainty and clarity’, the essayist requires the reader’s active participation in the form of a constantly renewed evaluation, deduction, and interpretation of the matter at hand. . . . [T]he reader . . . must in other words be as actively involved as the speaker. ‘Speech,’ Montaigne writes, ‘belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener’, as illustrated by his description of reader and writer on opposite sides of a tennis net.73 Meanwhile, this quality of ‘reaching out of text toward reader’, posits Retallack, ‘foregrounds the limitations of the writer’. It suggests, that is, that ‘the richer the matters at hand the more the writer needs the help of an intelligent, informed, interested reader’.74 Importantly, this ‘process of thinking’, de Obaldia writes, is one ‘unconstrained by any foregone conclusions’.75 Indeed, the citational practices that set this thinking in motion suggest that the writing of the essay is, in a sense, a continuation of productive readerly confusions: the essayist does not convey certainties, but she shares work in progress; she does not try to convince us of a truth, but instead she offers us possibilities as partial solutions, fictions that might be of use. This absence of a pre-established and orienting sense of certainty – as Montaigne puts it of his work, ‘Here you have not my teaching, but my study’76 – is what makes the essay differ from the treatise, as Max Bense suggests: The person who writes essayistically is the one who composes as he experiments, who turns his object around, questions it, feels it, tests it, reflects on it, who attacks it from different sides and assembles what he sees in his mind’s eye and puts into words what the object allows one to see under the conditions created in the course of writing.77 The essay thus does not follow ‘a linear path’, suggests Baldacchino, but rather ‘a circuit marked by “interruptions, detours, returns, blocked exits, mishaps and serendipity”’.78

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‘Essays’, Retallack writes, ‘like poems and philosophical meditations, should elude our grasp just because their business is to approach the liminal spectrum of near-unintelligibility.’79 Indeed, she suggests that ‘the best essay is a puzzle’.80 This last note may at first suggest a kind of difficulty at odds with the spirit of the essay, perhaps figuring the author as knowing riddler. Yet Retallack is quick to correct this impression: ‘Difficult texts’, she writes, ‘those that are difficult because of the proportions of what the writer is attempting to take on, have this quality of appealing vulnerability. Rather than pushing the reader away, they suggest collaboration.’81 These definitions would suggest a way of looking at a wider variety of text types as essayistic, insofar as they potentiate transformative and inconclusive experiences of thought. Essays could be included in that class of texts that Joshua Landy, in How to Do Things with Fictions, calls ‘formative’,82 although what they offer the opportunity to form may primarily be negative capability, a disposition less interested in knowing the world than in interesting and productive ways of not knowing it.

On Second Thoughts I am aware, of course, that a certain version of integrationism, far from offering a revolutionary vantage, has become a vexatious orthodoxy of the contemporary West: the loss of a sense of the fictional as a safely circumscribed region of human activity, it has been suggested, inaugurates what many of us now lament as the post-truth era. If the advent of postmodernist iconoclasm was characterized by a sense of play and possibility, its evolution into post-truth skepticism has come to signify something ‘sinister’. Christopher Schaberg reports in The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth: A few years before writing this book, I might have celebrated the idea of arriving at an age of ‘post-truth.’ In some ways, it sounds like a fundamental goal of literary studies: how readers learn to linger in and learn from uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox.83 Yet this insistence on ‘the slipperiness of truths’,84 salutary under less permissive social and political circumstances, is today itself viewed with consternation: This is the age when what is truthfully stated or factually reported can be dismissed as ‘just words’ – as Donald Trump put it in his first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. And by merely retorting that something is not true, any further inquiry is halted. Or, conversely, by claiming something patently untrue, one can nevertheless sow belief in such a form that floats freely away from actual life.85 It is perhaps understandable, faced with this anxiety, that we might experience a certain nostalgia for an outworn sense of the factual. In her introduction to The Best American Essays 2019, Rebecca Solnit appears to share Schaberg’s concerns about post-truth, the worst-case realization of which she too finds embodied in the figure of Trump. The central promise of Trump’s ascent to power, she writes, was ‘that truth could be whatever you wanted it to be, that reality was a Choose Your Own Adventure plus bullying romp’. ‘McCarthyism is far behind us as part of the era of the USSR and the Cold War,’ writes Solnit, ‘but right in front of

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us as a strategy to override facts, truths, and rights with belligerence, repetition, and sheer force of will.’86 However, where Schaberg worries about the value of literature in this context (‘Doesn’t any work of literature – much less literary studies – open the floodgates of endless interpretation, with no firm foundations to fall back on?’87), Solnit argues that the role of the essay is here one of resistance. She grounds this resistance, however, in a devotion to ‘accuracy and precision’, especially in matters of fact.88 Notwithstanding her insistence that ‘essay writing is reflective’, that ‘it doesn’t just want to recount things that happened, but contemplate what they mean’,89 she offers a conception of essay writing informed by what seems – somewhat surprisingly, from the author of as complex an essayistic meditation on knowledge as A Field Guide for Getting Lost – a segregationist nonfictionality. Indeed, she paints a picture of the community of essay writers as something like a scientific community. ‘It’s the relationship between generalities and particulars that matters, and often the work an essay does is taxonomical: here’s how this particular fits into this categorical reality’,90 she writes, and then imagines ‘one essay making a case that lets another make a case that goes a little further, establishing together a new set of perspectives from which new statements can be made’.91 In this venture, she encourages in essayists the ‘confidence to reach a conclusion. You have to take a stand, believe in yourself.’92 Reading these statements after traversing the terrain of this chapter, we might feel conflicted about Solnit’s words. Well might we agree with her invocation of the value of precision and especially with a vision of the essay as a shared project, one engendering a community (especially of skeptical readers and reader-writers). But this value and vision can clearly pertain not only to facts, but – as it were – to troubling facts about facts. Indeed, the problem with populist movements, mobilized by the mendacity of their leaders, that we associate with the notion of post-truth is certainly not that their world view is somehow too literary, but rather that it is not at all. It is not the fictionality of fake news and alternative facts but their factuality that is being insisted on in the post-truth era. What proliferate today are precisely competing and irreconcilable nonfictions. Taking a stand on self-belief may here be a symptom, not a solution. Where else, we might ask, is the confidence of conviction that Solnit calls for as countermeasure more notoriously at work than in Trumpian discourse? If the essay has something to offer here by way of resistance, it may be precisely in the traditional value of literary unmooring that Schaberg worries is outworn.93 Indeed, it might be precisely in its self-consciousness about fictionality that the essay resists most powerfully the ‘oversimplification and the binaries and absolutes that dog our sloganeering’.94 To ignore our ironizing awareness of the reality of fictions, to respond to post-truth confusion by too sincerely asserting a fabled immediacy, is itself an oversimplification. It is perhaps in a self-conscious fidelity to possibility rather than actuality that the essay can remain an oppositional, even transgressive, force. But to adhere to possibility does not place the essay at odds with reflection and meditation. Indeed, we can agree with Solnit that a ‘rush to judgment’ and ‘pretense that categories are airtight’ are among the things the essay can very effectively oppose.95 What the advent of post-truth consciousness perhaps suggests for any future ethics of the essay is an aesthetic that emphasizes recursiveness and reflexivity, doubling back, second thoughts. As Shields puts it: For me, what distinguishes Reality Hunger from any Trumpian ethos is that, while I’ll question any all-knowing expertise, one thing I do that Trump et al don’t do is

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jason childs I’m always questioning myself. The first thing I would question would be my own access to absolute knowledge. . . . I privilege vulnerability, weakness, and my own confusion.96

This would seem to locate the essay in the space of what James Corby, exploring the relationship between post-truth and the post-literary, calls ‘countertexts’. In contrast to romantic and modernist definitions of literature ‘as decisive, irruptive, transcendental, and capable of rupturing the prevailing condition of things’, the countertext ‘may not be decisive and heroic at all’. What it has to tell us may be ‘not so much a lesson of clarification, decisiveness, breakthrough, conviction, commitment . . . [but] rather, the lesson of weakness, vulnerability, complexity, disappointment, failure, and, yes, complicity’.97 If the essayist, as Wampole writes, offers ‘a cogent response to the renewed dogmatism of today’s political and social landscape’, it may be through a ‘meditative and measured’ mitigation of the need ‘to be unshakeably right’; indeed, through ‘a model of humanism that isn’t about profit or progress and does not propose a solution to life but rather puts endless questions to it’.98 Perhaps we need fewer declarations of being found and more field guides for staying lost. We might be better served, then, by thinking of the essay in terms of what Simon Critchley calls ‘a performative idea of truth as troth, an act of fidelity or “being true to,” rather than a propositional or empirical idea of truth’.99 Troth to what? Perhaps to possibility itself; to a reality not present and certain, but yet to emerge. In this view, the essay does not tell us how it is. At most, it tells us how it is as if it is – and allows us room to consider how else it could be.

Notes   1. Christy Wampole, ‘The Essayification of Everything’, The Stone (blog), New York Times, May 26, 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-ofeverything.   2. G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 115.   3. Wampole, ‘Essayification’.  4. Ibid.  5. David Foster Wallace, ‘Deciderization 2007: A Special Report’, in The Best American Essays 2007, ed. David Foster Wallace (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), xii–xxiv (xiii).   6. Robert Atwan, foreword to Best American Essays 2007, viii–xi (viii).  7. Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 3.   8. John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 111.   9. John D’Agata, ‘John D’Agata Redefines the Essay’, interview by Susan Steinberg, Electric Literature, July 14, 2016, https://electricliterature.com/john-dagata-redefines-the-essay. 10. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011), 134. 11. Ibid., 134, italics in original. 12. John D’Agata, ‘2003’, in The Next American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2003), 435–36 (435). 13. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On the Power of the Imagination’, in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 109–20 (119). 14. Ibid., 119.

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15. Ibid., 119. 16. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 11. 17. Denise Gigante, The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), xvi. 18. Ibid., xvi–xvii. 19. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 12. 20. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 65. For a similar view, see Stefano Ercolino, The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 21. See Jason Childs, ‘Assaying the Novel’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 183–96. 22. D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012), 185–87. 23. Janet Malcolm, ‘The Master Writer of the City’, The New York Review of Books, 23 April 23, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/joseph-mitchell-master-writer-city. 24. Adam Phillips, interview by Sameer Padania, BOMB, no. 113 (2010): 54–59 (54). 25. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 12. 26. Shields, Reality Hunger, 63. 27. Ibid., 177. 28. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1831), 54. 29. David Lazar, ‘An Introduction to Truth’, in Truth in Nonfiction: Essays, ed. David Lazar (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), ix–xiii (x). 30. Shields, Reality Hunger, 65. 31. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 12. 32. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3. For a thorough exploration of the arguments concerning fictionality in analytic philosophy, see Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 33. John R. Searle, ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975): 319–32 (325–26). 34. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 93. 35. Ibid., 97. 36. Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-Mary Sargent (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 73. 37. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 11. 38. Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 130. 39. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (1925; repr., Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2009), 12, italics in original. 40. Ibid., 157. 41. See ibid., 125–34. Vaihinger’s Law of Ideational Shifts examines the relationships between fiction, dogma and hypothesis. 42. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 3. 43. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23 (11). 44. Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2017), 20. 45. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 20. 46. See Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and R. M. Sainsbury, Fiction and Fictionalism (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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47. Daniel Punday, Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Writing (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 9. 48. Ibid., 1. 49. Goodman, quoted in Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 152–53, italics in original. 50. Goodman, quoted in ibid., 152. 51. Goodman, quoted in ibid., 154. 52. Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (London: Continuum, 2009), 5–6. 53. Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 167. 54. Goodman, quoted in ibid., 162, italics in original. 55. Goodman, quoted in ibid., 153. 56. Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 28, italics in original. 57. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 17. 58. Shields, Reality Hunger, 68. 59. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 4. 60. Shields, Reality Hunger, 120. 61. Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 1. 62. Ibid., 305n2. 63. Ibid., 5–6. 64. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 271. 65. See Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. R. A. Crowley and K. R. Olson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 66. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110. 67. Ingarden, Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 10. 68. Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 248. 69. Martin Harrison, ‘The Act of Writing and the Act of Attention’, in ‘Writing Creates Ecology and Ecology Creates Writing’, special issue, TEXT, no. 20 (October 2013): 1–11 (3), http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue20/Harrison.pdf. 70. Quoted in Iser, Prospecting, 210. 71. Rachel Baldacchino, ‘Otherness and the Essay in the Pacifist Work of Vernon Lee’, in Essay at the Limits, 125–36 (126). 72. Retallack, Poethical Wager, 49. 73. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 33. 74. Retallack, Poethical Wager, 42. 75. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 33. 76. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 424. 77. Max Bense, ‘Über den Essay und seine Prosa’, Merkur 1, no. 3 (1947): 418, quoted in translation in Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 17. 78. Baldacchino, ‘Otherness’, 125, quoting G. Douglas Atkins, On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34. 79. Retallack, Poethical Wager, 48. 80. Ibid., 48. 81. Ibid., 49–50. 82. See Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10. 83. Christopher Schaberg, The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 1. 84. Ibid., 2.

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85. 86. 87. 88.

Ibid., 1, italics in original. Ibid., xxii. Ibid., 2. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Introduction’, in The Best American Essays 2019, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Robert Atwan (New York: Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), xvii–xxvii (xxii). 89. Ibid., xviii. 90. Ibid., xviii. 91. Ibid., xxiii. 92. Ibid., xix. 93. Schaberg, Work of Literature, 2. 94. Solnit, ‘Introduction’, xxiv. 95. Ibid., xxv. 96. David Shields, email message to author, February 23, 2022. 97. James Corby, ‘The Post-Literary, Post-Truth, and Modernity’, CounterText 5, no. 1 (2019): 33–69 (66). 98. Wampole, ‘Essayification’. 99. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (New York: Verso, 2012), 165, italics in original.

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6 The Essay as Resistance Kara Wittman

M

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ontaigne resists simple definitions’: so opens Donald M. Frame’s introduction to his authoritative 1957 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. Frame elaborates: essayist, skeptic, moralist, prose stylist, student of himself, student of man – ‘no one description tells nearly enough’. Thus, he concludes, we might cut through the matter not by defining the man, but instead by recognizing that ‘the book is the man’, as Montaigne himself encourages us to do.1 This doesn’t quite solve the problem, however, of the resistance to definition; it seems merely to turn a warmblooded conundrum into one of pressed rags and ink. What is Montaigne; what are the Essais? In fact, Frame has made it simple: Montaigne resists. And if man and book are one and the same, (‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me’2), the Essais also resist. They are ‘radical in [their] non-radicalism’, writes Theodor W. Adorno, nodding to the ‘ironic modesty’ of Montaigne’s experiments and their resistance to conclusions, to the ‘ultimate’.3 And, as I shall trace in this chapter, Montaigne’s understated formal defiance will in its global inheritors have outsized political potential. Given this particular strand of Montaigne’s legacy – the refusal to ‘play by the rules’, literary, formal, intellectual and even, if we consider the looming threat of censorship, juridical – I want to turn away from ongoing efforts to define Montaigne, to define the Essais, to define ‘the essay’ and turn toward the resistance itself.4 What can we begin to know by understanding the Essais, and the essay form for which they stand as prototype, template and inspiration, as resistance? How, in other words, can we see Montaigne’s autobiographical resistance to ‘definition’ as a symbiotic sociopolitical and aesthetic innovation – ‘epitomizing in himself the confusion of his time’, as the Venezuelan essayist Mariano Picón-Salas puts it nearly four hundred years later – that inaugurates a particular global tradition of seeing the formal resistance internal to the essay as a means to protest the conditions of a reality external to it, experimental writings that, perforce, ‘mix and chop the old ways into new ones’?5 Resistance, a noun, would seem to name an action (‘the act of resisting’6), and we are perhaps habituated to think of that action as having material or energetic force and presence in the world, something we can point to as acting against, or reacting to, something else. Resistance, in written form, would seem to be argument, protest, dissent; outrage, outcry and struggle. In essay form, as Cheryl A. Wall writes, this resistance arrives as ‘interventions in social and political debates, whether over slavery and abolitionism, civil rights, feminism, or affirmative action’,7 to name just a few. As in the terms Cornel West uses to describe James Baldwin’s work, resistance writing does things in the world we can point to: it tells the truth, bears witness, stirs the soul.8

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Certainly when I began teaching a seminar I called ‘The Essay as Resistance’ several years ago this is how my students understood it, and their partial understanding is instructive for us here: they wanted from essays what Wall calls ‘the voices of thunder’ of the abolitionist African American essayists she considers, explicit arguments against an immiserating status quo.9 They expected essays that named injustice and spelled out the revolution and were surprised to encounter instead the seeming apolitical whimsy of something like Montaigne’s ‘Of Thumbs’. Protest and print have been of a piece since ‘Gutenberg first inked his press’, writes James P. Danky; print culture initially served Church and State, then became a medium for voices dissenting against the same.10 The essay in particular became the genre for ‘reform’, ‘revolt’, ‘protest’, ‘revolutionary and counterrevolutionary’ argument, and political and social ‘subversion’ and intervention.11 Understanding the essay in these terms – explicit, active, outraged – my students saw it rightly as the genre they could use to say the things and make the arguments that would lead directly to material change. They saw, and sought, the potential for essays that would be so compelling in their calls to action as to be almost action itself. But the call to action is only a fraction of the essay’s force: when an essay resists, it does so not only, perhaps not even mainly, with what it says, but also how it says, and how it says not. What I consider here is a continuous thread of resistance writing – more and less explicit – that extends from the formal resistance Montaigne introduces into his own writing through twenty-first-century essays that use the affordances of the form to make legible, visible and audible suffering, injustice and oppression. Put simply, this chapter traces a line between ‘Of Thumbs’ and contemporary works like Donald Glover’s short film essay This Is America, Claudia Rankine’s multimodal Just Us: An American Conversation or Eula Biss’s ‘Land Mines’, as well as less overt, but nonetheless forceful, resistance practices in contemporary essayists.12 This is not the only tributary along which we might follow the essay form – others have argued compellingly that Francis Bacon, for example, inaugurates a tradition of confident and methodical essays that has its own historical place in influencing arguments that engage and question doxa, but that subordinates the take-it-as-it-comes, anti-totalizing resistance we find in Montaigne to a need for order and argument: ‘Bacon, then’, Kathryn Murphy observes, ‘is at once inaugurator of the English essay, and the enemy of its experiential epistemology.’13 My goal here is to track, first, a particular tradition of epistemological and aesthetic resistance immanent in the Montaignian essay form and its four centuries of legatees, and second, the way later authors shift, adapt and innovate on that still-stable legacy in order to address crises and suffering Montaigne could not have foreseen. I want to trace the relationship between the formal resistance of the essay, which we might see as operating in the negative – critical, ironic, anti-totalizing – and the positive political resistance of the protest essay. It would be a monumental task on its own terms to catalog the essays throughout history and across the globe that have made essential contributions to social and political resistance by virtue of what they demand we look at, what they reveal, what injustices and inequities they illuminate and what histories of suffering and oppression they document and attempt to redress. Into this history of the essay as resistance we could put John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica and Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense; Frederick Douglass’s 1861 ‘The Union and How to Save It’ and John Lewis’s 2020 ‘Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation’.14 Audre Lorde’s 1977

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‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ would be here, with David Walker’s 1829 Appeal and Derek Jarman’s 1987 essay film The Last of England; we should include Oscar Wilde’s 1891 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and Alfonso Reyes’s 1917 ‘La Sonrisa’, Valeria Luiselli’s 2017 Tell Me How It Ends and Thomas Carlyle’s 1850 Latter-Day Pamphlets, Amitav Ghosh’s book-length 2016 essay The Great Derangement and the 2021 essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? by Jesse McCarthy.15 Essays with explicit, stated political intent crisscross the globe and use the associative, dialogic capacity of the form to engage each other: the Argentine essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada celebrates Thoreau’s American essays for causing ‘a true revolution in the souls and in the tentacular empires’ perhaps more consequential than the French Revolution;16 US author Claudia Rankine takes the first lines of Chris Marker’s French essay film Sans Soleil for her opening gambit on race and violence in American history: ‘If they don’t see the happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black’; 17 in ‘Revealing and Obscuring Myself on the Streets of New York’, Hilton Als uses Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ to compare the black male body in a Manhattan street to the white woman’s in London a century earlier and show us where, and for whom, movement – the freedom of essaying – collides with the specter of repressive violence.18 This is to name only the tiniest fraction: this list would go on and on, and the entries would have in common that they are essays – creative and critical works of nonfiction prose – that index social and political ills and injustices and, as they make legible these ills and injustices, offer us a way to resist them. Protest essays, we might call them, or at least expressly politically engaged essays: they mount an active and voluble resistance against the entrenched beliefs, actions, policies and ideologies their essayists perceive have been moving through a culture with invisible momentum. As César Díaz puts it, ‘A protest essay exists when society claims unity and equality and then turns a blind eye to division, bigotry, and inequality. The protest essayist is born out of this necessity.’19 The history of the protest essay is at once a history of calls for freedom, equality, democracy and justice, and of the medium for taking up those calls. We also need, however, to acknowledge that the letter of the essay – which is to say its argument, its platform, the social or political position it avows – is not necessarily, even in the protest essay, acting in service of those things. The anti-status-quo affordances of the essay have at times been mobilized against those same ideals, using some of the same apparatus for resistance we learn from Montaigne and that is theorized much later in Theodor Adorno. Witness, for example, Thomas Carlyle’s formally experimental and deeply anti-democratic later-career essays, or Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘tragic’ conclusion in the genre-questioning essay ‘Novels Disguised as History’ that the unquestioned social good of modernization necessitates the eradication of vestigial unassimilated ‘Indian cultures’ in Latin America.20 Joan Didion’s The White Album calls out our human attraction to totalizing, flattening narratives (‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’) but the same formally avant-garde essay evinces conservative derision in the face of student protesters at San Francisco State University in 1968 (‘enfants terribles’ living out a ‘wishful fantasy’).21 Or we could look to one of the even more extreme versions of the politically reactionary essay, Yukio Mishima’s 1968 Sun and Steel.22 Protest and resistance cut more than one way. Here, suffice it to say that whatever the perceived status quo, we can track a consistent formal capacity in a

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strand of the essay’s evolution to resist the ‘blind eye’ itself, the blinkering that allows that status quo to stand unchallenged, to pass as a self-evident and unassailable good. *** But why the essay? Even at its nominal origins, the relationship between the essay and social, political and ideological resistance is not a happy accident; protest writers do not always choose the form of the essay simply because it allows a convenient vehicle for an argument in moderate-length and rhetorically flexible prose. Readers may feel exhilarated by the voices of thunder Wall invokes, but she does not stop there: ‘Even essays that intend to rouse readers to action reflect the sensibility that how they make their argument is as illuminating as what the argument becomes.’23 We take this for granted with other literary genres, she continues, but with essays, especially with essays that name their politics, we tend to look through the formal architecture to the content. So we must ask: Why, in particular, the essay form? What is the formal resistance Montaigne shows us, and that gets picked up by writers from 1580 to the present as a means of pushing back, pushing against, and pushing us forward? Theorists of the essay and essayists themselves have tried throughout history to answer this question, to tease out and articulate the precise nature of the essay’s relationship to and capacity for resistance. Why, they have asked, is the essay form peculiarly equipped at once to represent and to enact a resistance with social and political consequence? The answers turn us from what the essays say, what truths they index and what injustices they witness, to how they say it. And in so doing, they turn us back to Montaigne himself, who conceives of his Essais as forms organized around a challenge to completion and stasis, around an exploration of what is held in tension with what might be, what cannot be, and what we do not know yet – as an engine driven by the evolving relationship between self and world, world and self. Montaigne lived, as Stephen Greenblatt reminds us with some force in his introduction to the Florio translation of Montaigne’s Essays, ‘in a profoundly intolerant age’; caught between the ‘all-or-nothing’ Manichean alternatives of God and the Devil, ‘no one in Montaigne’s repressive, conflict-ridden world would have grasped, let alone honored, the concept of freedom of speech’.24 And yet Montaigne did manage to resist the suffocating intolerance and restrictions on expression. Some of this is explicit: he speaks frankly about bodies, sex, sin, smells, things one enjoys in the mouth, marriage, death and whatever else he might explore in more and less open defiance of ecclesiastical prohibitions. ‘I have ordered myself to dare say’, he writes, ‘all that I dare to do’; ‘I am hungry to make myself known, and I care not to how many, provided it be truly.’25 But the resistance Montaigne’s essays offer does not manifest only in what their author is willing to say, describe or explore. We meet this resistance when we look to the essays for a coherent picture of Montaigne, a sequential understanding of his life and development; we meet this resistance when we try to pin down and peer into (as might the Church, or the State) a legible self. In his own self-fashioning, to use both Greenblatt’s influential phrase and Montaigne’s own (a self ‘whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again’26), Montaigne resists the notion that the self can or should be known as anything coherent; the self is an epistemological problem, not an ontological one. ‘Even in my own writings,’ he

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says, ‘I do not always find again the sense of my first thought; I do not know what I meant to say . . . I do nothing but come and go.’27 The Essays enact this refusal to superordinate coherence, legibility and conformity by allowing what Réda Bensmaïa calls a ‘subterranean’ machinery of ‘complicatio’, or complication, to push against or thwart entirely a ‘“finite mode” of reading or reader’.28 Aaron Aquilina points out that this particular resistance to self-completion, this un-portrait of ‘self as a failed entity’,29 finds its apotheosis in the ‘queer essay’; conversely, what Aquilina helps us identify as ‘queer essays’ – those that conceive, among other things, ‘alternative conceptions of thinking the self’ – might help us see more clearly the resistance at work in the essay form.30 As a scholar of ‘queer literacies’ advocating for just this essayistic, genre-troubling prose, Stacey Waite is blunter: ‘Without the ability to develop and cultivate alternative ways of reading and composing, I might be dead.’31 Indeed, in Montaigne, the avowed failure to produce a fully legible self serves in part as surface marker for the deeper workings of epistemological ambiguity, which in turn push against the blunt instrument of state repression by making that whole self structurally unavailable for sanction. In this sense, even as the reader might follow the text in one direction, looking for the familiar rhythm of cause and effect, chronology and Bildung, looking for eventually something that adds up to a whole greater than its parts (the whole of Montaigne, perhaps, or of a unified biography, body – and then something like a coherent account of that body’s world), something resists this frictionless unidirectional ‘readerly’ reading. Moving against this readerly impulse to discover the effects of causes or the answers to questions is the ebb tide of Montaigne’s commitment to ‘turn[ing] in’ upon his own themes, his own discoveries, his commitment to ‘wonder, the chase, ambiguity’.32 In other words, as Bensmaïa puts it, ‘there are always some pieces of story, some fragments of thought, some “bits” of quotation which, even if they do not come to anything in a given essay . . . will nevertheless continue to work in a subterranean fashion’.33 As readers of Montaigne have long observed, that subterranean complication in Montaigne’s essays takes the form of digressions, non sequiturs, and curiously achronological narration, of generic hodgepodge, spontaneous reflections and observations ‘ranging from the epigrammatic to the rambling and associative’.34 Formally, then, the Essays enact Montaigne’s resistance to ready conclusions, stable ontology and the rationalist impulse to ‘abstract from the particular to the general’, abstractions ‘founded on unacceptable elisions of difference and particularity’.35 In this way, while an essay like ‘Of Thumbs’ is not performing the overt, positive resistance of the more recognizably political ‘Of Freedom of Conscience’ or ‘Of Sumptuary Laws’, it still performs a resistance to ‘homogeniz[ing] what is heterogeneous’, refusing to subordinate or to give license to what Edward Said identifies as a ‘culture [that] cloak[s] itself in the particular authority of certain values over others’.36 The insistence on looking steadily at the thumb as physical, cultural and social object, imagining the thumb might be otherwise – asking the thumb, ‘But what are you?’, to borrow from Tressie McMillan Cottom37 – gradually makes visible a complex and sometimes insidious intersection of the cultural, historical, philosophical and political forces that we live in and have been accustomed to take for granted. Making the thumb thumb-y again, to paraphrase Victor Shklovsky’s work on aesthetic ‘enstrangement’ (loosely, defamiliarization), restores to us our ability to question and even to experience a salutary fear of things: thumbs, selves, dogmas, war.38 To escape

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a repressive regime, for Montaigne, is not always to call it out and bear witness against it, but sometimes instead to resist in the negative, to open up the possibilities in thinking, expressing and perceiving that would eat away at its foundations. What Bensmaïa identifies in Montaigne as the ‘subterranean’ push and pull of forces against the nominal, titular or avowed contents and biographic accounting of Montaigne’s essays, Paul de Man might recognize as what he calls in his 1982 ‘The Resistance to Theory’ ‘the residue of indetermination’.39 A mid-twentieth-century theorist committed, along with figures like Jacques Derrida, to bringing out the epistemological difficulties immanent in literature per se, de Man’s essay on literary scholars’ resistance to theory is useful for us here in considering how an essay performs resistance even without saying, ‘This is a protest essay; I resist.’ The problem, for de Man, is that even subtle scholars of literature remain tied to the grammatical and logical aspects of their objects of study: that literary language means, that the meaning of language points to something beyond itself and that the meaning has value. In other words, de Man takes issue with the conviction that a literary text can be fully decoded according to an x means y, y means z, and z means this or that truth about the world. But the essay offers something beyond a grammar, something de Man identifies as this ‘residue of indetermination’ that lingers even when the text has been grammatically decoded. This residue can only be understood rhetorically, as the aspects of a text that do not mean beyond themselves but instead embody a resistance to decoding that makes it almost impossible to flatten out and discipline the text. Put simply, if it cannot be known absolutely – as in Montaigne’s refusal to make his whole self available to scrutiny and sanction even as he builds and explores that self – it can introduce an instability and uncertainty into the reading experience akin to, and necessary for, questioning a status quo, a known and stable world. If we understand the active resistance of the protest essay as saying you will not, we can also identify a subterranean force of resistance in the essay’s form – refusing to yield everything to ‘official thought’ – saying I will not.40 To understand the rhetorical performance of this text demands a different kind of reading, one that undoes the perfect ‘stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic to a general science of man and of the phenomenal world’.41 In addition to articulating injustices, I am suggesting, protest essays might also rely on something functioning within the language of the text itself: the commitment to complication we see first in Montaigne, a resistance, the residue of indetermination. To read the essay as resistance, again borrowing from de Man, is to understand reading as ‘a negative process in which the grammatical cognition is undone, at all times’.42 In that negation, that undoing, the essay is resisting, offering us a way to understand the world not in positive terms (complete, fixed) but in negative terms (unfinished, constructed, discontinuous, dislocated). Whereas protest might seem to require positive articulation, the manifest and durable force of certainty and argument, the essay form shows us that we can find resistance at work in negation, the refusal to come out into the bright light of concepts and categories, sequences and narratives that can be decoded, labeled and put safely in their intellectual and aesthetic compartments. This relationship between the force of the negative and the form of the essay receives one of its most significant and enduring examinations in Theodor Adorno’s 1958 ‘The Essay as Form’, an essay that asks us to consider what might be the aesthetic form of the negative dialectic, the form most able to resist the totalizing impulses of the Enlightenment and its technocrats. ‘The essay’,

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he writes, ‘allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character.’43 Or, in grammatical terms similar to de Man’s, it refuses the ‘model of the protocol sentence’ that anchors the grammar of positivism.44 Adorno’s description here is characterized by the way it establishes the positive force of the essay from the negative: the essay is non-radical (and radically so); it refrains from reduction (suggesting the un-reduced, the complicated), it champions the incomplete form (the partial, the fragment). And perhaps most importantly, it makes us conscious of the nonidentical: those particularities – bodies, objects, ideas, histories – that do not fit easily or perfectly in the hermetic world of conceptual certainty, that slop over the neat edges of Enlightenment categories and so, in a world of fine-edged conceptual expectations, must be lopped off. For Adorno, these ‘ideals of purity and tidiness’ common to a ‘philosophy versed in eternal values, an airtight and thoroughly organized science, and an aconceptual intuitive art, bear the marks of a repressive order’ and the essay – skirting the well-guarded borders of that philosophy, art and science – negates those totalizing systems, giving us instead the critical, the transient and the heretical that would call them into question.45 ‘[T]he essay, in contrast’, he writes, ‘shakes off the illusion of a simple and fundamentally logical world, an illusion well suited to the defense of the status quo.’46 And it does so not in what it says, or argues, not in its content but in its form – as form: ‘Its totality, the unity of a form developed immanently, is that of something not total, a totality that does not maintain as form the thesis of the identity of thought and its object that it rejects as content.’47 When Said writes that the essay denies legitimacy to a culture that works by dominating and displacing voices in its own aesthetic canons, we might hear him as echoing Adorno’s observation that the essay coordinates rather than subordinates, which is to say the essay resists hierarchy in favor of metonymic, inclusive sprawl.48 In other words, the essay as form resists the status quo, the repressive order, in its rendering of the transient, its attention to the particular, in the way it ‘liquidate[s] opinion’ (including its own), its fragmentariness, incompletion, in its relentlessly critical effort to ‘move culture to become mindful of its own untruth’ by revealing the brutal artifice in its claims to totality.49 For examples of this we might look back, as I have suggested, to Montaigne’s efforts in the Essais to question the fiction of a ‘whole’ self, or to any number of the essayists I list earlier in this piece who filter their sociopolitical concerns through the fragmentary form of the essay and as such turn fictions of completion into the possibility of change, but we might also look to Adorno himself. Thorn-R Kray suggests we might rightly view the dense, slippery text of ‘The Essay as Form’ as an exemplum of the very form for which it argues.50 The essay as form, then, for Adorno, represents the hope for a ‘renewal of experience . . . possible even in [a] totalizing system of domination’.51 As we track the resistance inherent in Montaigne up to this Adornian moment, we thus see Montaigne’s famously vertiginous question ‘what do I know?’ become Adorno’s ‘what do any of us know – and in assuming we know, what suffering goes unheard?’52 Important to note here is that the urgency of resistance and the need to unsettle reason so that we might again hear the ‘echo of suffering’ is not, for Adorno, merely theoretical.53 He composes ‘The Essay as Form’ between 1954 and 1958, having returned from his exile in North America during World War II to a post-Holocaust Germany; he condemns

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positivism in this essay because he sees it as responsible for Auschwitz. Adorno names quite clearly the stakes of defending this critical, anti-positivist form: the negative, partial quality of the essay allows us, because it refuses what is, to imagine things otherwise. To do anything else in a damaged world is to sanction ‘the yellow star’ with which the ‘person who interprets instead of accepting what is given and classifying it’ is marked.54 While he is firm in his belief, outlined in his essay ‘On Commitment’, that art should not be overtly political (or ‘committed’), he is equally clear that it is the ‘office of art . . . to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads’.55 Other essayists and theorists of the essay echo this sense that the essay form in and of itself has sociopolitical consequence. For example, Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues that Alfonso Reyes, early twentieth-century giant of Latin American letters, mobilizes the essay in similarly Adornian ways avant la lettre. Reyes takes up the essay form, suggests Sánchez Prado, precisely to challenge the ‘hegemony of positivism inherited by the Porfirian regime’ and uses the form’s ‘capacity to intersect different elements of diverse intellectual traditions through the essayistic construction of terminological continuity’. This form allows Reyes to showcase a particular form of Latin American ‘episthetic play’ that would ‘provid[e] a way to think beyond the scientific imperatives of positivist scholastics’.56 Similarly, in explaining the formal choices for his 2021 book, Jesse McCarthy writes that the essay has long ‘held a special place’ in black aesthetic traditions, ‘as a space not only for argument but for experimental writings that mix and chop the old ways into new ones’. Writing in a tradition of ‘black resistance’, he tells us that he chooses essays because they are ‘experiments, eccentric but serious attempts to synthesize and connect different bodies of knowledge and their relationship to race or black culture’.57 Its resistance to cause and effect, predictable narrative and monologic response helps us understand why Amitav Ghosh chooses the essay as the form for his discussion of climate disruption. To represent ‘the forces of unthinkable magnitude’ that confront us as global warming and the currents of climate disruption turn huge portions of humanity into climate refugees and exacerbate to unimaginable degrees existing inequities and suffering,58 we need something more than a scientific paper or, for that matter, a realist novel. Ghosh, who identifies first and foremost as a novelist, turns to the essay when he meets what he identifies as a ‘form of resistance, a scalar one, that the Anthropocene presents to the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel’.59 He suggests only an expansive, flexible form such as the essay can render, consider and synthesize for our human-sized imaginations those phenomena whose power, severity and inconceivable vastness not only surpass the relatively modest imaginative and narrative capacities of the modern novel but also were, he suggests, in fact exacerbated by the ‘grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth’.60 In other words, the modern novel taught us to think in ways that are now being frustrated and eclipsed by the magnitude and complexity of climate change; Ghosh turns to the heterogeneity and massive coordinative capacity of essay in order to document what confounds and outstrips other literary forms. ‘[I]t is a striking fact,’ he writes, ‘that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction.’61

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Valeria Luiselli makes a similar point as she tries to write about the humanitarian crisis of US immigration in the twenty-first century: We should have predicted it, but we did not. I should have foreseen some of it: I am a novelist, which means my mind is trained to read the world as part of a narrative plot, where some events foreshadow others.62 But Luiselli did not foresee this, which may help explain why she needs to write her inconclusive and searching Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions in an attempt to understand her experiences with child immigration policies in the US before she can write her novel – Lost Children Archive – about the same. *** I want to end by turning to some specific examples of what I have been discussing here in order to address the question pressing at this essay throughout: What does the essay as resistance look like – how can we identify some of the formal apparatus driving the political engines of this resistance work? I shall move quickly through a few moments in this strand of the essay’s history that illustrate in different ways the political force of the ‘implicit critique of instrumental reason’ emergent in Montaigne’s formal ‘decenter[ing]’ of selfhood in the sixteenth century and leading more and less directly to Adorno’s equally form-driven ‘liquidation’ of totalizing perspectives and standpoints (and ‘abeyance’ of self explicitly to prevent domination and suffering) in the twentieth century63 – and leading also beyond that century. The essays of the future will be even more driven by questions, predicts Hilton Als, perhaps as certainty recedes even further over the warming horizon, and, as essays, they will not let us rest easy in our answers.64 For one of the most striking dramatizations of the essay form’s pointed resistance to answers and the urgent political ramifications of such, we can look to Teju Cole’s ‘What It Is’, from his 2016 collection Known and Strange Things. ‘What It Is’ works backwards from the epistemological certainty of Enlightenment clarity (we can know what it is), the identity of object and concept, via the unraveling logic of metaphor to show us the danger of certainty, the urgency of Adornian nonidentity, the need to resist easy categorization. It is worth quoting at some length, from title and epigraph through first few sentences: What It Is EBOLA: ‘The ISIS of biological agents?’     – CNN, October 2014 Is Ebola the ISIS of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram of AIDS? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever? Some say Ebola is the Milošević of West Nile virus. Others say Ebola is the Ku Klux Klan of paper cuts. It’s obvious that Ebola is the MH370 of MH17. But at some point the question must be asked whether Ebola isn’t also the Narendra Modi of sleeping sickness. And I don’t mean to offend anyone’s sensitivities, but there’s more and more reason to believe that Ebola is

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the Sani Abacha of having some trouble peeing. At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone’s podcast.65 If the title, ‘What It Is’, invokes the definitional absolute, offers the promise of ontological certainty, the epigraph gives us a sense of the arbiters of such certainty and the associative sleight of hand by which we might arrive there: CNN, a major US news outlet, asks if Ebola is ‘the ISIS of biological agents’. What would it mean to say yes? In the essay that then considers this question, Cole uses the open-ended associational structure of the essay form to set in relief the dangers of confusing what is lazy and politically strategic analogy (Ebola is the ISIS of biological agents) with explanation or determination (What It Is). The essay then speeds up, rolls its stop signs and slips loosely down an analogic track from Ebola to ‘listen[ing] to someone else’s podcast’. As it moves, it shows us the danger of confusing association with explanation. It also, by uprooting each signifier (sleeping sickness, George W. Bush) and putting them in a state of play, shows us how to resist the lure of taxonomy, the politically expedient shorthand of explaining the complex through simplified bogeyman specters and the quasi-positivist logic of categorical definition. In short, Cole drops the titular identitarian logic (what it is) into the negative space of the essay to show us how to resist. The essay ends this way: ‘But first let me open the discussion up to our panel and ask whether Ebola is merely the Fox News of explosive incontinence, or whether the situation is much worse than that and Ebola is, in fact, the CNN of CNN.’66 This ouroboros ending shows us that definitions are perhaps identical with nothing more than the desires of the definers and the essay form, the ‘reality of form-vision’, as György Lukács puts it, reveals the power of the essay to thwart this tendentious ‘verdict’ by returning us again and again to the ‘process of judging’.67 In this persistent ability of the essay form to return us to the necessary state of preconceptual and pre-affective wonder in which, as Plato and a long, long line of philosophers since have argued, all knowledge begins, we find its resistance. The example of Cole’s essay might suggest to us that this resistance is easier to see, and perhaps more present in the self-reflexive work of the post-Adornian late twentieth century, but as we saw in Montaigne, the resistance is endemic to the form. As Erin Plunkett demonstrates, turning our attention to the ‘philosophical implications of ways of writing’ in Western philosophical traditions after Montaigne shows us that the proliferations of ‘essays on . . .’ and ‘essays concerning’ reflect a commitment to rejecting ‘a priori reasoning in favor of an experience-based dialectic that unfolds in time’, to ‘preserving the contradictions in everyday experience’ from the tidy abstractions of an authoritative ‘view from nowhere’.68 Put another way, we can trace Adorno’s rejection of the copula ‘is’ in ‘The Essay as Form’ in favor of the prepositional ‘as’ as a way to favor relational, dialogic thinking over unilateral definition. Just a few decades after Montaigne, Margaret Cavendish illustrates the potential for resistance in this dialogic philosophical essayism in her 1662 ‘Female Orations’ from Orations of Divers Sorts. Angered by the conceptual manacles of men’s definitions of women and female liberty, she creates in ‘Female Orations’ a series of essays meant to represent a dialogue between women offering up a series of arguments that

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together form the horizon of ‘women’s nature and women’s potentialities’.69 Here she responds to the imposition of conceptual limitations on women by men not with a monologic retaliation, but with a series of essays, a dialogic ‘Frequentation, Association, and Combination’.70 No one woman is right or complete in her oration; in the essayistic play between them emerges ‘women’s potentialities’, and perhaps the tacit suggestion that they eclipse men’s. By splitting a single self into fractals (that talk to each other without signaling which is the most-self of the selves), Cavendish stages Montaigne’s alternate ways of thinking the self as a direct reproach to the repressive gender norms she openly flouts in her own life, dress and behavior. Where Cavendish achieves this a posteriori exploration by staging it between individual self-bodies, Thomas Carlyle, two hundred years later and responding not to gendered subjection but spiritual and intellectual, offers an essay from which a body is missing. Almost exactly halfway through Carlyle’s strange book-length essay (as it has been called, among other things – anti-novel, miscellany, satire) Sartor Resartus, the fictional ‘Editor’ – who is attempting to assemble the book in what might be considered the essayistic style par excellence: from fragments and scraps of thoughts – stops to ‘Pause’. The occasion for this pause (which gives the chapter its name) is that the Editor was feeling pretty good about having just assembled, from the fragments, a semi-coherent and stable biographical sketch of his subject, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, culminating in a triumphant ‘Yea’ of ontological clarity, and then got nervous. He got nervous because just as he finishes constructing this impossible biographical house of cards, he discovers an extra scrap of paper, heretofore unnoticed, floating amidst the six bags of scraps of information, philosophical meditations, historical data, biographical narrative etc. from which he has been piecing together this biography. This ‘small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but invisible’, reads, ‘What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all, a Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?’71 In other words, Carlyle mocks modern epistemology by adding an extra piece of paper to a collection of bags meant to add up to a body, a tiny slip meant to challenge the cog-wheel order of a mechanistic society. At his wits’ end by now, the Editor considers the question and then gives up; he moves on to try and approach his editorial task from another angle, abandoning the progress narrative (albeit a paradoxical one) of Book II for the piecemeal descriptions of Book III. The reader is thus left holding, as it were, this supernumerary scrap of paper, wondering what it does to the project of coherence, of narrative, of accounting, of essaying when, no matter what, there is perhaps always already one more ‘small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank’. Sartor Resartus is Carlyle’s cryptic, essayistic lampoon of everything from industrial capitalism to sumptuary laws and marriage plots. ‘Pause’ is perhaps its most formally incisive chapter, suggesting both in the presence of that small slip of paper, and the caution it bears, that anything resembling ‘Truth’ or complete knowledge is at best a fragment from which a ‘small slip’ has been torn and lost. In this missing piece, then, this little slip of paper threatening the stable body of the text, we find the heart of Carlyle’s epistemological and sociocultural critique and the resistance immanent in Sartor Resartus’s form. Two hundred and fifty years later, Jenny Boully recreates a version of this experiment in her The Body: An Essay. What can the form of the essay resist, her project asks, if we omit the text of the essay and write it only as a series of footnotes from

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which the body is missing? Boully’s Carlylean parody of the reader-as-editor trying desperately to piece together a body from a series of footnotes abandoned by their parent text dramatizes the same resistance to epistemological and ontological totalization – arrogance – that we see in Carlyle, in Cole and in Cavendish, and that Adorno promises the essay will give (or deny) us: ‘As ever’, the penultimate sentence of Boully’s epilogue reads, ‘there was no will found among the remains.’72 Boully’s visual illustration of essayistic resistance, her graphic rendering of the page that denies something to the reader and forces reflection not just on what is missing, but also on the intellectual and historical conditions under which we developed to believe we deserve to see it, finds in some way its apotheosis in those photographic essays that refuse to use either text as caption or photograph as illustration. The juxtaposition of text and image without explanation or seeming logic shows us exactly what resistance we must overcome to make them fit together, what authority and certainty we need to impose and what we risk in getting it wrong. Roland Barthes offers Camera Lucida as one such essay, letting ‘no more than a few photographs’ float suggestively along the surface of his exploratory, meditative prose, the tension between the media (as opposed to the photographs themselves) thus illustrating his ‘desperate resistance to any reductive system’.73 W. J. T. Mitchell explores the same resistance in his ‘The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies’ chapter of Picture Theory; he reads James Agee and Walker Evans’s Marxian exposé of Depression-era poverty in the South, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as an example of the ‘dialectic of exchange and resistance between photography and language . . . that make it possible (and sometimes impossible) to “read” the pictures, or to “see” the text illustrated in them’.74 For Mitchell, Agee and Evans’s photographic essay represents a ‘“collaboration” . . . governed by a rhetoric of resistance . . . “fully collaborative” in the project of subverting what they saw as a false and facile collaboration with governmental and journalistic institutions’ and the propagandistic agendas of those institutions.75 The visual aspects of essayistic resistance challenge our conception of wholeness and complicity in new ways. Always already ‘partial images’, Kevin Adonis Browne shows us in High Mas, his decolonial photographic essay on ‘Caribbeanness’, challenge the corrupt sovereignty on which we have built our sense of the whole.76 Édouard Glissant might call this necessary undoing a turn away from ‘establishing a sort of semiconceptual dominance’; essays resist because they protest – in their bones – this ‘semiconceptual dominance’, these efforts to sanitize and ‘contain the increasing opacity of the world’.77 The dense, fluid and explicitly political writing of Glissant’s own Poetics of Relation, a collection of short essays committed to a ‘time other than the linear, sequential order of syntax’, in which ‘[v]erb, noun, subject, object, are not fixed in their places’,78 are themselves – in argument, but even more in form – a rejection of that ‘semiconceptual dominance’ in which Adorno finds the seeds of totalitarianism and Montaigne finds the impossible and undesirable paradox of the human subject held in place. As Betsy Wing puts it in her ‘Translator’s Introduction’, the essays enact their own ‘refusal to accept the logic of linear sequences as the only productive logic’, linear sequences that blind their adherents to the ‘crazed’ history of coloniality and subjection.79 Resistance here is explicitly political but it is also explicitly poetic: the ‘barbaric’ and dangerous ‘hard line inherent in any politics’ is anathema to the associative questioning ‘essential to any relation’, and Glissant turns the opposition – the hard line versus the associative question – into the basis for the nonlinear

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‘opaque’ poetics of his essays. Or, as Glissant puts it, ‘[t]his same opacity is also the force that . . . would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive. . . . We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.’80 The resistance of the essay, it must be said, is not the same resistance of the bodies linking arms and marching in the streets. But these forms of resistance are also not opposed to one another – they do not represent an unreconcilable choice. To write in such a way that we reject the ‘straight path’ of method and instead cast out into what we do not know, Roland Barthes writes in How to Live Together,81 is to recognize our irreducibility, which is also to recognize our force.

Notes  1. Donald M. Frame, introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne, by Michel de Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), v–xiv (v).  2. Ibid.   3. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1991; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 29–47 (35). Adorno quotes György Lukács’s early writing on the essay form.  4. Ibid.   5. Mariano Picón-Salas, ‘From “On the Essay”’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 75–77 (76). ‘Mix and chop’ is from Jesse McCarthy, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2021), xvii–xix.  6. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), s.v. ‘resistance’.   7. Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 6–7.   8. Cornel West’s observations about the subversive nature of Baldwin’s ‘truth telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing’ appear in Justin A. Joyce, ‘The Matter of Black Lives: Baldwin Today’, in James Baldwin in Context, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 117–24 (121).  9. Wall, On Freedom, 36–83. 10. James P. Danky, ‘Preface: Protest and Print Culture in America’, in Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865, ed. James L. Baughman, Jennifer RatnerRosenhagen and James P. Danky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), vii–xv (x). 11. See, respectively, Denise Gigante, introduction to The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology, ed. Denise Gigante (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), xv–xxxiii (xvii); Brian Norman, The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), passim; Adam Thomas, ‘Writing Redemption: Racially Ambiguous Carpetbaggers and the Southern Print Culture Campaign against Reconstruction’, in Protest on the Page, 11–31 (12); and Gerald Early, introduction to Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), ix–xi (x). 12. Donald Glover (as Childish Gambino), This Is America (mcDJ: RCA, 2018); Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020); Eula Biss, ‘Land Mines’, in Notes from No Man’s Land (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009), 145–70. 13. Kathryn Murphy, ‘Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 78–96 (92).

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14. John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 236–72; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Frederick Douglass, The Union and How to Save It (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018); John Lewis, ‘Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation’, New York Times, July 30, 2020. 15. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Penguin Books, 2020); David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter Hinks (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (New York: Penguin Books, 2007); Alfonso Reyes, Obras Completas de Alfonso Reyes III. El plano oblicuo. El cazador. El suicida. Aquellos días. Retratos reales e imaginarios (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press); Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (New York: Penguin Books, 2015); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016); McCarthy, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?. 16. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, ‘Thoreau’, in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays, ed. Ilan Stavans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 127–31 (130). 17. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014). 18. Hilton Als, introduction to The Best American Essays 2018, ed. Hilton Als (New York: Mariner Books, 2018), xviii–xxix. 19. César Díaz, ‘On the Protest Essay’, Essay Daily, December 5, 2016, https://www.essaydaily.org/2016/12/125-on-protest-essay.html. 20. Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Novels Disguised as History’, in Oxford Book of Latin American Essays, 422–34 (432). 21. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 11, 38. 22. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, trans. John Bester (New York: Kodansha USA, 2003). 23. Wall, On Freedom, 6, emphasis in original. 24. Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, trans. John Florio (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014), ix–xxxiii (xvi–xvii). 25. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, in Complete Essays, III:638–84 (642–3). 26. Montaigne, ‘Of Repentance’, in Complete Essays, III:610–20 (610). 27. Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, in Complete Essays, II:318–457 (426). 28. Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, trans. Pat Fedkiew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4, 6, 4. 29. Aaron Aquilina, ‘Margins and Marginality: Jean Genet and the Queer Essay’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 137–49 (146). 30. Ibid., 140. 31. Stacey Waite, ‘Queer Literacies Survival Guide’, College Composition and Communication 67, no. 1 (September 2015): 111–14 (111). 32. Montaigne, ‘Of Experience’, in Complete Essays, III:815–58 (818). 33. Bensmaïa, Barthes Effect, 4. 34. Frame, introduction to Complete Essays, vi. 35. Murphy, ‘Of Sticks and Stones’, 82. 36. Martin Jay, Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (London: Verso, 2020), 161; Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 53.

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37. Tressie McMillan Cottom, ‘Sleep Around Before You Marry an Argument’, essaying, March 8, 2021, https://tressie.substack.com/p/sleep-around-before-you-marry-an. 38. Viktor Shklovksy, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991). 39. Paul de Man, ‘The Resistance to Theory’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3–20 (15). 40. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 42. 41. De Man, ‘Resistance’, 17. 42. Ibid. 43. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 35. 44. Ibid., 31. 45. Ibid., 33. 46. Ibid., 39. 47. Ibid., 42, emphasis added. 48. Said actually relies on Lukács in his analysis of the essay, but this is common ground for Lukács and Adorno. 49. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 42. 50. Thorn-R Kray, ‘More Dialectical Than the Dialectic: Exemplarity in Theodor W. Adorno’s “The Essay as Form”’, Thesis Eleven 144, no. 1 (2018): 30–45. 51. Martin Jay, ‘Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament’, in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Thomas Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129–47 (139). 52. Robert Kaufman, ‘Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity’, in Cambridge Companion to Adorno, 354–75 (361). 53. See, for example, Rolf Tiedemann’s engagement with accusations leveled against Adorno in his later years that he ‘rejected practice’ in favor of the abstract, which, Tiedemann claims, misreads Adorno. Rolf Tiedemann, introduction to Can One Live After Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), xiv. For art as the echo of suffering, see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 39. 54. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 30. 55. Theodor Adorno, ‘On Commitment’, trans. Francis McDonagh, Performing Arts Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1978), 3–11 (7). 56. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, ‘The Age of Utopia: Alfonso Reyes, Deep Time and the Critique of Colonial Modernity’, Romance Notes 53, no. 1 (2013): 93–104 (95). 57. McCarthy, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, xvii–xix. 58. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 63. 59. Ibid., 63. 60. Ibid., 7. 61. Ibid., 8. 62. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 101. 63. R. Lane Kauffmann, ‘The Skewed Path: Essaying as Unmethodical Method’, Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 225, 224. 64. Als, introduction to The Best American Essays 2018, xxviii. 65. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays (New York: Random House, 2016), 268. 66. Ibid. 67. György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock, ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 24; 34.

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68. Erin Plunkett, A Philosophy of the Essay (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 63, emphasis added. 69. Margaret Cavendish, Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 143. 70. Ibid. 71. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books, ed. Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), II:150. 72. Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay (New York: Essay Press, 2007), 75. 73. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang), 8. 74. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 289. 75. Ibid., 297–8. 76. Kevin Adonis Browne, High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018). 77. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 111. 78. Betsy Wing, translator’s introduction to Poetics of Relation, xi–xx (xx). 79. Ibid. 80. Glissant, Poetics, 194. 81. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, ed. Claude Coste, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 3.

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7 ‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay Douglas Hesse

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dward Hoagland once characterized personal essays as living on a line between ‘what I think and what I am’.1 I propose a parallel essay dynamic between ‘experiences I remember’ and ‘experiences I make’, between the ‘lived’ or found stories of memoir and the ‘sought’ stories of journalism. On the one hand, Joan Didion and George Orwell might remember Los Angeles in the 1960s and Burma in the 1930s. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin and Rebecca Solnit might seek a lobster festival, a Swiss village and an Irish coastal town. From either starting point, if the resulting work functions as an essay (as opposed to memoir or feature article), it features reflection and authorial presence. Essays drawing from already-lived experience must invest the past with more than recall. Essays driven by sought experience must move beyond journalistic report. While the reflective, associative, exploratory conventions of the personal essay traditionally have favored chance natural encounters over deliberately pursued ones, the latter expands written possibilities – not only in topic but also in idea. To Hoagland’s formulation comes a third element, ‘How the world is’, with the added essayistic qualifier ‘as I make it to be’. To explain some differences between lived and sought experience, I shall describe three pieces by David Foster Wallace: ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, ‘Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All’ and ‘Consider the Lobster’. The first relies on lived experience (his adolescence as a Midwestern tennis player) and resides firmly in that corner of the personal essay that adjoins memoir. The second is built on sought experience (Harper’s magazine commissioned Wallace to write about the Illinois State Fair) and walks a line between New Journalism and personal essay. The third is also sought experience (Gourmet magazine commissioned Wallace to write about the Maine Lobster Festival), but here we are squarely in the realm of essay, experience begetting the ideas that ultimately (and happily) take the piece over.2 ‘Derivative Sport’, which also appeared in Harper’s, is a thoroughly first-person meditation built around Wallace’s memory that, [b]etween the ages of twelve and fifteen, I was a near-great junior tennis player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers’ and dentists’ kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa.3

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The essay comes in seven sections. The first and briefest introduces Midwestern geometry through Wallace’s college interest in mathematics. The second lays out his tennis background and develops further the place’s geometry (‘a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad’) and the thematic element of the wind in a place where ‘life is informed and deformed by wind’, especially life as a tennis player.4 Wallace insistently and humorously deprecates his abilities, owing his modest success to the abilities to sweat profusely (and thus keep cool) and to manage the geometry of the court against the vagaries of Illinois winds. Sections three, four and five develop these elements into a barrage of memories, facts and reflections, all united by Wallace’s voice and stylistic verve. For example: I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts, and a kind of Stoic cheer that I was regarded as a kind of physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin.5 Although the essay is redolent with names, places, impressions, confessions and events, there is only one scene, a detailed account of a slice of time, describing a specific event and its setting. That scene closes out the piece, in a three-page paragraph narrating an afternoon ‘in June ’78 on a tennis court at Hessel Park’,6 when a tornado hit Wallace and his hitting partner, Gil Antitoi, during practice, carrying them fifty feet into a chainlink fence. The two-hundred-word penultimate sentence breathlessly and digressively conveys the moment of impact and the aftermath, after which Wallace concludes suddenly and laconically, ‘Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.’7 The single extended story, a sixth of the entire essay, serves as concluding strategy by shifting the general mode of the piece into scenic narrative. Certainly, Wallace may have done a bit of research about dates and places and facts (I doubt he knew off the top of his head that Wind-B-Gone screens were patented in 1971), but this essay comes entirely from memory. Of course, ‘coming entirely from memory’ does not mean simply transcribed, automatically, from recollection, past-Wallace dictating to present-Wallace. This is memory as constructed by the act of writing, although what happened limits the events eligible for narration. On the opposite end of the spectrum is ‘Consider the Lobster’, its pretext journalistic. Gourmet magazine wanted to hire a flashy writer to cover a famous event. Obviously, the editors knew (they thought) the kind of piece they would get: first person, likely irreverent, with an acerbic voice and eye, a crafty, surprising, humorous send-up of the sort they had seen Wallace produce about cruise ships and state fairs. If they had wanted a fine piece with the author’s personality in the backdrop, they would have hired John McPhee. The essay starts narratively and descriptively, with an overview of the Maine Lobster Festival, focusing on its various recipes, events, attractions and venues. Wallace introduces himself: ‘Your assigned correspondent saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own parents.’8 However, his interest and the essay’s heart lies ultimately not in account but rather in analysis, spurred by an ethical question: ‘Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?’9 In fact, only about a third of the essay describes festival happenings, and in almost none of those ‘reporting’ sections does Wallace figure himself as a character/agent. The few first-person references appear only in his familiar footnotes, such as number 12, recounting his time with Dick,

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a rental car manager.10 Wallace is present throughout, of course, as the intellectually and linguistically dexterous consciousness who summarizes research biology, zoology, psychology and ethics, voicing positions. Only in his last two pages does he turn fully to first person, in a rhetorically brilliant strategy to confront the Gourmet readership directly and harshly, in the just-folks voice of a guy simply trying to figure things out: I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here – at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF begins to take on the aspect of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest. Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why?11 While ‘Derivative Sport’ takes its impetus in memoir – the report of lived experience filtered through reflection – ‘Consider the Lobster’ takes its impetus in sought experience, but experience not simply rendered as lively chronicle, as might satisfy a feature writer’s editors and readers, but used as occasioning catalyst for a classic essayistic pursuit of ideas. Somewhere between ‘Derivative’ and ‘Lobster’ is ‘Getting Away’, which grows from sought experience and, like ‘Lobster’, a magazine assignment. This time a ‘swanky East-Coast magazine’ sends Wallace to Springfield and the Illinois State Fair. Wallace toys with the identity of journalist from the very outset, showing up to get his press credentials at ‘08/05/93/0800h’ and noting, ‘I’ve never been considered Press before. My main interest in Credentials is getting into rides and stuff for free.’12 Some of the humor in this rollicking piece is reflected in the arch tension between the precise military mission time markers for content that is often silly and commentary that is sometimes profound. Consider this sequence, in which clipped parataxis suggests cause and effect between the desserts and the ailment: 08/14/1015h. Rested, rehydrated. No Native Companion along to ask embarrassing questions about why the reverential treatment; plenty of time for the Harper’s Bazaar13 rumor to metastasize: I am primed to hit the Dessert Competitions. 08/14/1025h. Dessert Competitions. 08/14/1315h. Illinois State Fair Infirmary; then motel; then Springfield Memorial Medical Center Emergency Room for distention and possible rupture of transverse colon (false alarm); then motel; incapacitated till well after sunset; whole day a washout; incredibly embarrassing, unprofessional; indescribable. Delete entire day.14 The essay is crammed with one-liners and biting portrayals of carnival rides and cattle barns, animal competitions and fair foods (Freshfried Pork Skins, Lemon Shake Ups, Fried Dough, Cheez-Dip Hot Dogs, Curl Fries (‘which are pubic-hair-shaped’15)). Rendering fairgoers through long quotations, Wallace portrays himself as voyeur and self-consciously pretentious outsider. The welter of description pushes the piece toward journalism; it is more about events than ideas, and whereas ‘Lobster’ clearly

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establishes its essay credentials through reflection, narrative drives ‘Getting Away’ with a purpose more to entertain than to disrupt. Why is this, then, not simply a feature story? Two qualities. First, several times Wallace turns to autobiographical reflection, a quality essays share with many memoirs that go beyond chronicle to commentary and, sometimes, to analysis. Near the beginning, he includes a reverie: ‘I grew up in rural Illinois but haven’t been back for a long time and can’t say I’ve missed it – the yeasty heat, the lush desolation of limitless corn, the flatness’, which gives way to a long poetic description of Midwestern sameness, the ‘sky opaque, the dull crop-green constant’ that for Wallace resulted in ‘Middle-of-the-ocean lonely’.16 A few pages later is a longer meditation, three paragraphs, confessing, ‘One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me’, which leads into abstract analysis of ‘the regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God’.17 We are a long way from Curl Fries at this point. A second essayistic quality is the analysis of the fair itself. While narrative or descriptive showing (as opposed to overt telling) is a predominant mode of many personal essays, almost all of them turn in some degree to observations occasioned by the experience being described, passages in which analysis (or comment, reverie, observation or musing) take over narrative or descriptive presentation. It is the moment when Virginia Woolf tells us what the dying moth’s struggle portends, when E. B. White relates something larger about time in the bareback rider’s turns around the circus ring.18 Wallace makes this move repeatedly in ‘Getting Away’. In one lengthy philosophical/sociological excursion, he contrasts the East Coast’s vacation desire to get away from things, born of living in crowds, with the Midwestern counter-desire to ‘commune, melt, become part of a crowd’, born of living in isolation.19 It is an extended, mostly sympathetic attempt to account for behaviors and attitudes of fairgoers, meditative and philosophical. But just when the piece might seem inclined toward ‘Consider the Lobster’ seriousness, he abruptly shifts, ‘Then there are the carnies’, and we are back to energetic/comic reportage.20 Certainly, entertainment is at a premium in this essay, but analytic excursions occasionally shift the piece into observations about what the fair means. Wallace’s essays from sought experience differ from more strictly journalistic works, for example those of the fine writer Ted Conover, who frequently publishes immersive projects. Among his books, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing describes experiences in going undercover to get hired, trained and work as a guard in New York’s famous prison; Coyotes narrates walking through deserts, hiding in orchards and wading the Rio Grande with Mexican migrants.21 Conover’s magazine pieces most obviously compare with Wallace’s, and I shall focus on three from Harper’s Magazine. In ‘The Way of All Flesh’, Conover gets himself hired as a USDA meat inspector in a western Nebraska beef-processing plant. On his first day, he is introduced to the kill floor, ‘a singular circle of hell. The kill floor is a hubbub of human and mechanical activity, something horrific designed by ingenious and no doubt well-meaning engineers.’22 He describes cattle carcasses hanging from chains as they circle the floor, to be pieced out with electric saws. In ‘Cattle Calls’, he writes an extended profile of Zach Vosburg, an Iowa veterinarian.23 ‘The Last Frontier’ describes, with first-hand precision, life for homesteaders in Colorado’s spare San Luis Valley.24 Each article is literary journalism from a first-person perspective with a fairly light hand. Style and detail selections certainly convey a point of view; few readers are going to chew

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their evening steak more happily after reading ‘The Way of All Flesh’. But these differ from personal essays in two characteristics. Conover dwells less on himself or on the implications of these places than on telling what he learns about them and how their worlds function. And while he includes passing comments and observations, there are no extended reflections or digressive analyses into other experiences or topics. The pieces look consistently outward, and even if Conover is the locus of the narratives, and even if he shows things in ways that invite readers to form thoughts about them, he does not explicitly take us into his thinking, inviting us to watch his mind turn. To be clear, to say these are not essays is not to call them inferior; it is simply to make a distinction that sought experience does not yield an essay without significant analysis and reflection, figured explicitly in the presence of an author. Similarly, a writer’s short narrative about a past event might not move beyond memoir – although the line here between essay and memoir is thin, as can be seen in Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ or ‘Shooting an Elephant’. (Orwell’s essays fall on another fine line, between essay and short story; I have explained elsewhere how some first-person works can easily be read either as short stories or essays, the only difference being how editors or teachers present them.25) In Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep, Conover explains, ‘The kind of writing I’m talking about has a literary history – we’ll talk about important ancestors – and it has literary cousins: ethnography, travel writing, memoir.’26 Tellingly, he does not mention the essay, neither here nor elsewhere. He does mention David Foster Wallace, winking in a footnote.27 The distinction I am making can be illustrated in a diagram, Figure 7.1.

Self-full

Tends to essay Reflection

Y

Sought Experience

Z

X

Lived Experience

Report Tends to journalism

Self-less

Figure 7.1  Three analytic axes for nonfiction.

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In this schema, the x-axis represents the quality that most concerns me in this chapter, the continuum between the recollected ‘lived experience’ of memory, writers drawing on what they pull from memory, and ‘sought experience’, writers planning to seek – reportorially, ethnographically or archivally – events, facts or ideas that become the basis of writing. Establishing a line between found and sought experience is tricky. Does Annie Dillard travel to Washington’s Yakima Valley in order to write about a celestial event, or does she simply go and only afterward decide to write ‘Total Eclipse’?28 Does Joan Didion go to report on a 1968 practice session of The Doors, or does she happen to watch Jim Morrison and later put the story in ‘The White Album’?29 Does Joseph Addison walk through Westminster Abbey to seek material for an essay about monuments and epitaphs, or does he go there simply to ‘fill the Mind with a kind of Melancholy, or rather Thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable’, then in recollection discover material for writing?30 Determining whether an experience is ‘found’ or ‘sought’ is a dangerous game, especially given the essay’s quality of being, at some level, uncalculated and digressive and tracing the shape of thought. In an interview in the famous Paris Review series, E. B. White explained: If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time in writing a piece about it.31 Whether works originating in sought experience become essays rather than articles or reports depends on where they fall on two other continua: focus and degree of reflection. The y-axis in Figure 7.1 describes the writing’s ostensible focus, either on the writer or on whatever slice of the world the writer treats. I have chosen the terms ‘self-full’ and ‘self-less’. In self-full writings, the author figures him- or herself explicitly as character or agent in the piece, the always-present lens through which information, event or idea are recounted. An obvious marker is first-person narration, the reminder at every moment (through what ‘I’ did and what ‘I’ thought) that we learn what we learn through the attention of a witness teller. But self-full can also manifest through style and voice, as ‘departures’ from, say, an objective journalistic or academic voice crafted to get out of the way, aspiring to the kind of language perspicuity dreamt by John Locke.32 An experiment illustrates the difference. Consider two versions of a short passage from Luis Alberto Urrea’s By the Lake of Sleeping Children, an extraordinary collection of essays about lives on the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, with a penetrating focus on the poorest of the poor who live near and inside the dump. Here is a paragraph from ‘Introductory Matters: Home of the Brave’: My first home, where I stumbled into life and first greeted the astonishment of daylight, was on a hill above Tijuana. The house to the east was already giving way to gravity on the day I was born: it slumped downhill, a wooden trapezoid rushing slowly into the dry arroyo beneath our yards. In the shadow of this woozy building, bananas and pomegranates grew. The poor boys and I scrabbled in the dirt and grit of our street, throwing wooden tops to spin in the dust, herding amazingly

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huge red ants and pillbugs back and forth between the stones, and ambushing each other with bright pink and yellow squirt guns bought at the corner botica for the change left over from the kilo of tortillas we were sent to buy each afternoon.33 The passage is infused with Urrea. It describes a place, certainly, but a place in relation to its author. Knowing how he experienced the neighborhood is as important as knowing about the neighborhood itself. Consider an alternative: In the 1960s, poor neighborhoods were in the hills above Tijuana. In one of them, houses were unstable, tilting downhill into dry arroyos below. Bananas and pomegranates grew there, and poor boys played in dirty streets. Games included wooden tops, herding insects, and shooting each other with pink and yellow squirt guns. They bought guns at a corner botica, where each afternoon they purchased tortillas for their families. This fairly self-less version reports the same information but without the first-person perspective and stylistic coloration. Someone wrote it, of course, but their memory is relatively subordinated to the place, against which they stand as observer, not participant. Other essays in the book use sought experience. The titular ‘A Lake of Sleeping Children’ describes Urrea leading mini-safaris to the southland’s favorite representation of hell. You know the drill by now: we go to some shacks, maybe stop at an orphanage or two, gobble fish tacos and go to Tacos El Paisano, then gird ourselves for the Tijuana dump. Everybody loves the dump.34 Urrea’s contempt for the poverty tourists is palpable, yet he takes on the role to bring attention to dire destitution. On one venture into the dump, he sees water near a pitiful graveyard, a lake formed when ‘[a] small valley had been sealed at one end, where the runoff would have originally formed a nostalgic little waterfall into the little Edward Abbey desert canyon and run on to the sea’.35 Urrea shapes the scene as someone who has read Desert Solitaire, acidly contrasting Abbey’s romance of wilderness with his present hellish landscape. Then: And we looked in, deep, where the bed of the lake was mud, and the mud was drifting up, and the rotten soil was broken, and the coffins, the cardboard boxes, the pillowcases, the wood crates, the winding sheets, were coming up. They were coming up. The children themselves were rising, expanding into the water, and the gulls were eating them. The gulls had grown too fat to fly on the flesh of these sleeping children.36 Like Conover reporting daily to the Nebraska slaughterhouse, Urrea seeks the Tijuana dump with purpose. Visits generate images to convey his personal horror and anger at this place and, more importantly, at the countless millions of us ignorant of such places. Hoagland’s what I think/what I am formulation grafts onto my y-axis at the self-full pole. At the self-less end is ‘the way the world is’. In positioning any piece of nonfiction

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on this axis, the question is how much of the piece is ‘about me’ and how/why I experience and understand things, and how much of it aspires to objectivity about events and ideas in the world. The essayistic spirit or mode plays somewhere between the extremes of these axes, being about matters ‘in the world’ but in relation to how the writer’s particular consciousness and experiences render and make sense of them. The third axis in Figure 7.1, the z-axis, has as its poles ‘reflection’ and ‘report’. Pieces that report narrate events or information in a direct fashion. Pieces that reflect interpret reportage. They explore what report means or explain why and how it is significant. Reflection connects reports to idea or other reports.37 Of course, reporting necessarily involves interpretation, at least at the level of selection: what to include, what to omit, where to turn one’s gaze. I am simply marking the presence of explicit commentary. In many ways, the axis of reflection and report aligns with the axis of self-full and self-less, but the terms describe different qualities. Essays can be self-full and yet contain relatively little reflection. Consider George Orwell’s two well-anthologized pieces, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’. The former contains almost entirely reportage, a first-person narrative of a rainy morning on which Orwell watches a prisoner led to the gallows, in precise details that tend toward the journalistic. Reflection is minimal, ostensibly triggered only at the moment he watches the prisoner, minutes from death, step around a puddle. Orwell writes: It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live.38 That passage clearly stamps the piece’s essay passport. There is a similar quality in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, in which Orwell, as a British policeman in Burma, is called to kill an elephant gone rogue, a duty he is compelled to finish even when he realizes the elephant does not deserve death. Even as a piece critiquing British imperialism, Orwell’s essay is thoroughly self-full, from the initial sentence: ‘In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’39 There is considerably more reflection than in ‘A Hanging’, with the mode of the essay being primarily report, up to the key moment when he determines he must shoot. Then the action pauses for several sentences of commentary and idea, culminating in Orwell’s assertion, ‘And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.’40 The greater density of reflection in ‘Elephant’ makes it more solidly an essay than ‘A Hanging’. Conversely, an essay can be richly reflective but relatively self-less in terms of either lived or sought experiences. Michel de Montaigne’s essays, light on memoir but strong on reflection, set the early tone, and Francis Bacon’s essays took them perhaps to their extreme. Consider an essay that contains almost no narrative of authorial experience – in

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fact, nothing that would constitute a scene: James Baldwin’s ‘The Harlem Ghetto’. Here the authorial self is present as consciousness and identity rather than as actor. Baldwin figures himself sparsely at the outset: Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime or in mine. . . . All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.41 The essay continues with widely scattered first-person references; for example, ‘The terrible thing about being a Negro leader lies in the term itself. I do not mean merely the somewhat condescending differentiation the term implies’,42 or ‘It is personally painful to me to realize that so gifted and forceful man as [Paul] Robeson should have been tricked by his own bitterness.’43 Baldwin’s concern is with idea, not event or scene, least of all what has happened to him. At some level, Harlem itself is more an exigency than subject. Baldwin reports information to stage comments, as in his observations about Harlem newspapers: ‘The best-selling Negro newspaper, I believe, is the Amsterdam Star-News, which is also the worst, being gleefully devoted to murders, rapes, raids on love-nests, interracial wars.’44 The essay drives toward provocatively large observations, concluding with observations about the relationships between Blacks and Jews: ‘The structure of the American commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of perpetual hostility.’45 Baldwin writes in perhaps the ‘purest’ essay tradition after Montaigne, pursuing and connecting ideas, practicing what Robert E. Scholes and Carl Klaus fifty years ago characterized as ‘the essay as essay’. Scholes and Klaus offer a simple typology of essays coming in four guises and their various permutations.46 The essay as story focuses on narrating experience, offering idea through showing, not telling, in terrain adjacent to memoir and narrative journalism. The essay as poem practices the logic of lyric, focusing on description, image, metaphor and implication, all areas adjacent to prose poem. The essay as drama features dialogue; Scholes and Klaus were reaching most with this category, using as their example E. M. Forster’s ‘Our Graves in Gallipoli’, in which two graves speak as characters in dialogue. Finally, they describe the essay as essay, the piece driven by ideas, tracing the shape of thought, perpetually in the mode of reflection, with just enough report to set things in motion. That is what Baldwin enacts in ‘The Harlem Ghetto’. I am aware that I have spent considerable space discussing three axes of nonfiction, perhaps more than seems warranted in a chapter focusing on two engines of personal essays: those developing from lived experience versus those coming from sought experience. Higher degrees of self-fullness and/or reflection account for short nonfiction works presenting as essays rather than as feature articles. So does a tolerance for organic/associative forms that unfold through discovery rather than transmit efficient knowledge. Schema such as my Figure 7.1 promise a tidy algorithm surely, with three axes yielding eight cells (four quadrants times two). However, my intention was not to offer a formula, and I have neither the space nor the intellect ever to fill out this seductive template. I have offered it as heuristic to help understand how one might describe how works on the axis of lived versus sought experience might be understood as essays rather than memoir or journalism.

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One difficulty in setting a clean line between lived and sought experience is that essayists, by disposition and trade, continually live as if any new encounter may serve as essay material. Essayists treat the world as redolent of meaning, always on the writerly make, albeit with varying degrees of intention. An essayist might regard every moment of his or her past as potentially exploitable, to the point that all lived experience is subject to a dynamic of seeking: for the idea, the fact, the quotation, the juxtaposed event that justifies importing that past into the writing moment. Similarly, because writers with dispositions as essayists may never exist outside the seeking mode, I shall clarify the distinction I have in mind as one of going to a place or activity outside one’s usual habits for the specific purpose of writing about it. Joan Didion’s ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ illustrates a writerly practice for both the essayist’s transitory, inescapable attention to life as it happens and experience on assignment. Didion stitches together short scenes and anecdotes from her notebook: a snippet of overheard conversation from a woman in ‘a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper’ in a Delaware train station;47 a quotation from Jessica Mitford’s governess; a ‘Redhead getting out of car in front of Beverly Wilshire Hotel, chinchilla stole, Vuitton bags, with tags reading: MRS LOU FOX / HOTEL SAHARA / VEGAS’;48 a sauerkraut recipe; a couple dozen other notes. The heart of the essay is Didion exploring why she keeps a notebook: Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores.49 She writes not to preserve facts, she concludes, but to ‘[r]emember what it was to be me: that is always the point’. The ‘common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I”’, which Didion says she records not ‘for public consumption’. After all, ‘we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use’.50 But the great irony and delight of ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ is that these bits emphatically do not prove too short to use. She is using them! In fact, they constitute the very piece from which she has waved them off, a piece decidedly written for public consumption. Seemingly throwaway illustrations derive resonance through strategic repetition and deft recombination, as in her conclusion: It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut, and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story.51 Didion is being more crafty than disingenuous by claiming merely a private purpose for notebooks when, at the same time, she is publishing ‘personal’ notes. In fact, she is performing the personal essay’s presence of the ‘implacable I’. Moreover, she demonstrates the compulsion to live like a writer, treating prospectively every encounter as potential for writing. And while, I suppose, a scene once jotted in a notebook becomes a lived experience once it is incorporated into writing, there is an aspect for every essayist of being on perpetual assignment, whether commissioned by self or by editor.

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Four essays from The White Album illustrate this point. ‘Bureaucrats’ uses sought experience. Didion visits the operations center of the California Department of Transportation and reports how its workers monitor and try to control the flow of traffic on Los Angeles freeways. The piece is heavy on information, and Didion keeps herself largely out of it until the last couple of pages, where reflection also becomes denser.52 ‘In Bed’ uses lived experience – somewhat.53 Didion writes about her incapacitating migraines; obviously, she did not decide to have a migraine so she could write about it! I used the caveat ‘somewhat’ because only part of the essay narrates having headaches, scholarly research (a form of sought experience) constituting much of the rest of it. ‘Good Citizens’ uses partially lived but mainly sought experience. The opening section uses memory: ‘I was once invited to a civil rights meeting at Sammy Davis, Jr.’s house. . . . I remember spending an evening in 1968, a week or so before the California primary and Robert Kennedy’s death, at Eugene’s in Beverly Hills.’54 The middle section is sought experience, reporting a press visit with Nancy Reagan, in which Didion notes, ‘I was also there to watch her doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home.’55 The final section is also sought experience but even more heavily refracted through reflection. Didion goes to the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica for a national congress of the US Junior Chamber of Commerce. She writes, ‘I suppose I went to Santa Monica in search of the abstraction lately called “Middle America”’,56 thus figuring herself as essayist not reporter. ‘Many Mansions’ is about half-and-half: on the one hand, there is the ‘sought’ description of Ronald Reagan’s incomplete, uninhabited California governor’s mansion which Didion bitingly dismisses with ‘I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.’57 On the other hand, there is the ‘lived’ memory of her childhood playing with Earl Warren’s daughter, Nina, in the old governor’s mansion. As you can see from even a few brief examples, the whole matter of sorting lived experience from sought is complicated, not least because the materials are often mixed. James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’ is more sought experience than ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, described above, but it is still tricky. Baldwin’s essay appeared first as the Harper’s October 1953 cover story. Baldwin famously visits a remote Swiss village, where he realizes he is among people ‘who had never seen a Negro’.58 He describes for a few pages the place and the villagers’ reactions, including the too-familiar gestures of touching his hair and rubbing his skin. Then he uses his Swiss situation to open a broadly reflective dozen pages on the situation of Blacks in America, the village more lens than focal point, leading to broad assessments: No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive.59 So, Harper’s commissioned Baldwin to go there to write an article? Not quite. In fact, Baldwin’s essay is set during his second visit to Leukerbad, Switzerland. The first visit occurred a year earlier, when Baldwin, suffering mental health challenges, went there to a health resort, at the encouragement of his partner, Lucien Happersberger. That he returned suggests he sought new – or more – material. But Baldwin says he came back to this isolated place (for example, his is the only typewriter in town) simply to escape distractions. That he ends up writing about the village, even if just as an exigence or

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spark for a more idea-driven essay, is perhaps merely an unanticipated consequence of practicing Didion’s essayistic sensibility. Whatever Baldwin’s intention, being attentive to Leukerbad compels him to write about it, just as Didion is so often compelled to write. When asked by The American Scholar to write an essay on the subject of mortality, she finds herself in the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park in Death Valley on a 119°F July day. She uses stories circulating in the desert to concretize the abstract ideas she generates in ‘On Morality’.60 Countless other essayists work in the conceptual space of Baldwin’s ‘Village’, with sought experiences functioning more as pretexts than as fully narrated subjects. Rebecca Solnit’s A Book of Migrations is a collection occasioned by a summer journey to Ireland, with ‘a follow-up trip to round out [her] researches’.61 The seventeen essays describe places she visits, but they are much less journalism (and God forbid, surely not tourist guides) than evocations of meanings and effects. Solnit introduces the collection: In different places, different thoughts emerge, and this too I wanted to trace. I tried to use the subjective and personal not to glorify my mundane autobiography but as a case study in how one can explore the remoter reaches of the psyche by wandering across literal terrain.62 To explore just one example, consider ‘Wandering Rocks’, which intertwines Ireland and California with an observation that ‘it is possible to eat fish and chips and hear live blues in the poky town of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland’.63 Bantry is where a 1796 rebellion failed, eventually leading Irishman Timothy Murphy, Solnit speculates, to jump ship in 1828 in northern California. The essay is heavily inflected by both Californian and Irish history, with reflective connections such as, ‘The Irish, like the original Californians, had been too fragmented, despite their cultural homogeneity, to rally together against invasions on any grand scale.’64 Eventually, the piece turns autobiographical, returning to childhood in Novato, California, sought experience conjuring lived, Solnit remembering riding horses on dusty hills above long-ago-destroyed Indian burial mounds, chaining associations. Ireland reappears at the end, in a long series of speculative questions, Bantry serving more as the essay’s impetus than its focus.65 Rather than stacking more examples of lived versus thought, essay versus article, I shall cut to why all this matters. Sure, taxonomies are useful to anthologists, editors, curriculum builders, and others charged with setting boundaries and cuing reader expectations. As heuristics for analysis, the three axes are useful for teasing out choices that writers have made, including in the basic origins and development of individual work. But I suggest these distinctions are probably more useful to writers themselves, as they multiply possibilities, not only for subject matters but also for ways of thinking. One implicit assumption is that essays begin with memory or accidental encounter and get endowed with meaning as writers make their way, the evolving work tracing the shape of thought. A second assumption is that essayists start with ideas, questions, ill-formed observations, kernels, then chase where things lead, often finding narratives that illustrate or forward the quest. In both cases, an aesthetic rather than a logical sensibility determines form, completeness and closure. These assumptions root personal essays in autobiography or freewheeling dialectic.

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Lived experience, however extensive and varied, is complete. Certainly, it is recharged by the minute, in ways often fortuitous and generative, and it is not as if writers relying on memory, even of moments just past, are going to run dry. In ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’, Hilaire Belloc observes that ‘there is no reason why a fairly well-read man, still active and enjoying occasional travel, let along the infinite experience of daily life, should lack a subject. Stuff is infinite.’66 While that is certainly true for practiced writers, new ones often perceive their wells of experience as fairly shallow, something especially true for the kinds of undergraduate students I teach at an American university. Rather than only keep picking at those wells, it is often more productive to dig others – or to build spigots instead. I have students, even in essay workshops, assume roles as journalists or amateur ethnographers, sending them to write about events, places or people not part of their daily routines, and then figure the genre or form best suited for the material. We then discuss the affordances of the journalistic or essayistic, including for matters of craft and authorial temperament, as well as practical ones of publication for working writers’ lives; few can make a living as essayists alone. Certainly, E. B. White had his saltwater farm and Joan Didion her Sacramento childhood, but both also scheduled interviews and planned forays. I have long thought that the University of Iowa helped writers considerably by naming its Master of Fine Arts simply ‘Nonfiction’, abjuring adjectives of ‘creative’ or ‘literary’. Writing from sought experience has another, more subtle effect on writing, at the levels of style and idea. While Belloc was confident that ‘[s]tuff is infinite’, he also worried about ‘the fossilization of manner’ and the ‘restriction of matter’. Sought experience necessarily presents new events and settings, discourses and vocabularies, histories and trajectories. While writers unavoidably perceive them through existing frameworks, those frameworks expand in confronting the new. Certainly, Wallace is Wallace through the Maine Lobster Festival, Urrea is Urrea through the Tijuana dump, Baldwin after the Swiss village, Solnit after Bantry. In essaying sought experiences, these writers inevitably render ‘how the world is to me’, but it is not quite their same world and, however incrementally, not quite their same language or thought. Writing from memory means dealing with experiences that the mind has already encoded through a particular vocabulary, way of paying attention and set of associations, inscribed in a context with other experiences. Certain things, from details to whole events, get forgotten, perhaps because memory is frail but also because they do not fit the patterns or subconscious habits of being that constitute our life narratives. Of course, many other things get remembered both because they fit but also because they are odd or singular. Even then, the passage of time domesticates the strange, codes them into the cognitive and linguistic patterns that make life efficient. Essayists aspire beyond simply rendering experience in its own remembered terms, pushing for new details and interpretations through question, association and reframing, trying to disrupt the efficient narrative inertia that makes life easier, albeit at some cost if you are a writer. Skilled essayists have accumulated some tricks and strategies to defamiliarize and revise the safely truncated first draft of memory. Of course, writing from sought experience is hardly unfettered from personal inertia. People who come with deliberate writerly intention to new scenes or events obviously bring their vocabularies, syntaxes and dispositions: the set of lenses that frame and filter what they notice and how. But the very act of seeking something ‘new’ for

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writing makes those habitual lenses at least slightly insufficient and indeterminate. In coding a new experience rather than retrieving and reworking the pre-coded stuff of memory, essayists are more open to new terminologies and relationships, possible inscriptions and interpretations. Essaying sought experience means dealing with situations and materials as encountered, live and ‘pre-textualized’, not with experiences pre-fabricated. Shaping experience ‘at the point of utterance’, to invoke James N. Britton’s term,67 means needing to become a fractionally different writer, as one accounts for things not yet set in the language of memory. I hope it is clear that I am not privileging either sought or lived experience as better for essayists. They offer different starting places, attractions and possibilities. Writing from sought experience has the promise of inflecting the essayist’s repertory and, in the case of fledgling writers, solving the seeming problem of having ‘nothing worth writing about’. Writing from lived experience has the promise of refashioning who we were and why that matters now.

Notes   1. Edward Hoagland, ‘What I Think, What I Am’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 101–3 (101).   2. Dave and I were friends and colleagues at Illinois State University, where we co-taught creative nonfiction workshops. His passion as a writer and thinker welcomed any writing challenge that promised exercising intellectual and creative range, especially the opportunity to learn something new, as with his book Infinity. For an account, see Doug Hesse, ‘Teaching with Dave’, in Proofread or Die!: Writings by Former Students & Colleagues of David Foster Wallace, ed. Charles Harris (Gilson, IL: Lit Fest Press, 2016), 161–8.   3. David Foster Wallace, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1997), 3–20 (3–4).   4. Ibid., 5.   5. Ibid., 11.   6. Ibid., 17.   7. Ibid., 20.   8. David Foster Wallace, ‘Consider the Lobster’, in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 235–54 (236).   9. Ibid., 243. 10. Ibid., 245. 11. Ibid., 253. 12. David Foster Wallace, ‘Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All’, in Supposedly Fun Thing, 83–137 (83). 13. Elderly fairgoers have mistaken Harper’s for the fashion/beauty/celebrity/food magazine Harper’s Bazaar. 14. Wallace, ‘Getting Away’, 111. 15. Ibid., 103. 16. Ibid., 84. 17. Ibid., 89. 18. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth’, in Shaping Tradition: Art and Diversity in the Essay, ed. Sandra Fehl Tropp (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), 307–9; E. B. White, ‘The Ring of Time’, in Shaping Tradition, 354–60. 19. Ibid., 108.

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20. Ibid., 110. In American slang, ‘carnies’ is a somewhat derogatory name for carnival workers, itinerant men and women who set up and run rides and attractions. 21. Ted Conover, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Illegal Migrants (New York: Vintage Books, 1987); Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). 22. Ted Conover, ‘The Way of All Flesh’, Harper’s Magazine, May 2013, 31–49 (33). 23. Ted Conover, ‘Cattle Calls’, Harper’s Magazine, October 2015, 37–50. 24. Ted Conover, ‘The Last Frontier’, Harper’s Magazine, August 2019, 23–38. 25. Douglas Hesse, ‘A Boundary Zone: First-Person Short Stories and Narrative Essays’, in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 85–105. 26. Ted Conover, Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. 27. Ibid., 108. 28. Annie Dillard, ‘Total Eclipse’, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 84–103. 29. Joan Didion, ‘The White Album’, in The White Album (1979; New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 11–50. 30. Joseph Addison, ‘On Westminster Abbey’ [The Spectator #26, March 30, 1711], in Shaping Tradition, 56–58 (56). 31. E. B. White, ‘The Art of the Essay’, in The Paris Review Interviews, IV, ed. Philip Gourevitch (New York: Picador, 2009), 128–51 (139). 32. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin Press, 1997). 33. Luis Alberto Urrea, ‘Introductory Matters: Home of the Brave’, in By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 1–34 (5). 34. Luis Alberto Urrea, ‘A Lake of Sleeping Children’, in By the Lake of Sleeping Children, 35–46 (37). 35. Ibid., 44. 36. Ibid., 45. 37. I have written about reflection in the essay more fully. See Douglas Hesse, ‘Reflection and the Essay’, in A Rhetoric of Reflection, ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016), 288–302. 38. George Orwell, ‘A Hanging’, in On Essays: A Reader for Writers, ed. Paul H. Connolly (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 268–72 (269). 39. George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, in On Essays, 282–8 (282). 40. Ibid., 285. 41. James Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012), 59–74 (59) 42. Ibid., 61. 43. Ibid., 63. 44. Ibid., 62. 45. Ibid., 71. 46. Robert E. Scholes and Carl Klaus, Elements of the Essay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 3. 47. Joan Didion, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 131–41 (131). 48. Ibid., 137. 49. Ibid., 132. 50. Ibid., 136, italics in original. 51. Ibid., 141. 52. Joan Didion, ‘Bureaucrats’, in The White Album, 79–85.

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Joan Didion, ‘In Bed’, in The White Album, 168–72. Joan Didion, ‘Good Citizens’, in The White Album, 86–95 (86–7). Ibid., 90. Ibid., 93. Joan Didion, ‘Many Mansions’, in The White Album, 67–73 (73). James Baldwin, ‘Stranger in the Village’, in Notes of a Native Son, 163–79 (163). Ibid., 179. Joan Didion, ‘On Morality’, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 157–64. Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (London: Verso, 1997), vii. Ibid., viii. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Wandering Rocks’, in A Book of Migrations, 71–8 (73). Ibid., 73. Ibid., 78. While A Book of Migrations develops from sought experiences, Solnit’s more recent essay collection, Recollections of My Nonexistence (n.p.: Viking, 2020), develops from lived experience. 66. Hilaire Belloc, ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’, in Essayists on the Essay, 51–4 (53). 67. James N. Britton, ‘Shaping at the Point of Utterance’, in Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays of James Britton, ed. Gordon M. Pradl (Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1980), 139–48.

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8 The Essay and the Advertisement R. Eric Tippin

T

he history of modern advertising is a history of deceit, or at least the suspicion of deceit. Advertising as it is now understood began to take shape in the seventeenth century, and almost immediately it was censured by literary observers for its untruths. Daniel Defoe, looking back on 1665–6 in his Journal of the Plague Year, registers his disgust at seeing ‘Posts of Houses, and Corners of Streets . . . plaster’d over with Doctor’s Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows’ selling ‘INFALIBLE preventive Pills against the Plague’ and ‘NEVER-FAILING Preservatives against the infection’.1 John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Progress, uses the metaphor of advertising to condemn what he considers the excesses and idolatrous deceits of Roman Catholicism: ‘the ware of Rome and her merchandise is greatly promoted in [Vanity] [F]air’.2 In the eighteenth century, as advertising flowered not only in public spaces but in periodicals, Richard Sheridan introduced his character Puff (a verb, by then, commonly used to describe the lies-by-exaggeration of advertising), who embodied the public distrust in the veracity and authenticity of periodical advertisements. Puff boasts, ‘I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor.’3 In the nineteenth century, with the concurrent growth of periodicals, of literacy and of public taste for new books, Thomas Macaulay decried what he called the ‘new trickery’ of book advertisements: The puffing of books is now so shamefully and so successfully carried on that it is the duty of all who are anxious for the purity of the national taste, or for the honour of the literary character, to join in discountenancing the practice.4 Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present, added his own denunciation of that ‘all-deafening blast of Puffery’, perhaps missing the irony of his metaphor from loud noises.5 Many twentieth-century critiques, following Marx and taking into account the possibility of psychological lies, adjusted ‘puffery’ into ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘kitsch’, both of which retain the basic metaphor of disproportion found in ‘puffery’.6 George Orwell offered a further damning assessment, mapping the territorial overlap between advertisement culture and totalitarian propaganda, both of which justify the ‘falsification of reality’ and both of which, according to Orwell, verify the maxim, ‘a bought mind is a spoiled mind’.7 Other twentieth-century portrayals of advertisements show a similar emphasis on untruth as unreality. Philip Larkin’s ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ recounts with deadpan relish (and hungry regret) the defacement of an idealized woman on an

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advertisement billboard, culminating in the wry encomium, ‘She was too good for this life.’8 This experience of untruth – of ‘too good’ – is the mark of literary encounters with the advertisement. In stark contrast to this, the history of the essay is a history of truthfulness or at least the assertion of truthfulness. Montaigne presents his essays in the hope that they will reveal him ‘in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining [contention, also “restraint”] or artifice’.9 E. B. White claims that ‘there is one thing the essayist cannot do . . . he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time’.10 Theodor W. Adorno writes that the essay has a ‘claim to truth [Wahrheit] free from aesthetic semblance’.11 Similar quotations abound, but the essay’s status as generator of truth-content is perhaps most succinctly put here by pointing out the obvious but telling fact that denunciations of the advertisement’s untruth frequently appear in the form of an essay, from Samuel Johnson’s ‘Idler No. 41’ (treated below) to Macaulay’s, Carlyle’s and Orwell’s essays above, to Adorno’s ‘Culture Industry’ essays, showing the advertisement’s participation in commodity fetishizing – the ‘poetic mystery of the product, in which it is more than itself’ – to Raymond Williams’s ‘Advertising the Magic System’, which historicizes and taxonomizes the ‘confident absurdities’ of the modern advertisement.12 The essay, in short, is assumed to be the formal ground of truth on which the untruth of the advertisement can be exposed. Only rarely do essayists such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain challenge or flaunt this assumption, and even the flagrant lies and praises of lies of these essayists are understood by many critics to be a form of subversive, radical authenticity and truth-telling.13 While scholars of the essay have qualified its claims to truth,14 and scholars of the advertisement have qualified its penchant for untruth, the difference is only strengthened by nuance and exceptions.15 It is fundamentally accurate to both forms, I argue, to maintain that the essay as a form reveals (truth) and the advertisement as a form conceals (untruth), with obvious exceptions on both sides. And this mutual repulsion is a key starting point in understanding the forms’ shared concern. By the end of this chapter, I will arrive at two conclusions: the essay and the advertisement have an overlooked, productive historical and aesthetic partnership; the essay is a kind of advertisement. However, the best way to move toward these claims is to begin in the place where they seem least plausible – that is, at the radical dissimilarity between, even mutual repulsion of, the essay and the advertisement, and perhaps the most obvious dissimilarity between the essay and the advertisement to those who have encountered both seems to be their posture toward the true and the false. Beginning here, where the essay and the advertisement seem most at odds and the least compatible, this chapter will move in a kind of Hegelian, dialectical struggle toward those two claims, through historical coincidence to direct encounter, to complementarity, to sympathy and similarity. The dissimilarity and historical repulsion outlined above reveal the essay and the advertisement to be not indifferent acquaintances, but old enemies, and old enemies are apt to form grudging intimacies, simply by their long proximity to and study of one another. This, at least, is the picture I would like to offer of the essay and the advertisement, that they are old enemies and under one another’s influence, even constitutive of one another’s identities, and one understands each more precisely by a study of both.

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Historical Coincidence and Direct Encounter As old enemies, the essay and the advertisement have a history of direct encounter, and their first significant encounter, perhaps surprisingly, reveals an unexpected harmony between the forms. Montaigne, in his essay ‘Of a Lack in Our Administrations’, characteristically anticipates modern advertising before its advent. He imagines ‘a certain designated place where those who needed something could go and have their business registered’ in order to advertise their wares and their needs. He offers examples of these advertisements, such as ‘“I want to sell some pearls; I want to buy some pearls”’, and ends by observing, ‘for all the time there are people with congruous needs who are looking for one another, and, for lack of knowing one another, are left in extreme need’.16 He does not anticipate the puffery that would arise from ‘I want to sell’, but lays out, without the cynicism of later writers, the ideal of advertising, which is an ideal of open communication facilitating a positive-sum game between seller and buyer (‘congruous needs’), calibrating demand and supply. This first interaction is a kind of Edenic, prelapsarian encounter between two forms that would, in time, enter a centuries-long feud.17 The simple phrase ‘I want to sell’ carries with it much of (what has been perceived to be) the honest, first-person force of an essay. It differs subtly but significantly from what would become the advertisement’s typical second-person injunction, ‘you should buy’, which always already puts the motives and honesty of the seller into question. As Judith Williamson has shown, the modern advertisement is a second-person form, inviting you to ‘exchange yourself with the person “spoken to”’.18 As will be argued below, the essay speaks to a reader ‘you’, but it forms this second-person interaction out of first-person expression. Montaigne’s imagined advertisement takes on the first-personhood of the essay, and in this first engagement between essay and advertisement, the lack of ‘artifice’ that Montaigne claims for his own essays is passed to the advertisement, and readers catch a glimpse of an honest, adamic advertisement, before its ‘fall’ from first-person expression (‘I want to sell’) to second person coercion (‘You should buy’). Post-fall, the most significant and sustained encounter between essay and advertisement has been spatial. That is, after the rise of the newspaper and periodical – forms which promised to realize Montaigne’s vision of a place in which buyers and sellers could reveal themselves to one another – essays and advertisements existed in close quarters (at times just inches apart). This proximity, combined with the growing difference between the first-person, revelatory essay and the second-person, motive-concealing advertisement, made the forms natural sparring partners. It is not surprising, then, that one of the earliest topics for the periodical essay was the advertisement. In 1710, Joseph Addison, in typical satire, praises the ‘skill’ of the advertiser who touts the ‘“universal esteem, or general reputation” of things that were never heard of’ and scolds newspapers that allow ‘uncleanly’ advertisements to appear, such as ‘Carminative Wind-expelling Pills’.19 Addison’s is still a relatively light-hearted scrimmage with the advertisement, but it establishes two normative postures of subsequent essayists toward the advertisement: mannered, moral and censorious distaste for the ethical and proprietary failures of advertisements; magpie appreciation for the extravagant miscellany presented by advertisements. Addison also establishes what would become a long tradition of assuming both postures simultaneously. Contra Montaigne, Addison suggests that certain needs and certain ‘uncleanly’ matching commodities are best left concealed; however, in doing so, he also

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betrays a certain guilty relish in the bizarre detail of a ‘Wind-expelling’ pill, key to the success of his essay.20 As Addison writes, ‘a collection of advertisements is a kind of miscellany’, and the essay has often been characterized as a form that draws from miscellany for its subjects – a piece of chalk, a moth, a lobster, a pencil, soap. Essays, in David Russell’s words, ‘take their liberty to start from anywhere’ and from anything.21 As Addison and subsequent essayists show, the radically eclectic things provided by advertisements have proven a rich store for the essayist in search of an anything, and, as will be argued below, the essay’s unique handling of the things of advertisements constitutes its most significant, productive engagement with and gift to the advertisement. Addison wrote his satire in the early days of the cohabitation of the essay and the advertisement in periodicals. By the middle of the century, their union had become a stormy civil partnership. One suggestive example is Samuel Johnson’s ‘Idler No. 41’ (1759), which claims that ‘Promise, large promise, is the soul of an Advertisement’ and reaches toward a concept that would later be called ‘kitsch’ when he observes that the ‘noblest objects may be so associated as to be made ridiculous’.22 These observations were, by the middle of the eighteenth century, unsurprising. More telling is the context in which Johnson wrote the essay. For the first twenty-nine issues of Payne’s Universal Chronicle or Weekly Gazette, which had been founded largely to house Johnson’s essays, the periodical contained no advertisements, save a list of recently published books, which appeared in issue 27. However, issue 30, published Saturday, October 28, 1758, carried an advertisement for ‘Dr. JAMES’s POWDER’, which, with typically shocking bravado (‘large promise’), claimed that Dr. James’s Powder was the most ‘effectual remedy for all internal inflammations pleurices, quinces, acute rheumatisms, and the lowness of spirits, and uneasinesses, proceeding from flow and latent fevers, which are generally mistaken for vapours and hysterics’.23 From this issue forward, the Universal Chronicle carried advertisements, which increased in number from one to three or four in the next weeks. By issue 34, the ads were no longer confined to the back page but took up column space on the penultimate page as well. Twelve issues after that initial advertisement, at the peak of advertisement volume in the periodical, Johnson published ‘Idler No. 41’. The case is circumstantial, but it is not implausible to say that his essay does not seem simply to be a reaction to the advertisement of his time, but a reaction to a new trend of advertising in his own periodical. The evidence seems to point to the fact that the advertisement was not only the subject for but the catalyst of Johnson’s essay. In short, the border between the essay and the advertisement, at least in this instance, is not sealed but permeable, and Johnson’s criticism is an attempt to distance himself from and to counter a very literal invasion of his periodical. This dangerous permeability revealed itself in perhaps more troubling forms in the nineteenth century, when ‘advertisement books’ hybridized the genres and those such as Alexander Rowland of Rowland’s Macassar Oil published works with titles like An Essay on the Cultivation and Improvement of the Human Hair, with Remarks on the Virtues of the Macassar Oil.24 As John Strachan has claimed, ‘the language of advertisements echoes the more general literary preoccupations of the age in which they were composed’,25 and the advertisement, as it moved into the late nineteenth century, spoke in the language of the essayistic prose so common in the periodicals the forms shared. The evidence of substantial formal influence in the other direction – from advertisement to essay – seems to appear mostly in the twentieth century and to have much to

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do with Addison’s appeal to ‘miscellany’. The twentieth century saw essays that more willingly mimicked what writers perceived to be the shattered order of modernity, in which ‘[o]rganic unity could only be viewed ironically’,26 as Ned Stuckey-French puts it in his work on the modernist essay. Scholars such as Paige Reynolds, Mark S. Morrison and Bernard Vere have argued that modernist publications utilized common advertising techniques in their typology, layout and penchant for collage.27 Brian Dillon sets up a similar argument for the essay when he argues that the modern essay’s aphorism embraces its fragmentary implications and ‘manifests in multiple’.28 Twentieth- and twenty-first-century essayists more willingly deploy polyglot discourse, interpolation, malaprop eloquence and surgical ostentation, all important formal behaviors of the advertisement in the same centuries.29 While this is a suggestive and productive line of inquiry, I will not follow it here. Instead, to show the mutual influence of the essay and the advertisement in the twentieth century and beyond I will return to Montaigne’s emphasis on persons and things in his imagining of an ideal advertisement space (‘“I want to sell some pearls; I want to buy some pearls”’). It is here, I argue, where persons and things interact, that the differences between essay and advertisement shape themselves into something like a dialectical complementarity.

Complementarity This complementarity is on display most vividly in essays in and after the twentieth century, during which the advertisement grew in subtlety and ubiquity. One prime example is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’, which is tacitly about the desire for and purchase of a commodity – a ‘lead pencil’. However, in tracing Woolf’s quest from desire to purchase, it examines and critiques one of the key messages of advertising: that the purchase of objects can provide benefits equivalent to those received in the relations between persons. In doing so, it reveals, as I will show, something central to the essay, most visible when it encounters the advertisement. Woolf opens her essay by repudiating the kind of thinking that ascribes personhood to objects: No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext.30 While her characteristic, hedging ‘perhaps’ acknowledges the possibility of an unhealthy regard for objects as persons, her first two sentences are a systematic rejection of the kind of thinking that ascribes the commodities the intentionality reserved for persons (‘felt passionately’). To borrow the language of Kant’s critical imperative, so important to Marx, Lukács, Adorno and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of advertising, Woolf demotes the commodity of the lead pencil from ‘end in itself’ to means-to-end, calling it ‘an object, an excuse’.31 But even the Kantian taxonomy is too strong. The lead pencil is not even an instrument of happiness in Woolf’s understanding, but merely ‘a pretext’

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(from praetexere, ‘to disguise’) to pursue a greater end, an undirected walk, that has little to do with the pencil as a commodity. In advertising, the desires of the viewer are directed toward some specific object, and that object is portrayed either as a good end in itself (‘Open a Coke. Open Happy’ implying that Coke has an ontological equivalence to happiness) or as the gateway to some good end (‘Built Ford Tough’ implying a transfer of toughness to the consumer upon purchase of a Ford). Unlike the commodities in advertisements, Woolf’s pencil is not a gateway but a ‘pretext’, a decoy, the incidental paraphernalia of a planned deception and no more. The pencil is incidental because it is easily replaceable by something that has nothing to do with commodities or with purchasing – a visit to a friend, a trip to see a street musician, the desire for fresh air. Moreover, both parallel examples she offers for her motivation, fox hunting and golfing, have little to do with commerce. The lead pencil’s status as a purchasable commodity, in short, has almost nothing to do with the benefits that Woolf anticipates receiving in going to purchase it. In the paragraph quoted above, Woolf not only disenchants the unpurchased commodity of the lead pencil, treating it as an incidental ‘pretext’, she contrasts it with various enchanted objects around her house, all of which have taken on a value having little to do with their price: the ‘bowl on the mantelpiece . . . bought at Mantua on a windy day’; the carpet stained by an absent-minded interlocutor, and, later in the essay, the ‘chair’, which is ‘turned as we left it’.32 In rejecting the desirability of the as-yet-unpurchased commodity of the lead pencil for the familiar objects around her, Woolf is trading the enchantment of the advertised, fetishized, unpurchased commodity with its promises yet unfulfilled, for the enchantment of the familiar object, which has earned its significance through participating in slow, ritual domesticity. The bond between the speaker and the domestic objects around her, in other words, is not transactional but relational. They are not fetishized commodities but sacramental or talismanic objects necessary for the rites of domestic familiarity. Through this contrast between the lead pencil and the familiar objects around her, Woolf forms a persuasive, subtle argument that the benefits of any object cannot be transferred to a person simply through the purchase of that object – the key implication of every advertisement. The purchase is merely a ‘pretext’ for the real process of enchantment, which happens when an object participates in a significant interaction between persons and retains the memory of that interaction – much like an Islamic or Christian contact-relic retains something of a prophet’s merit (Muhammad’s cloak, Jesus’s wooden cross). She has established the thought that non-transferable benefits are attainable – are perhaps even more likely to be attained – apart from the act of purchasing, from old, inherited goods (Woolf’s bowl, carpet and chair) saturated in intentionality and carrying what Michael L. Ross has called ‘affective weight’.33 This contentment deduction is anathema to the advertisement, and it is the very deduction that Woolf makes in ‘Street Haunting’. Having bought the pencil and returned home, Woolf ends the essay this way: Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here – let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence – is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.34 It may appear from these lines that Woolf has been swayed by the advertisement’s promise that purchase and possession will confer the benefits of the commodity to the

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purchaser. She invites the reader not only to ‘examine tenderly’ her purchase but to ‘touch it with reverence’ – to adopt a posture of awe toward it like one might toward a holy object. This treatment looks like bare fetishizing, but to read it that way is to miss what has happened to turn the lead pencil from a ‘pretext’ into a ‘spoil’. And that word ‘spoil’ is one of Woolf’s tells. The pencil is not some good acquired through a transfer of capital but a ‘spoil’ – a good that is ‘taken from an enemy or captured city in time of war’, as the OED has it.35 The change in status of the pencil from mere ‘pretext’ to revered ‘spoil’ is clearly not a result of purchase; ‘spoil’ is, by definition, unpurchased. The pencil has taken on its new meaning because it has participated in and collected in itself a portion of the memory of the ‘rambling’ which was Woolf’s real aim at the outset. It has become a relic of the walk, like the chair is a relic of her domestic order and the carpet is a relic of a conversation on politics with a friend. The fitting responses Woolf commands of the authorial ‘we’, to ‘examine it tenderly’ and to ‘touch it with reverence’, are both behaviors one expects of a pilgrim encountering a relic. The pencil is ‘spoil’ taken from the clutches of price and given a mysterious, talismanic value reserved for objects that have encountered persons and their intentionality. Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ is not simply an essay critiquing the advertisement’s vision of commodities. Thomas Karshan argues persuasively that it is also ‘a summing up of the whole genre’ of the essay that ‘concentrates much of the history of the essay and its predominant themes’.36 The pursuit of the pencil is – like the pursuit of a stated topic in an essay – merely a ‘pretext’ for the primary action of the essay, that is, the free encounter of a rational subject with her environment and with sympathetic readers, represented in this essay by an aimless walk. I have shown here that Woolf’s essay is a subtle critique of the epistemology of the advertisement – a commentary on the proper interaction between persons and things and the ways in which consolation is attained through this interaction. If, as Karshan claims, ‘Street Haunting’ is a summation of the essay genre, Woolf’s essay becomes not merely a critique of the advertisement but a revelation of the essay’s contrasting treatment of objects. The essay, then, is itself a commentary on the proper interaction between subjects and objects – from Francis Bacon sparing ‘no cost’ in imagining his ideal garden to Jan Morris’s queasy look at the paraphernalia of Las Vegas marriage chapels – and, consequently, a critique of the advertisement’s acquisitive assumption that real ‘goods’ can be attained simply by purchasing and possessing them.37 Woolf’s essay provides a vision of an essayist who venerates objects for their familiarity (the bowl, the stained carpet, the chair), appreciates objects for their beauty and enjoys objects for their manipulability by perception – three modes of seeing unavailable to the possessive vision conditioned by advertisements. As she puts it in the essay, ‘With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances.’38 The essay’s freedom from the imperative to purchase and to possess conditions its unique vision of the many things it encounters. It is common in essay scholarship – as in scholarship on the advertisement – to use metaphors of clutter, emporia and objects-to-hand.39 The essay is, in part, ‘an assembly of disparate materials’.40 Woolf’s essay on essaying confirms this, but elaborates further, suggesting a proper relationship between the essay and the objects of its inquiry, whether material or immaterial. The posture of the essayist toward the world in Woolf’s vision is not one of the acquisitive consumer who fetishizes – or, to invoke

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the ancestor to that term, ‘idolizes’ – commodities but of the wanderer who maintains sufficient critical distance from objects to appreciate their status as separate, ontological gifts to the observer.41 Something similar can be said of the ideational objects of an essayist’s gaze. The essayist does not aim to possess concepts, but, in Adorno’s image, to handle them with ‘childlike’ freedom – that is, to have significant encounters with concepts without the thought of sustained attention to them.42 As in child’s play, sustained attention may result, but never for its own sake. This anti-acquisitive disposition toward objects makes the essay, in Woolf’s vision of it, fundamentally incompatible with the epistemology of the advertisement, which invites its readers or viewers to know the world by consuming it. Consumption in Woolf’s essay, unless it is a ‘pretext’, is hazardous behavior. Woolf records an encounter with a ‘dwarf’ woman in a boot shop who yields to the false promises of the acquisitive. As long as the woman ‘trie[s] on pair after pair’ of shoes, she is in ‘ecstasy’; however, thinking to secure this sensation and pressured by her companions, she purchases shoes, at which ‘the ecstasy faded’ and ‘knowledge returned’.43 This parable reworks the Torah’s origin myth of Eve and the serpent – in many ways the first warning against advertising and its promises. In that myth, the tempter presents a product (‘fruit’), ‘puffs’ it (‘ye shall be as gods’) and claims that the only way to gain this benefit is through possession and consumption of that product (‘in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened’).44 As in the Eve–serpent myth, the deception of advertising in Woolf’s parable of the ‘dwarf’ woman lies not in the pleasantness of the objects around her or even their desirability but in the claim of the serpent that to ‘eat’ is to secure that pleasantness. Both receive ‘knowledge’ from their acquisition, but only disenchanted knowledge of the inadequacy of their own attempt to secure a promised good. It may be a step too far to claim that the essay as a form reverses original sin as conceived in the Torah, but its habitual way of knowing the world is one that repudiates the possessing-as-knowing claim of the mythical tempter and of the modern advertiser. Woolf’s essay portrays and enacts a form that knows the world of objects in a way that registers their desirability without consuming them.

Sympathy and Similarity We have edged very near the first claim I laid out at the beginning of this chapter – that the essay and advertisement form a productive aesthetic partnership, one in which ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’, to borrow Adorno’s phrase.45 Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ shows that the essay understands its relations to the objects of its gaze more clearly when contrasted with the advertisement’s vision of those objects. However productive, this relationship remains antithetical. As Addison showed above, it is habitual for essayists not only to repudiate the advertisement but to show sly, perhaps guilty pleasure in the midst of this repudiation. The essay’s habitual posture toward the advertisement is not, in other words, one of pure, unmixed critique. Certain of the advertisement’s charms prove irresistible to essays treating them, and even those essays that debunk or repudiate the advertisement revel in the extremity, enormity and ostentation of its formal faux pas. One of these essays is E. B. White’s ‘The World of Tomorrow’, which recounts a visit to the 1939–40 World’s Fair in Queens, New York. White’s title refers to a specific, much-touted exhibit at the fair that displayed the projected technology and

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living conditions of the future. The title is also the foundation of a joke to which White returns a number of times throughout the essay – that is, that the ‘World of Tomorrow’ looks suspiciously like a retrogressive, even medieval, world of competing advertisements. He recounts his approach to the entrance of the fair this way: I might have been approaching the lists at Camelot, for I felt that perhaps here would be the tournament all men wait for, the field of honor, the knights and the ladies under those bright banners, beyond these great walls. A closer inspection, however, on the other side of the turnstile, revealed that it was merely Heinz jousting with Beech-Nut – the same old contest on a somewhat larger field.46 Heinz and Beech-Nut would be known to White’s contemporary reader as two food manufacturers known for their tomato products, who, somewhat ironically given White’s jousting metaphor, had at one time in their history hired the same advertising agent.47 In 1939, when White attended the World’s Fair, Heinz was running its ‘aristocrat’ advertising campaign, which figured a tomato in white tie, wearing a monocle and holding a cane.48 This context only heightens the effect of White’s disenchantment, which works on a sudden shift in register from noble-knightly to consumerist-quotidian. The cheap, imitative aristocrat of the Heinz advertisements is not the opposite of the noble or the knightly, but its corruption, and White savors the contrast, which is as pleasing to him as the critique. White encounters various advertisers and advertisements throughout the essay, and in every case he is careful to register their appeal before questioning their truth. In the General Motors exhibit ‘you lean back in a cushioned chair . . . and hear (from the depths of the chair) the soft electric assurance of a better life – the life which rests on wheels alone’.49 Again, the effect of his sentence works on canny register mingling – the material idea of electricity moving seamlessly into the immaterial idea of a ‘better life’. Of course, this is the seamless movement vital to the advertisement’s ‘large promise’ outlined above. ‘Depths’, ‘Soft’ and ‘rest’ – all potential bed metaphors – only add to the general sense of pleasant, narcotic drowsiness necessary to pull off the transfer from tangible to intangible benefits. Indeed, it is this evocation of drowsiness and sleep that provides White with the beginnings of a critique of the exhibit: ‘the General Motors dream, as dreams so often do, left some questions unanswered’.50 White is able to feel, imagine and participate in the pleasures of the advertisement’s promises ‘with no thought of buying’ – buying here being a kind of synonym for ‘believing’. With the acquisitive and the credulous neutralized, the advertisement itself becomes desirable to the essayist as a contact-relic, whose value inheres in its interaction with a person (the essayist), not its price or its promise. The essay as White writes it can reclaim the aesthetic ‘spoils’ of advertisements from the acquisitive. And White, whose essays often grow around ‘found’ aesthetic objects, is well tooled to carry out this reclamation. White ends his essay with a troubling reflection on the nature of persons and things, recounting a daily ritual at the fair in which, as a part of a pre-show advertisement, ‘a couple of girls’ sit on the lap of ‘an automaton – a giant man in white tie and tails with enormous rubber hands’, whose arms and hands move across the women’s bodies: The effect was peculiarly lascivious – the extra-size man, exploring with his gigantic rubber hands the breasts of . . . the girls with their own small hands (by comparison

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so small, by comparison so terribly real) restrainingly to his, to check the unthinkable impact of his mechanical passion.51 It is a striking figuration of the danger advertisements and their kitsch pose to the artist, literary or otherwise – the violation of delicate and complex reality by brute unreality, which is made possible by the confusion of persons (the ‘girls’) and things (the ‘automaton’) – of ends and means-to-ends. And yet White shows in ‘The World of Tomorrow’ that advertisements themselves can be changed by the essay from meansto-ends to ends. The ‘giant automaton’, stripped of its ability to sell its product, is given an aesthetic status in the essay that it cannot possibly have in the setting of the fair. White, like Woolf with her pencil, has reclaimed it as a ‘spoil’ of his essaying. His essay is honest with itself about its attraction to the unequaled spectacle conditioned by advertising, even while disapproving and showing deep discomfort with the implications of advertising for persons, things and their interactions. White’s essay in many ways acknowledges and redeems the essay’s inability – revealed first by Addison – to offer unironic condemnation of the advertisement. One sees a similar inability and a similar acknowledgment in other twentieth-century essays on advertisements, from the frothing descriptions of soap ads in Roland Barthes’s ‘Soap-powders and Detergents’ to the pleasingly dilapidated Coca-Cola and ‘GROVES CHILL TONIC’ signs hanging from lean-to country stores in the photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Essayists have consistently shown themselves to be unable to veil their appreciation for the advertisement, even as they critique and lay bare its false promises.52 I have already given one reason for this – namely, that essayists are able to see, appreciate, but not consume or desire to consume advertising’s objects and, consequently, to see advertisements themselves as ‘found’ objects of interest. But there is another, complementary explanation. It is here where we run up against my second claim set out at the beginning of the chapter and hinted at in Montaigne’s imagining of an advertisement space: the essay is a kind of advertisement, but not the kind that begins from the second person (‘you should buy’), rather, like Montaigne’s ideal advertisement, the kind that seeks, and perhaps shapes, ‘congruous needs’ from the first person (‘I want to sell’). It speaks in the first-person present, revealing that person’s desires, wants, needs and knowledge of her world. As in Montaigne’s advertisement, it is the first move in a positive-sum game with the reader, in which deceit becomes the exception, not the rule. The essay intuits and fulfills the simple desire of the ideal advertisement to offer its present wares to those who have a parallel desire to receive them. The present tense is not incidental, but central to the point. The essay has a privileged relationship with the first person, but it also has a privileged relationship with the present, even when the essayist recounts the past.53 Advertisements too speak to present needs and desires, so radically that only exceptional advertising campaigns – such as Volkswagen’s ‘Think Small’ campaign – transcend their current moment. The essay finds a way to embody this first-person presence without, like the advertisement, falling either into second-person deception or radical ephemerality and historical irrelevance. This avoidance of the advertisement’s failures is, in the end, the essay’s most subtle critique of its old sparring partner – fulfilling the ideals it has only ever corrupted. The essay is able to fulfill the advertisement’s ideals where the advertisement fails to do so, I argue, because the transaction that results from its expression of desire is

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not sale but gift – the transfer of some valuable without the consideration of price or the expectation of payment. The gift economy, as opposed to a market economy, retains the second person, but it emphasizes the receiver’s personhood rather than her instrumental function or response. The gift-transaction (the characteristic example of which is erotic love) involves a mutual offer of the first person to the other and a mutual reception.54 Unlike the advertisement, the essay’s success is not contingent upon a particular direct response of its readers – those to whom the essay is ‘given’, except of course their vital return-gift of reception and all the meaning the reader generates in offering that gift. The essay’s second-personhood is not a sales pitch or a sermon but an invitation to receive a gift of first-person subjectivity, even when it pitches and preaches. This first-personhood may be simulated, as in Wilde’s masked essay-personas or Woolf’s essayistic ‘one’, but it remains an advertised ‘good’ that rises above commodity.

Notes   1. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Cynthia Wall, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 31.   2. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 85.   3. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, in Six Plays, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 311–59 (330).   4. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Mr Robert Montgomery’, in Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Methuen, 1903), 251–70 (255).   5. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 122.   6. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001), 29–60 (30).   7. George Orwell, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4 (Boston, MA: Nonpareil Books, 2000), 59–72 (71–72).   8. Philip Larkin, ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), 106.21.   9. Michel Montaigne, ‘To the Reader’, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 2. 10. E. B. White, foreword to Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), vii–ix (viii). 11. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23 (5). 12. Samuel Johnson, ‘The IDLER. No. 41.’, Payne’s Universal Chronicle or Weekly Gazette 2, no. 42 (20 January 1759): 19; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, in Culture Industry, 61–97 (55); Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising the Magic System’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 170–95. 13. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue’, The Nineteenth Century 25, no. 143 (January 1889): 35–56; Mark Twain, ‘On the Decay of the Art of Lying’, in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays (New York: Library of America, 1992), 2:824–29; for praise of this subversion as radically authentic, see, for example, Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 37–38. 14. See, for example, Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), 7 and György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’, in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1974), 1–19 (11–12).

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15. See, for example, Nicholas Holme’s argument regarding the political truth-telling of the advertisement in ‘Art for Fun and Profit’, in Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising, ed. James F. Hamilton, Robert Bodle and Ezequiel Korin (New York: Routledge, 2017), 97–109 (100–101). 16. Montaigne, ‘Of a Lack in Our Administrations’, in Complete Essays, 165–66 (165). 17. I do not mean that the advertisement actually existed in an Edenic, prelapsarian state. As I argue below, the very myth of Eden implies that the advertisement-idea pre-existed the seventeenth-century material manifestation of it. 18. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 2002), 50–51. 19. Joseph Addison, ‘No 224 – Thursday, September 14, 1710’, in The Tatler, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 220–21. 20. See, for example, ‘The Grand Force’, Fraser’s Magazine 79 (March 1869): 380–83. 21. David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 8. 22. Johnson, ‘The IDLER. No. 41.’ In subsequent collections of Johnson’s essays, this article is listed as ‘Idler No. 40’. 23. ‘Dr. JAMES’s POWDER’, Payne’s Universal Chronicle or Weekly Gazette, October 28, 1758, 240. 24. See John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7, 209–10. David Foster Wallace labels the modern iteration of this phenomenon the ‘essaymercial’ in ‘Shipping Out: On the Nearly Lethal Comforts of a Luxury Cruise’, Harper’s Magazine, January 1996, 40–43. 25. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, 6–7. 26. Ned Stuckey-French, ‘“An Essay on Virginia”: William Carlos Williams and the Modern(ist) Essay’, American Literature 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 97–130 (110). 27. Paige Reynolds, ‘“Chaos Invading Concept”: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture’, Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 6 (2000): 238–68; Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905– 1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 116–32; Bernard Vere, ‘“BLAST SPORT”?: Vorticism, Sport, and William Roberts’s Boxers’, Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 2 (2017): 349–70. 28. Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 74. 29. For two very different representative examples, see G. K. Chesterton, ‘On Being Moved’, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution 1901–1913, 8 vols., ed. Julia Stapleton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 6:86–7 and Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). 30. Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4, 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 480–90 (480). 31. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A German–English Edition, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann, The Cambridge Kant German–English Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85. 32. Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, 481, 491. 33. Michael L. Ross, Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), xvi. 34. Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, 491. 35. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘spoil, n. 1’, https://oed.com/view/Entry/187260?rskey=cv 2PRS&result=1. 36. Thomas Karshan, ‘What Is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 32–55 (36, 34).

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37. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Gardens’, in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985), 197–202; Jan Morris, ‘Las Vegas: Fun City’, in Journeys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 21–34 (31–32). 38. Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, 484, emphasis added. 39. For critical and historical accounts of the advertisement’s miscellaneous effect, see Sara Thornton, Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of Walls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63–67; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in 19th Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 58; Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, 16–25; and Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 56–57. 40. See Karshan and Murphy, On Essays. See also Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2 and Dillon, Essayism, 23–28. 41. Roger Scruton argues that the Torah’s injunction against idolatry is the natural ancestor to Adorno and Horkheimer’s deployment of ‘commodity fetishism’. See Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 144. For a similar comparison, see F. P. Bishop, The Ethics of Advertising (London: R. Hale, 1949), 18. 42. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 4. 43. Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, 484. 44. Gen. 3:1–5 (King James Version). 45. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 7. 46. E. B. White, ‘The World of Tomorrow’, in Essays of E. B. White, 111–17 (111–12). 47. See John McDonough, Karen Egolf and Museum of Broadcast Communications, eds., The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising, 3 vols. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), 1:250. 48. Ibid., 2:729. 49. White, ‘World of Tomorrow’, 114. 50. Ibid., 114 51. Ibid., 117. 52. Roland Barthes, ‘Soap-powders and Detergents’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 36–38; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). 53. See my argument in ‘At the Limits of Fixité: The Essay and the Aphorism’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 169–82. 54. See Lewis Hyde’s claim that the gift, unlike commerce, cultivates a unique ‘feeling bond’ between giver and receiver, in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (London: Vintage, 1999), 56–73.

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Contemporary Essayists in Focus

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Rebecca Solnit on the Essay On the Essay as Political Discourse

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have to begin with the feminist tenet, ‘the personal is political’. There’s a popular idea that there’s this distinct type of thinking and writing that is ‘political’ – a credo I do not adhere to. This belief is usually espoused by people who think the status quo is settled truth, absolute reality, uncontestable normality etc. But if you believe, as I do, that every position is political, then in a sense every piece of writing is political. You write a haiku poem about the frogs and not about the toxic waste in the pond, or vice versa – those are political decisions.

On Choosing Essays for The Best American Essays 2019 The submissions for The Best American Essays were really interesting because I found myself thinking some of them were better than others, but also some of them didn’t feel like essays, and so I had to ask myself, ‘What makes something an essay or not?’ And there were pieces that felt . . . at one end of the spectrum like memoir. They weren’t really asking, ‘Well what are the general principles underlying my personal experience?’, ‘What could we understand about race or gender or childhood or families or the human experience?’, ‘How is my personal experience connected to broader experiences, to categories of experience, or questions of meaning, or the economic or ecological construction of that experience?’

On Journalism and the Essay There were also essays that functioned more like journalism, reporting more broadly without really contextualizing, critiquing, meditating on the material. I was trained as a journalist. I have a degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which I got partly because writing programs did not recognize nonfiction as creative back in those dark ages so long ago, and partly because I needed to make a living. I was quite poor, needed some skills, and journalism, unlike creative writing, promised that I might get a job. But there is a bullshit ideology in journalism that your work is neutral – for example, journalists should not over-interpret the data they gather or cite. But in the Trump era too much journalism did not put its data in context – for example, a journalist would report something happened without reporting that it had happened before, or it had never happened before, why it was illegal, what the pattern was etc. I saw journalists bending over backwards to not reach conclusions, which meant that the facts didn’t rise to meanings. In a way, it felt like actually essayistic writers (the columnists at the Washington Post and elsewhere) were the crucial people for this period. You really needed the context. What a lot of essayists do is to

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situate the particular in the general and draw the relationships between them, and to be willing to take a stand. Heather Cox Richardson assumed a remarkable role in American public life. She’s a historian who began to write an essay almost every day beginning in the Fall of 2019. She gained a strong readership, and she was always contextualizing. The fact that there’s such passionate appetite for a historian is in itself incredibly thrilling, and for a historian who is always saying, here’s what happened today, here’s how it relates to the Civil War, or the fight over women’s suffrage and black votes etc. In a present that is hard to understand, we really need the context. Essayists situate the particular in the general and draw the relationships between them.

On Facts, Opinions and Claims Essayists need to be willing to take a stand. There’s a strong sense in some social groups in the United States that to have an opinion is impolite. It is a pretense, of course, a polite consensus that nobody should shatter by saying, ‘Actually, the Civil War was about slavery.’ To state a contentious fact is to have an opinion, which is practically having a debate, which is akin to starting a war. Calls for objectivity and for politeness often steer away people in this country from just reaching conclusions. Essays are inherently political because if the piece doesn’t reach some conclusion, then it isn’t an essay. The conclusion does not have to be like a moral at the end of the sermon that hits you over the head. But an essay can retain a polemic quality, a position taken, an interpretation; essayists cannot limit themselves to just gathering facts or describing experience. Essays in particular ask us to think harder about something, look more closely at it, find out more about it. Just that process of thoughtfulness feels almost antithetical to what totalitarianism, fascism, cults etc. want of us, which is a kind of unthinking obedience to received ideas.

On the Genealogy of the Essay When I was young, creative writing programs basically focused on poetry and fiction and maybe some playwrighting. I used to think of poetry and fiction as akin to each other, sitting on their twin thrones with nonfiction still using the servants’ entrance back in those days. Later, I remember realizing, ‘Oh, most of the contemporary poetry I like is itself essayistic in that it is an exploration of something and more or less nonfiction.’ Recognizing that kinship was really helpful then and now. I read poetry a lot for pleasure. It gives me relief from the plodding language that gets called ‘prosaic’. A lot of academic, scientific or journalistic stuff I read when I’m doing research can flatten out my sense of what you can do with words. As I say in the introduction to The Best American Essays, the real genealogy of essays is the sermon. The insistence that the essay has to be secular means we have to start with Montaigne and Bacon, neither of whom I found very interesting to read. I have not gone to church very much in my life, but I have gone a lot to what we call ‘dharma talks’ in the Zen Buddhist world, which is often the same thing. In these talks, you take some little emotion that arose, an encounter, experience, or some passage from the Buddhist scriptures and you reflect deeply on it. The person I have encountered who

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has given the most beautiful dharma talks is Paul Haller. I met him in San Francisco at the Zen Center. Paul is of course Irish . . . Irish Catholic and therefore a brilliant storyteller. I quote him in A Field Guide to Getting Lost. I always suspect Paul is, stylistically, drawing from sermons he heard in Catholic Belfast. Essayists have not wanted to claim this relationship to the sermon because a lot of people are trying to escape religion for understandable reasons, but also because that makes explicit the fact that essayists always have an agenda. The agenda may not be theological, but isn’t the theological just another form of the political? ‘This is how things are, but this is how they should be.’ Having an agenda is a big part of my own relationship to the essay. Thus, I wrote an essay in Harper’s in praise of preaching to the choir.

Open-Endedness and Essays There are right-wing essays, of course. But it does feel like ultimately authoritarians want to issue dictates and prefer that people not think. And a lot of what they ask people to believe doesn’t survive interrogation. I’ve just written a book about Orwell, who not only asks people to question and interrogate what they are asked to believe, but he also looks at the tangible experiences in his own life as counters to that malleability of mind. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his character’s direct encounters allow him to reach his own conclusions. There’s a passage in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.’ So he demonstrates that in pursuit of independence of mind you establish principles and processes of inquiry. And you might benefit from a lot of firsthand experience, from a grounding in the senses, from trusting your own perception. In that book, he also says, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ Which means that trusting the evidence of your eyes and ears might be part of the process of building a robust sense of self capable of resistance. A really good essay, any really good piece of writing, gives you the thinking of the author but also encourages you to do your own thinking, and I have often found it’s the things I don’t agree with that prompt me to write. I had a little talk I never quite developed into an essay that began, ‘Dante had Beatrice, Orwell had Stalin.’ And so many of the occasional essays that I write are prompted by disagreement with something in the news. For example, in the United States, many journalists refer to ‘fetal heartbeats’ for six-week-old embryos, but an embryo is not yet a fetus, it’s the size of a pea, or maybe a large grain of rice, and it has not yet developed something that constitutes a heart. You can write to look at a use of language you disagree with – in this case a piece of propaganda from the anti-abortion movement that mainstream media repeat. A writer should notice when any outlet starts breaking the language in which we describe things. As an essayist, I see something that feels wrong or false or somehow I want to respond to it in some way and the politics of it. It is, in a grim way, inspiring. The poet or the essayist can look at the pond and write about the frogs or about the toxic waste in the pond, and of course you can do both. One of my favorite Orwell essays, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, one of his great essays, celebrates the beauty of toads coming out in the spring and mating, but it ends up including atom bombs. In this essay he is addressing people on the Left, who contest the legitimacy of taking pleasure in things like that, and it ends up being a deeply polemical essay

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about what it means to take pleasure in the natural world. And he asks what form of resistance this form of pleasure is and why some people on the Left disavow it.

On Literary Influence Using ‘essay’ as a verb, as in French ‘to try’, invites you to a kind of exploration that is not always recognized. If I had a Holy Trinity of essayists, it would be Woolf, Thoreau and Orwell. I decided to become a writer not long after I learned how to read in first grade. At that age you just think in terms of stories, so I was going to write stories. At some point I began to realize it was going to be nonfiction. I read Pauline Kael in The New Yorker and I got a Collected Works of Orwell really early. At age fifteen I bought a little Penguin paperback: Borges’s Labyrinths. Borges showed the imaginative possibility of short inquiries. His works are often described as fictions, but they are not bourgeois realist fiction. They are not concerned with emotion, interior experience, realism and verisimilitude. They’re philosophical inquiries, even when they describe imaginary individual experience. The personal matters a great deal – I have a personal life – and that is present in books of mine like A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby. But so much literature begins and ends there, and there’s so much beyond. I and we also have a public self, a self that cares passionately about something beyond this small realm of our love life and our family life and our personal security, that cares about ideas and ideals and community and a natural world. These things I call ‘other loves’, and my books Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell are very much about the relationship between interior emotional life and these larger realms. I still love a good bourgeois realist novel, but enough has been written about romantic and familial love. What about love of place? What about the deeply meaningful experience people have as part of civil society? One of the things that’s actually been most bracing about the Trump era is to find out that people care passionately about collective public and political life. You know, they’re not just kind of ‘I got mine, I don’t care if they put kids in gulags or destroy the climate.’ To see that, not everybody, but a lot of people are civic-minded, idealists etc. has been strangely reassuring. Another influence that comes much, much later is Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. There’s an amazing anthology, Our Word Is Our Weapon, that came out I think in the 1990s, maybe the early 2000s. But of course, I was reading the manifestos and these kind of great flowery, poetic political statements as they were issued after the 1994 Zapatista uprising. I’m not sure what exactly to call them. The Zapatistas contributed a post-Marxist vision of what the Left could be: indigenized, grounded in the natural and indigenous world. It was language that was poetic, that was playful, but suggested that you did not have to use the stale language of Marxists. They gave us a new political language that could be poetic and concrete, full of birds, animals, weather, tangible things that made the ideas fly higher. Thoreau’s language was really important for me too, its prophetic fire, its visionary quality. I also was interested in writing against the conventional nature essay, which tended to be white people being pious. One exception is Ed Abbey’s deeply unpious Desert Solitaire. It was a big influence, notably on Savage Dreams, my second book.

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He had something to give, and I’m glad I got it before it became harder to accept his misanthropic, misogynist, racist persona. Other influences were Susan Sontag and Eduardo Galeano, Sontag much earlier, Galeano much later, both of whom I got to meet briefly late in their lives. Political writing in this country has often been thought to be kind of dreary and almost antiaesthetic. You could have the ethics of a political writer or the aesthetics of a literary writer, and it often felt very segregated. I was impressed by the Latin American model where they’re deeply connected. Part of what makes Virginia Woolf so exciting as a literary model is that she feels she can be absolutely as political as she wants and she can be as subjective as she wants. One favorite essay of mine that I wrote is called ‘Arrival Gates’. Its opening sentence, which is almost 500 words long, is modeled after the opening sentence of ‘On Being Ill’. I’ve actually just done an essay for a book of photographs by an artist who works with water. My essay is many thousand words, but just seven sentences. They’re not as artful as the opening sentence of ‘Being Ill’, but it was interesting to look at Woolf as a stylist, Woolf as a polemicist, Woolf as just a kind of standard of how good writing can be. Orwell and Woolf lived in a world where the novel was considered to be the pinnacle genre, but it isn’t necessarily anyone’s most important work. You often see very gifted essayists yearning after the novel. I’ve been asked a lot of my life, ‘When are you going to write a novel?’ as though all this was warm-up for the real deal, as though I was climbing the foothills but surely I wanted to climb the Everest of literature. One of the exciting things about the last twenty years is the arrival of nonfiction as serious literature. It began partly with academics looking hard at nature writing, which is largely essayistic or at least nonfiction. The fact that Thoreau wrote almost entirely essayistic nonfiction has been really helpful to other essayists. No one says, ‘Oh but his novel is the real thing.’ No one would ever say his poems are the real thing.

On Orwell It’s funny, Orwell wrote three really bad novels in the process of finding out that he was the twentieth century’s most sublimely gifted British essayist after Woolf. He adventures, pursues his subjects; he goes to the industrial North for The Road to Wigan Pier, goes to Spain for the Spanish Civil War, his second and third books of nonfiction. His first book is nonfiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, and then he writes this immense quantity of essayistic nonfiction. My book Orwell’s Roses begins with me looking for the fruit trees he planted, as described in his essay ‘A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray’, and meeting this wonderful couple who invite me into the cottage that he had from 1936 to 1946, and they say, ‘Well the fruit trees have been cut down’, and then, to my amazement, ‘but you know his roses are still growing. Would you like to see them?’ It was November 2nd, the roses were in bloom and it was just such an epiphany, to have this sudden, immediate, visceral, in-person encounter with the roses, and with this man as a kind of corporeal entity, not as the abstract person I’ve met on the page for forty years. I love the essay ‘The Vicar of Bray’. I quoted it in a very early work of mine and always thought of it as a fugitive trace of who Orwell might have been in a more peaceful time. Standing in his garden, I realized ‘Vicar’ was not a fugitive trace. Orwell

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was robustly a person who spent plenty of time in arcadia as well as dystopia. But I was able to ask myself, ‘What did it mean that this particular man planted roses?’ This question raised many more questions for me about pleasure and beauty in the natural world and all the things we do that are not productive in a Fordist assembly-line kind of way, but essential, nevertheless. It’s a personal question for me: What are the things you need to do that might seem trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, idle, but also feel like the most important thing you have to contribute?

On the Essay as Conversation Authoritarian writing wants to have the last word on something followed by silence. There’s another kind of writing that wants to stimulate a conversation, wants there to never be a last word. An essay that quotes other people is drawing from an existing conversation to continue the conversation. So you’re looking at what other people said. I’ve always thought it makes you look smarter – if that’s the goal – to have paid attention to what has already been said and credit it, to quote people. When I was young, I quoted really heavily. I quoted to buttress my opinions. But there’s also a choral aspect [to quotation and citation] that can be really rich if the writer lets many voices from many times, places, contexts into their work. I was trained as a journalist, and people who are most impacted by a specific issue are people you have to listen to, whether the issue is about reproductive rights or trans identities or racism etc. For A Paradise Built in Hell, for example, I probably talked to more than a hundred people. Listening to people led me to write a book which is driven by ideas. I learned that powerful public loves are submerged in ordinary times but emerge in extraordinary times. The people I talked to for this book feel the passionate desire to be a member of civil society, to do meaningful work, which gave me a new window onto human nature. This research also made visible the profound racial violence during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Some of the creative writing programs now are teaching nonfiction as a 100 percent memoir, which makes me crazy, because it’s a way of depoliticizing and de-essaying, blunting the inquiry of nonfiction which should also be a kind of journalism. Journalism is, at its most succinct, other people’s stories, individual and collective stories. It’s a relationship between the two even in memoir that is interesting. My memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence is trying to say, ‘I had a quotidian experience of male violence.’ Books like Roxane Gay’s Hunger or Alice Sebold’s memoir are, whether or not they are intended that way, seen as something extreme that happened to one woman, which is a way of saying that gender violence is the exception, not the rule. Putting that experience in context, saying that it’s the rule, makes it political just because ‘political’ is what happens to the collective rather than the individual. The individual experience is only a fragment of the great collective experience. I wanted to make the case that even an unexceptional dose of gender violence could have a severe impact on one’s sense of self, safety, freedom, possibility, and mine came at a time when almost no one had anything to say about that, even that it was real and grim. There’s a wonderful line by Thoreau in Walden: ‘I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew so well’, and this understanding drives my first-person writing. It’s partly coming out of postmodernism. I write, still, according to some postmodern dictates: disclose your position, write from first-person experience

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because the universal is a fiction. There is no neutral place from which to speak, no absolute objective authority. Honesty consists not of transcending subjectivity but of being explicit about the specificity of your experiences. In Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, he lets you ground an account of a war in firstperson experience and moves deftly between the political situation and his sensory and first-person witnessing. Savage Dreams is the first place where I really was able to use first-person experience extensively in writing about something much larger: the Indian wars, the nuclear wars, the history of the West.

On Style In journalism school, what they were calling ‘objectivity’ was in part a very particular prose style that is traditionally gendered as masculine. This prose is stripped of adjectives, it is hard-boiled. Hemingway writes ‘objective’ prose, Fitzgerald writes ‘subjective’ because he uses dependent clauses and adjectives and adverbs and lusher evocations. I was not very good at imitating that masculine style, which annoyed my first journalism teacher, but also I didn’t particularly aspire to it. From poetry, we learn that there are things we want to tell that cannot be told in New York Times house style. Prose in journalism has to walk in a steady way, poetry gets to leap. You can find the relationship between two things; you can evoke in a more lyrical sense something that cannot be described, evoked, connected in a more prosaic sense. I don’t want to insult prose with ‘prosaic’ but we don’t have a better word for the flatter, more pseudo-objective stuff. Making and unmaking metaphors and other kinds of assumptions, assumptions that, for example, men’s opinions are objective and women’s facts are subjective, is something I’ve done a lot. I have been preoccupied with metaphor most of my writing life. Often journalism will rely on stale metaphors that are invisible to most people: the ‘upper classes’ and ‘lower classes’, ‘rising to the occasion’, ‘falling from grace’, or whatever, these phrases we don’t question. Metaphors show the connectedness of the world, the way things resemble each other, and they are not scientific or literal. Some metaphors rely on collective subjectivity. For example, birds sometimes mean hope. ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’, to quote Emily Dickinson. So in my essays I disassemble destructive embedded metaphors. Sometimes I try to supply new ones, which is definitely not something they taught me to do in journalism school. Journalism trained me in two things, both valuable for an essayist: resourcefulness and ethics. And then I went beyond that training, but I’m grateful for it as a grounding. I do worry sometimes nonfiction programs are essentially saying, ‘Nonfiction is just like fiction, except you’ve got your characters and plot handed to you and now go run with it.’ I have worked a lot of my life with photographers and feel very close to what they do. There was a period where photography was also considered not creative because it was assumed that photographers just replicated what was out there. The same thing was said of nonfiction.

On the Subject of Essays I also feel a deep moral responsibility toward my subjects in my essays. You don’t get to misrepresent people. I had a falling out on a literary jury once with a book I thought was maliciously misrepresenting its subject, and the other judges didn’t

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see that representation as a problem, but I saw it as an insurmountable flaw. They believed that we should judge books on aesthetics and that ethics are a separate issue. This experience made me understand not only that a work of art can be morally ugly or morally beautiful, but that a work of art is not beautiful if it’s not also morally beautiful. For Orwell, ethics and aesthetics are often the same thing. And a lot of what he admires is generosity, courage, integrity etc. All creative work invites us to become producers of meaning rather than consumers of meaning, to learn to ask big questions. Very few people are actually going to make a living from art, whether it’s dance, visual art, literary art etc. So when we teach any art, we have to ask what we are giving students that is valuable even if they end up doing something completely different. That capacity to question and reshape meaning might be what they can keep no matter what they do for a living. My first media job was fact-checking. I had to be skeptical, and always ask if a fact in a piece of journalism was true. Is this six-week-old being a fetus with a heartbeat? Are men inherently objective and women inherently subjective? Answering these questions made me look at how we tell the stories. My essay ‘Break the Story’ is about how we writers make the story, by telling stories that haven’t been told, but we also break the familiar and destructive version of the story we readers think we already know. Some stories are tenacious. For example, we need to break the story that women lie about rape, but men, namely the people charged with rape, don’t. We need to break the story that racism is a thing of the past. My 1994 book Savage Dreams breaks two stories: first, that the Indian wars ended a long time ago because Native people kind of gently, conveniently faded away; second, that nuclear war hasn’t happened yet. My goal was to situate readers in a landscape in which Indian wars and nuclear wars (as nuclear testing, at the rate of about one US nuclear bomb set off per month from 1951 to 1989) are going on simultaneously, but these phenomena are invisible because of how the stories about them are generally understood. So it is important to teach people to be story-breakers. The work begins when we ask ourselves, ‘Do I believe this fact as it is being reported in this story?’, ‘Do I recognize the status quo biases in the journalism I read?’ It is a joy to get to be the person who says this thing that needs to be said. It’s a bit like being the boy in Hans Christian Andersen saying the Emperor has no clothes. I wrote an essay after Biden’s election, ‘On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway’, that got a lot of traction. In this piece, I note that we don’t need to find common ground with Nazis because there’s no middle ground between ‘Jews are people’ and ‘Jews are not people’. There’s no middle ground between ‘the earth is flat’ or it’s round, or climate change isn’t real and it is. Truth doesn’t have to find common ground with lies, and human rights activists don’t have to find common ground with human rights abusers. Someone said, ‘The firefighter doesn’t have to find common ground with the arsonist’, and that was a beautiful way to put it. It ought to have been obvious, but in the postelection period many stories focused on fluff about unity, which meant indulging liars and normalizing hate.

On Wool-Gathering and Slowness Being an essayist is almost like being a wool-gatherer. All this stuff is ambient, and I get to gather it up and spin it into something. I noticed that it is common in these

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commentaries to note left and right political biases, but not to notice centrist bias. So I got to write a piece about status quo bias and centrist bias that felt like a useful corrective. I’m interested in meandering and indirection and sinuous routes that let you look more closely around you. I’ve written a lot about slowness as a kind of resistance. My book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is about what we do to ourselves with the railroad, the telegraph, all this acceleration. It’s a spinoff of Wanderlust, which is about the world at three miles an hour. I’ve been interested in slowness and meandering as ways of more deeply encountering the world and seeing what’s out there, which is the job of a nature writer and an essayist. A lot of things get sped past, including in the discourse. Communicating in texts and tweets requires a kind of glib condensation, proceeding to generalities, leaping to conclusions.

On the Future of the Essay I’m interested in people finding ways to connect the personal and the political in their essays. There’s so many versions of these connections in genres already, from confessional to manifesto to confessional manifesto but it would be good to see more writers give themselves more permission to experiment. The conventional essay is very tidy. You make a proposition, you explore it, and then you have this conclusion that tidies it up as though the case is closed, the meaning is established. But I often feel it closes off inquiry, partly through the pretense that you’ve been comprehensive and you have total understanding. The most useful thing is to not be inconclusive, but conclude with recognition that the work is unfinished, the conversation continues. That’s a delicate balancing act that every essayist should have some ability to manage. How do you not just drift off, but not also hammer the coffin closed, you know, so that it’s not a coffin at all? At the beginning of my writing life, I was an editor at this little art magazine, and I was writing art criticism for a weekly newspaper, was writing reviews, which I think is great training in classical essay writing. You do a sort of exposition, an analysis, a contextualization, a conclusion. But I do think that there’s too often either an overconfidence that you have the conclusion or an assumption that you must have a conclusion. I see students scramble toward tidying up the untidy pieces, and often we tidy them up in a way that eliminates what’s true or profound or useful about them, the open-endedness, the mystery. Something remains unreconcilable, unknown, and sometimes to pretend otherwise is where nonfiction becomes fiction. So I think we’re all trying to figure out that balance between being ‘not too tight, not too loose’, as we are taught in Zen training. How can a writer have elegant form without having to nail down meaning? How can writers trust our own analyses, so we can say that something is racist or transphobic, or that the world could change, but also not assume we know everything? Acknowledging the unknown has been a huge part of my work. Much of Hope in the Dark was written in short essays and also as a book that’s a bunch of propositions, forays. Ultimately, Hope in the Dark is a manifesto where I argue that the grounds for hope is that we don’t know what will happen, that the future is not yet written, we may have the opportunity to do some of the writing ourselves. The uncertainty is a

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kind of grace, which is sometimes hopeful, because false certainty is one of the demons of our time. And we can look at others’ certainty and see how poisonous it is; we can look at our own certainty critically too. Essays are a really important place to model how you do not assume also that we have the last word on something. There is a tendency of people to think not only that they are living at the end of history so we have nothing more to learn, but that their own world views are somehow personal virtue. There’s an ahistoricism that doesn’t recognize why people in the past, or even ourselves in the past, did not have the equipment we have now. I wrote an essay about a remarkable Native American man, Gerard Baker, who as park superintendent – the director’s title in the National Park system – helped remake two national parks by hiring Native people as interpreters, changing how the history was interpreted to visitors, trying to invite Native people to be part of the audience. I like to say, ‘If you think you’re woke, think first of the alarm clocks that woke you up’ because this person was like a human alarm clock. He did so much in the 1990s to change how the mainstream represented and recognized Native people and to invite Native people to tell their own stories. At its best, we recognize that the process is unfolding; at its worst, people think of themselves as morally superior rather than the lucky beneficiaries of that historic process. This all raises a political question: How can we learn things when it’s dangerous to acknowledge we didn’t always know them? George Orwell evolved over time a lot politically, and became a much more humane person. In his letters and in accounts by others, it was apparent that as a young man he almost recreationally discriminated against vegetarians, homosexuals, sandal-wearers, bourgeois socialists and others. Maybe it was his own sufferings, maybe just time itself. It’s all present in the late work. He’s still very polemical. In his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ (1949) he attacks Gandhi, for example, but he does it while clearly liking Gandhi. He writes, ‘Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.’ I want to think about the leaky edges of the essay. When does it become other forms of nonfiction? When do poems function as essays? And I’ve always had fun looking at form with students. Sometimes bringing poems in to read to show them what essays also can do, like Robert Hass’s ‘Palo Alto: The Marshes’, for example. I used to feel nonfiction was to fiction like nonwhite is to white or woman is to man: you’re being treated as being defined by the other, which makes you kind of subsidiary or almost inferior to the other. Now I enjoy understanding nonfiction as everything that’s not fiction. We have the rest of the universe, including all the forms of writing that existed before fiction and all the forms that aren’t fiction. We have manifestos and cookbooks and treatises and sermons and encyclopedias and letters. The essay is a specific form for me, but I’ve also situated myself in the larger category of ‘nonfiction’ as a writer who can learn from all these other genres and let them also be structures and forms and ways of relating information. It is a joy. There was that period when everyone was saying the future is female. It has been interesting to see nonfiction acquire so much stature in the last twenty years. For what it is worth, you can say the future is nonfiction.

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Claudia Rankine on the Essay On the Growth of a Writer

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hat was the big life question in my twenties: what path to take? In college, I worked with Louise Glück, and even though poetry wasn’t exclusively my focus, I kept coming back to it because it remained inchoate, the realm of the unsayable. It remains the place where I feel the unbearable is held, recognized, honored. In this sense, it did something very different than other genres. I was especially interested, back then, in Yeats, because he was both political and petty; he wrote incredibly misogynistically about Maud Gonne as a revolutionary while writing beautifully about the natural world and pointedly about the political situation in 1916. I learned from Yeats that poetry, in a single breath, could call Maud Gonne ‘a mess of shadows for its meat’, but also invoke a nation’s struggle: ‘I write it out in a verse– / MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.’ I always had the sense that poetry actually allowed for the most feeling, the most humanness. But running alongside that, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Audre Lorde – those prose stylists were also incredibly important to me, along with James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. As a first-gen student, I was extremely sensitive to the fact that my parents worked hard to educate their children. I didn’t want to waste their hard work. I thought the way you are an adult in the world is that you get an adult job, and I thought that an adult job was being a lawyer. Law seemed reasonable because it was basically about reading. The fantasy I had about being a lawyer was that you would read briefs and write and make arguments. And so, after college I worked for a law firm. And I made the mistake, or maybe not the mistake – maybe it was a blessing – of working for a corporate law firm. If I’d had somebody like Bryan Stevenson as a mentor, or a lawyer who was doing the kind of work that folded into my interests, maybe I would have gone on. But after working as a paralegal, I thought: hell, this is not really what I want to do. But I still didn’t feel like poetry was a career. In the 1980s, it wasn’t really a thing people did professionally in my world. Nonetheless, I did end up taking some writing courses at Columbia. From there, I went on to get an MFA as a kind of vocation, before going on to do something ‘professionally’. As you can see, I got waylaid.

On Becoming an Essayist I was always a reader of essays, but I don’t think I went there willingly. I was very apprehensive about accepting invitations to write essays for various publications, but I came to understand that I could write essays that were informed by my poetics, and this was exciting. There were many times when I wrote an essay and was told: it’s too

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lyrical, what is this? Which was OK, because I guess after a while people who could read the work found the work.

On Literary Influence The thing I’ve always appreciated and loved about Dickinson is the concision of thought without the loss of meaning. Her poems are as concise as a poem can be and yet, when you enter them, you can travel as far as you can see. For example, when I read Rilke’s elegies – and don’t get me wrong, I love Rilke – I sometimes have the mischievous thought that Dickinson could communicate the same darkness in three lines. I am also always a little bit confounded by her – how do you live during the Civil War and not ever mention it? Not in the backstory, not in the letters, not anywhere? I mean, you go into Walt Whitman’s archives, you read his diaries, it’s in there. He’s in the camps, he’s talking about it, he’s reckoning with it – he’s as racist as the next white guy, but he’s an abolitionist. It’s in the world, so it’s something he has to do the emotional math for, he has to figure it out. But Dickinson remains in her bubble. Curious. ‘After a great pain, a formal feeling comes–’. Sometimes I find myself caught by a line of Dickinson. It comes back to me to address the moment that I’m in. The other poet that does that to me is César Vallejo. I’m reading him in translation, so it’s not fair to say this – but I don’t feel like his political poetry is as successful as his more personal work, but his personal work, for me, is stunning. ‘There are blows in life so violent . . . I can’t answer!’ There is also Gertrude Stein’s proclamation that ‘all writing is written’. I think that she was my first example of what the fluidity of language could look like, from The Making of Americans to Three Lives to the more poetic pieces. There was a time when people would ask: why is your work so hybrid? All I could think to say was: because Stein says all writing is written. Henry Louis Gates Jr., in The Signifying Monkey, talks about African American writing as being, by definition, in conversation with that which came before. The opening example he gives is Black Boy to Native Son to Invisible Man to Beloved. I am constantly thinking about that: how are we repositioning our collective history? The slave narratives were narratives that could never really be located inside the tradition of black writing, because they were supposed to function as a document for white abolitionists. And then you have the amazing work of Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth – you carry all of that with you as a black writer writing in America. And everything gets said again by James Baldwin. If you are saying it, he has said it before, he has said it better, he has said it sideways, he’s punching up as you write your thing – he’s the light, not the shadow. Morrison has been a great influence in terms of both my writing and pedagogy. The idea of coming in through the door of whiteness was informed by Playing in the Dark and other essays of hers. Though I see myself in an African American tradition, I would extend it out to writers like Fanon and Césaire. And because I’m also in the classroom, these writers are always very present for me. I’m teaching them, I’m constantly re-entering their work, constantly reframing their relevance to the present moment as my students are discussing them. Sometimes what get used in the classroom are not conventional essays – it could be an essayistic

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film like Sans Soleil, or a song like Gil Scott Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ – I’m really just interested in how the voice plays, and that comes maybe from my work in the theatre. And so many surprising artists are present in both my writing and my teaching. I think everything I know – by any means possible – is alive and well and coming forward in all moments, but whatever it is, it’s in conversation with the African American essay tradition.

On Form Language, as material, has to understand its relationship to the subject of the piece before I can write. If the essay will be the best medium for the subject, I need to understand why before I can begin. Sometimes the sentence has to lead, rather than the line. These kinds of formal decisions all get worked out first, and then I start writing. In terms of the hybridity, the image–text engagement in my work: I’ve always been really interested in visual culture and what that can do for my subject. How can a Glenn Ligon piece extend the writing on the page, or David Hammons, or William Turner? Here too I feel like I’m always in conversation with visual artists. It took me a little while, until Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, to realize that I could actually just bring the visual interlocutors in. I think when people get stuck in a genre, it’s because they are unwilling to be outside categorization.

On Other Voices The first essay in Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) was ‘I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked’ (2019). I was really interested in how to make space for my interlocutors within the essay. I was experimenting with that essay – which traces conversations inside liminal spaces – and then I brought it to the New York Times. I was assuming they were going to say, ‘This is not for us! This is not the kind of essay that a newspaper can print.’ But surprisingly they thought it was interesting and wanted to publish it. I wondered how they would fact-check it. How did they know I hadn’t made the whole thing up? I, of course, hadn’t, but the process that happened between me and my editors at the Times for that piece eventually became the structural model for the other essays in Just Us. It initiated everything. This meant that the fact-checking of quotes, that back-and-forth that always happens with newspaper articles, got carried over into the rest of the book. The Times will call people up to find out if they really said what you said they said. For example, the last guy in the ‘White Privilege’ essay was contacted by them. I don’t know what he said to them, but I thought that I would ask him to talk to me about his experience of reading the essay. And then his response also got integrated. The essays then became a dynamic, conversational activity. In response to that original article, I received two hundred letters. Real letters, like Emily Dickinson letters: ‘Dear Claudia Rankine, I’m so-and-so, I live here, and my life has been like this, and I don’t think you understand this or that, you say this . . .’. Those letters became the foundation for my play Help, which opened in 2020. But back to Just Us: once I got the structure of the essays organized – the fact-checking, the responses – then I went on to do it again and again throughout the book.

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In one or two cases in Just Us, conversations were my interventions inside historical texts. Though I cannot call him up, I felt like I was talking to Thomas Jefferson when I engaged with Notes on the State of Virginia. Actually, I would like to talk to him about that text. And so moments of intertextuality are really my way of pushing back or engaging in a conversation with history.

On Language and Possibility I feel like possibility and porousness live at the core of my writing. This is where Dickinson comes in for me with her dashes and concision. The lyric serves me in the essay, in ways beyond the music of language. There is possibility inherent in every word. The training I had in poetry allows me to open out the essay in time and sound. It asks the essays to bring history forward and create avenues of thought that live beyond the logic and narrative of a piece. I feel like when I’m successful on the page, a person reads the work and it appears to be transparent – the sentence makes sense in the larger argument of the essay – but then, as they live with it, the work goes from being horizontal to vertical. It drops down into the possibility of protest, or the possibility of change, or the possibility of fuck you, or the possibility of mourning or joy or beauty or ugliness. Not everybody will take everything in; the idea is that it gets stitched in so that it is there when the reader is ready to find it. In order to do that, you have to be willing to lose some things, like the idea that writing can be locked down in its argument. I am always considering how to open up a piece so people can climb in, wander around, and think their own thoughts.

On Being in the Public Sphere Until I worked in the theatre, I was under the impression that all I wrote had to come from me. The collaborative nature of the theatre really opened up what was possible in the essays and the poems. Filmmakers like Claire Denis and playwrights like Beckett introduced me to the power of voices interacting in the work. A student of mine was working with The Foundry Theatre and she gave the director, Melanie Joseph, a copy of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Joseph then commissioned The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue. Her one directive was: I don’t want you to write a play, this is not what I’m asking you – I want you to write the way you write and I want you to write about the city. We spent months interviewing people who lived in the South Bronx, documenting their hopes, dreams, joys and sorrows. Much of what they said found its way into the actual script. The play happened on a bus; the audience traveled the landscape of the South Bronx. I learned in that process that you can actually just go out and talk to people – you don’t have to stay in with your books and films and catalogues; you can just be in conversation. The question we asked people was: If you had to show me three things in this neighborhood, what would they be? They’d drive us to the park that was built on top of a landfill and next to a truck route to a food distribution center, where they put in a fake beach with signs that said: ‘Do not swim here because it is polluted’. They told us that children were bussed to the park, which was surrounded on both sides by sewage

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plants. There was a number you could call if you were overwhelmed by the smells. I called it every day but nobody ever picked up. I could have read about those things, but to see them, to smell the smells, to see the sign on the beach – that was an education for me: the world, you could just go into it. A public voice built by actual people in a community suddenly arrived on the page. This almost documentary practice informed the pieces I later wrote for the New York Times and the Guardian. It would be a lie to say that I feel art is not an important aspect of what is possible, but I do feel inadequate, and full of admiration for the Bryan Stevensons and the Stacey Abramses of the world. All that they do. But still, the role of culture in the world, where I position myself, is hugely important because it opens up the possibility of change in our collective (and individual) imaginations. If people don’t encounter things that allow them to think past what is, we’re not going to get anywhere. And that’s where the essay comes in.

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Brian Dillon on the Essay On the Growth of an Essayist

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s a fifteen-year-old, my eye was not on contemporary Irish literature. I was thinking about music and I was thinking about music writing, and it was through writing about contemporary pop and rock music – British writing – that I started to get led towards, first of all, American writers, really obvious names for that period like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, and, to a much, much lesser extent, female writers of a similar era. So it was much later that I came to Sontag, say, or Didion. And there was something very exciting to me, even as an adolescent, about the idea that there was a kind of writing that could bring together journalism and something more experimental, something more literary. And weirdly enough it was in the pages of British music magazines, like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker in the 1980s, that I first discovered Roland Barthes, that I first saw Barthes’s name and the names of Foucault and Derrida. And I started reading Barthes at age sixteen. It wasn’t really a continuum between that kind of adolescent enthusiasm for various kinds of nonfiction and theory and journalism, and what I then went on to study as a literature and philosophy student in Dublin in the early 1990s. I threw myself into theory – we in Ireland fought the theory wars a decade or two later than everybody else – and it seemed at that point – ’91, ’92, when I was an undergraduate – an immensely exciting place to be thinking and writing. And strangely I never connected it – or only connected it very partially – back to that enthusiasm I’d had as a teenager for certain kinds of much more mainstream and much more popular and populist writing. In my twenties, while working on a PhD that was entirely in the field of literary theory – I did research on ideas about time in Barthes, Agamben, Paul de Man, Lyotard, a couple of other figures – I started to get quite frustrated with academia, frustrated with English as an academic discipline, and the kind of writing that it might make possible. And I actually remember sitting, at some point in my mid-twenties with friends, and saying, ‘Could we not just be essayists?’ in the much, much older sense, in the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century sense. And so I had this very vague inkling that there must be something else. And this is in a period, in the nineties, when of course there were many people in the US already at that point looking back at the postwar development of the essay as a form. Phillip Lopate’s anthologies, stuff like that was around. But really, in Ireland and the UK – I moved to the UK in the mid-1990s – the essay as a form had kind of fallen away. It wasn’t a term to describe exciting contemporary writing in nonfiction, whether journalistic or academic or purely literary – it really wasn’t circulating. So when I started writing criticism and personal writings like my first book (In the Dark Room, 2005), I wasn’t really thinking of myself as an essayist, and it was only when I published my second book, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives [2009] (in the US it’s

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called The Hypochondriacs, a good Jamesian title), when somebody on an awards panel told me that I was writing in the tradition of the essay. And I suddenly thought – yeah of course I am, and I have been for years, but we’re not calling it that. Suddenly, I realized that not only was I committed to the essay, but that there was a kind of essayism in the air, and I started at that point to pay much closer attention to the way that US writers and critics self-consciously described themselves in terms of the history of the essay. And I wrote a piece for Frieze [‘Energy & Rue’, 2012], the London-based art magazine, about the contemporary essay, touching on really, really obvious reference points; David Foster Wallace loomed very large in the mind in those days.

On Essayism In Essayism [2017], I was interested in writing about something that was not a tendency in contemporary publishing, not a historical move in terms of contemporary literature, but a mood, a mood that, it seemed to me, I had not had a name for until that point. It had to be something that was active. It felt like more of a tendency of a character, as it were, a kind of character trait, essayism, than it does a program or a field of inquiry. Quite early on [in my writing career], I realized that I wasn’t making distinctions between the kind of writing that I would do for an article for an art magazine, a book review for a national newspaper, or what I was trying to do in the books themselves. And I didn’t yet have a name for that other than: this is what I do, this is what I’m capable of. There was a kind of ambition which was, I suppose, to try to smuggle into those places – be it the pages of the Guardian or the pages of ArtReview or Artforum magazine – and art magazines and the art world was a much more congenial place, a much more accepting milieu in terms of this kind of hybrid of journalistic, academic and personal writing, and also somehow much more open to the kind of stylistic oddity that you might have ambitions towards in the essay. For me, essayism has always been this; once I started to name it, I realized that was the element or the mood that I’d been trying to employ across all of these different forms.

On the Contemporary Essay I think that essayism has always been around in British and Irish writing, but, in certain historical moments, unnamed. I have been looking back, for example, at writers for the London Review of Books over the past three, four decades, recently, and I’ve been reading the new collection of Jenny Diski’s writing for the London Review of Books, and you couldn’t say that Jenny Diski was not a major English essayist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; of course, she is. And the same is true of some writers who were writing right from the start of the LRB, like Bridget Brophy and Angela Carter, for example (much better known as a novelist, obviously). These writers have always been there, but there is a less developed sense of what the essay is capable of, and a less developed sense that if you declare a work as ‘essay’ or ‘essays’ that it will have a readership in the way that it might do in the US.

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On Defining the Essay I think it’s worth throwing the baggage of the terminology, and even the idea, the concept, away at some point. However, the affordances of the essay: I think that one of the defining things is that the essay for me is always worrying about its writing while writing. It’s always worrying about how to say things while finding things to say, things about which to say in the world. And that’s a writing that catches the ear and the eye, that troubles the ear and the eye, that makes the reader question, at every moment, inside every sentence, makes the reader wonder about the relation of this language to the world that it’s describing. That seems essential, to me, and that’s a liberty as well as a labor. The second thing is to do with the sense that the essay flings things together – in Essayism I used the word ‘aggregate’ to describe this. And that means bringing together, melding, different genres, different forms. The essay can move between theory, autobiography, travel writing, a kind of prose-poetry, cultural history, polemic and so on. There’s another kind of amalgam, though, and that is how the essay allows you to jump between moments in time, between different elements of an argument, between different emotional states, between different linguistic or stylistic registers, and the form is such that, you hope, if it’s done well, the reader accepts the gaps between these different elements. For me, that’s one of the joys compared with the kind of writing that one might feel one had to do in academic writing, say, or certainly what one might do in fiction, incapable of really writing fiction. There’s something just about the setting of things alongside each other that the essay allows. I keep coming back to the moment in Sontag’s diary when she talks about Elizabeth Hardwick’s sentences not connecting to each other. She says: ‘somebody said about Lizzie’s sentences that it’s as if she left out every second sentence’. And this is a good thing for Sontag, just as she thinks it’s a good thing in Benjamin’s prose; Benjamin’s sentences, she says, ‘do not entail’. So that sense that, even at the sentence level, things can sit alongside each other – the essay as a container, a box. You throw things into it, and there’s something about that miscellaneous quality that’s really important.

On the Essay and the World The essay has a purchase on the world. It is not simply a matter of form, not simply a matter of the excitements of style, or the excitement of undoing style, of exploding style. It must also be – and this must be part of the excitement and part of the rigor, for me, as much as anybody else – it must be a question of trying to describe, accurately, some portion of the real world. It must be something to do with a commitment to conveying the reality of real things in the real world. To be made to say that right now is surprising to me – because I find myself talking about the essay so often, in much more abstracted and formal terms.

On Affinity It’s something to do with the combination in Barthes, those moments when he brings together, or slides between, the intimacy and critique or theory, when he goes from his own feelings, looking at the photograph of his mother, to thinking about The Photograph

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with a capital ‘P’. That very movement is to me tremendously moving, because the suspicion is that the intimate has been deflected or displaced onto the theoretical, the academic, the authoritative voice, as well as the things in the world – in Barthes’s case, usually texts or images that are under discussion. In other words, the affinity is a way of avoiding the intimate. It’s a way of swerving from confession into something else. For some reason, I find that combination in Barthes immensely moving and something that I’ve always wanted to emulate, to be like, kind of, frank about it. I think that in my own work it’s two things: one of which is a long-held distrust of the straightforward memoir form, or many forms of contemporary confessional writing, which other people can do brilliantly, but I distrust as soon as I embark on it. I want to find a way that complicates the gesture of putting oneself out on the page into the world. On the other hand, I also like the idea that critique, or essaying about other people’s work, or about buildings or images or objects, is an excuse for saying intimate things that may not be said otherwise, that one may simply not find a form to be able to say them. However autobiographical some of the writing is, it’s always touching on other things – texts, objects, images, people, places sometimes – the other aspect of that is curiosity. One of the traditions of the essay is that it is the expression of certain kinds of curiosity; scientific curiosity is the most obvious one, going back to the seventeenth century. But for me, the essay is able to attach itself to an object no matter how unlikely – the essay has a relationship with detail, with the small, the miniature, the out-of-the-way. And that’s really important to me, I think, that one can move between whatever personal story it happens to be and an acknowledgment that, actually, this other thing in the world really matters too, and is not only a kind of objective correlative for my, whatever it happens to be – you know, melancholia, doubt, anxiety or so on. It also is something in the world and you want to give to a reader a sense that, somehow, this thing that you’re both engaged in, that we’re calling the essay, this text, might send them in any number of directions. And it has something to do with fixation as well – I think obsession might be too strong a word for it. Affinity is definitely the word that I’m thinking about right now. Having written Essayism and Suppose a Sentence [2020], I have realized that they’re the first two parts of a trilogy, and the third part is called Affinities and it’s a book about images and it’s trying to describe, I suppose, that space between the different elements of the essay; between objects, between images, between the writing ‘I’ and the objective correlatives that that ‘I’ has found in the world. How do you describe that kind of gaseous, etheric medium in-between?

On the ‘Political’ in the Essay One of the things that writing allows to do is to point elsewhere – to be part of the world, to be part of the present, personally and politically – but also to point elsewhere, and I don’t pretend for a moment that any of my books have a buried stratum of political import that has always been there, or anything like that. But I think that the politics of any kind of literature is unpredictable and, in many ways, always yet to be determined. And I look at a writer like Barthes and the ways in which Barthes was accused at the time, in the 1970s, and is still accused – if that’s not too strong a word – of having stepped away from politics, of having stepped away into a realm of the intimate and

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the personal and therefore, somehow, the bourgeois and the subjective and so on. And I think, at the same time – apart from ‘tentative’ – the other word that I would use with Barthes is a kind of susceptibility or vulnerability, and it strikes me that, if the essay is able – in its forms and its texture and its style and its approach to the world – to convey that kind of tentativeness, that kind of vulnerability, then the politics of that are as yet to be determined.

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Part II: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories

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9 On Reading and the Essay Nicole B. Wallack

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o hear some essayists characterize their relationship with reading, one could be forgiven for believing that they were describing a fraught connection with a best friend, lover, mentor, terrible bully . . . or maybe God. While essayists avail themselves of an infinite variety of materials to read, with a few notable exceptions, they are more likely to enact or demonstrate the power of their reading practice than to theorize it, even though theorizing and reading are inherently essayistic activities. Turn the onionskin pages of an old dictionary to reveal that the word ‘theory’ draws from the Ancient Greek θεωρός (theōros), ‘spectator’, while the word ‘read’ has etymological filaments that reach to Old Frisian (rēda) ‘to advise, to deliberate, to help’, Early Irish (ráidid) ‘says, speaks’, and Old Church Slavonic (raditi) ‘to attend to, to take care of (a thing)’. Reading in an essay can take on all of these dispositions, and many others, of course. This chapter argues that the act of reading animates essays, regardless of their subject matter. Essayists exemplify the practices and principles of what Ralph Waldo Emerson has called ‘creative reading’. Creative reading is not a singular activity, but the term describes the reciprocal nature of reading and writing in essays, a dynamic theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Graham Good. Literacy scholars such as Louise Rosenblatt highlight how readers in essays and readers of essays are responsible for and capable of creative experiences when reading, but trouble how reading expectations in school often obstruct students’ paths to those experiences. Virginia Woolf describes the conditions most fruitful for how readers can have the aesthetic, creative encounters that Rosenblatt, Good and Adorno envision. When readers and writers frame their ideas, values, discourse and style to resist injustices they encounter in a dominant view they participate in (and sometimes instantiate) a ‘counterpublic’, in Nancy Fraser’s and Michael Warner’s terms. The political essay in all of its guises – from Frederick Douglass’s speech ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ (1852) to Rebecca Solnit’s ‘The Slow Road to Sudden Change’ (2020) – is an act of reading in which writers accept their responsibility to address injustice, however imperfectly, and give others the means and reasons to do so. In essays, writers take on the ethical obligation to read in some fashion the materials they assemble, including the stories we present from our own lives and others’; they remind us that acts of reading are intimate and charged. James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’ dramatizes the writer’s experience of being read unwillingly by the people around him, while the legal scholar and essayist Patricia J. Williams demonstrates how to mount a political and intellectual resistance in reading a book that espouses hateful theories that she had a choice to dismiss. Collectively, the essayists in this chapter show that reading is never merely the activity of any essay. The essayist reads their materials

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to devise an experience for those who find their way to their work, and the resulting essay returns the favor, reading the writer, in turn.

Emerson’s ‘Creative Reading’ Ralph Waldo Emerson meditated often in his letters and journals on the hold reading had on him, akin to a compulsion. He writes in a letter to a friend, ‘I do not feel as if my day had substance in it, if I have read nothing.’1 The historian Robert D. Richardson notes that Emerson also was wary of reading: ‘Each of the books I read invades me, displaces me’, Emerson confides to his journal in 1842. Richardson notes that Emerson read widely but always favored firsthand accounts, literary texts of all kinds, and primary texts of philosophy, history and religion.2 He abhorred reading anyone else’s interpretations of literary texts. In a lecture, ‘Literature’, from 1839 Emerson averred that ‘[a] vast number of books are written in quiet imitation of the old civil, ecclesiastical and literary history; of these we need take no account. They are written by the dead to be read by the dead.’3 Live and lively people, according to Emerson, should read for themselves rather than permitting others to act as their proxies. Reading for ourselves is not an easy task, however; once we accept readerly agency, there is another challenge: to make something of our own in the act of reading. ‘There is then creative reading as well as creative writing’, Emerson posits in ‘The American Scholar’, which implies that there are also readers who are not creative.4 Creative readers are selective, they read even the most venerated text to focus on ‘only that least part, – only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest [they reject]’.5 As they wait for texts to speak to them oracularly and otherwise, they may mistakenly believe that they are doing so to create something utterly new. Michael Boatright has noted that Emerson seeks to liberate readers and writers by acknowledging the ‘futility of having an original thought’.6 In ‘Quotation and Originality’, Emerson invites us to embrace how the act of quotation can be a way of making a world with others: ‘there is no pure originality. All minds quote. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.’7 Here, Emerson attunes his readers to how the readerly/writerly practice of quotation is invention-in-process; since all who think quote others inevitably, Emerson lowers the threshold for anyone to see themselves as primed to read creatively. Not all readers will turn quotations and creative readings into public, shareable forms. But essayists do. If, as Emerson proposes, ‘[o]ne must be an inventor to read well’,8 then using chiasmatic logic, perhaps essays are for writers not simply an expression of their creative reading, but a modality for it. As has been well documented by scholars, including Robert Atwan, the series editor of The Best American Essays, Emerson’s essays began (and continued) their textual lives as lectures and public addresses.9 He delivered his essays to 1,469 audiences in the United States, Canada, England and Scotland between 1833 and 1881.10 Even though he sought in reading intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual sustenance for himself, he expected that much – if not all of this reading – would reach his audiences directly either off or on the page. Emerson’s art of the essay, Atwan argues, truly began in 1839 when in a journal entry he describes his desire to find in the Lyceum lectures ‘a new literature’ in which every topic, tone, and every temperament is permissible, where the ‘true orator’ can ‘lay himself out utterly, large, enormous, prodigal, on the subject of the hour . . . and

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hope for ecstasy and eloquence’.11 Emerson understood his role as having a teacherly component to it, even if he never enjoyed the security of a stable position within an educational institution. He used this new literature, the essay, to enact for his own publics ‘a [creative] process struggling against its completion’.12 However much Emerson fails to find an ideal role for reading when he writes his own essays, he insists that the distance could only be closed between himself and any writer he reads if their text could speak to him as one person does to another. Emerson felt keenly this connection to a writer when reading the essays of Michel de Montaigne. In ‘Montaigne: The Skeptic’ from Representative Men, he marvels at Montaigne’s embodiment in his prose: 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 conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.13 Emerson admired Montaigne not only for his ability to represent himself on the page as fallible and frank, but also for being someone who inspires his readers to align their sympathies, even if only temporarily, with his own: ‘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.’14 Montaigne’s power is, in part, the ability to court his readers’ desire to accompany him. Emerson aspired to be visible to his own readers through his work. Richardson notes: Most writers eventually disappear into their texts; many aim to do so. Emerson aimed at the opposite. His faith in texts is a faith only in their carrying capacity . . . the text should carry the reader to the writer and should carry the writer to the reader.15 Emerson closes this essay on Montaigne with a benediction, or perhaps a wish: ‘Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting . . . let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon.’16 Emerson sounds here a familiar transcendentalist note, but shows that creative reading itself is a way to permit others to work upon and with us across distances of time, language and privilege. Emerson’s experience of access to Montaigne’s presence in his essays is the quintessential one for generations of Montaigne’s readers, including Virginia Woolf: ‘Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity’, she writes. ‘We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself.’17 Over his 107 essays, Montaigne earns his reputation as the blithe spirit Woolf conjures here. In ‘Of Books’ he admits: I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction. And so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight not the measure of things.18 Montaigne reflects on his daily experiences and permits himself room to follow a train of thought wherever he deems it fruitful for it to go. He eschews the formal

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strictures of argument he learned from his self-directed study of Greek and Roman philosophers, most significantly Seneca. Essayists after Montaigne, including Woolf in her essay about him for The Common Reader: First Series (1925), acknowledge how Montaigne’s practice of keeping quotations in commonplace books gave form and texture to his essays. However, fewer scholars attribute Montaigne’s writerly experiment in self-making to his citational practices and the experiences he recreates and interprets as a reader.19 It could be said, then, that the central feature of essays working in Montaigne’s mode might be how their discursiveness, reflexivity and intimacy are a dimension of reading whatever the essayist chooses (or whatever chooses the essayist).

‘Creative Reading’ in Essays Biographical and autobiographical accounts of well-known essayists, from Montaigne and Bacon onwards, typically include some sustained attention to the writer’s reading practices and favored texts or authors. These accounts demonstrate how an essayist’s reading shapes their ideas, stylistic choices, their political, religious or other commitments, and sometimes their ambitions for how their own work is received by readers (although essayists are just as likely to reject the notion that readerly expectation is a factor when they write). Regardless of the particulars, these chronicles identify the essayist’s reading habits as central to an overarching appreciation of their oeuvre. It is not surprising that some of the most extensive work on reading as a subject of inquiry in essay studies still tends to be found within single author-focused projects20 or in books where reading is the focus of the book inflected through the analysis of different essayists to whom chapters are dedicated.21 Among essayists, Virginia Woolf takes pride of place for her lifelong work on representing the work of readers, both major literary figures as well as more obscure and even entirely unknown people. As Brenda Silver has recounted, Woolf was working on her final book of essays just before her death in 1941. The last of these essays had the working title of ‘The Reader’.22 There is a burgeoning literature on Woolf’s essayism and her contributions to reading theory, which deserves its own dedicated review. Even so, any discussion of the power of reading in essays should keep in mind Woolf’s appeal to readers in the closing essay for The Common Reader: Second Series, ‘How to Read a Book’: ‘Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.’23 In this small section, Woolf gives her own readers permission to read as she does. Woolf gives us as readers options in terms of adopting a readerly stance – as the writer or with the writer. Woolf was invested in the idea that readers and writers accompany one another in their work, and Woolf sought for her own readers this communion for themselves. Theodor Adorno provides the most well known theory for how essays enact readings, even though he never speaks of reading per se, but he focuses on one of the catalysts for an essay, namely the ideas and materials of others: ‘The essay . . . does not permit its domain to be prescribed. Instead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done.’24 The lack of what Adorno here calls ‘scruple’ seems to suggest that essayists are naive or amoral in their approach to drawing on their precursors’ labor. However, Adorno suggests that the

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essay as genre affirms that we bother to write about those materials to and in which we have affective responses and investments: ‘The essay mirrors what is loved and hated instead of presenting the intellect, on the model of a boundless work ethic, as creatio ex nihilo.’25 Here, Adorno helps us to see that the essayist does not pretend that their ideas are ever entirely created from one source or one thinker. Even more important to Adorno’s argument is the belief that the essay’s ‘unmethodical method’ is what systems theorists would call an ‘emergent property’ of the genre. The philosopher George Henry Lewes is credited with developing the concept of emergence in his multi-volume work Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79).26 Emergence seeks to explain the ways in which multiple actors or entities, when connected by some force, create a novel object, phenomenon or idea.27 The concept of emergence has been applied across a wide range of disciplines and contexts from biology and mathematics, to linguistics, philosophy and political theory. Adorno highlights the essay’s emergent quality when he writes: The essay is determined by the unity of its object, together with that of theory and experience which have migrated into the object. The essay’s openness is not vaguely one of feeling and mood, but obtains its contour from its content.28 The writer’s approach and the form their essay takes will be unique, in part, because the materials they work with have some continued presence in their text, as do the contextual factors (historical, aesthetic, ideological) of the objects of study and the writer. Adorno insists that the essay, ‘co-ordinates elements, rather than subordinating them’29 or subsuming them into a single claim, thesis or idea. The essay, unlike other emergent properties, still retains the visible residua of its constituent elements. The concept of the essay as an emergent property also underscores the sense of discovery or newness that writers bring to their readings of materials on the page. Graham Good ascribes this sensation to the fact that ‘the essay is always a “first account” of its object, since it does not borrow its first principles from outside its particular situation’.30 More important to Good than the knowledge any essayist will create is their ability to undertake two actions simultaneously, ‘the inscription of a self and the description of an object’;31 the object can be textual, material or experiential, but the goal of these processes is to arrive at a moment of ‘spontaneous, predictable discovery . . . often prepared by careful attention and observation’.32 He insists that the insights about the self or about the object under consideration in an essay can ‘inspire confidence not by its authority, not by the mastery of general laws and principles applied to the particular, but by its capacity to record the particulars of experiences and responses accurately as particulars’.33 That is, essayists linger on the details of their encounters with objects not to produce knowledge in any final sense, but to dramatize how any truth is tethered to particular moments, things and readings: ‘The truth of an essay is a limited truth, limited by the concrete experience, itself limited, which gave rise to it. The essay is a provisional reflection of an ephemeral experience of an event or object.’34 The nested limits that Good names would reduce the likelihood that any essay could move readers over time. While reading is iterative and therefore ‘provisional’, by the time an essay reaches its public it is already a palimpsest of the writer’s readings – consider Brian Doyle’s song of attention to hummingbirds in ‘Joyas Voladoras’ (2004), Wayne Koestenbaum’s synesthetic recreations

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in ‘Opera and Homosexuality: Seven Arias’ (1992) and Claudia Rankine’s reflection across media on the construction of whiteness in the United States in ‘liminal spaces i’ from Just Us: An American Conversation (2020). An essay need not aspire to have the last or best word on anything the writer chooses to read to see its limits of scope as an affordance of the genre.

Aesthetic and Implicative Readings Literary theorists and literacy scholars have examined what makes reading as a practice a ‘creative act’ rather than a passive one. The renewed scholarly interest in readerresponse and phenomenological approaches to reading as well as relatively newer methods, such as surface reading, agonistic and implicative reading provide essay studies scholars with helpful – and underutilized – tools to account for the variety and impact of how essayists read. Without intersectional theorists, without feminist, queer and critical race theorists, without the questions raised by disability studies and postcolonial studies, and without keeping in mind questions about readerly experiences over our lifespans inside and outside of school, no theory of reading can be much more than an exercise with limited explanatory power and ethical value. The collected essays in this current volume reflect the theoretical and aesthetic potential of myriad intersecting reading theories for the essay as genre and praxis. Among the many reading theories scholars could bring to their analyses of essays, Louise Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory and Andrew H. Miller’s implicative reading theory help to identify how reading can be understood as the center of gravity for essays. Louise Rosenblatt’s long and celebrated career as a scholar of reading and literacy began when she first published Literature as Exploration in 1938, a groundbreaking book that introduced both the concept and pedagogical methods associated with reader-response theory. Rosenblatt describes her impetus to write the book as a corrective to an approach to learning literature in American colleges and universities at that time, which ‘reflected the pseudo-scientific model of the German universities. Literary history, philology, or a watered-down moralistic didacticism mainly constituted the study of literature.’35 These approaches, while requiring students to be careful readers of texts, did not ‘[help] the average student discover why one should read literary texts, given all the other interesting things in life’.36 Rosenblatt proposes that between readers and the myriad literary texts they encounter (notably including essays) there are ‘transactions’, ‘the to-and-fro, spiraling, nonlinear continuously reciprocal influence of reader and text in the making of meaning’.37 Rosenblatt’s ‘[m]aking meaning’ of a text, she clarifies, is a process that falls along a continuum from ‘predominantly non-literary to predominantly literary’ readings.38 When a reader primarily seeks to draw information from a text they read ‘efferently’; when they seek to describe the dimensions of the text that prompt affective responses they read ‘aesthetically’. Her defense of aesthetic approaches, both in Literature as Exploration and in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), has continued to have relevance for literary scholarship and teaching into the twenty-first century. Essayists may or may not be teachers and students, but Rosenblatt identifies the challenge and centrality of reading as an inherently creative experience, not a report of one that someone else has had: ‘In both kinds of reading, efferent and aesthetic, the reader focuses attention on the stream of consciousness, selecting out the particular

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mix of public and private linkages with the words dictated by the purposes of the reading.’39 Rosenblatt credits pragmatist philosophers including William James, alluded to here, and John Dewey as helping her to conceptualize and describe the readerly experience in these dynamic terms. In later work, Rosenblatt extends the notion of what can be read to nonverbal media, as well. Critiques of the transactional approach have suggested that it is too focused on individuals’ actions and experiences; however, Rosenblatt emphasizes that a reader’s interpretation of a text is ‘located in a particular time and a particular social or cultural context’, so neither entirely private and individualized nor utterly ‘caught in the prison house of language and culture’ that poststructuralism may portray.40 Any group of readers can be prompted to examine the ‘implicit underlying cultural and social assumptions of any evoked work’ which can prompt them to ‘[scrutinize] their own assumptions’.41 While Rosenblatt has teachers in mind when she imagines the source of this guidance, all essayists when reading in their work also stage these moments of engagement, exchange and reflection, for themselves and for their readers. In Rosenblatt’s conception of the transactions between readers and texts in their readings, the text itself has the power to contain elements that readers may wish to take away (the efferent components), which can include data of all kinds, but also potentially claims, on which readers may focus if they are trying to find the ‘point’ of a text, particularly an essay. The aesthetic dimensions of a readerly experience, by contrast, cannot be located within a single moment in a text the reader interprets, but infuse the readerly experience. An efferent reading of an essay such as James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’ would drive a reader towards identifying the significance of Baldwin’s early claim that ‘[p]eople are trapped in history and history is trapped in them’.42 An aesthetic reading might help one notice that Baldwin never names the tiny Swiss village, that he is not the only stranger there, but that he is the only Black person who has ever visited. One might notice how many different villagers – also unnamed – approach him to touch his hair, his skin. One might wonder why it takes three visits over two years for the locals to speak to him, but once they do, some never stop. Baldwin grounds his readers in the setting, and we accompany him as the villagers continuously enact their racism with a startling frankness: the children put on blackface at Lent to collect money for Christian missions in Africa; they follow him in the streets playfully lobbing racial epithets at him. He speaks to himself as much as he does to his readers: ‘I knew that [the children] did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time I walk out of the chalet.’43 As Baldwin speaks to himself in the moments before facing the villagers, he pauses, and the pause invites his reader to think with him about what we would say to ourselves or to him, before he leaves. Most important, perhaps, accounting for these elements of setting, of character, of tone, permit Baldwin’s readers to follow him towards a profound moment of recognition and grief once the Swiss children are out of view: There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born . . . The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.44

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From this moment until the end of the essay the physical details of his immediate surroundings disappear. Baldwin needs this liminal space to recount a different story, a story about how ‘the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too . . . I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive.’45 James Baldwin demonstrates how reading any story of experience in essays reveals that none is ours, alone, which is part of what makes them strange and urgent to tell. Iterative readings of our individual and collective lives cannot free us from the trap of history, but they can help us to see what springs it. While Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading can help to account for how Baldwin’s readers might approach his essay, it cannot sufficiently characterize how he reads for his own audiences. The methods of ‘implicative’ criticism can provide some of that awareness. In his essay ‘Implicative Criticism, or The Display of Thinking’ (2013), literary scholar Andrew H. Miller proposes that there is a need for a modality of criticism whose goal is to invite readers to ‘reply’ to the reading, to extend or replace it, rather than simply to agree or disagree with the writer’s interpretations. Miller distinguishes implicative goals and methods from those of ‘conclusive’ criticism: ‘Conclusive criticism can be considered a retrospective report of conclusions at which the author has already arrived; implicative criticism by contrast is a performance of thinking itself.’46 Miller identifies several ways that the implicative critic can prompt their reader to think with them: they can address the reader directly and invite them to consider an idea, pose questions to them, play out multiple possibilities to problems under examination, craft dialogue and permit moments of ‘latency’ (any feature that the writer does not entirely explain).47 To practice implicative criticism, the most important component is for the writer to reveal rather than conceal their process of thinking about the materials they read. The moves of implicative criticism derive from the concept of the ‘perlocutionary utterance’ which J. L. Austin first describes in How to Do Things with Words (1962). In Austin’s conception, the perlocutionary utterance is one that aims to move another person – a single or multiple readers – to act. The act of any single critic on one or more readers gains additional momentum when the issues and texts they comment on engage the concerns and discourse of a public or a counterpublic. Michael Warner in Publics and Counterpublics (2002) identifies the important relationships between these concepts. The concept of a public first arises in Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925) followed closely by John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927). Each of these books, written in the aftermath of the First World War, explore what factors contribute to the likelihood that a democracy will fulfill its obligation to reflect the values and priorities of its citizens. While Lippmann and Dewey are more directly concerned with the relationship between citizens and the state, Dewey identifies the specific need to improve ‘the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.’48 Notably, Dewey identifies discourse as both a site and means for a public’s formation; a public does not exist prior to the moment of acknowledgment or confrontation. Publics theorists emphasize the fact that a public tends to be ‘called into being’ by virtue of texts or linguistic events that signal its existence to itself. As Warner notes, ‘A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself . . . It exists by virtue of being addressed.’49 Counterpublics, by contrast, ‘are understood to be not merely a subset of the public but constituted through conflictual relationship to the

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dominant public’.50 Theorized first by Nancy Fraser in 1992, the idea of the ‘subaltern counterpublic’ is meant to speak to how ‘members of subordinated social groups – women, workers, people of color, and gays and lesbians – have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics’.51 A counterpublic primarily needs to define itself as speaking from a marginalized vantage point but not as a fixed category – always in relation to a more dominant discursive position. If publics and counterpublics work through discursive interventions, then it could be understood that one means by which an essayist can signal their participation in a counterpublic is through their acts of reading. In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1992, Susan Sontag meditates on how essayists’ ideas are frequently involved in dialogue with others and they are meant to test the status quo: Ideas about literature unlike ideas about, say, love almost never arise except in response to other people’s ideas. They are reactive ideas. I say this because it’s my impression that you or most people, or many people are saying that. Ideas give permission. And I want to give permission, by what I write, to a different feeling or evaluation or practice. This is, preeminently, the essayist’s stance.52 The essayist earns the right to ‘give permission’ to others by virtue of how they read, and resist, the current thinking about ideas that concern a public or a counterpublic. Sometimes, essayists find that they need to permit themselves and their readers to overturn a commonsense or dominant reading of an event or text. Rebecca Solnit notes in ‘Break the Story’ (2016) that journalists are expected to ‘break stories’ by reporting on events that have not yet been covered in the public sphere, but a writer might also need to break the very idea that any story exists, intact, as an entity to be conveyed to one’s own readers. Solnit argues that in journalism there are no objective stories to break: The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of view.53 Solnit figures story as a house that is probably structurally unsound as a metaphor for the habits of reading, thinking and believing that can interfere with writers and readers having access to large and small truths that need telling. The space is also, notably, still inhabited, but there is no lock, no single key to ‘free what’s inside’. The essayist addresses a counterpublic when they break a story, not only to show why it needs to be demolished, but also to account for how it got built in the first place. If readings in essays can provide both an occasion and moment for calling into being a counterpublic, then what are the attendant responsibilities for those of us assembled there? The legal scholar and essayist Patricia J. Williams begins her essay ‘They, the People’ for The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in August 2021 by naming her own readerly dilemma: why should she, an African American cultural theorist and scholar, review a new book by an infamous eugenicist even though his social Darwinist position on inherent racial differences among people had been debated and debunked for twenty years?54 Her answer is simple and sobering: ‘The reason I find myself writing this review in 2021 is that lots of people still believe [this theory], want

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to believe it, and remain committed to the disparagements such colonial conceptions invite.’55 The reading that Williams creates in this essay not only justifies her individual rejection of these ideas, but demonstrates how they have entered into the mainstream of American political life with lethal consequences. The book Williams reads is Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray. In 1994, Murray co-authored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which became a focal point for debates about affirmative action (among other issues) at a moment in the United States when writers such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant introduced the concept of racial formation, and Kimberlé Crenshaw first explained the power of intersectional analyses of social and legal disparities. The mid-1980s through the end of the millennium saw Williams, among other critical race theorists, establishing a new body of work for readers within and beyond the academy on the effects of ideas about racial determinism on American life and law. By the time Williams shares the thinking process that leads her to agree to review Murray’s new book, she has cited him on multiple occasions over the decades in her column ‘Diary of a Mad Law Professor’ for the progressive journal The Nation. Relatively early in her prolific writing career, she cites him in the piece that opens her second book of connected essays, The Rooster’s Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (1995), ‘Scarlet, the Sequel’. In this piece, she identifies Murray as a syndicated columnist whose scientistic defenses of race-based social theories are attractive to American policymakers who are primarily interested in maintaining the social, legal and educational status quo that requires the continued subjugation of Black citizens, particularly Black women and children. As an essayist, it would seem that there is not much room in a review of this kind for any uncertainty regarding both her own understanding of Murray’s work and the place she believes it deserves in American public life. It is not the book qua book that galvanizes her to write the review, but the timing of the book’s release only months after the cataclysm of the riots in the Capitol building of January 6, 2021, which were stoked by arguments, including Murray’s, that the United States is at a crossroads, morally and politically speaking. ‘In brief,’ reports Williams, ‘the American “reality” Murray presents is a construct of “race” as a category of unyielding genetic difference, a sealed box of capability, disposition, and destiny.’56 In Murray’s view, Americans who deny these immutable differences also will not recognize some people’s inherent cognitive limitations and propensities to violence and other antisocial behavior. Williams’s essay reads Murray’s text not to refute his theories (not directly); instead, she pledges ‘to point out the most dangerous bits of Murray’s political agenda, while providing more grounded bibliographic sources – before they disappear, given the sudden proliferation of state laws suppressing the teaching of anti-racism or other “controversial topics”’.57 Williams shares Murray’s belief that America faces a moral and political crisis, but for entirely different reasons: ‘So here we have it: a book, published in 2021 that could have been written in 1921 or 1821. A book that forces the reader to confront the basics of white supremacy and take a stand . . . [A] moral crossroads is laid before the reader: a choice.’58 Here, Williams performs the clearest act of implicative criticism that gives readers work to do alongside the writer at given moments of the text, specifically to ‘think with’ the critic. The drama of this essay is not Williams’s ability to refute Murray’s

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ideas, but her ability to resist the urge to turn away from the responsibility (individual and collective) to engage with the ideas that we find abhorrent and hateful – that reject our humanity. Of course, the review and her meticulous and difficult intellectual worldmaking through her citational praxis is not something all of her readers can or should take part in themselves. She notes that we must not only attend the words and persistent ideas of those who would erase us, but also be mindful of the ethical questions those who believe they hold mainstream views about race, privilege and justice must ask themselves. In just 3,000 words, Williams shows how through Murray’s decades-long project to promulgate racist ideology the powerful counterpublic of right-wing politicians, and cultural commentators, are seeking to shape the larger public in their image. Her readerly intervention provides a sobering example of how much labor, attention and commitment are needed to ensure that stories do not become true simply because someone is willing to retell them as if they were. For an essayist like Patricia Williams, reading is a technology for truth-telling at a historical moment when it can feel easier than ever to leave the responsibility for such work to anyone else. The essay gives us room to register the struggle and promise of reading for us all.

Notes   1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1841–1843, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 8:54.   2. Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 8.  3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert Ernest Spiller and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 210.  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (Boston, MA: J. R. Osgood, 1875), 51.  5. Ibid.   6. Michael Boatright, ‘Emersonian Reading and Ethics: Reading for Developing an Ethical Stance Toward Self and Other’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50, no. 4 (2016): 15–30, https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.50.4.0015.   7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims (Boston, MA: J. R. Osgood, 1876), 144. Quoted in Boatright, ‘Emersonian Reading and Ethics’, 25.   8. Emerson, ‘American Scholar’, 51.   9. Robert Atwan, ‘“Ecstasy & Eloquence”: The Method of Emerson’s Essays’, in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 106–15. 10. Cameron C. Nickels, ‘“Roaring Ralph”: Emerson as Lecturer’, The New England Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2003): 116, https://doi.org/10.2307/1559666. 11. Atwan, ‘“Ecstasy & Eloquence”’, 107. 12. Ibid., 114. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, Riverside Library (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 168, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001422443. 14. Emerson, Representative Men, 177. 15. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write, 16. 16. Emerson, Representative Men, 186. 17. Virginia Woolf, ‘Montaigne’, in The Common Reader: First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Harcourt, 1986), 59.

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18. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 298. 19. In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), Phillip Lopate characterizes Montaigne as a ‘sprinkler of citations’ who ‘made such a mosaic of his and others’ words that quotations became a kind of baroque tilework overlaying his Essais, without compromising his originality’ (xli). It is notable that even here Montaigne’s originality is a property that is separable from the ‘baroque tilework’ of others’ words, ideas, presences in his texts. 20. See Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472544902; John O’Neill, Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading, electronic resource, 2nd ed., Studies in Social and Political Thought 5 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001); Carl Rollyson, Understanding Susan Sontag, Understanding Contemporary American Literature (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016); Anthony Lioi, ‘An End to Cosmic Loneliness: Alice Walker’s Essays as Abolitionist Enchantment’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15, no. 1 (2008): 11–37; and Garrett Stewart, ‘The Deed of Reading: Toni Morrison and the Sculpted Book’, ELH 80, no. 2 (2013): 427–53. 21. See G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Essays: An Invitation, electronic resource (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 22. Brenda R. Silver and Virginia Woolf, ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 3/4 (1979): 356–441, https://doi. org/10.2307/441326. 23. Virginia Woolf, ‘How to Read a Book’, in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1986), 259. 24. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 153. 25. Ibid. 26. Peter A. Corning, ‘The Re-emergence of Emergence, and the Causal Role of Synergy in Emergent Evolution’, Synthese 185, no. 2 (2012): 297. 27. I. Georgiou, ‘The Idea of Emergent Property’, The Journal of the Operational Research Society 54, no. 3 (March 2003): 239–47; George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001383987; Sandra D. Mitchell, ‘Emergence: Logical, Functional and Dynamical’, Synthese 185, no. 2 (2012): 171–86; Timothy O’Connor, ‘Emergent Properties’, American Philosophical Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1994): 91–104; Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, ‘The History and Status of General Systems Theory’, The Academy of Management Journal 15, no. 4 (1972): 407–26, https:// doi.org/10.2307/255139. 28. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 166. 29. Ibid., 171. 30. Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 41. 31. Ibid., 42. 32. Ibid., 41. 33. Ibid., 42. 34. Ibid., 26. 35. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 285. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., xvi.

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38. Ibid., xvii. 39. Ibid., 293. 40. Ibid., 295. 41. Ibid. 42. James Baldwin, ‘Stranger in the Village’, in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 85. 43. Ibid., 81. 44. Ibid., 85. 45. Ibid., 89. 46. Andrew H. Miller, ‘Implicative Criticism, or The Display of Thinking’, New Literary History 44, no. 3 (2013): 348. 47. Ibid., 352. 48. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1927), 208. 49. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 67, emphasis in original. 50. Ibid., 118. 51. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 122. 52. Susan Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in The Best American Essays 1992, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), xviii. 53. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Break the Story’, in Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 163. 54. Patricia J. Williams, ‘They, the People’, TLS, the Times Literary Supplement, no. 6175 (August 6, 2021): 3. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 4. 58. Ibid., 5.

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10 Heretical Hearts and the Infinite Game: Why Teaching the Essay (Still) Matters Bob Cowser Jr

I do not think I will give you my teaching in the form of a pill; I think that would be difficult. . . . What I am trying to do is to let you in on something that is under way, that is in train, something that is unfinished and that will probably be finished only when I am finished. — Jacques Lacan1 The contemporary relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The time is less favorable to it than ever. — Theodor W. Adorno2

I

came to essay accidentally. I mean, doesn’t everyone? Like, is the essay ever ‘the plan’? The plan, when I arrived to begin doctoral study at a large land grant American university on the Midwestern plains in the mid-1990s, had been that I would write a dissertation on the novels of one of the region’s most beloved figures and then land a tenure-track job somewhere as a professor of American literature, the holy grail of an academic career. But a funny thing happened on my way to the ivory tower. At universities of that profile, with enrollments in the several tens of thousands, graduate students become conscripts in a veritable army of instructors tasked with introducing undergraduates to college-level writing. So for whatever else I believed would be my focus in my doctoral program, ‘writing studies’3 was necessarily added – I would become a writing teacher in the bargain. The writing studies faculty at the University of Nebraska espoused an expressivist model, leaving behind the more traditional argumentation approach my secondary and undergraduate school instructors had taken, with its classic five-paragraph theme, for an approach they believed placed a greater premium on student writers’ self-expression and discovery. The approach emphasized the writing process – revision of multiple drafts, individual student conferences with instructors, meta-writing reflecting on the process – rather than a final student product. Assessment was holistic, taking the entire process into account, and rather than begin by asking students to approximate an academic discourse that was still to them a foreign language, as they expounded on texts equally as foreign and subjects they had only begun to plumb, students were invited to begin by writing what they knew. That meant the personal essay would serve as the chief form of expression for students in these courses, as the surest route to the expression and exploration of such

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self-knowledge, though it seemed little attention would be paid to the age-old essay tradition or to the aesthetics of the form, what might be called its poetics. Why would a graduate student completing a dissertation in Rhetorical Theory or Restoration Drama need to get bogged down with Montaigne or Hazlitt? The support we received had more to do with the process of writing personal essays as a means of student writers confronting themselves (using critical thinking skills to interrogate experiences, relationships and cultural issues). To do otherwise would be to gild the lily, it seemed, at least at this early stage in a student’s career. Except I took to the ancient form immediately. Beyond the crude appeal of discussing oneself endlessly, its aesthetic and conceptual questions fascinated me. Besides, one of the earliest and most fundamental pedagogical lessons I learned was that I was not much help to students who were navigating writing situations I had never been in. I could not imagine their difficulty or begin to answer their questions without having climbed into the cockpit and experienced these situations myself. Thus my own essaywriting career – or perhaps it would be better termed a ‘practice’ – began: motivated by a desire to be a better writing teacher, I became a novice writer of essays. I had completed my American literature coursework and so had begun to spend a lot of my free time (when I might have been writing that lost Willa Cather dissertation) scratching out personal essays – publishing several – and enrolling in my first creative writing classes. These included a curious graduate writing workshop titled ‘Advanced Fiction/Nonfiction’, taught by a short story writer – there were no essayists per se on the faculty4 – who announced on the first day of class that fiction and nonfiction were fundamentally the same beast, that the only significant difference was that one detailed actual events and one ‘made things up’. Of course I knew better than to say so, but my budding instincts told me he was mistaken in this. For example, I knew narrative was not literary nonfiction’s only mode, not even its primary one, and I sensed the essay’s desire to intellectualize even more than it wanted to dramatize.5 I realize now that much of my early teaching was a project of trying to articulate my inchoate dissent. Of course that fiction writing professor is not entirely to blame: America was enduring/enjoying a memoir ‘boom’ in the mid-1990s, in popular and subsequently academic culture, which the academy itself had not yet had time to properly consider. Daniel Worden writes in ‘The Memoir in the Age of Neoliberal Individualism’ that books like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993) and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) mark an important shift in popular and literary culture at the end of the twentieth century, away from postmodernism’s history-as-text mode and toward New Journalism’s privileging of first-person, lived-experience accounts.6 Worden writes that the memoir, with ‘its vision of selfrealization . . . and its emphasis on individual self-fashioning’, was uniquely outfitted to articulate the spirit of that age (what I will call homo entrepreneurius), even as its most celebrated writers, most of them professors themselves, used the term ‘novel’ indiscriminately when discussing their nonfiction narratives.7 The literary marketplace was hungry for those memoirs and the movies they spawned, and graduate and even undergraduate students began to demand courses in writing in the form, hoping in many cases to ‘cash in’. But English studies offered no strong pedagogical tradition where personal nonfiction was concerned with which to meet this demand. Of course the personal essay had long survived in the academy as an object of critical study, discovered in one of its more natural habitats (literary journals, glossy magazines, between the hard covers

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of a trade book) and then dragged under a critical lens by scholars from departments of comparative literature and foreign language, philosophy and, sometimes, English literature. In fact, this volume is full of brilliant examples of such analysis. But I am speaking now of the informal essay as a thing generated by student writers in college classrooms. Another animal altogether. The form’s second-class, ‘fourth genre’ status meant it had yet to garner serious attention from anyone outside of a niche group of essay critics (Lynn Z. Bloom, Graham Good, Douglas Atkins, James McConkey and Carl Klaus, among others).8 It really did feel like we were making the creative nonfiction pedagogy up as we went along in those years, on panels at writing conferences and in craft essays in literary magazines. While I am the first to acknowledge that I lack the eminence to author the ‘origin story’ that this piece is shaping up to be, I can presume with the authority of one who was there to witness the genre’s rise in status in American literary studies. The best someone in my situation could do, someone trying to teach students to write personal essays (and meanwhile trying to learn to write in the form himself) – and this is widely acknowledged now among those of us who have been teaching the essay in a ‘creative writing’ context since the ‘boom’ – was to read and reread Phillip Lopate’s introduction to his Art of the Personal Essay (1994), which sought to recover and present a classical essay tradition and offered language for the characteristics the rest of us had been observing in our reading. And also to consult Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays annual, inaugurated in 1986, which sought to track down, in what were their natural habitats, the best essays published each year and corral them between two covers. So when as a graduate student I was offered a section of ‘advanced composition’ as a special teaching opportunity, I decided to commandeer the course for creative writing and the essay (see the note on Carl Klaus above), adopting Lopate and Atwan’s Best American Essays 1994 as my course texts. I was eager to explore with students the theoretical and aesthetic issues I could not reach in my beginner courses. But without much guidance or experience, I recall the assignments I gave them as rather clichéd, writing prompts cued to trends I observed in my reading in the genre in the years immediately prior, aimed at leading them, again, toward subjects that they thought they knew: a ‘hometown’ assignment (good, I assumed, with Nebraskans who had just left home), another which asked them to explore an important relationship in an essay (I expected most would write about parents and siblings), and finally one which described a ‘turning point’ in their (mostly) young lives. Though many had enrolled expecting to learn to sharpen their skills with fiveparagraph themes or perfect their medical school statements of purpose, they gave the personal essay the old college try, if with mostly forgettable results. In their defense, they gave me exactly what my assignment had asked for: located momentous occasions, predictable in some but not all cases, and used their skill in narrative writing to recreate them. Teaching students to render what Vivian Gornick calls an essay’s ‘situation’, ‘the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot’,9 has always seemed to me the easier part of the essay’s binaries10 for students to learn. There are conventions for doing so that run across genre, but its reflective move is far more elusive. The student essay that stands out from that class – and arriving here has been the point of all this personal pedagogical history – was written by a ‘nontraditional’ student (read: someone not aged eighteen to twenty-two, who had not necessarily

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matriculated immediately after high school and might not be enrolled full-time), a young woman taking courses while she earned tuition money making pizzas at a local eatery. She was likely my age (mid-twenties), possibly even a bit older, and somewhat skeptical of me for that reason. I remember her as tattooed and pierced but that may just be the work my memory and imagination have done to account for the pronounced chip on her shoulder during our interactions. What I remember much more clearly and specifically (and this is usually the case with my former students – personal details seem to evaporate but their writing remains with me) is the essay she wrote about her night job. ‘I have not had a “turning point”’, she wrote, something genuine and vulnerable in the way she expressed her frustration, ‘but I’m in the kitchen at Valentino’s every night making pizzas and waiting for it’. Alone in my apartment grading papers, I found myself utterly charmed by her resistance to my assignment. She alone had managed to get at what Gornick calls ‘story’, an essay’s emotional/intellectual heart, ‘the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: . . . the thing one has come to say’.11 The other students had wagered little and none of their essays were provocative or memorable. About bad essays, Theodor W. Adorno says, ‘The bad essay chats about people without opening up the matter at hand.’12 The essays were dutiful but not beautiful. None, that is, but hers. Her pizza parlor epiphany has remained with me in small ways through nearly thirty years of nonfiction writing courses, the last twenty-five spent at a small liberal arts university where I am a professor of ‘creative writing’, no longer hijacking expository writing courses but now blessedly free to explore the essay’s aesthetic and theoretical questions at my whim. I am something of a pedagogical magpie, having retained many of the best practices from my start in composition and adding what I have learned from my casual study of the essay, but if there is a chief aim to my variegated method, it is the effort to identify and recreate the conditions that allowed for that student’s realization and others like it. I see myself as merely the one who arranges the rendezvous in my classroom – between students and texts, students and one another, students and themselves – in a way that encourages such realizations. At a time when the neoliberal university has also begun to question the wisdom of academic tenure, I know one of its greatest benefits to me is the long perspective my position affords me on my approaches to the classroom, the time it affords me to tinker with my courses and experiment. So why does teaching this supposedly simple form, arranging the rendezvous, never seem to get any easier? There are somewhat facile explanations easily at hand: the lack of pedagogical precedent mentioned above, for starters (the sense that we are making this up as we go along). Also the essay’s practically fetishized formlessness, its lack of a poetics (unless we count Lopate’s introduction as a sort of makeshift poetics). At least beginner poets can pour language into sonnets or villanelles like they were builders’ concrete forms, and nascent story writers have Aristotle and Freytag’s pyramid, but essayists have no equivalent. This Companion quotes Carl Klaus in its Introduction as saying, ‘the essay has yet to find its Aristotle’. In fact, we have prided ourselves on the idea that there is ‘no there there’ where essay form and poetics are concerned. Princeton French literature professor Christy Wampole explained in a New York Times op-ed that even ‘armed with our panoply of canonical essay theories and our own conjectures’, she and the brilliant students in a recent graduate seminar on essayism could say ‘almost nothing’ on

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the subject with any certainty.13 True enough, but a difficult spot from which to begin professing. Inherited associations and connotations of the word ‘essay’ must be contended with, as well. When I say ‘essay’, I mean it, as Wampole does, in the Montaignian sense: ‘short nonfiction prose with a meditative subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude’.14 But most of my academic colleagues (and, more to the point, most of my students) have something more utilitarian in mind: the kind of writing expected on the SAT, in seminar papers, dissertations, professional criticism or other scholarly writing; politically engaged texts or other forms of peremptory writing that insist upon their theses and leave no room for uncertainty; or other short prose forms in which the author’s subjectivity is purposely erased or disguised.15 The privileging of the expository over the Montaignian essay reveals a larger, more structural resistance to essayistic thought in the modern American university. The fiveparagraph theme, with its empirical reasoning and obscuring of subjectivity, is the lingua franca of academic discourse. In this form, according to Wampole, one is to pretend that one’s opinions or findings have emanated from some office of higher truth where rigor and science are the managers on duty. . . . [T]hese texts are untentative: they know what they want to argue before they begin, stealthily making their case, anticipating any objections, aiming for air-tightness. These texts are not attempts; they are obstinacies. They are fortresses.16 Adorno called academic discourse ‘washed out cultural babble’, bemoaning the elimination by Enlightenment rationalism of any modes of thinking that had come before and the resultant compartmentalization of knowledge (perhaps nowhere more apparent than in contemporary university departments and subdepartments), which he believed incapable of unlocking the ‘whole truth’. Living consciousness, he claimed, that which the essay would purport to represent – what Scott Russell Sanders has called the ‘record of the individual mind at work and play’17 – had heretofore managed to transcend disciplinary purity and disciplinary separation (Proust was his exemplar) but was now vulnerable to being subsumed by the culture industry.18 Jacques Lacan was similarly suspicious of knowledge gained in such a university whose transmission of culture and knowledge actually ‘discharges us from the function’ of the sort of thinking so crucial to essaying.19 Kevin Rulo worries elsewhere in this volume that the essay’s anarchic spirit is under greater threat than ever from the cynicism of today’s neoliberal American university structure, with its focus on the commercialization and marketization of teaching and research and its vocational orientation toward learning, its elevation of the rational, scientific and quantitative at the expense of work that appears irrational, unscientific and qualitative (read: any endeavor that does not seem to offer immediate advantage to business or industry, to productive, real-world economies). Rulo decries the accompanying ascendency of what he calls a ‘transparency discourse’, characterized by clarity, self-evidentiary communication, tight structure, explicitness, logical progression.20 He sees it as a real threat to the rogue prose of Adorno and George Orwell, for whom

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essaying is a heretical, politically subversive act. More than Sanders’s refuge,21 the essay is in fact a site of resistance, what Rulo calls a site of ‘“anarchy” in the best sense of that word’.22 Even more insidious than the dominion empiricism enjoys in the contemporary American university at large – at least more important to the matter at hand – is the way this neoliberal thinking has colonized the minds of student writers in my classes. The art/science split Adorno notes in ‘The Essay as Form’ has taken firm hold, is very real to many college students (to the point that I sometimes hear science students boasting to the humanities majors before and after class of the superior rigor and value of their curriculum). Psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips calls the university experience no less than a ‘crisis of ambition’.23 There is, he writes, ‘nothing less disreputable’ than the desire to get into and succeed at university – college success is a culturally legitimated desire.24 The issue is that it is largely a ‘received’ ambition, simply the next thing in many students’ lives, and may disguise more problematic wishes (to borrow a psychoanalytic term) or the absence of any. I have identified something I jokingly call the ‘valedictorian complex’ affecting/ infecting the most successful students, which has them coveting ‘success’ (high marks and ‘correct’ answers) at the expense of truly higher learning, fearing risk and failure in a way that inhibits them from undertaking the sort of bold, fanciful, playful, irreverent and heretical thinking that characterizes the most provocative essaying. These beginner essayists verily beg me for ‘the formula’ for a successful essay, something like the ones their high school masters offered them, the code for the five-paragraph theme, rules which Sanders says they can now gleefully break on the way to more informal essays. But there is often precious little glee. Phillips, himself a prolific essayist, explains that the mere attainment of goals, if we receive them unexamined from parents and from the culture in loco parentis, actually makes us miserable. Imagine waking up in the middle of one’s life with a career (and a load of student loan debt) but no true sense of vocation. I realize it is not very interesting to listen to a longtime professor complain about grade-grubbing students. It is admittedly bad form. But the point I want to make is that the student focus on grades, on ‘success’, is more than mere irritation where the project of teaching the essay is concerned. It is a significant impediment to the enterprise. Of course there exists no formula for the kind of essaying I want them to attempt, and a certain amount of failure and uncertainty seems baked into the recipe for essaying. I am genuinely more interested in questions than answers and I encourage them to bite off more than we can chew, as it were, so that we may focus on the chewing, the masticating, the ruminating. Because I do not know what I want from them, honestly. To take this all the way back to those long, lonely nights in that pizza kitchen on O Street in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the woman jilted by her ‘turning point’, what I want is to be surprised, to be charmed. I want to witness their arrival at what they have come to say. Once, at a cocktail party, my loud grousing about student attitudes caught the attention of a visiting poet, J. Michael Martinez, who sympathized and told me he had of course encountered similar challenges in his creative writing classes. As a solution, he had offered his students an analogy from game theory, from a book by Simon Sinek entitled The Infinite Game.25 Sinek explores the differences between ‘finite’ games, where the players play to win, and infinite games, where players play to survive, thrive

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and keep playing. He argues that those who view an endeavor as an infinite game that is constantly evolving and never-ending are more successful, while those who aim to ‘win’ do not end up as well off. Sinek started thinking about these concepts after reading James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games (1986),26 which first contrasted the idea of a finite game (played to win) with an infinite game (played to keep playing). Finite games are those with known players, fixed rules and an agreed-upon objective. A poker game is Sinek’s example, but I am afraid students often think about their college classes in similar ways. In this paradigm, students and teachers are opponents locked in an agon, the syllabus representing a series of trials, and the objective is a high (or at least passing) mark. But infinite games, by contrast, have both known and unknown players, changeable rules and no clear ending point at which one person is declared the winner and everyone goes home. I want students to conceive of my essay-writing courses in this way – Adorno says play is essential to the essay.27 After all, we find ourselves amidst a throng of other writers on a marathon course engaged in a similar struggle, an age-old conversation – I often tell students I am only a little further down the road than they are – so we enjoy solidarity (trust is crucial to getting them to take risks). Furthermore, the obstacles and rules do change – rhetoric is defined as ‘the appropriate tool for the appropriate situation’, after all, and essays are famously multimodal. Perhaps Sinek’s most important distinction is that when players leave a finite game, the game ends, but when players leave an infinite game, it continues. Or they take the game with them. I hope the budding writers in my classes never really leave the game, but dip in and out over a lifetime. And that was the most important idea for me, that the infinite game concept lays a foundation for a life of essayistic contemplation, if not actual writing. Continual seeking is the thing. Presenting a writing course as an infinite game, I have a fighting chance of getting student writers to leave aside ‘answers’ and the grades that follow them and focus on questions and the true spirit of essayism. ‘This is the force of the essay’, writes Christy Wampole: ‘it impels you to face the undecidable. It asks you to get comfortable with ambivalence.’28 Assuming a teacher can establish rapport and trust and solidarity in a classroom (I have often said that I am like bandleader Creole from the James Baldwin story ‘Sonny’s Blues’ (1957), encouraging bandmates to strike out for the deep water while serving as testament to the fact that deep water and drowning are not the same thing), how do beginners even ascertain which questions to ask of their experience? I imagine moonlighting at Valentino’s Pizza had afforded that Nebraska woman no small amount of insight about her future, clarified a great many questions. Those sorts of twenty-something jobs usually do. And honestly, the questions and the crucial curiosity that leads us to them are something not even the best teacher can give student writers. Life presents such things. ‘Much of the work is grounded in essential mysteries that we cannot teach by professing’, Pat Hoy writes in his contribution to this volume. ‘We learn about these mysteries through practice, through exciting discoveries about the mind’s independent powers.’29 Still, I believe writing can be taught, or at least that we as teachers are obligated to create environments where students can learn to play this most infinite of games. There are strategies we can offer to deepen the questioning, to help students move from received, culturally legitimated opinions and desires to a greater awareness of the deeper structures that give rise to them. I tell students that my class is geared to

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help them develop the antennae necessary for tuning into the essayistic wavelength or frequency. When I was teaching in a Master’s of Fine Arts (MFA) program several years ago, I stole from my colleague Jill Christman what she calls her ‘rooting questions’, which essayists can ask themselves when they begin to revise (Christman herself adapted them from Sandra Huss). ‘Before your manuscript there is silence’, Huss had told her; ‘your manuscript breaks the silence.’30 The silence broken, Huss and Christman direct writers to ask themselves, ‘Why me?’ (which gets at authority and agency) and ‘Why now?’ (the matter of urgency). In an essay, after all, the what is frequently not very dramatic (the turning point that does not come); it is the ‘why’ questions that yield the right stuff. Vivian Gornick again: it is not about what happened to you, it is about what you make of it, your emotional/intellectual preoccupation.31 When the venerable William Kittredge visited that same MFA program, he left the students with a phrase I use with my essayists at least once a term: ‘they won’t pay you to juggle one orange’. And I take his most immediate meaning: any narrative, to interest readers, has to involve more than one drive. Often the question or goal that obsesses the writer originally, whether it be a current or former self, will not carry an essay. But when I add my third ‘rooting question’, namely, ‘What else might this be about?’, I am asking, in other words, what additional subconscious oranges they might be juggling besides the essay’s ostensible concern, the apparent question they have drawn a bead on from the beginning. After all, what would be the point of eschewing linearity and the methodical subordination of concepts if a personal essayist does not take advantage of the resultant freedom and wander, digress, dive deep into consciousness, building texts via association and what Lacan would call ‘weaker logic’?32 In a coda to his 2013 collection of selected essays, One Way and Another, Adam Phillips considers why psychoanalysts are wary of using the word ‘essay’ to describe their work (too tentative, he concludes, too far from science and empiricism for a field always seeking legitimacy), but I wonder why essayists do not take greater advantage of subconscious experience, why they maintain such a conventional view of the mind, especially when Adorno tells us the form’s greatest advantage is that anything goes, any route to truth is viable.33 ‘Weaker logic’ is not, after all, less interesting, Lacan reminds us. In fact, the opposite often seems true. I encourage students to let the essay itself lead them into subconscious depths, to follow their hands across the laptop keyboard as if it were a spirit board and the mouse its Ouija planchette. Graham Greene’s fictional novelist Maurice Bendrix puts great stock in the subconscious as a prime mover in his writing: One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.34 For Greene’s Bendrix, even the Blitz did not trouble the deep sea caves of the subconscious mind (as a troubled late adolescent, Greene himself had been a very early

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subject of psychoanalysis); in those depths, he tells us, ‘the last word is written before the first word appears on paper’.35 I have a few go-to examples of essays that shine a light into those depths, which I frequently assign to students. In that Best American Essays 1994 anthology I used to teach, Atwan had included Phillip Weiss’s comic essay ‘How to Get Out of a Locked Trunk’, in which the writer details his growing obsession with that predicament, waiting to reveal his impending nuptials until the final paragraph and leaving the reader to make that subconscious connection. But much better is my friend Steven Church’s personal essay ‘Crown and Shoulder’, which he explains was ‘trying to be about physical injury’ (his ruined shoulders) and about the features of suburban roads and streets, but reveals itself to be, like some sort of extended Freudian narrative slip, about the grief he has shouldered since his younger brother’s early death in a car crash.36 Like everything he writes, he explains. ‘[T]he same old secret emotional engine, the humming grief that fuels so much of my creative life’, he writes. ‘I should have known that all this essaying would tumble back down to this root . . . no matter how many digressive gymnastic leaps I made, how many fancy roadside attractions I built for you.’37 I try to help students identify these secret emotional engines through the drafting and revision process, assist them in interpreting the words and images and patterns they throw up from those undersea caverns where they hum with their industry. And again, I am their witness to the difference between deep water and drowning, because truly confronting oneself is far from easy work. If the first insight I gained about teaching the personal essay was that I would have little to offer students until I had faced down the challenges myself, a later-arriving corollary truth was that my most important relationship was not with published texts or the essay tradition but with their words, with my students’ writing. That to be of use I would have to give it some lifeblood. It is what they pay me for, after all, because it is the hardest work, and because the rest of the work I would do for free. *** Eminent Victorian thinker John Ruskin was asked if he intended to make portrait painters, little J. M. W. Turners, of all the tradesmen enrolled in the amateur drawing classes he used to offer in the Holborn parish of central London in the middle of the nineteenth century. No, he is said to have replied, he only meant to make them happier tradespeople. Few of the students in my classes will become essayists, and only one or two in any class will study writing after college. I feel sometimes like I am introducing them to a classical instrument as outmoded as the harpsichord. Still, while I am not quite as radical as Adorno or Orwell (it is not crucial to me that my students’ writing baffle the neoliberal paradigm, à la Roland Barthes), I do share Christy Wampole’s idealism about the form, believing that essaying presents the best way to approach the world we live in, an ‘alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America’, the sickness of our souls.38 (A spirit so whimsical and elusive could never be outmoded anyway.) My faith in the essay has led me to introduce it in a wide variety of contexts over the years – high schools, MFA programs and retirement groups, even prisons, addiction treatment centers – but my most frequent demographic remains American undergraduates in the misty midst of what they are told will be the ‘best four years’

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of their lives. When they tell me about the various kinds of learning they are engaged in, the variety of disciplines and approaches they are asked to take on board, many of them making competing claims on ‘truth’, I imagine the smile on John Henry Cardinal Newman’s face and think of that semester back in the haze of my own sophomore year when Intro to Astronomy and Renaissance Poetry had me wrestling with the music of the spheres and the theory of relativity simultaneously. That sort of juggling, Adorno (and Newman) would tell us, represents the best of those best years, the ideal situation for the personal essay, which I consider the crown of the liberal arts education. If only I had had the form on my tool belt back in 1990. The aim of my teaching, and of my own writing, is eudaimonia, human thriving, and I think of the essay as a sort of magic eudaimonia machine. (Adorno: ‘the essay expresses the utopian intention’.39) Inasmuch as essayism is a mode of thinking and being, a habit of mind, a philosophy, I want my students to be essayists in the way the Caesars were Stoics. The way your yoga teacher wants you to think of your practice as more than just stretching. Essaying is prime noticing, the cultivation of self-doubt, approaching the whole truth of the matter just as one gains comfort with uncertainty. It is saying, with panache, ‘I’m still waiting for my turning point.’ Which, of course, I am.

Notes   1. Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macev (London: Verso, 2008), 3.   2. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (170).  3. A research-based field broadly focused on analyzing the production, consumption and circulation of writing in specific contexts. The field incorporates subspecialties such as composition and rhetoric, computers and writing, second language writing, genre studies and textual analysis.   4. When I applied to complete a collection of personal essays as my ‘creative dissertation’ at the University of Nebraska, one of only a handful of American universities offering the PhD in creative writing in 1998, only one other person, Lisa Knopp, had done so before me.  5. Years later I would read Claire de Obaldia’s succinct parsing of this distinction in The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995): fiction mimes the world, the essay mimes the mind in the act of apprehending the world.   6. Daniel Worden, ‘The Memoir in the Age of Neoliberal Individualism’, in Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, ed. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 160–77.   7. Ibid., 162.   8. The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa was founded in 1976, independent of the more senior and better-known Writer’s Workshop, and when Carl Klaus assumed leadership, he did so on the condition that he shift its focus from expository writing to ‘the literary essay’.   9. Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 170. 10. An essay’s rhetorical gestures expressed as binaries: show/tell; render/explain; narration/ exposition; anecdote/conjecture. Graham Good challenges the idea of expressing them as binaries in ‘The Essay as Genre’, in The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988).

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11. Gornick, The Situation and the Story, 13. 12. Adorno, ‘ Essay as Form’, 154. 13. Christy Wampole, ‘The Essayification of Everything’, The Stone (blog), New York Times, May 26, 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-ofeverything. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Scott Russell Sanders, ‘The Singular First Person’, Sewanee Review 96, no. 4 (1988): 658–72 (660). 18. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 154. 19. Lacan, My Teaching, 67. 20. Kevin Rulo, this volume, p. 192. 21. Sanders, ‘Singular First Person’. 22. Kevin Rulo, this volume, p. 198. 23. Adam Phillips, ‘On Success’, in One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 2013), 60–77 (66). 24. Ibid., 66. 25. Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game (London: Penguin Business, 2019). 26. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986). 27. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 152. 28. Wampole, ‘Essayification’. 29. Pat C. Hoy, this volume, p. 205. 30. Jill Christman, personal communication. 31. Gornick, The Situation and the Story, 13. 32. Lacan, My Teaching, 32. 33. Phillips, ‘Coda: Up to a Point’, in One Way and Another, 382–94 (386). 34. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (London: Vintage, 2019), 37. 35. Ibid., 37. 36. Steven Church, ‘Crown and Shoulder’, Passages North 35, no. 2 (2015), https://www. passagesnorth.com/issue-35-2/crown-and-shoulder. 37. Ibid. 38. Wampole, ‘Essayification’. 39. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, 161.

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11 The Essay and the Episteme: A Genealogy for Modern Classroom Use Kevin Rulo

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ne of the more significant intellectual spaces in which the essay has been theorized, produced and critiqued over the last two centuries has been the American university and college classroom. This owes in large part to the near universally required first-year composition course, the core assignments of which are usually essays of one kind or another. While this curriculum is particular to the United States context, understanding its dynamics and how those dynamics affect the conception and practice of essay writing is of no less importance for considering transnational contexts, given the extent to which the contemporary American ideal of the essay can be considered another of its many cultural exports – one that has already substantially shaped the history of the essay and one that seems likely only to continue to gain in influence in the coming years. At least since the Second World War and the advent of the GI Bill, the average American citizen has been more likely to encounter the essay as a thing in and of itself – to be reflected upon, to be read as such, to be studied and to be composed in apprentice-like fashion – in the classroom and, for most, likely nowhere else.1 If genres are ‘ways of doing things’, as Charles Bazerman has characterized them, the genre of the essay does quite a lot.2 It is, along with lectures and written examinations, the primary basis for evaluation of student learning. It is also perceived as a practice that enables students to embody the values of academia (for example, scholarship and mastery of subject matter) as well as, and increasingly so, the characteristics necessary for competitive status in the workforce beyond academia. Practice in essay writing is conceived as a means toward excellence in all types of writing.3 In light of these facts, the question of what precisely happens in the classroom, of how the essay is conceived and of how the praxis of essay writing is conditioned and normed, becomes a question of the greatest significance. This question cannot be satisfactorily answered, however, without considering the relationship between essay writing and the composition curricula in which that writing is situated. Richard Fulkerson once proposed that writing courses always have – and therefore need to explicitly recognize and foreground – their ‘theory’ or ‘philosophy’ of composition. He outlined three main components to such a philosophy: axiological (what is good writing?), procedural (how do writers write?) and pedagogical (how do we teach writing?).4 The most important concern for our purposes is with the axiological component. The essay writing and the reflection on that writing that is done in the composition classroom is always informed by standards, sometimes only implicitly understood, about what counts as ‘good’ writing. But it is not enough of

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itself to ask how we understand good writing or even how that might motivate our teaching and pedagogical practices. We must go further and take account of how the axiological dimensions of writing in our classrooms are themselves determined by larger epistemic structures of language production and regulation. What is more, we must understand the origins of these structures, their impacts beyond purely matters of writing, and how they have developed over time. While the essay has been examined at length in terms of generic distinctiveness and historical evolution, there remains work to be done in consideration of its discursive features, including in its social practices and ideological implications as linked with elements of texture and style. My focus in this chapter will be on how the essay has functioned and continues to function as a contested site for larger assumptions and attitudes about language and writing. I aim to show first how the essay has been appropriated by dominant capitalizing, colonializing and racist regimes ideologically wedded to transparency discourse – which defines communicative efficacy as necessarily marked by standardization, regularity, rationality, clarity and efficiency – above all, those associated today with what is increasingly called ‘neoliberalism’. Second, I wish to consider how the essay can and should function as an alternative, counteractive space that resists and even overturns the market and colonial logics long at work in our academic institutions. My particular interest and point of reference will be the anglophone educational setting, with specific and primary reference to the American context; in tracing the roots of the attitudes currently dominant in these settings, however, I will follow intellectual and cultural descendants far afield. In tracing this longue durée of the essay as a form that both participates in and resists the dominant epistemic structures of modernity, I make use of Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ methodology. For Foucault, ‘the type of enunciation used’ at a given historical moment represents a ‘criterion’ for established discursive features and the structuring of knowledge and systems of power. In this vein, he discusses as an example that in ‘the nineteenth century medical science was characterized less by its objects or concepts . . . than by a certain style, a certain constant form of enunciation’.5 This insight gives us a lens by which to consider the essay’s interplay with modern forms of writing and communication conceived not so much as genres, although generic considerations cannot be excluded, but as discursive practices constituted by knowledge and ideology – and in the case of the essay, most especially by a discursive practice characterized by its style, by the ‘type of enunciation’ that it brings into being, regulates and makes normative.6 What is the ‘style’ of the essay, then, conceived as a ‘type of enunciation’? While the essay is often theorized as a heterogeneous or dialogical or ‘queer’ space in ways that draw us to its subversive potency, it remains the case that the essay is often assigned in practice according to a much different rubric, one motivated by those forces aligned with what has been diagnosed as a ‘neoliberal’ turn in the academy, about which much has been written recently.7 Along these lines but from outside of writing studies, Terry Eagleton has referred to ‘an almost complete capitulation to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism’.8 Wendy Brown, for her part, tracks the ‘neoliberalization’ of the university, characterizing it as the dominance of economic thinking to the exclusion of other values, evidenced most poignantly in reconceptualizations of education in terms of market values and the resulting move away from public funding and public civic values – which she characterizes as the drivers and

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preservers of our democracy – a shift felt most intensely in the past few decades.9 More specific to writing studies and the work that composition teachers do, Brown observes among other effects the increasing pressure to align the teaching of writing with the broader goals of ‘job training’ and preparedness for the modern workforce that are ever more so those of higher education today.10 Compositionists have explored these impacts and dynamics from a variety of angles, tracing their effects on students, who find themselves in an impoverished learning environment focused narrowly on skills, utility and testing, one which marginalizes and looks askance at forms like the essay; on faculty, who are viewed as exploitable capital and increasingly sidelined as functionaries within the higher education system; and on the field itself, which finds itself more and more ill at ease with the nature of its own work.11 Donna Strickland has gone so far as to argue that there is a highly problematic ‘managerial unconscious’ at work in the field’s origins and in its deepest administrative and pedagogic practices, which also inform the field’s approach to and understanding of writing.12 These voices within the profession have produced a varied and diverse account of the manifold, deleterious effects of neoliberalism on higher education, the liberal arts, and the field of rhetoric and composition. What these voices share for the most part, and what is implicit in the very conception of the issue as being characterized by the emergence of neoliberalism, is a view that this negative experience is a phenomenon of more recent origin. Brown summarizes the perspective succinctly when she says that ‘[t]he North American twentieth century, for all its ghastly episodes and wrong turns, retroactively appears as something of a golden age for public higher education’.13 At the height of this ‘golden age’ for Brown is the 1960s when liberal arts education became more widely available to ‘the masses’, fostering the ideals of economic advancement, social integration and civic participation central to the values undergirding our democracy.14 But if the 1960s can be considered a ‘golden age’ in higher education, its achievement is best understood as a momentary respite in a much more sustained and deeply rooted historical, sociocultural and economic process, one in which the very trends that are decried in narratives of neoliberal crisis can be found to be at work. The research of Frank Donoghue shows conclusively, for example, that the university and the corporate world have been intertwined in America at least since the Civil War, when both became prominent.15 Fears within academic culture about corporatization of the university are equally as old.16 While the neoliberal turn may represent a new phase, the issues that drive this phase are not as superficial or novel as our narratives of neoliberalism would suggest. In fact, there is compelling evidence that they are so deeply ingrained in our common life as to go back centuries and to imbue the very structure and character of our ways of life and our modes of thinking. The essay as a discursive practice plays a central role in this longue durée because the essay has formed such a powerful part of the story of writing from the early modern period onward. As an occasional and non-specialist form, the essay was perfectly situated to mediate styles of life, impressions and the self-fashioning of an emergent modernity. With the increasing proliferation of print media, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the essay became a means of reflecting and of conditioning reading habits and identities in addition to doing the work of shaping the boundaries of modern discursive prose. If writing and speech have shaped and been shaped by the larger tectonic plates of cultural, social and civic life, the essay has become a touchpoint in the history of writing precisely due to its role as a broad cultural practice.

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The essay as a ‘type of enunciation’, therefore, finds itself entangled with the larger epistemic frameworks of modernity, themselves shifting and transforming. But rather than merely relating these epistemic frameworks, the essay is better understood as a disputed space for discursive practice, often an alternative to dominant paradigms, a ‘temporary autonomous zone’, to quote Hakim Bey, where the prevailing and increasingly ubiquitous modern linguistic regimes are challenged, thwarted or blissfully ignored.17 At the same time, however, what I conceive of as the essay’s ultimately anarchic potential, its essayistic or modal faculty for expressing an anti-epistemic spirit, its capacity for what Nicholas Royle calls ‘veering’, for opening up rather than closing off, for slipping, deviating from the norm – these qualities are continuously threatened and must be remade again and again as countervailing forces reassemble into new formations.18 The cultural or discourse morphology traced below concerns the modern episteme’s genealogical origins and subsequent development, which provide key contexts for understanding both how the essay has given birth to a kind of rogue prose, resistant to the modern episteme and its penchant for order and efficiency, as well as how these regimes have nonetheless successfully and increasingly co-opted the essay, making it an instrument for the kind of epistemic work that it has as often undermined. This faux essay, as we could call it, encapsulates an epistemic ideology that bears its own discursive and generic practices and modes of activity. It could be summed up as what James Paul Gee has called, following Ron and Suzanne B. K. Scollon, ‘essayist literacy’,19 alternatively dubbed the ‘discourse of transparency’ by Theresa Lillis and Joan Turner, where language is assumed to be a mere ‘Conduit’, as John Locke refers to it, the carrier of thought, whose goal is to communicate thinking as clearly and unobtrusively, as objectively, as possible.20 The axiological dimension, the philosophy of good writing, upheld by this ‘discourse of transparency’ can be summarized by clarity, self-evidentiary communication, tight structure, explicitness, logical progression – all embodied in the adage often given to student writers by instructors no doubt wearied by endless stacks of ungraded essays: ‘don’t make your reader work to find your meaning’. Its reach continues to be felt across a wide range of writing contexts, in and out of the classroom. The cultures of finance and business, and subsequently of the technocracy, have grown substantially over the past two centuries and have generally adopted the discourse of transparency as their preferred style (I use the word ‘style’ broadly to encompass what Maurice Merleau-Ponty conceived of as ‘a way of inhabiting the world’21). This is perhaps seen most evidently in business writing where the ‘three Cs’ – clarity, concision and correctness – reign supreme.22 Although perhaps once predominant primarily in the Anglosphere, transparency discourse has enjoyed widespread diffusion across the globe. Today, we are everywhere surrounded by the culture of global capitalism and its ideology of writing, which conceives of communication as production for exchange, similar to the production of goods, manifesting itself in its more naked forms in movements like those for Basic English or Standard English.23 That Lillis and Turner cite Locke in their account of transparency discourse indicates how historically enmeshed this discourse is. Just as the processes that have resulted in our current socioeconomic and political conditions have been in progress for many centuries, so too can this ‘discourse of transparency’ be seen itself as the result of or an ingredient in these processes.24 While these processes predate the essay

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at least in its modern form, the fact that the discourse of transparency is central to the history of the essay means that it is nonetheless crucial to include a longer genealogical durée of this discourse. Doing so helps us to account better for the emergence and growth of the essay as well as for the various epistemic takeovers to which this writing has been regularly subjected. The essay’s roots in the humanist tradition are well recognized, but there are lines of influence that can be traced further back still, to medieval scholasticism. Walter J. Ong was among the first to note within medieval intellectual and literate cultures a distinction between a kind of broadly humanist tradition and a school of pure logicians. His insight reveals the anachronisms necessarily involved in attempts to read the later Renaissance humanist disdain of scholasticism as targeted at those figures whom we primarily associate today with the movement, such as Thomas Aquinas, who tellingly escapes Erasmus’s censure.25 Humanist scorn was in actuality reserved for figures like Peter of Spain, the ancestors of modern logicians like Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein, who could not bilk unease with the slippages of language and the interpretative difficulties that result from language’s failure to behave like mathematical symbols. If we had to adopt C. P. Snow’s binary of the two cultures split asunder between science and the humanities, these medieval logicians – like their modern descendants but quite unlike other more well known scholastics as well as later humanists – would surely belong to the former camp.26 Ong’s research shows that Peter Ramus, although a Renaissance humanist, held ideas about dialectic and its relationship to rhetoric that owed much to the later medieval logicians and those who followed them, quite in opposition to humanism. Ramus is well recognized today as a pivot point in the decline of rhetoric’s importance, as the antagonist who sundered dialectic from rhetoric and relegated rhetoric’s role to matters of adornment and style; yet it is important to note that, while representing a break, he was nonetheless also continuing and taking up along more pragmatic lines what had already been established by those key intellectual developments taking place in the universities of the late Middle Ages – developments which have important implications for our understanding of language and communication. In this late medieval logical turn, we find already the seeds of the modern discourse of transparency, the most glaring example of which would be the doctrine of Occam’s razor. An important early thinker in the construction of this new paradigm was France’s René Descartes, who was soon followed in the anglophone world by John Locke, to whom reference has already been made, and by the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660 and dedicated to the advancement of scientific learning and knowledge. Descartes and Locke are two figures representative of nascent disciplinary differentiations in rationalism and empiricism, respectively. Yet for all the significant divergences of these philosophical systems, they nonetheless share important lines of continuity for the development of the modern discourse of transparency. The Port-Royal Grammar would take up and carry forward the project of conceiving a Cartesian linguistics. Its original title – translated in part as General and Rational Grammar, Containing the Fundamentals of the Art of Speaking, Explained in a Clear and Natural Way – illustrates the qualities of universality and transparency that the volume espouses.27 Empiricism for its part has long been understood to be ‘antirhetorical’ even as its own practice surely betrays a rhetoric.28 For Locke, ‘language [is] the great conduit, whereby men convey their discoveries, reasonings, and knowledge, from one to another’.29 At

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this stage, then, modernity’s discourse of transparency comes already into discernible shape. A similarly foundational moment in the emergence of this episteme is the previously mentioned founding of the Royal Society in London – an event of particular importance for ensuring the entrenchment of modern discourse as a dominant reigning paradigm for the English-speaking world, one that would have significant impacts on the discourse of the essay. An important precursor in this regard – for both readers today and in the view of Royal Society members themselves – is Francis Bacon. Among Bacon’s explicit targets were ‘Scholasticism’ and ‘Ciceronianism’, which ‘did bring an affectionate study of eloquence’30 but grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter . . . more after the round an [sic] clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of the matter.31 Bacon here characterizes stylistic adornment – the ‘sweet falling of the clauses’ – in negative contrast to ‘the weight of the matter’, which is only obscured by ‘tropes and figures’. In these stylistic conceptions and the ideology of style that they presuppose, Bacon echoes Ramus’s attack on aspects of the scholastic as well as the humanist traditions, including with his sundering of dialectic from rhetoric, thought from speech. The Royal Society would take up this ‘plain style’ mantle, making it their ‘constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style’.32 Motivating this desire for transparent prose was the aspiration to make writing equivalent to mathematics, which was regarded as the ideal form of symbolic communication for universalism and transparency. Prominent Royal Society member Robert Boyle put it thus: since our arithmetical characters are understood by all Nations of Europe the same . . . I conceive of no impossibility, that opposes the doing in words, that we [have] already done in numbers. . . . [I]t will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of Babel.33 We are already here in the imaginary of early twentieth-century analytic thinkers like Frege, Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, who regarded language as a bit too untidy and in need of a good deal of cleaning up to serve its useful purpose of communicating thought. As Ryan J. Stark has shown, there are deeper philosophical impulses at work in the construction of nonscientific others that must be erased by the new regime of scientific, rational thinking. The desire to uphold ‘plainness’ in writing is ultimately a matter of banishing a ‘magical’ or ‘mystical worldview’ and the ‘enchanted cosmos’ that goes with it.34 As Stark puts it, ‘The shift in the late Renaissance from a cosmos moved by purposeful energy to a cosmos moved by blind force . . . marks the decline of a complex philosophy of style.’35 But if this shift is motivated by the rise of scientific culture, it nonetheless cannot be limited to such microcultures. We find cognate theories and praxes operative in Puritan plain style preaching, which likewise assumed a transparent, instrumentalist approach to language. The important thing was salvation and the communication of truth; lack of clarity imperiled souls and was therefore to be

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avoided at great pains.36 So in both scientific and religious discourse of this period, we find a shared basic understanding of language’s relation to thought and a commonly held general sense of the hallmarks of effective communication – hallmarks especially relevant for effective communication to more popular or general audiences, above all in forms such as the essay. The ascendency of transparency discourse and its adoption among those with sociocultural power resulted in the scorning and even active oppression of those deemed linguistic violators of its norms. These violators, even when not essayists strictly speaking, nonetheless possessed an essayistic sensibility. As scholars Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford, as well as Kathryn T. Flannery, have shown, the transparency ideology of style had oppressive implications for many marginalized groups, most especially women, who were often associated with stylistic vitality and lack of logical rigor in communication.37 As Stark further points out, it also led to attitudes about decorum and ‘politeness’ in communication that inevitably had implications for class expectations similar to other behavioral and social rituals of manners and etiquette: namely, serving to exclude marginalized others.38 The emphasis on a ‘politeness’ that, in its exclusionary function, served the ends of at least a version of social peace also points to a key component not just of scientific or religious culture but of the developing economic and political thought of the Enlightenment and to its views on rhetoric, which has significant ramifications even for our own time, for current readings of neoliberalism and for the essay as it is taught in our colleges and universities. These impacts can be found perhaps most readily in the way in which matters of decorum re-emerge in contemporary terms in advocacy for monolingualism and for privileging certain variants of English as ‘acceptable’ while branding others as impolitesse.39 They are more broadly evident in the academy’s advocacy for transparency discourse in the teaching and evaluation of essay writing. We are right to see this advocacy as entangled in those forces often referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, but we need also to understand the provenance of these forces as surveyed above and their present widespread diffusion. For as French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa and others have argued, the economic, political and social aspects of liberalism form an integrity; thus the developments in education which serve economics also relate equally to politics.40 Such theoretical work invites us to consider how the efforts of liberalism to render humanity the master and possessor of nature might also entail in its logic a similar desire to make the human the master and possessor of language. Additionally, Michéa argues that the impetus of liberalism as a political and social theory to make all conflict and all community superfluous, to bring peace and to secure for each person their own private jouissance, can be traced to an anthropological pessimism that aims to avoid engagement because of fear that it will lead to conflict. This reading of liberalism’s deep structures can serve a useful hermeneutic for examining the ideologies behind the positivist prose that, as Richard Ohmann has shown, focuses its attentions on objects and the objectively real, which supposedly cannot be disputed – precisely in order to avoid dispute.41 On the heels of these insights, other liberal logics appear at the heart of this transparent discourse: for example, the great liberal dream of equal access, of the idea that language can simply be made available equally – accessible to all regardless of class, creed, race or gender – and that it can be put to use for primarily economic opportunities based on unfettered individual activity.42 The discourse of transparency here opens onto the plane of laissez-faire prose.

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If such an epistemic regime exists, has deep sociocultural roots and is only advancing in influence, there nonetheless has been from the beginning an alternative and counter to this empire of universalist, monologic discursive practice. The alternative lies in what Mario Aquilina characterizes as the essayistic mode’s ‘centrifugal’ force, its supple play of relations, its explosive playfulness.43 In saying this, I do not wish to discount what G. Douglas Atkins has called the ‘home-cosmography’ so central to Montaigne’s method.44 The ways that the essay provides a space for interiority and ‘self-exploration’ are central to its work, without question. They are also qualities that position it against a discourse that is intentionally universalizing, monovalent and objective – which are precisely those qualities of the discursive regime that I have traced above. But having said that, I want to place the emphasis on the essay’s distinctive modality, its way of being in the world discursively, and not so much on this quality of ‘home-cosmography’ as on the discursive theory behind essay writing as it developed in the early modern period and subsequently. This can perhaps be best expressed by Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of the ‘childlike’ quality of the essay: [It] does not permit its domain to be prescribed. Instead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done. The essay mirrors what is loved and hated instead of presenting the intellect, on the model of a boundless work ethic, as creatio ex nihilo. 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. Therefore it is classed among the oddities.45 In this ‘childlike freedom’, this ludic playfulness, this oddityness, its status as a kind of marginalia, the essay distinguishes itself as a unique form. In this way, the essay is more closely akin to other kinds of ‘minor’ writing – the fragment, as first theorized by Friedrich Schlegel and the Romantics; aphorisms; travel writing; journals; as well as figures and tropes such as paradox, irony, satire, the pun, oxymoron – than to other forms of shorter discursive prose. There are resonances here with the later Roland Barthes’s idea of the Neutral (Neutre), which is a kind of use of language described as subtlety against barbarism, that which ‘baffles the paradigm’.46 If we are today indeed besieged by what Terry Eagleton has called a kind of corporate ‘barbarism’, the Neutral’s ‘subtlety’ can be a welcome antidote, or neutralizer. The essay is therefore, I argue, the site of ‘anarchy’ in the best sense of that word, not as mere chaos but as freedom, play, lateral self-regulating structures, the gratuitous over the efficient, community without coercion. Although there were precursors in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, including in the more dialogical, humanist spirit of certain schoolmen such as Aquinas, as surveyed above, the essay as a form developed out of the Renaissance and savors richness and complexity in language, the experiential and the personal. As Mario Aquilina has shown, this is not to say that the essay has not always been a site of conflict and tension with competing epistemic structures.47 As I have already noted: if Bacon is often paired with Montaigne as one of the form’s originators, there are qualities in both, but particularly in Bacon, which owe more to the modern episteme’s ideology than to the essay tradition as we are following it here. Such elements continue forward into some

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of the essay tradition’s most notable names, including Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson and other Age of Reason essayists who inveighed against the tradition of ‘mysterious prose’ considered so dangerous by Royal Society adherents.48 They continue into our own time with the prevalence of transparency discourse in Strunk and White and in popular textbooks like Joseph Williams’s Style: Ten Lesson in Clarity and Grace. At the same time, while the genre of the essay can interact in tension with essayistic modalities, the essayistic itself can overlap with other genres and practices. We might mention writers such as Erasmus, the Jesuit rhetoricians (Binet, Pétau and Caussin among them), G. B. Vico, Herder, J. G. Hamann and Rousseau, for example, as Continental writers who did not necessarily utilize the essay form or write in English but nonetheless exhibited an essayistic sensibility of the kind that I am recounting here. As different as these writers are, they share a linguistic gratuity, playful exuberance of prose, and a feeling for rhetorical and local force over universalizing rationalisms. The more recognizable essayists exhibit similar qualities, which are integral to the forms they utilize. The bracing wit and centrifugal irony of Jonathan Swift; the exquisite stylings of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater; the magisterial poise of T. S. Eliot; the lyrical brightness of Virginia Woolf; the hybridizing Black church aphoristic wit of James Baldwin; the vivid polyphony of Zora Neale Hurston – these are the adumbrations of the essay as a kind of writing that counteracts the prevailing episteme. The foils in these cases, the shadowy figurations of the modern episteme, can be found in Swift’s Grub Street Hack,49 who produces the aeolian hot air of the heard words and regurgitated formulae of mass print; in the ‘monstrous worship of facts’ decried by Wilde;50 in Woolf’s ‘masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency’ with its orderliness and hierarchies;51 in the blind-eyed white supremacist order and tidiness of the ‘European vision of the universe’ as exposed by Baldwin.52 This tradition’s status in the United States composition classroom – where, as I have noted, the essay remains a prominent and rather high stakes curricular genre for students both as writers and as readers – finds itself increasingly marginalized, as Nicole B. Wallack has pointed out, not only by efforts outside of writing studies to increase emphases on skills training and job preparation but also by a field that is itself ever more turning toward ‘rhetorical and discursive awareness’ as an organizing principle.53 As writing studies becomes increasingly self-promotional in its aims – endeavoring to become a discipline whose goal is to teach itself as a discipline, as is evident, for example, in Writing about Writing approaches – greater attention is paid to questions of specialized and academic discourses at the expense of more popular forms. Importantly, these academic and specialized discourses also include those discourses enraptured by the forms of capitalist-liberal thinking that seek to appropriate the modern classroom as a space for the perpetuation and indoctrination of students into what one of Bernard Stiegler’s interpreters has called the ‘capitalization of life’: where all technology, science, nature, processes, thought and activity become absorbed into cycles of production, commodification and consumption.54 Just as art, even that which explicitly aims to resist the control of cultural production, can be commodified or co-opted into a larger process of capitalization of thoughts, feelings and ways of being, so too can an essay tradition whose ultimate cultural potential has been to open up anarchic temporary autonomous zones, spaces of free play and childlike exploration, dialogical ambivalence and multifaceted expression, be

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assimilated into the broader stream of enervating, monopolizing capitalization, which can mobilize such values in terrifyingly efficient ways toward the ends of exploitative commerce. To give just one example: can we be certain that the ‘home-cosmographic’ dimensions of the essay, which have spurred explorations and thickenings of the self that have been unquestionably positive, cannot also be re-engineered by capitalism to advance its project of colonializing the self precisely in its increasingly complex interiority, about which we have been warned by Ben Agger and others?55 The danger of backsliding is real, especially to the extent that the essay as a form drifts toward the conventional and formulaic and away from the ‘interstitial’ positioning that Rachel Blau DuPlessis rightly sees as proper to it.56 If our composition classrooms, then, face the very real possibility of becoming factories for the corporatization of the student, assembly lines for the production of corporate agents, is there any hope for another way? I am suggesting here that such a way is at least envisionable, if nonetheless ever less possible amid seemingly growing mechanisms of oppression. Fortunately, within writing studies, there are many encouraging voices that offer pathways forward, although the power structures of the academy promise to undermine such efforts at every turn. Those scholars, like Douglas Hesse, John Schilb, Deborah Holdstein, John Brereton and Cinthia Gannett, among many others, who seek to blur rather than harden disciplinary boundaries between literary criticism and writing would ultimately sabotage the professionalizing trajectories of current curricula and of the encroaching corporatese of the academy and our composition classrooms (and in this way, we can see the composition/literary studies divide as itself a manifestation of the neoliberal turn). The advocacy for the essay as a form that is dynamic and dialogical, that ‘may offer multiple perspectives on its subject, weigh alternative (even contradictory) points of view, broaden rather than narrow one’s vision’57 by those such as Paul Heilker, Wendy Bishop, Kurt Spellmeyer and Nicole B. Wallack provides new stimuli for curricular design and instruction. Similarly, Patrick Sullivan’s work on creativity and Adam Banks’s call for funk, flight and freedom in the comp classroom, while very different from each other, are motivated by the same spirit, as is Byron Hawk’s counter-history of composition that explores vitalism.58 What is more, Victor Villanueva’s and, more recently, Romeo García’s calls for decolonializing the humanities and composition studies in the United States – for opening the fields to equity and diversity of voices, traditions and perspectives – can also be applied to the discursive practices of essay writing.59 The triumph of transparent discourse that I have been tracing in these pages can easily be reread with this lens, for example, as a history of the colonization of prose by whiteness. Instead of an essay that co-opts, or is co-opted by, the platform of neoliberal ideology, I would aim for a composition classroom that makes room for a kind of writing that itself makes room, we could say. It would not at all be a discourse devoid of reason, but rather one sufficiently capacious to welcome Pascal’s reasons of the heart into its dialogue of voices,60 more a style, a way of being in the world akin to anarchist Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, spaces of alternative existence and resistance that open however temporarily on a world which seems to have monopolized all possible manner of expression and action. The essay would then be a neutralizing discourse, to borrow again Barthes’s conception – refusing closure, baffling the episteme.

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Notes   1. Of course, the essay has been a formative space for US students going back much earlier. For example, see Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession, rev. ed. with a new chapter by Wallace Douglas (1976; repr., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).   2. Charles Bazerman, A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action, vol. 1 (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2013), 24.   3. This goal is widely assumed beyond the field of writing studies as justifying the usefulness of the composition course. Within writing studies, it is no less a motivating concern, as is evident in the rise of Teaching for Transfer (TFT) approaches. For example, see Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson and Kara Taczak, Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014).   4. Richard Fulkerson, ‘Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity’, College Composition and Communication 41, no. 4 (1990): 409–29 (410–11).   5. Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 314, emphasis in original.   6. Useful as a lens, Foucault’s concept of the episteme is illustrated by means of a periodization whose terminology or historical configurations I will not follow precisely. Instead, I will be considering a longue durée of modernity’s morphology and development that, while not necessarily incompatible with Foucault’s, is nonetheless different. For connections between Foucault and the Annales school of the longue durée, see Gérard Noiriel, ‘Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion’, Journal of Modern History 66, no. 3 (1994): 547–68.   7. See Aaron Aquilina, ‘Margins and Marginality: Jean Genet and the Queer Essay’ (137–50) and Allen Durgin, ‘Wallace Stevens, Audre Lorde and the Queer Performativity of the Essay’ (197–212), in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics, and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); and David Lazar, ‘Queering the Essay’, in Occasional Desire: Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 61–67.   8. ‘Interview: Terry Eagleton’, Times Higher Education, January 8, 2015, https://www. timeshighereducation.com/features/interview-terry-eagleton/2017733.article.   9. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 10. Ibid., 181–82. 11. For example, see Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, eds., Composition in the Age of Austerity (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016); Bruce Horner, Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008); and Jonathan Alexander, ed., ‘The Political Economies of Composition Studies’, special issue, College Composition and Communication 68, no. 1 (September 2016). 12. Donna Strickland, The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011). 13. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 180. 14. Ibid., 180–81. 15. Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 16. Ibid., 1–4. 17. If Foucault foresees the diachronic transformational potential of epistemic structures, I would argue that the essay also provides an example of the possibility for synchronic dissonance

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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kevin rulo within discrete epistemic moments. See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2003). Nicholas Royle, Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). See also the distinction between the tensional pairing of ‘essay’ (genre/centripetal) and ‘essayistic’ (mode/centrifugal) in Mario Aquilina, introduction to Essay at the Limits, 1–17. In outlining the more centrifugal, anarchic potential of essay writing, I mean something akin to what Réda Bensmaïa has characterized as the essay’s propensity to breed ‘“chaos” rather than synthesis’ (quoted in ibid., 8), except that anarchy in its theoretical tradition evokes not chaos, as is sometimes mistakenly believed, but instead an order without imposition, an improvisational and transversal medley of expression that is nonetheless productive of its own harmonies. James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, 2nd ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996), 156; Ron Scollon and Suzanne B. K. Scollon, Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981). Theresa Lillis and Joan Turner, ‘Student Writing in Higher Education: Contemporary Confusion, Traditional Concerns’, Teaching in Higher Education 6, no. 1 (2001): 57–68 (58, 62–63); Theresa Lillis, The Sociolinguistics of Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). For the Western roots of this essayist, transparent discourse, see David Olson, ‘From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing’, Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 3 (1977): 257–81. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (orig. pub. in French, 1960; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 54. For a variation on the ‘three Cs’, there is C–B–S style (Clarity–Brevity–Sincerity). See Paul Butler, Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 51–53. Abdulla Al-Dabbagh, ‘Globalism and the Universal Language’, English Today 21, no. 2 (2005): 3–12. On these larger historical processes, see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 132–39. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, with an introduction by Stefan Collini, Canto Edition (1959; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Maria Tsiapera and Garon Wheeler, The Port-Royal Grammar: Sources and Influences (Münster: Nodus, 1993). Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), ix. John W. Yolton, ed., The Locke Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 162. Francis Bacon, quoted in Ryan J. Stark, ‘From Mysticism to Skepticism: Stylistic Reform in Seventeenth-Century British Philosophy and Rhetoric’, Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 4 (2001): 322–34 (323, 327). Francis Bacon, quoted in ibid., 327. Royal Society, quoted in ibid., 326. Robert Boyle, quoted in ibid., 328. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 324. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The Puritans (New York: American Book Company, 1938); Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford, ‘Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism’, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 13, no. 4 (1995): 401–41.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

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See also this immensely valuable volume, to which the present chapter is indebted: Kathryn T. Flannery, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Stark, ‘Mysticism to Skepticism’, 330. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu and Paul Kei Matsuda, eds., Cross-Language Relations in Composition (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). See Jean-Claude Michéa, L’empire du moindre mal: Essai sur la civilisation libérale (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). Ibid., 15–20, 29–30. See also Richard Ohmann, ‘Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language’, College English 41, no. 4 (1979): 390–97. For an account that complicates ideals of access and writing, see Theresa M. Lillis, Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (New York: Routledge, 2001). M. Aquilina, introduction to Essay at the Limits, 10. G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 34. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (152). Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 176. Barthes’s Neutre also implies the idea of the ‘neuter’, the third term between the masculine/ feminine binary. M. Aquilina, introduction to Essay at the Limits, 10. Stark, ‘Mysticism to Skepticism’, 327. Jonathan Swift, ‘A Tale of a Tub’, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–103. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in The Decay of Lying and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 1–38 (8). Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, in The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, ed. David Bradshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–10 (7). James Baldwin, ‘On Being White . . . and Other Lies’, in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kean (New York: Vintage, 2010), 166–70 (166). Nicole B. Wallack, Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2017), 13. See Ross Abbinnett’s chapter of that name, in The Thought of Bernard Stiegler: Capitalism, Technology and the Politics of Spirit (London: Routledge, 2018), 64–89. See Ben Agger, ‘Adventures in Capitalism’, in The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 98–123. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘f-Words: An Essay on the Essay’, American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 15–45. Paul Heilker, quoted in Wallack, Crafting Presence, 13. Patrick Sullivan, ‘The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom’, College Composition and Communication 67, no. 1 (2015): 6–34; Adam Banks, ‘2015 CCCC Chair’s Address: Ain’t No Walls Behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom’, College Composition and Communication 67, no. 2 (2015): 267–79; Byron Hawk, A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Victor Villanueva Jr, ‘Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community’, JAC 17, no. 2 (1997): 183–90; Romeo García, ‘Decoloniality and the Humanities: Possibilities and Predicaments’, Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 19, no. 3 (2020): 303–17. See Pascal’s assertion that ‘[t]he heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’, in Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 2003), [423].

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12 Commonplace Mysteries: Soaring on the Wings of Desire Pat C. Hoy

The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can. — Lewis Thomas1 In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. — Anne Carson2

I

magine a woman in hot pursuit of an elusive idea, a woman stopped dead in her tracks in Amsterdam, seized unexpectedly by a painting: The quality of the draughtsmanship, the brush strokes in thin oils, had a Renaissance beauty, but the fearful and compelling thing about the picture was its modernity. Here was a figure without a context, in its own context, a haunted woman in blue robes pulling a huge moon face through a subterranean waterway.3

Jeanette Winterson wondered what she was to do as she stood transfixed in silent obedience to the painting’s call. Shaken by her experience, Winterson fled to the comfort and safety of a nearby bookshop, seeking shelter in familiar things. She had intended to leave Amsterdam the next day but extended her stay to visit the city’s museums, where she found two things of note as she faced her own anxiety: ‘The paintings were perfectly at ease. I had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb.’4 From selected books about visual art, Winterson hoped to acquire a language that would not only allow her to reason with herself about the power of the arresting image and her personal reaction to it but would also give her a way to think about the image itself, the painting as painting. She had fallen into the gap between knowing and not knowing, but instead of walking away in frustration, she persevered. Later, Winterson wrote a book grounded in this experience – a book not just about paintings but about art in general and our personal relationship to it. Art Objects reveals how we can think of objects such as books, paintings, essays and novels. But, in a more intriguing way, the title challenges us to realize that art of any kind objects

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to being ignored; calls out to us to pay attention, to expand our personal horizons and deepen our understanding. After the Amsterdam experience and after her book, Winterson bought a painting by Massimo Rao, the artist who had created the ‘haunted woman in blue robes’. ‘Since that day’, she writes, ‘I have been filling my walls with new light.’5 What is so valuable about Winterson’s story is that she was compelled to reveal the consequences of that mysterious encounter. She demonstrates to us and our writing students the importance of those moments when we are fatally attracted to an image – or to a knowledge gap – that summons us, calls to us, demands a response. Without that kind of gripping encounter, we are unlikely ever to know what can happen in our minds when the personal and the intellectual collide and set us on a chase. It follows that our pedagogy should lead students into these rich personal encounters. Without them, other beginnings are likely to result in lackluster efforts to fulfill just another writing requirement.

The Whirl of Essaying Pedagogy, for me, is a word of enormous promise. Before retiring, I had been fascinated by that promise during the thirty-five years I taught writing. In our writing program, pedagogy was one of the four linguistic coins of the realm, along with evidence, idea and essay. Focused on student writing, we were deeply interested in how we learn, in how we acquire knowledge and use it in highly effective ways. But pedagogy turned out to be just as interesting as epistemology. Pedagogy: The function or work of a teacher; teaching. The art or science of teaching. It is what we teachers do as we veer toward the practical. We work in utils, utilitarians that we must be. And yet there is another even more intriguing aspect of teaching writing. Much of the work is grounded in essential mysteries that we cannot teach by professing. We learn about these mysteries through practice, through exciting discoveries about the mind’s independent powers. The pedagogy exhumes the mysteries and sets them as well as us in motion. During my years as a writing program director, our focus was on the essay – the product toward which everything inclined, the target toward which our work progressed. It was in many ways the most fundamental mystery behind our calling. And yet we aimed to keep the target in mind but out of sight – to keep the mind yearning. Essay. Not the five-paragraph one akin to an army field order. Not the asserting, declaring one. We had in mind an exploratory, inquisitive essay that turns on itself again and again, surprises even the writer in the process of writing. At the core of the process, at the core of the pedagogy, despite its practical and utilitarian nature, we discovered things one can learn only by doing. The mysteries arise as the mind works to create meaning, as it moves from nothing but evidence to a scintillating idea about it and, finally, to the essay itself. Having served for years in the US Army, mingling West Point teaching with tours of duty in Korea and Vietnam, I became wary of tightly constructed linear arguments that seemed always to force the moment to a crisis as they moved toward seemingly airtight conclusions. I sought in those days a better way of expressing supple and

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complex ideas – a spiraling, circular way of knowing and writing, something more akin to Eros than Ares. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Cardinal Newman captures the essence of such maneuvering in a single sentence: We know,   not by a direct and simple vision,   not at a glance,   but,     as it were,     by piecemeal and accumulation,     by a mental process,      by going round an object,     by the comparison,        the combination,           the mutual correction,              the continual adaptation,                 of many partial notions,     by the employment,        concentration,          and            joint action               of many faculties                and                 exercises of mind.6 Going round an object, observing it in its entirety, coming to terms with its inherent complexity by the joint action of those many faculties and exercises of mind – that approach satisfied my desire for a wayward reasoning process that would in turn lead to a complementary written form of expression that would be both idiosyncratic and persuasive. William Butler Yeats’s summons in ‘The Second Coming’ affords an apt metaphor.7 We need only visualize that upward-spiraling, inverted cone to understand the falcon’s yearning for freedom. Its circling effort to escape the falconer has become my nominal sense of a stimulating, robust idea in the making; so too does the spiraling flight seem a natural counter response to restraint, a reminder of both a human kinship and a lasting image of a bird’s soaring on the wings of suppressed desire. Tethered in the most tenuous way to the falconer at the gyre’s point of origin, the soaring bird gives us reason to think of a writer’s holding on for dear life, grounded but being taken aloft in both mind and spirit by an invigorating idea. That image – a lasting approximation of a long-standing human desire to capture the ineffable – reminds us that the essence of essaying itself is nothing more nor less than the pursuit of desire, the attempt to capture a specter, to hold it in the mind and transform it into language, to make it known.

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Essaying provides a protean space for accommodating whatever we find in the gaps between knowing and not knowing. The essay’s elasticity, its shape-shifting accommodation, allows room for rumination and investigative journeys that take us round about, following a path that can be at once linear and recursive, logical and idiosyncratic.

Conceiving Relationships In his essay ‘The Uncommon Reader’, George Steiner helps us understand that a wide variety of texts can capture us just as that Massimo painting seized Winterson. Steiner emphasizes the reader’s part of the bargain. But his analysis, like Winterson’s, begins with an image – Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Le Philosophe lisant – which serves as Steiner’s prism. Through it, he teaches us how to read uncommonly well, just as he teaches us indirectly that reading itself sets in motion and fuels the creative force that engenders our search for meaning. Steiner’s essay is an extended meditation on the various objects within Chardin’s painting: the reader himself, his clothes, the book being read, the medallions in front of the book, the quill and the hourglass to our left and the dramatic backdrop. I will focus on the quill, which for Steiner ‘crystallizes the primary obligation of response’.8 Reader and text are ‘answerable’ to one another. Steiner considers that reciprocal process a ‘primal fact: to read well is to be read by that which we read’.9 Therein lie two fundamental mysteries: the text’s calling and our responding. Our personal response to those mysteries is rooted in an inward mental action, a commingling of mind and personality that sets in motion a deeply personal act of meaning-making, engendered, as it is, by the text being read and an archetypal urge to understand – an urge we readers and writers cannot do without. In ‘Real Presences’, another of Steiner’s essays, he has more to say about that symbiotic relationship that obligates us to ‘read as if the text before us had meaning. This will not be a single meaning if the text is a serious one, if it makes us answerable to its force of life.’10 Responding to that textual force is like dealing with a conditional wager, a ‘leap into sense’ that is grounded in both hermeneutics and what Steiner calls ‘assumptions of transcendence’. He makes clear that when we read for meaning, ‘we do so as if the text (the piece of music, the work of art) incarnates . . . a real presence of significant being’. ‘These are not occult notions’, Steiner insists:11 They are of the immensity of the commonplace. They are perfectly pragmatic, experiential, repetitive, each and every time a melody comes to inhabit us, to possess us even unbidden, each and every time a poem, a passage of prose seizes upon our thought and feelings, enters into the sinews of our remembrance and sense of the future.12 Steiner mingles mystery and obligation: ‘To be “indwelt” by music, art, literature, to be made responsible, answerable to such habitation as a host is to a guest – perhaps unknown, unexpected – at evening, is to experience the commonplace mystery of a real presence.’ And then he returns us to the commonplace: ‘The experience itself is one we are thoroughly at home with – an informing idiom – each and every time we live a text, a sonata, a painting.’13 Each and every time we live a text. And each and every time we write one, we too should aim to create such a living presence – a notion or a force that forms around the

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words, exceeding them in ways that move us toward meaning, toward conversation, toward life itself. To imagine that students cannot write such texts is to deny them the opportunity to do so. But doing so depends on that initial seizure and a fervent desire on the writer’s part to create meaning, to develop and substantiate an idea that evolves from one’s personal and interactive relationship with the evidence – whether reading and responding to someone else’s text or making one’s own.

Pedagogical Reflections Among the important things that we are doing in this essay, besides coming to terms with commonplace mysteries, is placing those mysteries along the expected arc of an essay’s development – following a meaningful sequence from seizure to essay or, more precisely, from evidence to idea to essay. As we approach the transition into the second phase of that writing journey from idea to essay, I want to pause for a backward glance – considering as we do what goes on in my own classroom to engender that personal, inward mental action so vital to all of this essaying work. Moving into the classroom now, we transition from theory to practice, using a language that is, on occasion, more instructive than conversational. Beginning on the first day of classes, I ask students what they think is required of them to move from evidence to idea (during the first part of that journey toward essay), and we imagine the possibilities. The whiteboard looks similar each time a new group of students struggles to understand these needs: • a text or a body of texts related to the chosen subject of inquiry • a growing awareness of the difference between the pursuit of an idea and their own habitual declaration of a thesis statement (sometimes derived from an act of conjuring that bears little resemblance to the commonplace mysteries we are considering in this essay) • an awareness of the meaning of logical, orderly thinking (and the difference between that and their own idiosyncratic and productive flights of fancy). My favorite answer to this question about what it takes to leap from evidence to idea – an answer that students never offer on their own – is a really good, engaged mind. By the time we consider these questions together, students have already begun to read and write about a small group of texts that I have selected for study. The texts are chosen to set minds and writing in motion. These texts are somehow related to one another but not like-minded, and the relationships among them are unlikely to become clear without astute, imaginative reading and an exploratory way of writing about them. The pedagogy throughout the course is deceptively simple – not simpleminded, of course, but simple on the surface. Nothing tricky, nothing misleading. I rarely, if ever, speak about the commonplace mysteries; they manifest themselves through the work. The exercises in and out of class are designed to turn those selected texts over to the students, to help them discover connections and create a conversation among the texts. The search for idea is primary – because nothing but an idea can generate the work that follows. No idea, no essay – our only hard and fast rule.

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There is nothing quite as exciting as watching students struggle to discover what a real idea is, how ideas differ from what they have learned to think of as ‘provable’ thesis statements, and how such ideas begin to form and seize the mind in odd and unusual ways. My aim is to help students discover those ideas, while continually experimenting with ways to engender them. Both the rhythm of the work and the emphasis on relationships direct students away from the mechanical construction of summaries created out of context and the simplistic comparison/contrast work that dwells primarily on patterns instead of the creation of ideas. • One text. Two texts. Three texts. Contexts. • I ask students to select one text from the initial group of assigned texts. Part One. Read the text to learn two things: what it says and how it says it. Begin with ‘how’: identify crucial words, look into the structure of the essay by diagramming it into meaningful sections; identify each section with a two-word title. Part Two. Write out in no fewer than three sentences what you consider to be the essay’s idea. Do this writing for someone who has not read the essay. • Subsequently, I ask students to figure out which text among the initial group is a suitable companion to the first text. Write at least three well-developed paragraphs about how one of those two texts helps you understand the other; two or three double-spaced pages, maximum. The underlying aim: to enlighten a reader about ideas at play between the two texts. • I move toward grounding and involvement by asking students to create a third text from their own lived experiences. Develop a scene that will establish your own relationship to the evolving idea. The scene should not explain the relationship between your life and the text; its purpose is to reveal the relationship – to render a moment from your life that has something to do with what you’re thinking about – and to recreate that moment as a scene (two or three double-spaced pages) so that readers can enter it. • Finally, I ask students to select yet another written text, letting them choose it from anywhere. Add to your texts a fourth one. Using those assembled texts as you see fit, write a letter to the smartest friend you know (not in the class). In the letter, introduce your evolving idea and try to deepen your friend’s understanding of it. Aim for three pages, double-spaced. (Reminder: the friend has not read the texts and should not be told that this is a class assignment.) These preliminary exercises encourage intellectual play and experimentation, just as they call for the imaginative discovery of textual relationships. The letter and scene anchor and ground students’ work in ways that require personal involvement. But the most important characteristic of the design ensures that students begin thinking and writing about texts in creative ways from the outset.

Images, Imaginal and Visual As we move deeper into the creative journey – the more concerted effort to move from idea to essay – the work becomes more complex and more challenging. The nascent idea, gleaned from that small group of initial texts, will, of necessity, have to be further

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developed and transferred from the mind to the page. The practical work of drafting should, of course, keep those student minds in motion. But instead of staying with exploration, students almost always resort to previously acquired habits. The fear of leaping makes them do it. They endeavor to line up the exercises as if drafting requires little more than mathematical addition. Instead of seeing the drafting process as an opportunity for more serious thinking, idea becomes thesis as exploration yields to declamation. Always, we discover a need for deeper reading and more meaningful reflection as students continue to learn that evidence does not speak for itself. At the heart of this longer developmental process, and central to it, is the work of the mind’s eye. When that eye sees, it does not necessarily see a pictorial thing. Carl G. Jung suggests that we know everything we know by way of images, that images are closely akin to, if not the same as, ideas: ‘Every psychic process is an image and an “imagining,” otherwise no consciousness could exist.’14 Ideas are conceptions, expressions of meaning. They tend to be complex, subject more to analysis and amplification than to proof – and as one of my students reminded me, always subject to further analysis. There is something both clarifying and evocative about a stimulating idea, but something unfinished as well. So, what the mind’s eye is seeing as it conceives ideas is not at the outset a clear, pictorial image, or even a finished thought. We are likely to see instead what Newman calls a ‘partial notion’.15 James Hillman, the archetypal psychologist, argues that an image need not be perceived only ‘as a picture [that] can tend to become optical and intellectual and distanced’.16 If we think of image as ‘context, mood, scene’, we can begin to understand Hillman’s claim that ‘images hold us; we can be in the grasp of an image’. Or an idea. When the mind is actually at work, developing ideas, trying to figure out what the evidence means and how to use it, the metaphorical act of seeing rewards the writer with additional insights. What we see along the way becomes a more compelling image of thought, an evolving notion of what the evidence means. Without that evolution, writers do not advance intellectually; they acquire no deeper understanding of the idea. The evolving mental image itself is full of energy, full of life. Meaning is there for the taking, but the taking most often requires more reading, more writing – not to prove a point but to improve one’s understanding. These imaginal conceptions are wedded to our own creativity. They do not come to us from out there; instead, they come from within. No teacher should give such an image to a student unless the aim is codependency. Students have to learn to conceive these more complex notions for themselves and their readers.

Transfiguring Representations In Feeling and Form, Susanne K. Langer – theorizing about art and painting – sheds light on these conceptual and translational activities. She focuses on the difference between an object in the world outside the mind and the image the mind creates in the object’s stead. Langer refers to that inner image (which eventually manifests itself on the canvas as a painting) as a ‘semblance’ or an ‘illusion’. She tells us that ‘[a]n image in this sense, something that exists only for perception, abstracted from the physical and causal order, is the artist’s creation’. She calls such an image ‘the bearer of an idea’.17 Langer’s idea of image complements Hillman’s, reminding us that the mind

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creates, through active imagination, a semblance of what the evidence and idea mean to the writer. Sometimes as we consider a body of evidence, the conception (or interpretation) comes to us in a flash. At other times, meaning eludes us when we are concentrating most intently. Jung considers the creative process ‘a living thing implanted in the human psyche’, an ‘autonomous complex . . . which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness’.18 So it stands to reason that we cannot always control this process. And yet without our active participation as searching readers, without the application and personal involvement of a curious and open mind, the evidence will hold on to its secrets.

From Parts to Whole The mind, during this protracted process, works in curious ways. Too much work, too much reliance on that ‘hierarchy of consciousness’, and the idea resists; too little structure and we are left with something resembling stream of consciousness. Classroom work and writing experience tell us that the mind is often more productive when playing within boundaries: spiraling while loosely tethered within a gyre; exploring within an essay’s three-part structure; moving toward an essay’s completion fully aware that its internal shape is changing as the mind searches diligently for a more holistic representation of the evolving idea. Always, something is missing; something just out of sight, beckoning. Frank Kermode cautions us that we are most often seeking to make sense of the parts (the assembled evidence) before the whole has been completed. We are of necessity always trying to create an essay from the many stories, or an idea from the many pieces of evidence. Kermode calls our attention to how the mind goes about transcending the limitations imposed by such absence – when we have some of the parts but not the whole of them. To locate ourselves as a writer within this routine but seldom-understood process, pause for a second to consider this essay, the one you are reading, the one I am still writing. Recall that Jeanette Winterson set us in motion, but also remember the various writers who have subsequently appeared: John Henry Newman, William Butler Yeats, George Steiner, Carl G. Jung, James Hillman, Susanne K. Langer and now Frank Kermode. I have represented each of them in different ways for different reasons; together they have helped me clarify ideas related to the commonplace mysteries, but each of them has also reminded me, during the writing, of other things I want to say to you before this essay can be complete. The evidence itself has been generative. My writing somehow awakened those writers who were lying dormant in memory. But at other times, the sources came when I called. And on other occasions, they simply appeared unbidden at a specific time in my drafting when I least expected them. When they did appear, for whatever reason, I listened and tried to understand their intrusion. Every writer, aware or not, replies to what Steiner calls ‘the articulate density of his [or her] own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.’19 The echoes among the remembered texts reverberate in our heads as we write, pushing us to attend to the connections, beckoning us as we write, enticing us to respect and make use of the mind’s gifts, of memory’s plenty.

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When Kermode speaks of making a whole of the many parts, he calls on Friedrich Schleiermacher, a pioneer in hermeneutics, to help us understand how the mind deals with that commonplace conundrum: ‘the whole is made up of parts we cannot understand until it exists, and we cannot see the whole without understanding the parts. Something, therefore, must happen.’ Kermode refers to that something as ‘a leap, a divination . . . whereby we are enabled to understand both part and whole’.20 We learn through practice to trust those powers of intuitive perception. But Kermode is not hesitant to remind us that our intuition also ‘needs support from knowledge’.21

Eros and Desire I am still thinking schematically and specifically about the movement from idea to essay, thinking about the many ways the mind engenders and sustains that movement – sometimes consciously but oft times according to its own willful curiosity. Those mysterious activities that continue to surprise and assist us as we think and write stem from a desire to better understand the elusive idea fomenting in the mind, reminding us as we pursue our idea that something is missing. Working in the gap between knowing and not knowing, we are always like Winterson – fleeing ignorance while pursuing knowledge on the coattails of desire. Long before I read Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, I had for years encouraged my students in the Tisch School of the Arts to develop a deeper understanding of the erotic. I wanted them to begin to see how desire plays into the development of ideas – how the pursuit of knowledge feeds on a lack, a human need for fulfillment and understanding. Carson brings her book-length study of Eros the Bittersweet to a close by issuing a challenging imperative: ‘Imagine a city where there is no desire.’ Such a city, she explains, is a ‘city of no imagination’, a static city whose inhabitants live lives devoid of what Aristotle calls phantasia –the fuel of imagination, which ‘stirs minds to movement by its power of representation; in other words, imagination prepares desire by representing the desired object as desirable to the mind of the desirer’. The story, the mind’s fiction, ‘must make one thing clear, namely, the difference between what is present/actual/known and what is not, the difference between the desirer and the desired’.22 Having dwelled at length on Sappho and matters of love in her book, Carson decides to bring Sappho and Socrates together in the ending, along with Aristotle, to extend the reach of her study. What she has in mind is the ‘wooing of knowledge and the wooing of love’.23 Recalling Sappho’s fragment 31, Carson reminds us of Sappho’s ‘erotic triangle’ where the ‘components of desire all become visible at once in a sort of electrification’.24 Aided by Aristotle’s conception of phantasia, Carson reasons that ‘every desiring mind reaches out toward its object by means of an imaginative action’, creating with the help of Eros a ‘fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge.’25 For Socrates, the wooing of knowledge and the wooing of love collapse into a single concept. In his mind, a search for wisdom is a search for ‘erotic things’.26 Deducing what he meant, Carson reminds us that he loved to ask questions and hear answers,

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loved the very thrill of watching them ‘unfold out of one another in a structure opening down through the logos like a spiralling road . . . or a vertigo. He loved, that is, the process of coming to know.’27 Carson argues that Eros is located precisely at the intersection of two principles of reasoning. First, ‘the reasoning mind must perceive and bring together certain scattered particulars, in order to make clear by definition the thing it wishes to explain.’ But this collecting activity is accompanied by a dividing activity that identifies ‘classes’ and lets us see ‘where the natural joints are’.28 Carson belabors these Socratic principles: ‘we think by projecting sameness upon difference, by drawing things together in a relation or idea while at the same time maintaining the distinctions between them’. She reveals that a ‘thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge . . . but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge.’ Negotiating the erotic space between is ‘tricky’ but necessary if we are to move beyond what we already know.29 Desire fuels movement. Closing her inquiry, Carson reminds us that ‘the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story’.30 Without desire there is nothing to pursue; no space into which a risky Eros might light a fire and fan a flame.

Stories Begetting Stories Every writer’s fascinating play with idea and sense-making must eventually yield a satisfying shape, a meaningful representation of that multiform mental action so essential for meaning-making. In the final rounds of drafting, writers must grapple not only with the semblance of what the mind is seeing but also with its justification, for the essayist – unlike novelists, poets and painters – has a pressing obligation to persuade. To round out this – our final sense-making phase of the journey – I turn to a published story of my own, one that finds me on a forty-five-foot sailboat negotiating the waters around the British Virgin Islands. I want to reveal a final mystery about how images can conspire to create meaning. *** I have spent most of the morning at the helm, on a deck bench, on my back, looking up at the sails, looking occasionally across the bow to make sure no other boat is in my path.31 My sailing method seems to suit the man in charge. I have chosen a general direction – toward a destination – but my aim is not to get there by the most direct route; it is, as Annie Dillard might say, to sail on solar wind. So I am on my back, looking up at the jib, determined to sail the wind as fast as I can for the sheer pleasure of it. I feel the wind on my face, sense her power and her direction. I also feel the wind and the sea come together as I feel tautness at the helm, the lift, an exhilarating shift in the speed of the boat. As I sail, I feel the sea pull and haul on the boat. And yet I relax into the mystery of it all, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that we are moving forward while going roundabout.

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In my head, I am seized by something almost as lovely as the rush of love. A cacophony of voices chatter to me out of the depths of memory, and I want to tell my fellow sailors what I hear – I want to tell them why I feel so good riding on the sea’s power and feel so ill at ease in her depths, I want to talk about Conrad and the ‘destructive element’, I want to explore the way other people’s books and ideas limit and entangle my own sexual metaphor of the sea, I want to come to terms with that childhood experience when my dad jokingly threatened to cut me up for fish bait and throw me in the water, scaring me half out of my wits . . . want to talk about William Carlos Williams’s ‘Death / is not the end of it’ – but I say little.32 Amidst all the memories, Robert Scholes, a fellow rhetor, speaks loudest, and I hear him reminding me that moments such as this ‘must be seized’. ‘When digested’, he had claimed, ‘they become the very body of our consciousness, as the food we eat becomes our flesh.’33 I want to tell my secrets, but my friends on board aren’t with me. My experiences at the moment are not theirs. Yet they sense my exuberance, and I babble about something primordial. My fellow voyagers like the word. During the next four or five days of sailing, Scholes keeps pestering my imagination. He had set my mind whirling at a writing conference in Seattle months earlier. As the foundation for a talk about reading and writing, Scholes had chosen three images – a painting (The Education of the Virgin), a personal experience on a small sailboat and a photograph (Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath). What unified his talk and made those images so powerful was the way he read them against his own life, showing us what they said to each other and to us about mothering and love and human development. Nowhere was his point clearer than in his account of the boat trip he and his wife had taken down the Sakonnet River toward Rhode Island Sound. ‘What had happened was a simple thing, really’, he says. ‘We began to encounter the great ground swells that come from far out in the ocean and rise higher as the bottom underneath them begins to affect their progress. These swells were gentle but immensely powerful, and they raised and lowered our little boat with awesome ease. This was a rhythm’, he goes on to say, a rhythm that ‘whispered to us of primal things and we understood what it was saying. It was like returning to a state before birth and listening to your mother’s heart beat, pumping life into your own arteries as well, for it spoke of life and death and said that they were one.’34 Scholes’s storytelling was spellbinding, but busy as he was creating the story of his own life with the chosen images, he left out another story that was equally intriguing to me – the story about the unspoken, subterranean language that had in the first place connected in his mind those three images. That mysterious language was what I, as a writer, wanted to know more about. Gripped by Scholes’s images, I went back that day to my hotel room to be alone, and I began to write, began to recreate a part of my own life. Scholes’s three images had become mine even as he talked about them, and I wanted to see how they might continue to work on me. Writing, I began to see that deep in my imagination, those subterranean images have a language of their own, a prelingual language that images speak to themselves – first silently and then verbally through us. That compelling language moves us individually, speaks to us privately and leads us through our selves and beyond into the world of ideas. There on the deck bench in the Caribbean, they led me to a series of images that would eventually provide the organizing principle for a new essay, ‘Conversing with Images’.

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What continues to interest me most about such images is the way they tend to find one another without our prompting, the way an image translated into story often leads to other stories, other texts, ideas. It makes little difference whether those inward glimpses of truth stem from pictorial remnants of experience or the non-pictorial fuzzy conceptions of meaning that form in our minds as we grapple with evidence. If those images seize us, if Eros slips in to excite desire, the rest will follow behind in close order. It goes without saying that if we want to read powerful student writing, we have to help our students discover the images and ideas that lie at the heart of this creative process. But we cannot talk our students into finding them, and even the best of ideas will certainly not arise miraculously from the smoldering evidence. Nothing short of a personal twitch can flame the embers of desire; nothing short of the erotic chase can expose students to their own intelligence, their own idiosyncratic ways of seeing and knowing; and nothing short of essaying itself can attune them to the mind’s enabling mysteries. As I glide into old age, I see more clearly how experience itself turns out to be its own reward, yielding a thing that only it can yield. The appearance of making the writing on the page seem easy is perhaps the grandest illusion of them all; it comes from, and masks, the sweat of a lifetime – it comes gradually, over time, during the journey. It comes along with the sure knowledge that becoming itself is never finished. Nothing is. The first draft is always going to be the first draft. And the many revisions will always follow, but the work itself, performed against the requirements and the grain of time, becomes addictive rather than laborious, resulting in a kind of found freedom for the imagination. The mind, having changed itself during the struggle, has also changed my relationship to the work itself. Eventually, the inevitable problems with language and form seem more like a gift than a curse – an opportunity to play intellectually in search of my own version of truth. At my age, the enveloping whirl of challenges seems always to carry with it a semblance of promise.

Notes   1. Lewis Thomas, ‘The Attic of the Brain’, in Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (New York: Penguin, 1983), 138–42 (141).   2. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 171.   3. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 3.   4. Ibid., 4.   5. Ibid., 21.   6. John Henry Newman, ‘VII. Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill’, in The Idea of a University, with an introduction and notes by Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1960), 114–35 (114).   7. Willian Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 187.   8. George Steiner, ‘The Uncommon Reader (1978)’, in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 1–19 (6).   9. Ibid., 6.

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

George Steiner, ‘Real Presences’, in No Passion Spent, 20–39 (34). Ibid., 35. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 35, italics in original. Carl G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 544, para. 889. 15. Newman, ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation’, 114. 16. James Hillman, ‘Further Notes on Images’, Spring (1978): 152–82 (159). 17. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 47. 18. Carl G. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 75, para. 115, italics in original. 19. Steiner, ‘Uncommon Reader’, 14. 20. Frank Kermode, ‘Divination’, in The Ordering Mirror: Readers and Contexts (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 21–41 (23), italics in original. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 168–69. 23. Ibid., 170. 24. Ibid., 169. 25. Ibid., 169. 26. Ibid., 170. 27. Ibid., 171. 28. Ibid., 171. 29. Ibid., 171. 30. Ibid., 173. 31. This section of the chapter is a condensed and adapted version of Pat C. Hoy II, Instinct for Survival (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 85–88. 32. William Carlos Williams, ‘from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book 1’, in The Selected Poems of Williams Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), 142–51 (146). 33. Robert Scholes, ‘Reading: An Intertextual Activity’, in Protocols of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 1–49 (21). 34. Ibid., 20.

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13 Politics and the English Essay Bruce Robbins

I

n his diary for June 11, 1942, George Orwell records an atrocity. The Germans have massacred all the male inhabitants of the Czech town of Lidice, sent the women to concentration camps, sent the children to be ‘reeducated’, razed the village to the ground and changed its name.1 They have done this because the population of Lidice had harbored the assassins of a high Nazi official, Reinhard Heydrich, who as it turns out (Orwell could not know this at the time) had also been a leading architect of the ‘final solution’ for Europe’s Jews. The announcement comes via the BBC, but it also comes from the Germans themselves, who are obviously not afraid to publicize the slaughter they have committed. Resistance elsewhere will be discouraged. ‘It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing’, Orwell comments, ‘nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment.’2 Orwell was perhaps reminding himself that like the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python, good essays – he was using his diary to collect material for future essays – depend on the weapon of surprise. By rough definition, an atrocity is an act of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence aimed at civilians. Here, what surprises Orwell is that the news of such violence does not give rise to instinctive, universal horror and indignation. Instead, he says, people react according to their pre-existing political loyalties. Political loyalties are so strong that they cannot be overridden even by an atrocity as atrocious as the destruction of a whole village, most of the inhabitants of which could not have had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of Heydrich, however justified we may judge that killing to have been. Simple human decency, confronted by the simple facts, seems unable to suspend partisan loyalties. To Orwell, this failure comes as an especially unpleasant surprise. He wanted to believe in the power of the facts. He based his own politics – socialist politics, as is often forgotten – as well as his strategies for getting his politics across to the unconverted on the assumption that human decency, once put in clear, forceful possession of the facts, is capable of overriding differences of allegiance, whatever their basis, and coming to an independent, fair-minded conclusion. In the twenty-first century, it seems less likely that people will share his assumption – though many will nevertheless share his frustration. If this is the argument that Orwell was preparing, the slaughter at Lidice does not seem an ideal example of it, and that is perhaps why he did not put the event to direct use. Could there really have been, as Orwell grumpily suggests, people around him in England in mid-1942 who were ready to ‘write off all horror stories as “propaganda”’,3 including Nazi horror stories? That seems unlikely.4 Orwell would surely

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have done better to cite some of the earlier atrocities that he lists on the next page of his diary. They are arranged in two columns, the first titled ‘Believed by the Right’, the second ‘Believed by the Left’. In the first column are, for example, atrocities attributed to Sinn Féin and the Bolsheviks; in the second, atrocities attributed to the Black and Tans in Ireland, the Americans in Nicaragua and the British in India.5 The ones Orwell knew best were from British rule in India, where he had served as a military policeman, and from the Spanish Civil War, where he fought for the Left and where each side did indeed point to the atrocities committed by the other while ignoring or justifying those its own partisans had perpetrated. If there is no such thing as a universal sense of decency that would permit everyone, looking at the unadorned specifics of the case, to recognize an atrocity and judge it as it deserves to be judged, we find ourselves in a zone of extreme moral confusion. Above the entrance to that zone, the placard Orwell would like to hang would read something like ‘everything is politics’. By ‘politics’, he means taking sides and doggedly sticking to your own side no matter what. And that in turn means, he suggests, that your side, whichever side it may be, is finally not worth sticking to. Political adhesiveness allows for no space outside itself, yet that space seems morally uninhabitable. As Orwell was to put it four years later in ‘Politics and the English Language’: ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.’6 If certain theorists of the essay have prized the genre for a programmatic inconclusiveness that seems the polar opposite of political commitment, Orwell helps explain their perspective. For him, politics is made up of lies and evasions because it is a region of commitments that are absolute and unwavering. It has no room for the merely exploratory. The essay, as many of its admirers habitually remind us, is etymologically ‘an attempt’, meaning that by its nature it is tentative, modest, provisional – anything but absolutist. If so, then politics is indeed antithetical to it. Orwell makes this dilemma seem inescapable and insuperable. But like many other dilemmas, it is perhaps more apparent than real. We know from his own writings that his political experiences of Burma, Spain and working for the BBC were rich in complexity and ambivalence. Orwell himself cannot have thought there was no way around his dilemma, given that he took up, again and again, the challenge of writing about politics.7 He does not name the attraction that keeps him coming back to politics in spite of the lies and evasions, the folly and the hatred. But it does not seem too much of a stretch to identify that attractive force as the consciousness that what is riding on the struggles happening in the unhappy zone of politics is nothing less than the fate of those one loves. The circle of those one loves takes in more than immediate family and friends, and the life one wants for them. It is not infinite, but it is hard to say where the circle ends, who would be left outside it. Its expansiveness might help clarify why Orwell took the trouble to do so much political writing, why he acted as if it was after all possible to accomplish something as a political writer that was worth accomplishing. In order to escape Orwell’s dilemma, it ought to be enough to look more closely both at what is meant by politics and at what is meant by good writing, essayistic or not. That will reveal what sort of accomplishment has been possible for the political essay and will maybe even leave us wanting to make an attempt of our own. It seems probable that what Orwell was eventually inspired to write after making that diary entry about the massacre at Lidice was ‘Politics and the English Language’,

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an essay that for better or worse has been an inevitable site of pilgrimage for writers (and teachers of writing) seeking enlightenment about the proper connection between politics and prose. There is a visible continuity between the two. But the continuity suggests a problem for the more famous essay. Four years later, when Orwell talks about politics in that essay, he is thinking less about politics in general than about atrocities such as Lidice. And atrocities are not obviously representative of politics. Political theorist William E. Connolly has argued that politics is one of W. B. Gallie’s essentially contested concepts.8 If so, then there is a kind of inherent essayism in politics itself, and we should not expect to arrive at a single definition of politics, any more than of the essay, that will satisfy all parties – no single set of participants, no single kind of issue, no single scale of confrontation that settles once and for all the matter of what politics means. We can, however, discover something about what political discourse is by pointing to certain neighboring kinds of discourse that do not fit comfortably within that category. Where do you go if, like Orwell, you want to escape from politics? Today, the most obvious place is the discourse of human rights. In expressing his astonishment that political alignments determine whether atrocities are or are not recognized as such, Orwell seems to be calling for a turn toward human rights, a category that would only come into its own in the years after his death in 1950, spurred in part by gradually increasing awareness of the Nazi genocide. For the discourse of human rights, atrocity was the definitive phenomenon. In the atrocity, there is no room for the formula ‘it’s complicated’. There are perpetrators and there are victims. It does not matter what either side thought they were fighting for or against or how justified their cause might be. It does not matter whether or to what degree the victims supported or belonged to a given side. The sides and the causes, the kinds and degrees of belonging and the goals or values pursued by each – all this is irrelevant. There is no reason for the writer to undertake a fine-grained close reading of the event, for the particulars of what led the perpetrators and victims to their fatal encounter do not really matter. All that matters is the truth of what happened in the moment itself, a truth that does not suffer from being summarized crudely and abstractly. Like the massacre at Lidice as Orwell presents it, the atrocity is completely transparent, unambiguous, something on which all reasonably decent people should be able to agree, whatever side they are on. A representation of atrocity in the human rights style is, or strives to be, apolitical. For example: Witnesses of such killings of relatives and neighbors, and FDN personnel who have deserted the force, have described in detailed testimonies made available to Amnesty International execution-style killings, in which captives were bound, tortured, and their throats slit by FDN forces. . . . The number of captives tortured and put to death by FDN forces since 1981 is impossible to determine, but it is believed total several hundred.9 The effort here is to give the facts and nothing but the facts, careful not to claim anything that cannot be impartially verified, free of the controversies that would inevitably arise from any account of the whys and wherefores behind the violence. Today, for many people, the category of human rights seems morally incontestable. In this sense, it is a sort of secular throwback to the era of universal religious faith: professions of unbelief in it seem satanic if not utterly inconceivable. Though it

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has been much less powerful in practice than in theory (in this, too, resembling religious faith), human rights practitioners have considerable achievements to their credit. Malefactors have been successfully blamed, shamed and sometimes even held to legal account. It is hard to imagine speaking coherently about the forlorn state of today’s world without aid from the intensely focused indignation that the discourse of human rights can marshal. But does human rights discourse adequately answer Orwell’s complaints about political discourse? Perhaps not. The difficulty is not that literary representations of atrocity would have to be forensic, aiming to approach as close as possible to the precision, impartiality and impersonality of evidence presented in court. The discourse of human rights does not prohibit righteous anger. There is no inevitable contradiction between human rights and that display of authorial sensibility that is often taken to characterize and even define the essay genre. The trouble lies elsewhere. Perversely, the human rights template would seem to ensure that writing about atrocity will be just as partisan as the political writing that Orwell despises, but partisan at a smaller scale. Its partisanship would be microscopic, fragmented, discontinuous. The writer would again assume an absolute division between victims and perpetrators, the good and the evil, but they would do so on a case-by-case basis rather than according to the prior and overriding alignments of Left and Right, parties and nations, one side versus another. By ignoring these alignments, this approach would be able to claim political neutrality. Stylistically, however, it would be anything but neutral. While there would be no overall partisanship, each discrete atrocity would be described in terms that are totally partisan, totally black and white, no shades of gray permitted. As a matter of good or bad writing, this is a formula for the exaggerated clarity of melodrama.10 In ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell does not spend much time objecting to melodrama or worrying about the blindness that might result from the glare of excess illumination. On the contrary, he presents clarity as a self-evident good; it is his preferred alternative to the morally evasive, self-serving fuzziness that to him is the unforgivable sin of political writing. Drawing out the thoughts he had registered in that diary entry, ‘Politics and the English Language’ calls for something like the clear, unambiguous, apolitical discourse of human rights, as in the example above from Amnesty International. And what Orwell targets is not bad writing as such, or even the bad writing that results from strong political loyalties, but more precisely the bad writing that results from strong political loyalties where those loyalties are clearly out of place. The key paragraph begins: ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.’ To judge from his examples, what Orwell means by the indefensible is largely what we would call atrocities: ‘[t]hings like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan’.11 These things ‘can indeed be defended’, the paragraph goes on, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent

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trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.12 Orwell focuses mainly on the Soviet purges and deportations. This focus corresponds to his much-remarked preference for criticizing his allies on the Left rather than his enemies on the Right. This is a sort of generic would-be surprise in the political essay: look at me and admire, the essayist says in effect. At the risk of being branded a turncoat, I am taking my distance even from my closest friends! After so many examples, the surprise is no longer either very surprising or inevitably convincing. Yet it may in fact get at something essential to the genre. More on this below. I cannot quarrel with Orwell’s example of rhetoric that defends the indefensible: While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.13 This is bad political writing. It seems reasonable to ask, nevertheless, whether the only alternative, in the presence of atrocity, is writing that is apolitical – just the facts or the acts, in all their undeniable horror, with a finger pointed unshrinkingly at those who perpetrated those acts, whoever they may be. To begin with, are we sure that the straightforward factual accounts demanded by the discourse of human rights deserve to be considered apolitical? Second and more important: are there not other, preferable ways of writing about atrocity – that is, of writing politically – even at the limits of political solidarity? The rhetoric that Orwell finds or invents to illustrate what is wrong with political writing does its nefarious work by offering a context for Soviet atrocities. Orwell, like the discourse of human rights, is extremely wary of the impulse to contextualize, and it is not hard to see why. Context threatens, sometimes maddeningly, to let the perpetrators off the hook. One context Orwell’s example gives for Soviet misconduct is the ‘transitional’ period – perhaps a way of pointing to the fact that the Soviet Union was immediately invaded by several European armies, the fact that it was fighting a civil war, or (going deeper, and turning more critical) the fact that the Communist Party had never won the support of a majority of Soviet citizens and thus had to fall back on authoritarian brutality. Another context provided is the ‘concrete achievements’ of the Russian people, offered as a supposed balance to the ‘rigours’ they have undergone. Both of these are inadequate at best; the latter seems criminally irresponsible. But the same cannot be said of contextualizing itself. Are we so sure that we never, under any circumstances, want to see our atrocities contextualized? Consider the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s reflections on another of Orwell’s listed atrocities, the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the 1995 introduction to his 1965 book Hiroshima Notes, Oe says that since writing that book – and since receiving the Nobel Prize – he has discovered that the story of Hiroshima is ‘full of ambiguities’. What ambiguities could those be? Not the usual ambiguities raised in the United States,

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like the number of American soldiers who would have died in a projected invasion of Japan. The ambiguities come, Oe says, from adopting an Asian perspective: ‘At the time of writing the essays in this book I was sadly lacking in the attitude and ability needed to recast Hiroshima in an Asian perspective. In that respect I reflected the prevailing Japanese outlook on Hiroshima.’ Since then, however, he has revised his views. ‘I have focused more on Japan’s wars of aggression against Asian peoples, on understanding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as one result of those wars, and on the special hardships suffered by the many Koreans who experienced the atomic bombings.’14 The Korean victims of the atomic bombings and the Chinese and Korean victims of the Japanese wars of aggression in Asia (which brought Korean workers to Hiroshima) are of course contexts that Oe is here adding to the bombing itself. To some extent, these contexts dilute the blame of the United States as perpetrator of what Orwell described, correctly, as an indefensible atrocity. Critics of American militarism and defenders of human rights (overlapping categories) would each have reason to worry that here the accusatory finger is wavering, no longer firmly pointing where it belongs. Yet to ignore this contextualization or the ambiguities to which it responds would be dangerously myopic. Not because to do so would be to refuse moral credit to the courage and insight of Oe, who in contextualizing is taking a stand against the conduct of his own country – much the same gesture of surprising self-distancing, one might say, that Orwell makes vis-à-vis the Left. The more significant point is political. Oe is redirecting the attention of his countrymen to the militarist, imperialist government that embroiled Japan in the war that ended in the dropping of the atomic bomb. He is doing so without apologizing for the United States. Instead of presenting, apolitically, the transparent horror of the atrocity, as Orwell seems to demand, Oe elects to make a nuanced political statement, demanding that both blame and the action that would result from blame should go in more than one direction. This is morally complicating but, I would argue, politically necessary. If you want to prevent future atrocities, you ought to be struggling against militarism and imperialism wherever you find them. The sides available to be taken are never only two. There is a general argument to be extrapolated from this example. If you choose not to try to understand why an atrocity happened, you are also choosing not to try to understand what might be done to avoid future atrocities. You are ignoring any action other than blaming, or the blaming of a single party. You are ignoring what might well be considered the more important goal of such writing, which arguably should aim at effects on and in a more distant future. Deliberate ignorance of this sort would be the course suggested by a human rights sensibility, but it would be a political choice, and a questionable one. Ignorance is not a choice to which the essay as a genre is necessarily committed. Writing about the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 in his book Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846–1890, Larry McMurtry (better known for his more literary writings) refers explicitly to context: ‘Few, I imagine, see it as a simple case of white wrong. Though it was wrong, it had a context that few not of that region can appreciate now.’15 It was 1864, he says, and the American Civil War was still going on. The Plains Indians were still ‘unbroken and undefeated peoples . . . able, and very determined, to wage a vigorous defense of their hunting grounds and their way of life’.16 Culturally, the US government expected an agreement with leaders to

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protect the ‘immigrants pouring west’, but ‘[n]o Indian leader had authority over even his own band such as a white executive might possess’, meaning that young warriors ‘would run off and raid’.17 ‘Leadership among the plains [sic] tribes was collective but not coercive.’18 Objections can be raised against these bits of historical context, but each of them also has a positive value for anyone who, in today’s political context, is motivated to remember the cultural distinctness and autonomy of Native American nationhood in the not so distant past. The same can be said when McMurtry commits the sin of comparing atrocities, comparison being the variant of contextualization that many consider inexcusable: Judged by world-historical perspectives these massacres were tiny . . . the body count in the six massacres I’m especially interested in still adds up to fewer than one thousand people, barely one-third of the number who died in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.19 One may disagree with the implications of a particular act of comparison, like this one, which confines itself to absolute numbers. One may ask what the different killings mean relative to the total population or its ability to sustain its way of life. From this viewpoint, the genocidal killing of the Native Americans is arguably more different from 9/11 than the comparison of absolute casualty figures would suggest. The general point, however, is that it is not wrong to compare. It is not wrong even to use the Holocaust as a term of comparison, although the Nazi genocide has often been taken as a conclusive argument against both comparison and understanding itself.20 In the presence of atrocity, there is often a hesitation, a fear that any proposed bit of intelligibility, however fragmentary, would constitute a violation of the experience of those who have suffered so unimaginably. This conclusion – natural enough, but wrong – was given memorable utterance, with regard to the Holocaust, by Claude Lanzmann, director of the documentary Shoah (1985), a film that famously refused to enter into explanations. The German sentence is: ‘Hier ist kein warum.’ Lanzmann borrowed it from Primo Levi’s book If This Is a Man, in America mistranslated as Survival in Auschwitz. Thirsty, Levi reaches through the barracks window and grabs an icicle. The icicle is batted out of his hand by a passing guard. He asks, in German, why: ‘Warum?’ The guard replies, ‘Hier ist kein warum’: there is no why here.21 After quoting Levi, Lanzmann says that in his film, he was not trying to understand. There is ‘an absolute obscenity in the project of understanding’.22 But a rather telling rejoinder to Lanzmann exists. As the intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra pointed out, the person who says ‘Hier ist kein warum’ is not Primo Levi himself, but a Nazi guard.23 Those who insist on ultimate unintelligibility are not agreeing with Primo Levi; they are agreeing with the guard. Which is not to say that Levi has an explanation for Auschwitz, only that he has not given up the quest for some measure of intelligibility, the idea that suffering might be made more intelligible and should be made as intelligible as it can be made, if only so that those who come after can do what they can to prevent further suffering. What that intelligibility consists of, how much of it is permissible, and how soon it can be offered – these are among the questions to which the political essayist addresses their writerly powers. Think of Susan Sontag writing in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001.24 To Sontag, it was important to call out ‘the

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self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by virtually all our public figures’25 after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And it was an act of self-conscious recontextualization to say that ‘this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions’.26 But Sontag’s essay did not go over well in the United States. Fierce pressure was brought to bear on her. In an interview a few weeks later, she backtracked, clarifying that she did not share the view ‘that America has brought this horror upon itself, that America itself is, in part, to blame for the deaths of these thousands upon its own territory’ – exactly what she had initially suggested. She went on to say that she did not ‘in any way excuse or condone this atrocity by blaming the United States’.27 For to do so would be ‘morally obscene’.28 This is an expression of Sontag’s weakness, perhaps the weakness of any individual, in the face of overwhelming public outrage. But on a second inspection her sentence does not seem an abject surrender. It is ambiguous. It could be understood as meaning that she did not blame the United States, for to do so (or to do so now – another ambiguity) would be morally obscene. Or it could be read as meaning that although her recontextualization did indeed blame the United States, to blame the United States is not to excuse or condone the atrocity. Here one of America’s finest essayists arguably finds a way to evade, if not to overthrow, the dictatorship of political loyalty that makes Orwell despair of all political writing. Something analogous happens in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After.29 Looking back from the vantage point of the 1960s at the miracle by which she and a small number of her fellow French Resistance fighters survived their imprisonment in Auschwitz – as well as on the many women who did not – and confronted like Levi by the camp’s seemingly incomprehensible murderousness, Delbo has absolutely no desire to justify the Nazis. Yet when she remembers the execution by the Germans of four French résistants, she chooses to add, without commentary, a news item from a later year and another country: ‘Last week, an incoherent action, followed by several others, was decided upon by the new government: the execution in the courtyard of the sinister fortress of Montluc, in Lyons, of the Algerian patriot Abderahmane Laklifi. He was beheaded Saturday, at dawn, accompanied to the gallows by the singing of all his comrades, behind the bars of their cells.’ (L’Express, August 4, 1960).30 It was not just the Germans who were responsible for such atrocities. Delbo does not slow down to underline the point, but it is unmistakable. If ‘everything is political’, it will be tempting to condemn writing that presents itself as apolitical, as much treatment of atrocity tries to do, and to reserve the title of true political essayist for those who do not submit to the illusory ideal of neutral transparency. In ‘Hersey, Resnais and Representing Hiroshima: Towards an Essayistic Historiography’, his contribution to the volume The Essay at the Limits,31 Bob Cowser Jr argues that John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a long essay (it took up an entire issue of The New Yorker) that has never been out of print since 1946, is precisely not an essay – not because it is too long but because it merely recites the facts with a maximum of objectivity, keeping away from any political judgments (for example, that the bomb

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was justified retribution for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) and thus providing the ‘human’ side of the story that others had missed. To show that Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour does deserve to be considered an essay, on the other hand, it is enough to show, in Cowser’s view, that it subverts Hersey’s pretense of documentary objectivity. The essay, then, is subjective by definition and, by the same token, it counts as political. One might object that Hersey’s stripped-down, deliberately objective prose does not hide his book’s inevitable subjectivity, which is to be detected in abundance in Hersey’s narrative choices (for example, making two of his six protagonists doctors, who by profession are concerned only to help others). By the criterion of subjectivity, it is not so easy to deny to any text the status of essay. But the fact that it is political writing, and not merely an attempt to produce an objective account of an atrocity, shows up more dramatically when one considers the essayist’s decision about which contexts to include and which to downplay or withhold. Hersey arguably goes easy on the United States by deciding not to discuss the US government’s rejection of other possible ways of bringing the war to an end without such enormous loss of civilian life, or for that matter the American desire to make an imposing show of force to the Russians who were advancing on Japan from the west. That said, one might also argue that Hersey adds contexts, even at the risk of violating his own narrative focus on nothing but the present tense, on the survivors, their immediate suffering, and their courageous efforts to rescue other survivors. Intermittently, and then increasingly in the ending, Hersey chooses to ask how, looking back, the surviving people of Hiroshima have understood what they went through. What sense did they make of the bombing? That is a context that was not absolutely necessary for Hersey to cover, given that it largely came in retrospect, but cover it he does. After the Emperor’s radio broadcast saying the war is over, he writes: ‘What a wonderful blessing it is that [the Emperor] calls on us and we can hear his own voice in person. We are thoroughly satisfied in such a great sacrifice.’32 And then in the essay’s conclusion we get additional voices, standing in for whatever conclusions Hersey himself has decided not to draw on his own account, in his own voice. In broken English, a professor at the Hiroshima University of Literature and Science says, ‘It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor. . . . Yes, people of Hiroshima died mainly in the atomic bombing, believing it was for Emperor’s sake.’33 Others conclude, ‘It was war and we had to expect it.’34 Instead of blaming the Americans, some blamed the local doctors, although as Hersey says, in a proleptic leap into the future to grasp knowledge not then available, ‘Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded.’35 In the final pages, Hersey adds: A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like.36 One of Hersey’s sources is quoted as saying, reasonably enough, that those Americans who decided to use the bomb should be hanged as war criminals. Another rejects that option, speaking the international language of underclass fatalism: ‘“Shikata ga nai,” a

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Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “nichevo,” “it can’t be helped, Oh, well. Too bad”.’37 The answers Hersey gets back, having asked what sense the survivors are left with, suggest, as he selects and arranges them, a patterned failure of understanding. Which is not to say a refusal of understanding but, for the reader at least, a sort of photographic negative, outlining and encouraging a politically superior understanding that will have to be fleshed out and filled in later. What will come later cannot be kept out of the picture even if one is primarily concerned (as I am not) with formal qualities of the essay genre. In his introduction to Writing Politics: An Anthology, a collection of political essays, David Bromwich writes: ‘A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment.’38 If not a contradiction, this is at least a tension threatening to pull the essay and the political apart. In order to count as political, the essay must intersect significantly with the concerns of the present moment; it must seek to affect an ongoing struggle. But in order to count as an essay – which is to say, deserve attention for its literary value – it needs to outlast the concerns of the present, or at least the terms in which the present has defined its concerns. Politics demands context; literariness is defined by the capacity to transcend context. On second thought, however, one wonders whether these two aspirations are after all as separable as they may seem. Only those who are not prepared for political involvement will imagine that politics is a matter of the short run. In an essay entitled ‘Swift as Intellectual’, Edward W. Said – a great admirer of what he saw as the provisional, anti-systemic nature of the essay genre – praised Swift not for his enduring vision of human life but as ‘an opportunistic political pamphleteer and polemicist’,39 in other words for the local force of writings that have not lasted. Said put to the side those writings of Swift’s, such as Gulliver’s Travels and ‘A Modest Proposal’, that have obviously lasted quite well, indeed better than those of any other writer of his time. The paradox is that, for Said, Swift’s ‘local performances’40 have in fact lasted, even if on the whole the political ideas behind them have not. Said’s own theoretical ideas are still very much with us, but the day may well come when what he said of Swift will be said of him as well – when future readers will admire his ‘local performances’ on the topic of Israel and United States policy in the Middle East more than Orientalism, which made him famous. If so, it is to be hoped that future readers will notice a strand of continuity between Swift’s obdurate resistance to English military aggression of any kind, for which there was no comfortable place on the party spectrum of his time, and Said’s own eloquent dissent from decades of bipartisan support for Israel’s settler colonialism. Unless there is a radical and unexpected shift in United States policy, that dissent will probably remain relevant and, if so, Said’s eloquently local writings too seem likely to pass the test of time. American and European military interventions in the world beyond their own borders have largely been a bipartisan affair. A narrow definition of the political essay would therefore have little or no place for essays that took up that topic, like those of Said or Noam Chomsky, as opposed to topics that divide and define the parties. At various times and places, the same might have been said about the politics of racial justice or women’s equality or the status of indigenous peoples. Each has appeared on party platforms, but none has defined the sorts of side-taking political loyalty about which Orwell complained. They and the solidarities they inspire are real; they cannot

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be used as evidence in favor of ideas of human rights or aesthetic value that would commit us in advance to not taking sides. But they are on a different timetable. One of the more underreported powers of the essay is its ability to stretch the understanding of politics, forcing it to adopt a wider temporal perspective, making the case that proper political judgment needs more time or, for that matter, more space. If essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr, all of them represented in Bromwich’s anthology, can be read with such a tangible and imperious sense of relevance today, it is both because of the things that have still not changed and because their perspectives were broad enough to take in the long haul. In the next edition, there will perhaps also be room for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has taken the long view of the US Supreme Court. After discussing Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court held that state segregation laws did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, Taylor states: The accomplishments of the Court while led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, stand out as exceptions in the body’s long history of regression. But even the decisions from this period that we now laud for upholding or defending freedom . . . were often aimed at reversing the damage that the Court had done in the first place. The Court is celebrated for its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, which banned segregation in public education, but it was merely undoing policies and practices that it had set in motion with Plessy.41 What objection could Orwell have to political writing like this? There are no euphemisms or evasions anywhere; there are not even stylistic flourishes. Taylor writes in much the same plain style as Orwell himself. What she offers is a bold, uncompromising vision of how power is organized in the United States and one thing that will have to change – the position of the Supreme Court – in order for power to change, too. She does this by taking a creative leap beyond the political options most discussed in the media, which most often aim lower. But her manner of political writing is also available to those of us who lack the confidence to propose quite so boldly or so freely. No issue is an island. There is no such thing as a political question that does not overlap with other questions, other issues. But not all overlaps are equally relevant. The political essayist needs imagination in order to see the linkages between one issue and another, and to see which linkages are the most urgent. So, for example, feminism, sometimes disavowed as a white and middle-class movement, has benefited from those farseeing writers who engaged directly and powerfully with those constituencies and loyalties that feminism seemed to be neglecting. In her contribution to a volume entitled Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Bonnie Honig took on the self-flattering metropolitan impulse to blame non-Western cultures for violence against women. The point is made in the brilliantly sarcastic title of her essay, ‘“My Culture Made Me Do It”’. Honig writes: culture is something rather more complicated than patriarchal permission for powerful men to subordinate vulnerable women. There are brutal men (and women) everywhere. Is it their Jewish, Christian, or Muslim identity that makes them brutal . . . or is it their brutality?42

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Laura Kipnis writes: Perhaps this is the moment to say that a large part of what impels me to write this essay is my own disgust in reading Hustler. In fact I have wanted to write this essay for several years, but every time I trudge out and buy the latest issue, open it and begin to try to bring my analytical powers to bear upon it, I’m just so disgusted that I give up, never quite sure whether this almost automatic response is one of feminist disgust or bourgeois disgust.43 Kipnis does not go into the first person in order to make her essay more relatable; she talks about herself in order to illustrate a division within herself, a division between her gendered self (female) and her classed self (bourgeois). This self-questioning enables her analysis to bring out something important that she might otherwise have missed: how for better or worse the physical grossness of Hustler is an expression of class feeling, aimed at ‘the pretensions (and the social power) of the professional classes’, ‘against the power of government’ and ‘against the rich’.44 She goes on: Do I feel assaulted and affronted by Hustler’s images, as do many other women? Yes. Is that a necessary and sufficient condition on which to base the charge of its misogyny? Given my own gender and class position I’m not sure that I’m exactly in a position to trust my immediate response.45 This is not the idealized inconclusiveness that some would attach with pride to the essay genre, elevating it (as one might say Orwell does) above the tawdriness of politics. It is a way of saying, more powerful because more indirect, that in general it is politically important not to trust one’s immediate response without trying to factor in other aspects of one’s positionality that may not have seemed relevant at first. And it is a way of saying in particular that her fellow feminists, especially anti-porn feminists, have got to stop and think about their class position. Kipnis concludes that ‘Hustler does powerfully articulate class resentment, and to the extent that anti-porn feminism lapses into bourgeois reformism, and that we devote ourselves to sanitizing representation, we are legitimately a target of that resentment.’46 Ambivalence is not an automatic mechanism; it is not guaranteed to deliver literary value. But in the absence of other inspiration, one could do worse than to follow its guidance. One could do worse, that is, than to question not only the private self but the public takings of position that self generates, its taken-for-granted reactions and visceral solidarities. What Kipnis does in her analysis of Hustler is what Sontag did in the essay that made her reputation, ‘Notes on Camp’: not simple self-expression, but self-scrutiny.47 In these political essays, it is not so much that you feel as if you had met someone. It is more like feeling as if you had met more than one person, a person who knows they contain multitudes, that those multitudes are arguing amongst themselves and that their arguments might just be of some importance to the large question of how well society is constituted – the question of politics. Self-scrutiny, as cause or effect of a deviation from some party line, could of course be interpreted as a move outside or beyond politics. That seems to be the move Orwell is advocating when he defines politics as absolute partisanship. Self-scrutiny is arguably a virtue, and an important one, but that virtue should not be confused with

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literariness (which is as much about reattachment as about detachment) or with a transcendence of politics. It does not entail a rejection of what Cold War ideology called ‘group thinking’. Rather, it enables a multiplying of solidarities – solidarities not just in defense of the victims of atrocity, but in positive collaboration with those who have mobilized as a group to prevent atrocities in the future. This is a kind of work that, unlike the atrocity, is usually anything but sensational and often quite boring, which is why the essays that inspire readers to stick with them, and stick to each other, cannot afford to be.

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.

 5.   6.   7.

  8.   9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

George Orwell, Diaries, ed. Peter Davison (New York: Liveright, 2013), 387. Ibid., 387. Ibid., 387. There is no such thing as a set of facts from which only one political conclusion can be reasonably drawn. Take the example of the war against the Nazis. By June 1942, few if any members of the Left in Britain were still reluctant to join capitalist England in its struggle against fascist Germany. But at the moment when Orwell transcribed the BBC report about Lidice, he was working at the BBC World Service, broadcasting to South Asia. His task was to bring Indians into the war. As he was well aware, he was asking his listeners to side with their colonizers, whom they knew, in a war against Germany, about which they probably knew much less. That may explain some of his otherwise misguided irritation about how the news of atrocity is received. For an equally irritated reaction to Orwell’s obtuseness on the subject of atrocity, see Mary McCarthy, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (San Diego, CA: Harvest/HBJ, 1970), 154–71 (154–55). Orwell, Diaries, 388. George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 127–40 (137). For a brief but incisive treatment of Orwell’s ambivalence about political writing, and especially his positive commitment to it, and his extensive collection of political pamphlets, see Robert Atwan, foreword to The Best American Essays, 2019, ed. Rebecca Solnit (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), ix–xvi. There is also an excellent treatment of the subject of political writing in Solnit’s introduction (xvii–xxvii). William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 10. Amnesty International, ‘Human Rights in Nicaragua’ (1986), in Human Rights Reader, ed. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (New York: New American Library, 1989), 385–91 (389–90). On the subject of melodrama, see my ‘Bad Atrocity Writing’, n+1 32 (2018), https:// nplusonemag.com/issue-32/politics/bad-atrocity-writing/. As I argue, the thin, valiant line of European protestors against the many atrocities committed by European colonizers – heroic figures like Bartolomé de las Casas and Edmund Burke – have to their credit some of the most painfully purple prose ever canonized. Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 136. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 136. Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 9.

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15. Larry McMurtry, Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846–1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 93, emphasis in original. 16. Ibid., 94. 17. Ibid., 94, emphasis in original. 18. Ibid., 99. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Sven Lindqvist offers a useful example: a comparison between the Holocaust and the Allied bombing of the German cities, which resulted in between 500,000 and 600,000 civilian casualties. Careful comparison of the context of each allows Lindqvist to differentiate the two substantially without denying that bombing from the air was, also, an atrocity. See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: New Press, 2001), 97. 21. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 24. 22. Claude Lanzmann, ‘Hier ist kein Warum’, in Bernard Cuau et al., Au sujet de Shoah: Le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990), 279. 23. ‘What is surprising’, LaCapra says very carefully, ‘is that Lanzmann takes up in his own voice, without adequate qualification and exegesis, the statement of an SS guard to Levi. He postulates this statement as constituting a valid law’ (102). ‘A great deal – perhaps everything – depends not on whether one poses the why question but on how and why one poses it. . . . Levi himself wanted an answer, however partial and inadequate’ (103, italics in original). Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 24. Susan Sontag, At the Same Times: Essays and Speeches, ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump (2007; repr., New York: Picador, 2008). 25. Ibid., 105. 26. Ibid., 105. 27. Ibid., 113. 28. Ibid., 114. 29. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 30. Ibid., 132–33. 31. Bob Cowser Jr, ‘Hersey, Resnais and Representing Hiroshima: Towards an Essayistic Historiography’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 229–42. 32. John Hersey, Hiroshima (n.p.: Stellar Books, 2014), 89. 33. Ibid., 116–17. 34. Ibid., 117. 35. Ibid., 40. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Ibid., 117. 38. David Bromwich, Writing Politics: An Anthology (New York: New York Review Books, 2020), ix. 39. Edward W. Said, ‘Swift as Intellectual’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 72–89 (76–77). Note that Said devotes some pages to arguing over Swift with Orwell, whose essay on Swift is entitled ‘Politics versus Literature’. 40. Ibid., 79. 41. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ‘The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It’, The New Yorker, September 25, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/thecase-for-ending-the-supreme-court-as-we-know-it.

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42. Bonnie Honig, ‘“My Culture Made Me Do It”’, in Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35–40 (36). 43. Laura Kipnis, ‘(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 373–91 (378). 44. Ibid., 378. 45. Ibid., 387. 46. Ibid., 389. 47. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). Sontag cannot quite imagine that a gay constituency (to which Sontag would not claim membership) might also turn a seemingly apolitical sensibility into the basis of a political movement.

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14 The Postwar American Essay, the Liberal Imagination and the Contemporary Essay Phillip Lopate

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t seems to me that there are certain historical periods when the essay suddenly comes to the fore, and is popular and talked about and relevant, before sinking back into a more typically comatose, commercially wan state. The eighteenth-century periodic essay of Addison and Steele, and Samuel Johnson, the nineteenth-century Romantic essay with Hazlitt and Lamb, or the early decades of twentieth-century Britain with Virginia Woolf, Max Beerbohm and George Orwell, are all examples of such spikes. Another such efflorescence occurred during the post-World War II period of 1945, and lasted for a few decades, let us say until 1970. It was an exceptionally fertile period for essays in the United States: one would have to go back to the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Margaret Fuller for a comparable flowering. If we are to consider the essay in the broadest sense, not just personal, formal or academic essays but well-written ruminations or arguments that might occur in every discipline, the extent of such essayistic experiments in thought during this particular period will become apparent. Just to give you some idea of the range and talent of the essayists in that era: there was James Baldwin, E. B. White, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edmund Wilson; critics such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Edwin Denby, James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Pauline Kael, Irving Howe; policy pundits such as Walter Lippmann and George F. Kennan; theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr; novelists who moonlighted as essayists, including Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Flannery O’Connor, Gore Vidal; poet-essayists like Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens; sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and historians such as Robert K. Merton, Margaret Mead, Erving Goffman, Richard Hofstadter, Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl; nature and science writers, Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, Lewis Thomas; food writers M. F. K. Fisher and A. J. Liebling; and New Journalists Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Seymour Krim. Why should this proliferation of the essay have occurred at this particular moment? I could offer several explanations. At the war’s end, the United States was positioned as the dominant world power, which perhaps gave its writers a sense of responsibility to reflect and criticize, with the vanity or expectation that the world would be listening. The presence of European émigré thinkers who had fled Fascism, such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Nicola Chiaromonte and Thomas

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Mann, had raised the intellectual tone and invited a more cosmopolitan perspective, and a wish to emulate that sophisticated Continental discourse. The figure of the public intellectual, who would be expected to transmit and explain complex ideas to the reading public, was in ascension, in tandem with the sudden multiplication of weeklies, little magazines and quarterlies that welcomed such voices. (I am thinking of Partisan Review, Commentary, Paris Review, Saturday Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Leader, Hudson Review, Village Voice, The New Yorker, . . . even established mass market journals like Esquire, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, Playboy, not to mention newspapers. All romanced the essay, for a while.) The astounding growth of American universities and colleges in the postwar era suddenly provided many freelance writers with a living, by offering them opportunities to teach creative writing, literature or English composition. The mandate to ‘publish or perish’, which might have cowed academic scholars, was less of a threat to garrulous belletrists, supplied as they were with a plethora of periodicals in which to vent. Meanwhile, the tensions that rippled through the postwar era and beyond cried out for interpretation and commentary. There was the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its side-effect, McCarthyism, that elicited heated debate when it did not provoke silence and fear; the armed conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear threat hovering over everyone; the enduring problems of racism, gender discrimination, poverty and ecological degradation; the clash between puritanical family values and sexual freedom – all of which spawned the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the environmental, gay rights and antiwar movements, and their attendant essayistic formulations. But let us go back to the immediate start of the postwar era to try to disentangle these strands. The jubilation that followed the defeat of the Axis powers was widespread. As Anatole Broyard describes it in Kafka Was the Rage: Nineteen forty-six was a good time – perhaps the best time – in the twentieth century. The war was over, the Depression had ended, and everyone was rediscovering the simple pleasures. A war is like an illness and when it’s over you think you’ve never felt so well. There’s a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing your life.1 There was also newfound pride in the nation’s position: the twentieth century was dubbed ‘The American Century’ and New York City, home to the newly established United Nations, referred to as ‘the capital of the world’. It is odd, in retrospect, to consider how short-lived that era of good feeling was. It fell swiftly to anxiety. By 1948 the threat of an expansionist Soviet Union had given rise to the House of Un-American Activity hearings, intended to ferret out Communists or fellow travelers in the Hollywood community, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s probes of alleged spies in the Federal government soon followed. The Republican Party, which had been locked out of power during the five terms of office of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, saw anti-communism as both a patriotic issue and an opportunity to begin to roll back the New Deal’s social programs. The antiStalinist Left was torn between acknowledging the Soviet Union’s threat and deploring wholesale attacks on radicals’ speech.

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Some of the anxiety and malaise that took hold of the United States can be seen as a hangover from the tragedies surrounding World War II. Norman Mailer put it this way in his essay ‘The White Negro’: Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atomic bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone in those years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps . . . and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature? Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve.2 For Mailer, there were only two choices: the meek Organization Man, or the existential outlaw-hipster living in the margins of society. The 1950s, especially during General Eisenhower’s two terms as President, 1952–60, have been called an ‘Age of Conformity’, to quote the title of Irving Howe’s essay.3 I think that the era’s level of conformity can be overstated: there were many contrarian and critical voices at the time among the nation’s essayists. Certainly, however, the collapse of the Old Left, not just because of McCarthyite persecution of members of the Communist Party but also because of an increasing awareness of Stalin’s murderous regime, meant that Soviet Russia’s type of Marxism came to be seen as ‘the God that failed’. That left most American writers and intellectuals pretty much in agreement, united behind a liberal consensus. Call it a collective failure of nerve or a realistic adjustment, as you wish. In any case, Lionel Trilling, in the introduction to his book The Liberal Imagination, went so far as to say that: In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.4 Before considering how correct Trilling was in saying this, or for how long it would continue to be correct, let us pause for a moment. Remember, he was writing this in 1950, before the word ‘liberal’ had been attacked and disparaged by both the Left and the Right. There is first of all the problem of what exactly is meant by liberalism. As Stefan Collini has written, ‘[t]he term has been thrown around in such various and contested ways that it has become more or less unusable unless one specifies temporal and geographical boundaries quite closely’. Collini points out that in the United Kingdom ‘liberal’

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is associated with free trade economics, whereas in the United States it is often applied to ‘progressive and redistributive policies’.5 I am using it here in the sense of advocating progressive reform, not revolution. One such tenet of that progressive ideology would be a tolerance for pluralism and difference, for ensuring the rights of all minority groups and equal access to the goods of society. The defeat of the Nazis positioned America in the postwar era as a potential beacon of tolerance. It seemed an auspicious moment to complete the project of American democracy by rooting out inequalities and arriving at a benign acceptance of all who comprised ‘the Family of Man’ (to cite the title of a popular Fifties photography exhibit). Message films of the day, such as Gentlemen’s Agreement, Crossfire and Home of the Brave, sought to point out the absurdity and perniciousness of anti-Semitism and racism. The sociologist Robert K. Merton, who invented the concept of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ in a 1948 essay of the same name, demonstrated the irrationality of racial or religious bias.6 Mary McCarthy’s depiction of the bigoted Colonel in her essay ‘Artists in Uniform’ did the same by way of personal narrative.7 While Merton wrote in a relaxedacademic style of logical argument and Mary McCarthy in a more confessional, short story-like fashion, both partook of what I am calling the liberal consensus. Now I am going to make a leap and claim that there is a relationship between essayism – that is, the practice or faith implicit in essay writing – and liberalism. My point is not to defend liberalism as a political philosophy, but simply to show a mutually beneficial overlap between its temperament and that of the essay. Some of the attributes with which the essay has often been associated are skepticism (including self-skepticism), thinking against oneself, open-ended speculation, freedom, adaptability, avoidance of system and refusal of dogmatism. In eschewing rigid, polarizing, revolutionary postures, it seeks out the middle way. The impulse toward moderation goes all the way back to Montaigne, whom Trilling cited as the ideal for the liberal critic, and who was always advocating equanimity and avoidance of extremes. As was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, ‘I think I have not the common degree of sympathy with dark, turbid, mournful, passionate natures . . . Very hard it is to keep the middle point. It is a very narrow line.’8 To quote William H. Gass: 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 of community.9 Theodor W. Adorno, who certainly had no problem taking ideologically firm stances, nevertheless was drawn to the essay’s contrarian, dialectical potential, saying, ‘the innermost form of the essay is heresy’, and insisting that ‘the essay does not strive for closed, deductive, or inductive, construction . . . The essay . . . proceeds so to speak methodically unmethodically.’10 One of the potential weaknesses of liberalism, according to Trilling, is that in the interests of ‘a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life’ it privileges the mind at the expense of the emotions, and does not make enough allowance for the dark, demonic, terrible and mystical forces.11 In this way, too, I see a connection between liberalism and what I am calling ‘essayism’. In politics, the liberal tends toward

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tolerant inclusion, the Big Tent, reluctant to offend or exclude any group. In literature, I would argue, the essay – unlike much early modernist literature (think of Faulkner’s idiot Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s schizophrenic in Mrs. Dalloway, or the French Surrealist André Breton’s insistence on the ‘convulsive’) – shies away from the unconscious, the irrational, the violent or emotionally raw, and seems more at home in the appeal to common sense. Even those pleasurably perverse, cranky essays which seek to undermine an apparent good or defend an ostensible evil do so by employing a measured irony that allows the reader to glimpse both sides. Even writers such as Irving Howe and Susan Sontag, who identified themselves as ‘radical’, wrote essays in a manner that was traditionally thoughtful, even-tempered and persuasive, rather than aesthetically avant-garde or emotionally extreme. Irving Howe, in his essay ‘This Age of Conformity’, was very wary of the liberal consensus, finding it too smug, cautious and protective of the status quo. He thought that intellectuals had been bought off by employment in the ‘mass culture industries and the academy’, and were losing their critical independence. ‘We have all’, he wrote, ‘even the handful who still try to retain a glower of criticism, become responsible and moderate.’ He also disagreed with Trilling’s optimistic view that there had been an improvement in the cultural standards of America, through the spread of higher education, paperbacks and so on. Howe saw a dilution and vulgarization. ‘It seems to me that, thus far at least, in the encounter between high and middle culture, the latter has come off by far the better.’12 He was not alone. During the Fifties and early Sixties, many essayists regarded themselves as gatekeepers, guardians of standards that they warned were being eroded by the barbarian middlebrows. Randall Jarrell, in his essay ‘The Sad Heart at the Supermarket’, discerned what he saw as pop culture’s vampirelike relation to high culture while pandering to the lowest common denominator.13 So did Dwight Macdonald in his screeds against the middlebrow. In Macdonald’s words: ‘It is sometimes called “Popular Culture”, but I think “Mass Culture” a more accurate term, since its distinctive mark is that it is solely and directly an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum.’14 Consumerism, driven by Madison Avenue ad agencies, was seen as inducing a hypnotized populace. Robert Warshow wrote an essay worrying that his son might be becoming too attached to comic books.15 Harold Rosenberg not only dissected mass culture’s dependence on intellectuals but took potshots at Warshow, Trilling and Edmund Wilson.16 It was common practice then for public intellectuals to criticize each other, like members of a quarreling family. If that made for some nasty competitiveness, it also showed ideas were taken seriously enough to be tested by written debate. This was particularly true for the group centered round Partisan Review, the New York Intellectuals. Their approach was shrewdly anatomized by Irving Howe, himself one: In their published work during these years, the New York intellectuals developed a characteristic style of exposition and polemic. With some admiration and a bit of irony, let us call it the style of brilliance. The kind of essay they wrote was likely to be wide-ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to ‘go beyond’ its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation. It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases,

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impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle – such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the New York writers.17 Though he did not name anyone specifically, he might well have been referring to Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Burke or Alfred Kazin. One thing to notice about the essays that dominated the postwar era into the mid1960s was the prevalence of a formal intellectual tone. Regardless of how their positions may have differed or how much they lambasted each other, they were all writing to show off their intelligence and learning. Though bristling with charisma, they still seemed attached to the impersonal ideal that T. S. Eliot had advocated in his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Seymour Krim, a late arrival on the scene, described how difficult it could be for a young aspiring critic to adopt the approved manner: For people of my age and bent . . . the whole PR [Partisan Review] phenomenon along with the Kenyon Review, the Sewanee, the Hudson Review . . . and all the others unfertilized into being by the Anglo-Protestant New Critical chill was a very bad, inhibiting, distorting, freakish influence. It made us ashamed to be what we were and the cruel acid of its standards tore through our writing and scarred our lives as well; in our prose we had to put on Englishy airs, affect all sorts of impressive scholarship and social register unnaturalness and in general contort ourselves into literary pretzels in order to slip through their narrow transoms and get into their pages.18 In the Sixties, that high formal tone that had signified quality in American essays began to break down. Brasher voices emerged among the New Journalists: Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Krim himself (who took inspiration from the Beats’ Jack Kerouac) put forward a flashy, no-holds-barred, jazzy, sometimes stream-of-consciousness style and an insistent way of inserting themselves as protagonists into the reported story. It would not be long before the genre became dominated by the personal essay. This shift away from the impersonal was in line with a growing distaste for the all-knowing authority of the public intellectual, who was perceived as condescending, academic and elitist, as well as an increasing unwillingness to express superiority toward mass culture. Indeed, another outcropping of more casual, unbuttoned essay prose came directly from pop culture criticism. The staying power and inherent vitality of popular culture had outlasted the snobbish disdain of the gatekeepers, and caused writers everywhere, even in the academy, to take it more seriously. In step with the Sixties’ explosion of youth culture and the antiwar movement, pop culture was looked to as a source of rebellious energy, a weapon against the staid Establishment. A new breed of fearless, sophisticated rock critics would soon appear: Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau, Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus. Susan Sontag expressed approval of the Beatles, rock ’n’ roll and science fiction movies: the kids were all right. Thirty years later, she had second thoughts: To laud work condescended to then as ‘popular’ culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities . . . What I didn’t understand

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. . . was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions.19 In retrospect, you might say it was a trade-off: essayists no longer felt obliged to demonstrate their intellectual bona fides, which unleashed a new vitality into their prose even as it cut them off from a conversation with the form’s ancestors and traditions. Throughout history, essayists have conversed with each other through their pieces, in dialogues that might span decades or centuries. Montaigne quoted Seneca, Plutarch and Cicero; William Hazlitt wrote an appreciation of Montaigne; Virginia Woolf wrote about Hazlitt and Montaigne, and so on. The essay tradition has been a linked conversation, an invitation to form friendship with the reader and to affirm or joust with one’s fellow essayists. So Susan Sontag wrote a beautiful eulogy to Paul Goodman about their failed friendship; James Baldwin wrote a searching analysis of his relationship with Richard Wright, which went from mentor to peer to rueful alienation of affection. The essay continued to offer a home for the polemical, especially those polemics that sought to develop communal values. Minorities were drawn to the essay form as an extremely useful way to define and refine group identity, to embrace or situate oneself at a distance from the tribe. Gerald Early has shrewdly analyzed this linkage: It is not surprising that many black writers have been attracted to the essay as a literary form since the essay is the most exploitable mode of the confession and the polemic, the two variants of the essay that black writers have mostly used. (Few black writers have written what might be strictly called belles lettres-style essays.) The condition under which many black writers felt they had to write (and live), and their coming to terms with these conditions, have constituted their most driving intellectual obsession. Thus, the black essay has been, in truth, a political provocation and a flawed example, if not a full representation, of a philosophical rumination even if the work itself was sometimes entangled in a wealth of sociological detail. Black writers could not help but see their writing as political, since they saw their condition in these terms and their writing and their condition have been largely inseparable.20 Early goes on to say that much of this writing has been done by a bourgeois elite, who are often driven out of guilt to romanticize ‘the poverty culture of lower- or under-class blacks’, and who find themselves caught between speaking for the African American experience but often not to the majority of blacks.21 This may partly explain the prose style of a Baldwin, Ralph Ellison or Albert Murray, whose essays were strewn with rhetorical Anglicisms, qualifying interjections and Jamesian syntactical constructions – all of which was simply expected then of essayists – at the same time as they incorporated gritty, colloquial tonalities from the blues and the street. The civil rights movement was given its most direct articulation by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr in his famous ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ and his ‘I Have a Dream’ and anti-Vietnam War speeches. Though these may have taken an initially epistolary or oratorical form, these were in fact essays in the classical sense, circling their subject matter with complexity, doubt and interrogation. James Baldwin passionately articulated

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the anger, sorrow and disappointment of African Americans, the despair at the poor condition of ghetto neighborhoods, at the same time as he put forward a self-portrait of stunning specificity. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison and his friend and fellow Harlem writer Albert Murray took friendly issue with Baldwin for overstressing the miseries of blacks in America and leaving out their joy, humor, creativity and resilience. Increasingly during this period, women came to the fore as essayists. Though technically not a minority, they had long been underrepresented on publishers’ lists. Now they emerged as celebrated spokespersons for both gender and region. There were Southerners such as Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Hardwick, and a number of West Coast women – Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion – who moved east to claim their seat at Gotham’s table while expressing irritation at the smug provinciality of the New York intelligentsia. When the women’s movement caught fire in the 1970s, feminism was given ideological shape and urgent witness by essayists such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Vivian Gornick and Andrea Dworkin. Rachel Carson sounded the alarm about chemical pollution in her seminal book Silent Spring, and a whole generation of environmental essayists followed her lead. Essays got talked about, as they still do. George F. Kennan’s ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’, Leslie Fiedler’s ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!’, James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’, Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’, Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Toward Bethlehem’, and many others were the staples of dinner party conversation. As James Wolcott has stated, ‘[e]ssays can make news, excite the chattering classes, provoke op-eds, catch a cultural phenomenon in a butterfly net, clear away the deadwood of received opinion or simply make the reader privy to the writer’s thought processes and preoccupations’.22 In retrospect, each of these essays can be seen as expressions on the part of liberal consensus writers to attempt at an understanding of the Other – the black or the homosexual or the Russian Communist or the white bigot – however clumsily managed or ultimately dismissive. Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’, for instance, is now seen by many as distasteful, crudely reductionist and unteachable, though at the time he saw himself as motivated by admiration for the vital energies of African Americans. Susan Sontag unpacked camp as a curious gay aesthetic, with a tone of speculative distance and ambivalence, without ever admitting in the piece that she herself was gay or bisexual. James Baldwin tried to project himself into the minds of insecure whites, and George F. Kennan portrayed the resentful, competitive mindset of Soviet Communists toward the United States, by way of warning on the brink of the Cold War that Americans could not count on the USSR to play nice. Not surprisingly, many of the era’s novelists took a crack at essay writing, especially when magazines enticed them with big paydays. Some, such as Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron, proved equally adept at both forms. Saul Bellow never put his full energies into essay writing, electing to save them for his essayistic fiction, replete with heady monologues. (By essayistic fiction, I mean that hybrid form, usually longer on ruminative summation than scene, most often practiced by European writers such as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Marcel Proust, and championed by Milan Kundera.) Since essays have never enjoyed the same status as novels, it is understandable that writers who practiced both forms preferred to be regarded primarily as novelists. That being said, it could be argued that more than a few – James Baldwin, Joan Didion,

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Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal, even Norman Mailer – did their most lasting work in essays and extended nonfiction. The liveliest, most memorable and believable characters they were able to create on the page were their essays’ I-narrators: Jimmy, Joan, Susan, Mary, Gore, Aquarius. Whether this disparity arose because the novel had temporarily reached an impasse between exhausted realism and over-tricky postmodernism, or because the particular turmoil of those postwar decades was suited to a form that encouraged quick response, the essay was having one of its moments. *** I was born in 1943, right before the end of World War II, and so I cannot claim to remember those war years, but I have a sort of in-utero identification with that period. Being a Freudian, I could even ascribe my sympathetic interest in those years to an oedipal desire to insert myself in the midst of my then-young parents. In 1950 I was seven years old and just starting to come into consciousness about the world surrounding me. By 1960 I had entered college, and a few years later had joined the antiwar protests. I am well aware that there is something suspect about the whole notion of a ‘golden age’, which invites the sentimentality of fuddy-duddies who cannot seem to feel comfortable in the present, and who discount the value of youthful creativity. I hope I am a little more open to new achievements. As it happens, the current moment in America is once again enjoying a revival of the essay, which I am tempted to call another golden age. Why is the essay so suited to our current mood and predicament? The critic Margo Jefferson provides one answer: The essay form models the way we need to live now. We need to think and feel in so many directions, reject easy dogmas, test our beliefs and desires. We want a literature that joins analysis and imagination, conviction and inquiry, rigor and pleasure, secular and spiritual strivings.23 There are still plenty of distinguished senior essayists around – by which I mean sixty years old or more – such as Cynthia Ozick, Janet Malcolm, Richard Rodriguez, John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, Vivian Gornick, David Shields, Camille Paglia, Charles D’Ambrosio, Hilton Als, David Sedaris . . . and Phillip Lopate. But the real energy and excitement is coming from the younger crowd, writers like Maggie Nelson, John D’Agata, Lia Purpura, Meghan Daum, Eula Biss, Jia Tolentino, Roxanne Gay, Zadie Smith, Mark Greif, Ander Monson, Sarah Manguso, Alexander Chee, Mary Cappello, Sloane Crosley, Leslie Jamison, Meghan O’Gleblyn, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ross Gay, Wesley Yang, Jenny Boully, Samantha Irby and Rebecca Solnit. The roots of the contemporary essay and many of its preferred tropes, such as identity politics or the need to attend to marginalized voices, can be traced back to the period from the postwar era to the mid-Seventies. But there are, it seems to me, differences in tone and stress. For one thing, the younger generation has been schooled in spotting various biases – racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, heteronormativity, neocolonialism, essentialism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, micro-aggressions and appropriations – and they are quick to pounce on instances of these errors of thought, armed as they are with a checklist and marching orders. Then, too, because there is a uniformity of opinion about the correct side of every question, one rarely sees essayists of the same

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generation taking issue with each other in print. They praise and write blurbs on each other’s books; their mutual support is admirable, but I miss the old sniping arguments that used to occur among the New York Intellectuals. There is also a certain closed bubble aspect to their cultural references: they are more apt to quote from a blog article that aroused chatter on the Internet than a great dead author, or to cite the lyrics of a rock song or television show, thereby reaffirming the triumph of pop culture over high culture. But of course there are many exceptions to this generality: Maggie Nelson, Brian Blanchfield and Mary Cappello, for instance, were all doctoral students in English, and their cultural references display a wide intellectual cultivation. Still, I think back with some nostalgic incredulity about the praise that Adam Gopnik lavished on Max Beerbohm, one of my all-time favorite essayists: ‘For me, Beerbohm has an almost dangerously perfect tone – a mixture of benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority that I think is the tone every essayist searches for.’24 I do not think benign serenity or quiet intellectual authority are still held in such high regard; the ‘geniality’ of which William H. Gass spoke may seem a copout in a period that invites such understandable righteous indignation at social injustice. One is more apt to see an assertion of wounded virtue and a claim of victimhood at society’s insensitivity. But while many essayists today are given over to self-righteous outrage and that perhaps overly vaunted virtue, vulnerability, others continue to play with irony, humor and doubt. Another difference between the present era of essayists and those postwar essayists is that there seems to be more experimentation with the form today. Many essayists are now engaged with the lyric essay, hybrid combinations of fiction and nonfiction, extreme fragmentation, collage and list essays, the short short essay, hyperlinks, blogs, graphic elements and other formal procedures. There may be a correlation between this formal experimentation and the political or moral stance of these authors. The taste for fragmentation, as seen, for instance, in the work of Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sarah Manguso and so many others, speaks to a reluctance to seek closure and resolution, and a desire to keep the discourse mobile, unfixed – just as, in matters of grammar, the preference for the pronoun ‘they’ indicates an embrace of gender fluidity and a rejection of binary male/female designation. The mosaic essay has the capacity to include surprisingly heterogeneous materials; the problem is that it puts extra pressure on the writer to hold together with virtuoso style what may not seem otherwise connected. (The great ur-model for this kind of essay, Joan Didion’s ‘The White Album’, is a thrilling testament to the fact that it can be done beautifully: even as Didion insists that the narratives do not cohere, the piece itself builds and builds.25) The lyric essay, as defined by John D’Agata, is more associative than narrative, and as such resembles contemporary poetry. It passionately shies away from linear argumentation. Again, is there an implicit political source for this predilection? Some have argued that rationality and logic themselves are tools of the patriarchy and white supremacy. If, as Audre Lorde famously pronounced, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, then jumbling up the contents of a piece may hasten the arrival of the ‘post-patriarchal essay’.26 I do not see much future myself in the essay jettisoning rationality, but these challenges to the presumed nature and tenor of the form make for an exciting period of transition. And all these ways to test and subvert the classical essay are very much in the tradition of the essay itself, whose very name bespeaks an attempt, an experiment, a stab in the dark.

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What of liberalism today and its connection to the essay? In spite of thorough analyses from the Left and the Right about liberalism’s shortcomings, and in spite of what one author (Jon Baskin) asserted was the impression ‘among younger readers, that liberalism is a zombie ideology, staggering forward on the diminishing strength of past achievement’, I tend to think that there is still a liberal consensus, however shaky, among the educated classes.27 But liberalism is evolving. (I am not speaking of neoliberalism, God forbid.) The good liberal today has now incorporated a heightened sensitivity to micro-aggressions, to the insults and biases that can give pain to various groups. Some older liberals have voiced annoyance at the curbing of free speech and the policing of unpopular ideas by ‘woke’ activists (see, for instance, essays on the subject by Robert Boyers, Camille Paglia and Lynn Freed, or the letter signed by writers and intellectuals in Harper’s, and the blowback that resulted). Liberalism would seem to have split into two streams, the hundred percent convinced, politically correct activists and the ironic, if still progressive, skeptics craving more nuance. The split is not entirely generational. And many essayists find themselves torn, somewhere in-between. Wesley Yang, for instance, in his essay ‘We Out Here’, seeks to balance his stoical acceptance of life’s indignities with an admiration for youth’s idealistic opposition to such slights.28 Darryl Pinckney addresses violence against blacks by drawing on his considerable knowledge of the African American literary canon and a historical perspective that imparts depth to a topical discussion.29 Zadie Smith tries to thread the needle between acknowledging the possible offense of cultural appropriation, regarding the painting by a white woman that depicted the corpse of black martyr Emmett Till, and a defense of the rights of artists to deal with the suffering of others. In another essay, her ‘Brexit diary’, Smith tries to understand the worldwide backlash against liberalism, the antagonism toward immigrants and the embrace of authoritarian nationalism. She is discussing at a dinner party the rigidities of the younger lefty generation, and their tendency to censor any opinion they think is wrong. Her friend tells her, ‘Well, they got that habit from us.’ (Us being old liberals, I assume.) ‘We always wanted to be seen to be right. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.’30 The Achilles heel of liberalism is that it is so convinced of its rationality that it can easily harden into smugness, ignoring the deeply felt resentments of those with an ‘impulse to conservatism or to reaction’ of which Trilling warned. All the more reason for essayists to hark back to Montaigne, as the exemplar of humility (‘What do I know?’) and of what I take to be the heart of liberalism: namely, humanism. Now, humanism itself has been roughed up a bit by Sartre and the critical theorists as a bourgeois presumption of entitlement. But I am with Irving Howe when he says: The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.31 Though Howe was speaking about humanism, he might just as well have been describing the essay, as an ideal and sometimes a fulfillment.

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Notes   1. Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993), 7.   2. Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro’, in Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, ed. Phillip Sipiora (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014), 42–43.   3. Irving Howe, ‘This Age of Conformity’, in Selected Writings 1950–1990 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 26–49.   4. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), 5.   5. Stefan Collini, ‘In Real Sound Stupidity the English Are Unrivalled’, The London Review of Books 42, no. 3 (February 6, 2020), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n03/stefancollini/in-real-sound-stupidity-the-english-are-unrivalled.  6. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1945): 193–210.   7. Mary McCarthy, ‘Artists in Uniform’, in On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961 (New York: Noonday Press, 1963), 55–74.  8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals 1820–1842, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald (New York: The Library of America, 2010), 614 and Selected Journals 1841–1877, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald (New York: The Library of America, 2010), 145.   9. William H. Gass, ‘Emerson and the Essay’, in Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 9–49 (23–24), emphasis in original. 10. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (171, 160–61). 11. Trilling, Liberal Imagination, 5–10. 12. Howe, ‘This Age of Conformity’, 47. 13. Randall Jarrell, ‘The Sad Heart at the Supermarket’, in ‘Mass Culture and Mass Media’, Daedalus 89, no. 2 (1960): 359–72. 14. Dwight Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, Diogenes 1, no. 3 (1953): 1–17 (1). 15. Robert Warshow, ‘Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham’, in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964), 44–62. 16. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?’, Commentary, September 1948, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/ articles/harold-rosenberg-2/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-ownmass-culture/. 17. Irving Howe, ‘The New York Intellectuals’, in Selected Writings 1950–1990, 240–80 (261). 18. Seymour Krim, ‘What’s This Cat’s Story?’, in What’s This Cat’s Story?: The Best of Seymour Krim, ed. Peggy Brooks (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 1–18 (6). 19. Susan Sontag, ‘Thirty Years Later’, in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Picador, 2001), 268–73 (272–73). 20. Gerald Early, ‘Introduction’, in Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit, Volume 1, ed. Gerald Early (New York: The Ecco Press, 1992), vii–xv (x), emphasis in original. 21. Ibid. 22. James Wolcott, ‘All That Gab’, The London Review of Books 41, no. 20, October 24, 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/james-wolcott/all-that-gab. 23. Margo Jefferson in correspondence with Phillip Lopate, August 1, 2020. 24. Adam Gopnik, interview, ‘Adam Gopnik on His Favorite Essay Collections’, in the Five Books series of The Browser, 2011, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/essay-collections-adamgopnik/.

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25. Joan Didion, ‘The White Album’, in The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11–47. 26. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin, 2018). 27. Jon Baskin, ‘Friends Like These’, The Point Magazine, no. 21, January 28, 2020, https:// thepointmag.com/politics/friends-like-these-a-thousand-small-sanities-gopnik/. 28. Wesley Yang, ‘We Out Here’, in The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 191–97. 29. Darryl Pinckney, ‘Black Lives and the Police’, in Busted in New York and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). 30. Zadie Smith, ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary’, in Feel Free: Essays (New York: Penguin, 2018), 20–33 (27). 31. Howe, ‘This Age of Conformity’, 49.

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15 Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet Briallen Hopper

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. E. B. Du Bois exchanging visiting cards or mourning a firstborn. Virginia Woolf dining on an unappetizing dish of prunes and custard. George Orwell shooting an elephant. James Baldwin trying to be pleasant while yet another small Swiss child reaches out to touch his hair. Some of the most-read, most-written-about, most-anthologized, most-assigned essays in English are personal protest essays. The personal essay form, with its mix of narration and reflection, lends itself to exploring intersections between individual experience and structures of injustice. As a result, for well over a century, essayists have written about themselves to protest the political status quo. They have placed their experiences in a political context to make them newly meaningful to themselves and to others. They have used their essays as a place to mourn, rage, contend, critique, assert, incite, revise and reckon. Whether writing about instances of everyday awkwardness or searing encounters with violence or death (or those awful moments that are simultaneously both), they have tried to write a significance for their lives that extends beyond themselves, and to turn an individual experience into a collective one. In giving readers new and necessary political language – ‘double-consciousness’, ‘a room of one’s own’ – essays have paved the way for or participated in political movements. As critics have noted, the personal protest essay tradition has been particularly influential in the United States. Though neither book focuses on the personal essay in particular, both Brian Norman’s The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division and Cheryl A. Wall’s On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay examine the intimate relationship between the personal and the political in American essays from the nineteenth century onwards. Norman’s book tells ‘[a] story of the protest essay embedded in both the European personal essay and American political oratory’,1 and argues that ‘[t]he inextricability of the personal and political, or the immediate and enduring, gets at the essence of the American protest essay’.2 Meanwhile Wall explores the political preoccupations at the heart of the African American personal essay: ‘Even the most personal essays in the African American tradition continually engage the subject of freedom.’3 She sees essayists’ choice to write about their own experiences as a literary, epistemological and existential adaptation to systemic racism:

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For African American writers, who enter a discursive arena in which their own history and – before the mid-twentieth century – their humanity was not recognized or acknowledged in philosophy or science, their own experience was the only truth on which they could rely.4 Wall’s primary subject is nineteenth- and twentieth-century essays, but she concludes her book with an epilogue entitled ‘Essaying in the Digital Age’, and observes that thanks to digital technology, ‘June Jordan’s assertion that any citizen should be able to write an essay has come closer to reality than she could have imagined.’5 One way to tell the recent story of American personal protest essays would be to focus on the literary essay collection or book-length essay as both an important cultural form and a touchstone for political conversations. During the second decade of this century, a period rocked by widespread protest and the tumultuous Trump presidency, books such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014),6 Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015),7 Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016),8 Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017)9 and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)10 responded to the political crises of racism and xenophobia in personal essayistic prose. Published in high-quality hardbacks by major publishers or in somber monochrome chapbook-like paperbacks by prestigious independent presses, these essays reached readers in forms that signaled their gravitas. Several of these books have won or been finalists for literary honors including National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and they are frequently assigned in colleges and universities. I have chosen not to focus on these books here, partly because they are already justly the focus of so much critical attention and will likely continue to be. Instead, my chapter builds on Wall’s digital epilogue by exploring a less celebrated but more widely read subgenre I am calling ‘everybody’s protest essay’ – a mashup between the protest essay and the popular Internet form Tressie McMillan Cottom refers to as ‘the dreaded “first-person essay”’, a much-maligned kind of personal writing that dominated much of the recent digital era.11 Not to be confused with the literary personal essays that might be found in venues such as Harper’s, VQR or The New York Review of Books, this ubiquitous, clickable, confessional first-person prose proliferated in the United States from approximately 2008 to 2017, creating a constant stream of cheap content for traffic-driven websites such as Gawker, BuzzFeed and Slate – sites more famous for their gossip, quizzes and listicles, or hot takes, respectively, than for their literary nonfiction. They also appeared in low-budget, memoir-heavy online magazines such as The Rumpus and Entropy, where writers were often paid virtually or literally nothing. These first-person essays were sometimes minimally edited or simply cut-andpasted from a blog. They circulated widely on Facebook and Twitter and were usually encountered and read on a laptop or phone. Though this form is not as omnipresent as it was, it has not disappeared, and its influence persists in social media posts, in newsletters, on podcasts and even in some critically acclaimed essay collections. It has brought essays to millions of readers who might not otherwise encounter them and has helped to re-establish them as an important part of popular political discourse. My name for this kind of essay riffs on the title of Baldwin’s ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, a classic protest essay, though unlike Baldwin my goal is not to condemn the

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genre I am describing.12 Baldwin’s resounding critique of popular protest novels – that they are formulaic, reductive and self-righteous, designed to give readers an easy virtuous thrill and not much else – certainly applies to some popular protest essays, but many of these essays, like Baldwin’s own, fuse political insight with literary artistry. Baldwin used ‘everybody’s’ to signify the interchangeability of texts in a protest genre. I am using it in more of a June Jordan sense, to highlight online personal essays’ democratic accessibility for both readers and writers. Condemning the genre would be superfluous anyway, because it has already been sharply criticized by journalist critics and largely ignored by academic ones, and its political significance has been underestimated. In 2015, during the heyday of the genre, Slate writer Laura Bennett dismissed many of these essays en masse as ‘half-baked and dashed-off’ and denounced the publishing economy that produced them as ‘The FirstPerson Industrial Complex’ in which cost-cutting websites took advantage of aspiring writers trying to get their foot in the door.13 Bennett observed that many writers claimed a broader social significance for the experiences they narrated, but she viewed their attempts to ‘dress up the personal in the language of the political’ as a kind of pandering.14 In 2017, in a viral obituary for the genre in The New Yorker entitled ‘The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over’, Jia Tolentino characterized the genre as ‘too personal: the topics seemed insignificant, or else too important to be aired for an audience of strangers’; as an example, she mentioned essays that ‘directed outrage at society by describing incidents of sexism, abuse, or rape’.15 Though both Bennett and Tolentino recognized that the online personal essay had allowed previously unpublished writers to break into print, they viewed the genre as at best an ‘on-ramp’ to other kinds of writing rather than as a substantial form in its own right. ‘The Internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things’, Tolentino wrote.16 Did the Internet really make the personal essay worse? It would be more accurate to say that it transformed it, creating new kinds of freedom and constraint. The Internet has certainly diversified the audience for personal essays, and thus diversified essays themselves. As Kiese Laymon has said: I have little to no desire to write to what people would call a ‘heteronormative white male gaze,’ but before the internet, I had to. . . . [The internet] has expanded the essay, it has expanded the audience for the essays, and ultimately it’s made the art more elastic.17 For Laymon, who embraces the confessional mode and delves deeply into shame, self-harm and the personal work of remembering, writing online personal essays has allowed for a new sense of audience and form and has affirmed the relational quality of his work. But for Tressie McMillan Cottom, an essayist trained as a social scientist who disavows the identity of ‘literary writer’,18 the expanded demand for personal essays has sometimes felt like an imposition that is unfairly placed on Black women and other marginalized writers who want to enter the public sphere: ‘We have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movements theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us.’19 In the pages that follow, I focus on four viral personal protest essays by Rebecca Solnit, Kiese Laymon, Chanel Miller and Seo-Young Chu that demonstrate the elasticity, range and reach of the form. These essays have been influential enough to have an

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ongoing life on- and off-line, and, in some cases, have helped to define a widespread social phenomenon or ignite a movement. (I discuss them chronologically to foreground how their publication history has anticipated and participated in the unfolding of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo protest movements.) Through close attention to these essays, I show how some of the characteristics that have led to the genre’s dismissal – speed of composition and publication, banal or shocking content, informality, so-called oversharing– have been inextricable from its aesthetic and political power. I conclude by turning to Tressie McMillan Cottom’s meta-essays on the genre in her collection Thick: And Other Essays and her alternative mode of personal political writing.

Rebecca Solnit and the Slippery Slope Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ has been circulating continuously since 2008.20 ‘It spread quickly and has never stopped going around, being reposted and shared and commented upon. It’s circulated like nothing else I’ve done’, Solnit writes. ‘It struck a chord. And a nerve.’21 The essay inspired a new word – ‘mansplaining’ – that is now part of everyday conversation. It also helped to create a broader audience and market for personal protest writing. Fueled by Solnit’s frustration with being patronized at a dinner party by a man who knew much less than she did, the essay practically wrote itself. As Solnit says in a postscript, ‘[i]t wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer’.22 It was originally published on a friend’s blog in 2008, and had, in Solnit’s words, a ‘big revival’ in 2012, when it was reposted in response to Representative Todd Akin’s appalling comments about ‘legitimate rape’.23 After six years of being read and shared online, it finally appeared in book form as the eponymous essay in the first in a series of small-format, collectible, best-selling political essay collections by Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me is blue, Hope in the Dark is black, The Mother of All Questions is orange, Call Them by Their True Names is red and Whose Story Is This? is purple.24 Though the books deal with serious political issues, they are invitingly priced and sized (not that much bigger than a phone!) and can be read in a few sittings. ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ changed the trajectory of Solnit’s career, turning her from a midlist cultural critic into a celebrated public intellectual, popular feminist, and publishing phenomenon. It also helped to establish the popularity of the personal political essay collection in the decade that followed. In ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ and other essays, in a strategy reminiscent of Woolf, Solnit’s method is to start by narrating a personal anecdote of annoying everyday sexism she has experienced as a white woman in elite contexts – for example, the time her host at a fancy Aspen dinner party did not know she had written a book on the topic he was pontificating on,25 or the time she was onstage at a literary event and the man who was interviewing her asked her why she did not have children.26 She then dramatically escalates and extrapolates from the annoying experience in question so that the essay becomes a protest against extreme violent misogyny writ large. As Solnit describes it, ‘I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.’27 Solnit signals this method in ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ with her first section heading, ‘The Slippery Slope of Silencings’, which helps her quickly transition (or slide) from the dinner party to war with

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Iraq (if only the US government had listened to a particular woman in the FBI, the war could have been avoided), to sexist laws in the Middle East, to a suburban American woman who said her husband was trying to kill her but was not believed.28 Subsequent rapid rhetorical slides can be spatial, temporal and philosophical, sometimes all in the space of a sentence: The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women – of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.29 Solnit’s steep ski-slope slides can be thought of as an accelerated or extreme version of some of the major rhetorical moves or ‘common stances’ Norman identifies as characteristic of American protest essays, including ‘collectivity’, or speaking as one of a large group,30 and ‘representation’, or speaking on behalf of others whose experiences you may not personally share.31 Something that is distinctive about Solnit’s essay, however, and that makes it read like a personal blogpost as well as a manifesto, is the way she makes these stances serve a personal as well as a political purpose. She starts out the essay by narrating a previous version of herself that is silenced by her own internalized sexism, ‘caught up . . . in my assigned role as ingénue’, fully willing to believe that the sexist man she is talking to has identified an embarrassing gap in her knowledge.32 She does not even have the confidence to correct him – her friend has to do this for her. (‘Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.’33) But over the course of the essay, by allying herself with or speaking for countless silenced women throughout time and space, she is able to tap into a bold voice of righteous anger and irreverent scorn that turns the tables on smug men via mocking asides, for example: ‘intelligence is not situated in the crotch – even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf’s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie’.34 ‘Men Who Message Me’ is protest writing as staircase wit – a devastating riposte in essay form that makes personal revenge part of bringing down the patriarchy. Solnit’s politicized personal trajectory from silence to confidence can serve as a model or aspiration for her readers. Solnit’s essays have been criticized by Viviane Fairbank, Jennifer Wilson and others for the ways they move quickly and seemingly unreflectively from Solnit’s everyday experiences of elite sexism to much more serious kinds of oppression, seeking to create consensus by eliding important differences of race and class as well as of scale.35 But Solnit defends her approach: The point of the essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.36 Solnit unapologetically makes her own everyday experiences part of and representative of sexism and misogyny generally. Whether this is a strength, a limitation or both,

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the social power and popularity of her essays rests in the way they take her own exasperations seriously and center her own personal frustration as a political feeling. She is writing for other women who have been explained to, and, she hopes, to the men who have explained things to her. As she writes, ‘Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.’37

Kiese Laymon and the Confessional For Kiese Laymon, shame is not primarily a curse to be wished on his nemeses but a constant companion – a feeling to be written and reckoned with. This reckoning suffuses ‘How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance’, an essay with a publication history that parallels and participates in the Black Lives Matter movement.38 ‘HSKY’, as Laymon sometimes acronymically calls it (pronounced ‘husky’ – a hefty title echoed by his subsequent book, Heavy), was originally written in 2012, the year Trayvon Martin was killed. It was published on the gossip and news site Gawker, where it went viral, and was republished there again during George Zimmerman’s trial, with an editor’s note informing the reader of these political convergences.39 It subsequently appeared in an eponymous essay collection in time for the Ferguson uprising.40 Laymon bought back, revised and republished the collection in 2020, the year that Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed and protests filled the streets again.41 ‘HSKY’ is a personal narrative designed to be read alongside and in the midst of this shared history. The ‘Yourself and Others’ of the title emphasizes the relational dynamic of Laymon’s work and the way that for him, personal self-destruction – or thriving – can never be experienced or written about in isolation. In a 2013 interview in The Rumpus, Laymon explained: I’m not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think ‘confessing’ is a major part of reckoning. One of the problems with a lot of ‘confessional’ writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn’t really tie the ‘I’ into a ‘we’ at all.42 Laymon ties the ‘I’ into a ‘we’ throughout his essay, beginning with the unforgettable lede: I’ve had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies – once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I’ve helped many folks say yes to life but I’ve definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.43 From the beginning, the divisions between self and others begin to blur as Laymon appears on both sides of the gun. His confession that he’s ‘aided in few folks dying slowly’ reckons with his part in collective slow death (which he later specifies as ‘easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad’). Laymon places all

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these personal responses to sadness in a political context, repeatedly reminding us that these things happened ‘in America’ and ‘in Mississippi’ and ‘in Central Mississippi’ and ‘under the blue-black sky in Central Mississippi’, and naming the people he writes about as ‘children of our nation’. In so doing, he insists on his experience as representative of both national and local forms of violence and survival. He also measures his life and each of his brushes with quick or slow death against the lives and deaths of other young Black people who did not survive: I’m 17, five years younger than Rekia Boyd will be when she is shot in the head by an off duty police officer in Chicago . . . 16 months later, I’m 18, three years older than Edward Evans will be when he is shot in the head behind an abandoned home in Jackson . . . The day that I’m awarded the Benjamin Brown award, named after a 21-year-old truck driver shot in the back by police officers during a student protest near Jackson State in 1967, I take the bullets out of my gun, throw it in the Ross Barnett Reservoir and avoid my Grandma for a long, long time . . . I know that by the time I left Mississippi, I was 20 years old, three years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he is murdered for wearing a hoodie and swinging back in the wrong American neighborhood.44 The juxtaposition between himself and these others mutually illuminates Laymon’s life and theirs, and their hyperlinked names lead readers to read their stories as well. We can see how Laymon’s life was always haunted by these deaths, past and future, and can only be understood, by him and by us, as part of this larger history. Laymon’s ‘personal’ feelings – his sadness, stubbornness, ‘uncanny resolve’, rage, love and ‘toxic miasma’ – and his responses to them are thus never merely personal. This technique of setting his own life alongside historical lives is a powerful move Laymon adapts for varied purposes in other essays, including one on the pandemic published in the new edition of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America in which he juxtaposes what he did at various times in 2020 with the very different things that Donald Trump did and said.45 Like Baldwin, Laymon writes about Black life and death in spiritual terms, though unlike Baldwin, who is often writing for a mostly white audience, Laymon primarily writes for and evokes a Black ‘us’ – a readership initially made possible by the Internet, sidestepping the white gatekeepers at book publishers and print magazines. In an epiphanic moment towards the end of the essay, he and his friend help a woman who has been beaten and raped, and he recognizes a common destructive force in himself and his friend, and in the people who hurt her, and in the woman herself: We know that whatever is in the boys . . . has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of the shivering black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also know that whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves and those around us slowly, is also in the heart and mind of this black girl on the couch.46

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The antidote to all this pervasive slow death is a kind of spiritual practice: ‘saying yes to life’ and ‘leaning on memory for help’ (both phrases Laymon repeats as refrains), and ‘telling and listening to each other’s odd-shaped truth’. Laymon concludes the essay with what Norman might call a stance of ‘incitement and open-endedness’ rooted in remembering:47 I want to say and mean that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really ask nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.48 For Laymon, who tells his story alongside so many others’ stories, and who ends with an appeal to ‘all of us’, an essay is part of an ongoing collective work of remembering, telling, accepting, revisiting and revising. This particular essay does not represent an endpoint of that collective work. Nothing has been solved, either in the nation or in the spirit; at the time of writing, Laymon confesses, ‘I have managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me.’ But the essay tells a truth about how what is sometimes understood as personal sadness is in fact relational, shared and rooted in race, place and nation. In so doing, it participates in a form of political remembrance that may somehow help its readers and its author say yes to life, even in the midst of death.

Chanel Miller and Survivor Impact Laymon’s essay went viral the year before #BlackLivesMatter; Chanel Miller’s went viral the year before #MeToo.49 It is hard to overstate the impact of her victim impact statement, which was read by over fifteen million people when it was first published anonymously on BuzzFeed in 2016, and was republished as an appendix to her bestselling memoir a few years later.50 Miller had been raped by Stanford student Brock Turner, who was convicted of the crime but received a sentence so light it became a national scandal. The statement Miller read at his sentencing undoubtedly paved the way for the movement that caught fire the following year. The statement can be thought of as a kind of ‘hermit crab essay’ – a term coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola to describe essays that ‘adopt already existing forms as the container for the writing at hand’.51 It combines the legal gravity of a victim impact statement with the intimacy of an online personal essay and the anger of a protest. Miller’s task in the statement, as it was in the trial, is to create a persona that is clear, confident and articulate enough to be credible, but also damaged enough so that the weight of her rapist’s harm will be felt. To these difficult demands she adds the political tasks of critiquing the legal system and building community among survivors, and she manages to accomplish it all. Miller begins by bluntly confronting her rapist: ‘You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.’ She then sets up a cozy pre-rape domestic scene (parents, TV, a family dinner, joking with her sister on the way to a party) and uses narrative rupture to represent the rupture of the rape: a blank line drop followed by a grim paragraph beginning, ‘The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway.’ Her account of the aftermath – physical, emotional, social – is detailed

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and intimate and altogether harrowing. The confusion of finding pine needles in her hair, of having ‘a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs’, of discovering the details of her own rape from an article on the Internet. Her futile desire to protect her family and boyfriend from what had happened to her. The revictimization she endured when the case went to trial: ‘I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, almost broke me.’52 But the vulnerable voice Miller uses in narrating these experiences is ballasted by the unwavering boldness she adopts when challenging her rapist and the legal system. Her statement creates and controls a confrontation between herself and her rapist that the court (and the assault) did not allow. She writes her story against his, ultimately arranging the two stories as an anaphoric series of his lies and her truths. Each of his lies has its own short paragraph in bold, followed by her rebuttal: You said . . . You said . . . You said . . .53 ‘He said/she said’ is a phrase used to dismiss testimony at rape trials. But Miller will not allow her words and his to have any equivalence. She responds to Turner’s short flat excuses with an astonishing and expansive range of literary tones and modes ranging from sarcasm to lyricism, refusing for her words to be reduced to his level. In the actual courtroom, Turner’s attempts to portray himself as the real victim may sway the judge, but in the courtroom of Miller’s essay, his voice is overwhelmed by hers, and she has the last word. Miller includes her listeners and readers in her own experience of both the assault and the trial by ventriloquizing the hectoring questions of Turner’s attorney. Again, she sets his words typographically apart, in an exhausting italicized paragraph listing forty-three invasive and hostile questions in a row. A sample: How much do you weigh? . . . What were you wearing? . . . When did you urinate? . . . Would you ever cheat?54 Miller’s exasperated rehash of her own examination is an attempt to cause the people reading or hearing it to experience some of the discomfort and frustration she did. She wants us to feel the indecency of being subjected to an undermining barrage in the aftermath of a violent assault. Her recreation of the interrogation dramatizes the inherent structural problems with rape cases and the way they put their victims on trial. Her protest is not just against rapists but against the way a trial can replicate the dynamics of a rape. By the end, Miller has used the essay to gather and dramatize her fractured personae: her distorted, damaged, almost broken self; her militant, protesting self; her connected, collective self. She concludes by turning away from Turner and his representatives and addressing the readers who have endured trauma like hers: [T]o girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you.55 Her tone is simultaneously intimate and galvanizing, an imagined shared loneliness reimagined as company, consolation and a shared battle.

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Jia Tolentino laments that ‘so many women wrote about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and received not much in return’.56 For many personal essay writers, this was sadly the case. But by turning her victim impact statement into an online protest against rape and the structures that protect it, Miller publicly transformed herself from a victim into a survivor and a writer. Instead of simply stating the impact the assault had on her, Miller used the possibilities of the personal essay genre to redefine what happened and what it means, to reshape the power relationships of violence and law, and to call a community and movement into being.

Seo-Young Chu and Hybridity Inspired by Miller’s statement, Seo-Young Chu wrote about her own experience of rape at Stanford. Her viral and virtuosic essay ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major’57 was published on Entropy (‘We like to think of ourselves as more than just a magazine or website, but also as a community space’58) and was part of its ‘Woven’ essay series, a ‘dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental illness, substance addiction, and legal failures and remedies. We believe you.’59 It became one of the site’s most-read pieces ever.60 ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe’ is hybrid and complex, demonstrating what Laymon calls the ‘elastic’ aesthetic possibilities of the genre. (Entropy tagged it as both ‘creative nonfiction/essay’ and ‘poetry’.) Like Miller, Chu repurposes pre-existing forms as a way to protest both sexual violence and the structures that protect and perpetuate it. But whereas Miller repurposes a single legal form, Chu repurposes a host of literary and academic ones. As if in defiance of the assumption that online personal essays about trauma involve gratuitous and sensational personal exposure, she stores and hides her experience in the small anecdotes, poems, questionnaires, dialogues, Facebook posts, multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blanks, academic emails, real and imagined documents and ‘interludes’ that make up her essay. Miller writes direct confrontations; Chu writes oblique ones. She often puts her reader in the position of a student of literature (as she was when she was raped by her professor). In short sections entitled ‘DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION’, ‘COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING DIALOGUE’ and ‘IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF IRONY? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER’, Chu presents us with quotations that allow us to see the implicit violence in academic and literary language, such as this quotation from her rapist: In a 1996 News Service interview, [JF] described the 18th-century attitude toward belongings this way: ‘There was a sense that objects were preferred over people because they didn’t leave you, they didn’t talk back, and you could project a certain subjectivity and have an intense relationship with them, particularly with books,’ he said. (Source: Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, August 17, 2007)61 Rather than accepting the common assumption that it is possible to separate a rapist/ artist from their work, Chu suggests that her rapist’s relationship to rare and old books paralleled his dominating, silencing and objectifying relationship to her. Meanwhile, in poems modeled on Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Donne and others,

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Chu explores the predatory quality of much classic love poetry, and shows us rape culture in the heart of the canon: ‘I write, rewrite, a “sonnet” about rape / To hunt that voice I wish I could escape.’62 Here and elsewhere, Chu turns the tables, rewriting classic sonnets of seduction – replete with metaphors of hunting women and girls as prey – into sonnets about hunting a predator. She contrasts these fragments of the corrupt literary past with fictions of a literary future, including an imagined future in which sonnets, finally, respect consent: Now, in the year 2078, it is possible to choose existence in a world designed like a sonnet. It is possible to live one’s entire life inside a sonnet. It is possible to become a sonnet. – But only if one has consented to such an existence.63 Throughout, through juxtaposition, interpretation and ‘SOURCES AND ALLUSIONS’ (to borrow one of her section headings), Chu connects her personal history with the oppressive structures of literature and the academy. The sections track the many ways she has responded to and resisted the violence she experienced, and there is a discernible though tortuous and nonlinear movement from self-harm to survival to protest. A few pages after a villanelle about her suicidal ideation, for example, there is a sonnet that rewrites harm into healing: ‘Gather our parts, united self’, a revision of Donne’s Holy Sonnet about asking to be battered.64 Near the end of the essay, she includes an email she wrote protesting the naming of a mentoring award after her rapist. Like the other essays in this chapter, ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe’ concludes by rippling out from the author’s individual experience towards political collectivity. In the penultimate section, ‘January 2017. Why I Am Joining The March’, Chu imagines a world in which she might literally participate in the Women’s March (‘In an ideal world, my body and mind together would join the march – in person, in public, in visible protest’) while naming the PTSD and pain that make this impossible in the real world. But even if this kind of marching is not yet possible, Chu still participates in the movement in other ways – including, even, in the essay she is writing: ‘Yet I believe in the reality of ideal worlds. They can be articulated. They can be drawn. They can be painted. They can be diagrammed. They can be meditated. They can be realized.’65

Epilogue: Tressie McMillan Cottom and the Impersonal Self The personal essay can be a powerful public space, but not everyone wants to claim it. Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist who is arguably one of the greatest modern practitioners of the genre, disavows the ‘personal essay’ label. She kicks off her National Book Award-nominated collection Thick: And Other Essays with a meta-essay explaining why: ‘When I write . . . I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse. And I am defying every expectation when I do it. What I am not doing is writing personal essays.’66 Unlike personal essayists, Cottom explains, she begins by asking, ‘What . . . does my social location say about our society? That is quite different from trying to figure out how everything in our society is about me . . . . A personal essay would not make the distinction.’67 Cottom uses the personal as evidence, not confession: ‘I have shared parts of myself, my history, and my identity to make social theory concrete.’68

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As a Black woman whose rise as a writer coincided with the online personal essay boom, and who published hundreds of blogposts and Internet essays on her way to becoming a MacArthur Fellow who writes for the New York Times, Cottom is well aware of the pressures some writers have faced to be personal. As she says, ‘[w]e [Black women] were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us’.69 (This is almost the flipside of Wall’s argument: instead of personal experience being ‘the only truth on which [Black authors] could rely’, it is the only topic on which white readers will trust them, or at least publish them.) Cottom has responded to the pressure to be personal by writing stylish, substantive essays that include personal experiences, sometimes even personal trauma, as sociological facts to further or flesh out her arguments rather than as feelings to be worked through. At times this practice, reminiscent of the robust style celebrated in Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough,70 has gotten her into trouble with readers who expect a more vulnerable narrative persona. Her meta-essay ‘In the Name of Beauty’ discusses the fallout of a viral blogpost about the politics of beauty she published on Slate in 2013 in which she wrote, ‘blithely as a matter of observable fact, that I am unattractive’.71 For Cottom, this assessment of her looks was an indictment of racist beauty standards, not an expression of insecurity, but for readers accustomed to ‘the dreaded “first-person essay”’, it was intelligible only as a true confession, a sign of self-hatred, an appeal for reassurance. Some readers felt betrayed by her choice to use her looks in passing to make a cultural critique, instead of as part of a personal journey from shame to self-love. Though Cottom’s use of the personal might occasionally be misunderstood, it is as powerful as any ‘confessional’ personal essay could be. In ‘Dying to Be Competent’, an essay about, among other things, the medical racism that caused the death of her only child at birth, she summarizes the loss in a single sentence: ‘When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.’72 Her essay is not a lyrical elegy like Du Bois’s ‘Of the Passing of the First Born’ or a wild journey into grief like Ariel Levy’s ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’. Her mourning takes place off the page. But in part because of its restraint, it is one of the most devastating essays about the lethal consequences of racism ever written. Cottom has survived some gory experiences, but she refuses to simply bleed her personal life into the genre afforded her. In defiance of the dominant online personal essay culture, Cottom represents an alternative way of thinking about the role of the self in essays – a self where the ‘me’ of an essay is not ‘the most difficult thing that ever happened to me’ (to paraphrase Tolentino) but the essayist’s full authorial voice. No one is a sharper critic of the modern personal essay than Cottom, and she has worked hard to write essays that ‘dance along the line’ of the genre rather than existing within it.73 But even as she distinguishes her own writing from personal essays, Cottom distances herself from critics who would dismiss the genre or celebrate its demise. As Cottom argues, those who condemn the personal essay risk perpetuating ‘systemic discrimination’ against the writers who have written in it, defended it and made it their own:74 Black women writers spoke up about the personal essay. For them, it was the only point of access for telling the creative stories of empirical realities. Latinas said the

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same. Queer women and trans women and all manner of women stepped forward to add dimensions to what the personal essay form is and what it is assumed to be.75 An account of the online personal protest essay needs to acknowledge the constraints of the personal essay genre and market while taking these writers seriously and honoring their work. People should not have to write personal essays in order to make political arguments in the public sphere. At the same time, for many writers the personal essay is not merely a concession to the market. It is a dynamic form to ‘add dimensions to’ and reimagine. For these writers, the self offers not just evidence for a political argument but its subject and method as well: in their hands, the personal essay becomes a mode of remembrance, a reckoning, a revision, a refuge. And the Internet, with its widely criticized culture of personal disclosure and performance, its expanding demand for fresh (if undervalued) content, has made a way for their work to reach new readers. Despite its drawbacks, in many meaningful ways the Internet did make the personal protest essay better – faster than a pamphlet, larger than a march, a confessional box with the whole world on the other side of the screen. Online writing is dynamic and relational in unprecedented ways. Writers can often respond to events, thoughts and feelings as they are happening, without the time lag and word limits of traditional publishing. They can watch as their words are read and responded to in real time. There are dangers in the comment sections and social media responses to Internet essays – ‘don’t read the comments’ is conventional wisdom for a reason – but there is also the possibility for intimacy and influence, for dialogue and discussion, for connections that can coalesce into a community or a movement. Solnit laughing with her friend in a Colorado cabin. Laymon leaning on memory and putting down his gun. Miller combing the pine needles out of her hair and rousing herself to fight. Chu rewriting the Western canon. Online personal protest essays offered each of these very different writers the scope and space for personal and political remaking. Each essay evokes a dynamic self that changes over the course of the essay. Each essay writes an ‘I’ into a ‘we’. Each essay has reached countless readers who find themselves in centuries of mansplained women, or in those slowly killing themselves who want to say yes to life, or in the midnight loneliness of survivors, or in a protest march in an ideal world. As these protest essays traveled swiftly and freely from screen to screen, they became everybody’s.

Notes   1. Brian Norman, The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 40.   2. Ibid., 156.   3. Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), loc. 186 of 7477, Kindle.   4. Ibid., loc. 150 of 7477.   5. Ibid., loc. 4944 of 7477.   6. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014).   7. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).   8. Jesmyn Ward, ed., The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (New York: Scribner, 2016).

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  9. Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2017). 10. Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020). 11. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019), 16. 12. James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, Partisan Review 16 (June 1949): 578–85. 13. Laura Bennett, ‘The First-Person Industrial Complex’, Slate, September 14, 2015, http:// www.slate.com/articles/life/technology/2015/09/the_first_person_industrial_complex_ how_the_harrowing_personal_essay_took.html. 14. Ibid. 15. Jia Tolentino, ‘The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over’, The New Yorker, May 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over, emphasis in original. 16. Ibid. 17. ‘An Interview with Distinguished Visiting Professor Kiese Laymon’, University of Iowa English department website, Spring 2018, https://english.uiowa.edu/newsletter/mfa-nonfictionwriting/spring-2018/interview-distinguished-visiting-professor-kiese. 18. Cottom, Thick, 25. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Published on TomDispatch.com in 2008, https://tomdispatch.com/best-of-tomdispatchrebecca-solnit-the-archipelago-of-arrogance/, on Guernica in 2012, https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-men-explain-things-to-me/, and in book form in 2014: Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014). 21. Solnit, Men Explain Things, 11. 22. Ibid. 23. John Eligon and Michael Schwirtz, ‘Senate Candidate Provokes Ire with “Legitimate Rape” Comment’, New York Times, August 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/us/ politics/todd-akin-provokes-ire-with-legitimate-rape-comment.html. 24. Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), The Mother of All Questions (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018) and Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 25. Solnit, Men Explain Things, 2. 26. Solnit, Mother of All Questions, 4. 27. Solnit, Men Explain Things, 14. 28. Ibid., 3–7. 29. Ibid., 9. 30. Norman, American Protest Essay, 17. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. Solnit, Men Explain Things, 2. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. Ibid., 8–9. 35. Viviane Fairbank, ‘Why I Don’t Read Rebecca Solnit’, Walrus, April 23, 2020, https:// thewalrus.ca/why-i-dont-read-rebecca-solnit/; Jennifer Wilson, ‘No One Disagrees with Rebecca Solnit’, New Republic, April 3, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157136/noone-disagrees-rebecca-solnit-memoir-feminism. 36. Solnit, Men Explain Things, 14. 37. Ibid., 9. 38. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was first used in 2013 by activist Alicia Garza in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Tens of millions participated in online and in-person

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Black Lives Matter protests in the decade that followed. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel, ‘Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History’, New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/ george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 39. Kiese Laymon, ‘How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance’, Gawker, July 28, 2012, https://gawker.com/5927452/how-to-slowly-kill-yourself-andothers-in-america-a-remembrance. 40. Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (New York: Agate, 2013), loc. 361–577 of 2070, Kindle. 41. Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), loc. 1663–853 of 2102, Kindle. 42. Kima Jones, ‘The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Kiese Laymon’, Rumpus, August 31, 2013, https://therumpus.net/2013/08/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-kiese-laymon/. 43. Laymon, ‘How to Slowly’ (2012). All subsequent quotations from the essay are from the 2012 Gawker version. 44. Ibid. 45. Laymon, How to Slowly (2020), chap. 1, loc. 94–329 of 2102, Kindle. 46. Laymon, ‘How to Slowly’ (2012). 47. Norman, American Protest Essay, 37. 48. Laymon, ‘How to Slowly’ (2012). 49. ‘Me Too’ was first used by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to protest sexual violence and harassment. The hashtag trended in 2017 in the wake of the rape and sexual harassment allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. 50. ‘Victim Impact Statement’, originally published anonymously in Katie J. M. Baker, ‘Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker’, BuzzFeed, June 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letterthe-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra. Reprinted as ‘Emily Doe’s Victim Impact Statement’, in Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2019), 339–63. 51. Brenda Miller, ‘The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study’, Brevity, January 7, 2015, https://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/the-shared-space/, and Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2019). 52. Miller, ‘Victim Impact Statement’, BuzzFeed. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Tolentino, ‘Personal-Essay Boom’. 57. Seo-Young Chu, ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major’, Entropy, November 3, 2017, https://entropymag.org/a-refuge-for-jae-in-doe-fugues-in-the-key-ofenglish-major/. 58. ‘About’, Entropy, https://entropymag.org/about/. 59. Chu, ‘Refuge for Jae-in Doe’. 60. Reprinted in Sheila Heti and the Students of 826 National, eds., Best American NonRequired Reading 2018 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 60–82. 61. Chu, ‘Refuge for Jae-in Doe’. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. John Donne, ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god. 65. Chu, ‘Refuge for Jae-in Doe’. 66. Cottom, Thick, 25.

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67. 68. 69. 70.

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 22–23. Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 71. Cottom, Thick, 38. 72. Tressie McMillan Cottom, ‘Dying to be Competent’, in Thick, 73–98 (89). 73. Cottom, Thick, 16. 74. Ibid., 18. 75. Ibid.

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16 Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment Jenny Spinner

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‘ s this a golden age for women essayists?’ Cheryl Strayed and Ben Moser addressed that question in a 2014 column for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Pointing to the commercial success of writers like Leslie Jamison and Roxane Gay, Strayed agreed that ‘[e]ssayists who happen to be women are having a banner year’. But, Strayed offered, ‘as long as we still have reason to wedge “women” as a qualifier before “essayist,” the age is not exactly golden’.1 Strayed and Moser’s conversation subsequently became a reference point for others attempting to corral the twenty-first-century explosion of women essayists, predominantly but not entirely North American, into something critically comprehensible. The Times was not the first publication to put ‘women essayist’ and ‘golden age’ in the same sentence. In an interview with Jamison and Gay earlier that year, Salon writer Michele Filgate asked the two essayists whether this is ‘a great time to be a female essayist’. Yes, they both agreed, but, as with Strayed, not without caveats. Gay’s reply: women essayists still aren’t taken as seriously as men. I think that you can look at all of the major, all the publications that publish essays that we all want to get into . . . their mastheads feel very male. And so I think we’re in a golden age of women essayists, but in what publications?2 When we survey the landscape of women’s essay writing in the twenty-first century, we find a nearly unprecedented season in the history of the essay, a veritable and broad bloom of women essayists springing forth. But while it may be intoxicating to imagine a future in which essayists write and are celebrated without the weight of gender qualifiers, gender has always mattered in the essay tradition, heretofore dominated by male writers and critics – and it continues to matter, as Gay points out. Strayed said as much herself in a 2013 interview in Creative Nonfiction magazine where she acknowledged the ‘discreet and ingrained’ gender bias that women writers continue to face.3 Recent attempts to interrogate restrictive binary framings and recast the essay genre as queer, as David Lazar does in ‘Queering the Essay’, mark an important turning point in essay criticism, but new theoretical approaches do not change the essayist’s lived or textual experience along the gender spectrum, which so often drives the very subject of the essay.4 In other words, accepting Lazar’s argument that ‘[t]he essay is not and has never been genre normative’ does

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not necessitate denying the existence of gender norms, which have hung over the modern essay since its beginnings.5 Women essayists – especially women of color, lesbian and transfeminine essayists – have historically been tied to cultural and marketplace expectations regarding what it means either to be a woman or to write as one, even as they have confronted expectations, barreled through them or used them to their advantage. On a 2017 panel of transgender nonfiction writers at the NonfictioNOW Conference, Brook Shelley remarked, ‘I know if I want to sell a piece, it’s got to be about my transsexuality. If I want to write a piece that will be great, then it’s about almost anything else.’6 In a similar vein, Joy Castro, in the title essay of her collection Island of Bones, writes movingly about the expectations for a Latina writer like herself and how it impacts the choices she makes as a writer, asking, ‘What happens when a Latina not only doesn’t look the part but also doesn’t write the part’?7 And so, the original question takes on additional qualifiers. Is this a golden age for women essayists if trans essayists are boxed in, and out, of writing about certain subjects, and if essayists of color must negotiate perceptions and expectations with their felt and lived identities? Despite the current spotlight on women essayists, women have largely been left out of the history of the essay – at least until the last two decades – passed over in theoretical and scholarly discussions, and omitted from or underrepresented in annuals and anthologies not specifically dedicated to women. Oft-anthologized essayists like Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion and Annie Dillard have borne an outsized weight of critical and editorial attention, imprinted on the flag of inclusiveness and waved as proof against bias and neglect – to the detriment of a much more diverse representation of women essayists and of a fuller examination of women writing in the form. (To some extent, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker have borne that weight for Black essayists.)8 In ‘f-Words: An Essay on the Essay’, one of a handful of critical examinations of the essay as feminized space, Rachel Blau DuPlessis – expounding upon Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ – suggests that ‘our culture depends on an already engaged and often written [male] body which has nullified the female body’s presence and powers’.9 ‘Queering’ the genre rightly disrupts a forked theoretical framing as necessarily masculine or feminine but, in the process, it cannot and should not further ‘nullify’ the female – even as the nonbinary writer and the nonbinary body present further complexities. Given the historical neglect of women’s essays, it is also fair to ask who is doing that new framing and who is being framed, just as Barrie Jean Borich does in ‘The Craft of Writing Queer’, where she wonders why queer women are largely absent from ‘the central debates of our genre times’.10 In making her argument, Borich returns the queer but female body to the critical conversation about a genre in which the body as essay, or the essayist as female body, has struggled to be (ac)counted (for). From a historical perspective, this struggle is strikingly apparent in the nineteenth century, when the essay embodied the female gender in derogatory terms. Male essayists, according to (male) scholars, positioned themselves as ‘something less than a virile patriarch’11 and ‘effeminate and sickly, full of resentment and weakness, procrastinators, passive as hens, nervous, unwed’.12 No matter that the femininity of the essay might now be recast positively, as DuPlessis does in ‘f-Words’, and Nancy Mairs did earlier in ‘Essaying the Feminine’, contemporary women essayists continue to write from the tangle of the bodies they inhabit both in life and in construct on the page.13 In the intersectional body, lived and textual, gender may slip behind color, and

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then perhaps further still between layers of color. For example, in the title essay of Emily Bernard’s essay collection Black is the Body, about the lingering physical and emotional effects of being stabbed in a coffee shop while a graduate student at Yale, Bernard writes, ‘I am black – and brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.’14 In the introduction to the collection, Bernard remarks that ‘Blackness is an art, not a science’, and here are the brown and Black of Bernard’s identity offered as just that.15 If, as Griselda Murray Brown suggests, ‘“the personal” often means the body’, then for women essayists and essayists of color, the essay is inherently personal and inherently bodied.16 Critical responses are tied to those bodies as well, especially if those bodies are female but even more so if they are also Black, brown, disabled or fat. In an interview for the Guardian, Gay observes: Do you see how much I had to write to get you to even notice me? And that’s because I’m fat. I know that. That’s how much work I’ve had to put in to get a fraction of the attention that a conventionally attractive thin person is going to get.17 The difference for male essayists is that critics often read and respond to essays written by men – at least straight, cisgender men – as ungendered and thus universal. Critical, and even craft, conversations about the contemporary essay seem to rest on the idea that the form itself is somehow ungendered, unraced and unclassed, to which qualifiers are added only when essays are written by women and people of color, at which point the pining begins for a post-gender, post-race stage where the essay might somehow be seen as neutral (male, white) and unqualified (just an essay) again. That does not mean that all writers must be read through the critical lenses of race and gender, but rather that race and gender are part of any writer’s experience as constructed in their text, whoever that writer is, and failing to acknowledge it does not make it otherwise. In ‘writing to confess’, bell hooks describes how she uses ‘the personal as a way to go beyond it’; for hooks, ‘the personal’ acts like a pin drop on a map, ‘offering the reader a sense of who I am, a sense of location’.18 Every writer’s pin is situated in their gender identity, and when the essay is personal, there is simply no neutral (neutered?) space, even if it remains unlabeled. Morgan Jerkins makes a similar point in her essay ‘Monkeys Like You’, where she writes about how the argument that all women are victims in a patriarchal society minimizes the particular experiences of Black women: The word ‘all’ switches to whiteness as the default – this is also why I write. When black women speak about themselves to those who are not black, somehow our interlocutors get offended that we dare speak about how both race and gender affect us.19 Whiteness, she concludes, ‘provides some kind of intellectual relief that erases black women all over again’.20 Indeed, whiteness – and maleness – have long attempted to serve as an invisible default for the essay, erasing women in the process. In many ways, the modern essay can never fully escape its birth from the privileged white male experience of Montaigne, who, in this space of privilege, gave himself permission to write of himself. However bold an act then, it was performed in a society that granted him permission back and was willing to receive the (male) self

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he delivered (as human). In the essay that Montaigne puts forth, the mind moves, explores, engages with other writers and thinkers. It weaves exterior and interior worlds. It offers something of value beyond the thing itself, whether that value lies in lyrical language, in uncomfortable truths, in what is left unsaid or in what cannot be determined with any certainty. Women make these moves in their essays, too, but it is difficult to identify what precisely about the genre’s techniques transcends white, male, Montaigne, often erroneously cast as an equivalent of human. At the very least, the stylistic implementation of the essayist’s moves is inevitably impacted by the politics of gender and race, whether or not it is recognized by the writer or the reader/ critic. For example, Lisa Low argues that the proleptic conversational techniques that are a signature part of the essay are complicated by race for ‘writers of color who anticipate audience response to racial topics’ and then find themselves ‘maneuvering around, despite, and through white fragility’.21 Among the contemporary women essayists whose craft moves seem to align most closely with Montaigne’s – Rachel Cusk, Sinéad Gleeson, Jericho Parms and Zadie Smith, among them – it is hard to say what exactly about their essays is tied to, or free from, the bodies (in which) they write or construct on the page, if the essay itself is never free. In ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’, Cusk examines a number of texts – Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Doris Lessing’s short story ‘To Room Nineteen’ – seeking an answer to the question, ‘Can we, in the twenty-first century, identify something that could be called “women’s writing”?’22 Notably, Cusk searches for answers not through a single Judith, the sister whom Woolf imagines for Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own, but through a collective of both real and fictionalized sisters. What Cusk finds through these sisters’ narratives is a false equality in a society that continues to be dominated by masculine values, and a twenty-first-century woman writer who is taught to seek assimilation in male literary culture by way of ‘compromise and false consciousness and “mystification”’, the latter concept borrowed from de Beauvoir.23 Women must resist that assimilation, Cusk contends; they must ‘irritate and antagonise rather than please’.24 So much of contemporary women’s essay writing seems to do just that: to poke, to unsettle, to resist resolution. This resistance often comes in the form of speaking the unspeakable, a phrase that many contemporary women essayists use to describe their acts of writing. But unspeakable might mean not only what should not be spoken, but also what cannot be. In ‘On Rudeness’, Cusk observes that the very anecdote with which she begins the essay – an encounter with an airport official who treats her rudely in part because she has broken ‘the social code’ by traveling alone as a woman – is unreliable.25 She writes that the story doesn’t work as it should. Why, then, if it proves nothing, is this a story I persist in telling? The answer: because I don’t understand it . . . and I feel that the thing I don’t understand about it – indeed the mere fact of not understanding – is significant.26 Contemporary women essayists regularly enter these unreliable spaces, using their subjectivities to push against boundaries, and in doing so, interrogate – intentionally or not – what an essay can do when the body is female. In our own attempt to

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understand the twenty-first-century essay as written by women, perhaps what we do not understand or cannot fully answer is also what is significant. Yet this much seems clear: contemporary women’s essaying both nods toward the gendered origins of the modern essay’s beginnings as well as diverges from them. For once unhooked, the essay travels a path (essays move!), whether accidental or deliberate, from the site of tethering. It is the divergences along this path, shaped both by the site of origin and by their resistance to it, that begin to mark contemporary women’s essays in ways that may be critically identified. As one example, contemporary women essayists both embrace and resist tradition in the evocation of other female essayists in their work. Specifically, Brown observes that the tendency of contemporary women essayists to summon other female essayists (she names Woolf, Didion, Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag) departs from the past where both male and female essayists alike drew primarily upon the male tradition (here she names Montaigne, William Hazlitt and George Orwell).27 The evocation is more than just naming, however. For Emily Donaldson, it is about stylistic conversation with other female essayists. Donaldson argues, for instance, that Jia Tolentino is ‘the essay writer of the moment’ in part because of Tolentino’s ‘cherry-picking from the best of her forebears’ narrative techniques: [Janet] Malcom’s slipperiness, Sontag’s rigour, Woolf’s dubiousness and Didion’s remove’.28 In On Freedom and the Will to Adorn, a history of the African American essay tradition, Cheryl A. Wall also makes this case for Black essayists, noting that they ‘engage, directly or indirectly, the examples of writers before them who used the essay to focus attention on political controversies, to shape aesthetic debates, and to create a space for personal recollection and philosophical reflection’.29 In the case of Black women essayists, evocation becomes conversation becomes action. Rather than construct the female tradition as linear, though – or even matrilineal – in the way that male tradition or literary influence is often mapped, essayist Rebecca Solnit encourages us to think of female influence as webbed. In ‘Grandmother Spider’, Solnit describes a painting by Ana Teresa Fernández from a series titled Teleraña, or spiderweb, in which a woman hangs laundry. Solnit draws the reader’s attention to the ‘spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven’. Solnit continues: ‘[s]piderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats’.30 When we pull the threads of the female essay tradition back and forth, like a weaver at their loom, we achieve a greater understanding of the strings that contemporary women essayists have carried into their present moment. Thus, we might read Solnit’s essays in the light of the essay lectures of early twentieth-century essayist Agnes Repplier. Morgan Jerkins’s ‘A Black Girl Like Me’, from her 2018 collection This Will Be My Undoing, demands a rereading of Marita Bonner’s ‘On Being Young – a Woman – and Colored’ (1925) and Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’ (1928).31 We could also consider the threads that Megan Daum and Gail Hamilton share. In The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion, Daum writes about the lingering cultural penchant for sentimentality that continues to eschew the rawer stories contemporary women might wish to tell, noting that ‘“getting real”’ is challenging in a culture whose ‘discourse is largely rooted in platitudes’.32 Hamilton was railing against that sentimentality

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in her essays as far back as 1863 when she wrote ‘Happiest Days’, an essay that criticizes romantic notions of childhood as the ‘infatuated apotheosis of doughiness and rank unfinish’ and ‘low, gross, material’.33 Or how about Ashleigh Young’s ‘On Going Away’, published in 2018, about being told to go away, and Vernon Lee’s essay ‘Going Away’, first published in 1903, on the going away of one’s choosing.34 Or Samantha Irby’s darkly funny essays about being a fat Black woman, which send us back to Frances Power Cobbe’s humorous essay ‘Fat People’, first published in 1869, where Cobbe wonders why fat people are not celebrated with national pride, rather than derided, given their proof that a country’s food is abundant and the air is clean to breathe.35 Whereas the fat person in Cobbe’s essay takes the form of a (large), white, male Everyman, the fat woman in ‘Fuck it, Bitch. Stay Fat.’ is Irby herself. After so many failed attempts at dieting and exercise, Irby concludes, ‘I am fat and I am mentally ill, and those two things have been intertwined since before I even knew what those words mean. If this is how I’m going to die, then why not just let me.’36 This is the contemporary woman essayist: matter-of-fact, raw, bodied – but controlled, constructed, not naked. There is also the webbing crafted by the writers themselves, not simply by readers and editors with their magnifying glasses to the tapestry, though both provide us with new, tactile understandings of contemporary women’s essays. For example, the dead luna moth that Parms writes about in ‘Immortal Wound’ reminds Parms of two other famous literary moths, written into essays by Woolf and Dillard, both titled ‘Death of a Moth’.37 In an interview for the Normal School literary magazine, Parms says ‘Immortal Wound’ was an opportunity not just to ‘describe, to record, to take notice, to pay tribute’ and ‘to assay something greater’ but to write in conversation with Woolf and Dillard, writers she admires and whose descriptions of dying moths influenced Parms’s thinking. Parms says her own essay allowed her to ‘explore a similar premise – albeit in a wholly different space, circumstance, and time, and to pay homage to a tradition, through observation and detail, of speaking to our preoccupation with life and death’.38 Eula Biss pays similar tribute to Didion when Biss attempts to rewrite Didion’s essay ‘Goodbye to All That’ as her own. In a separate essay for Fourth Genre, Biss explains that Didion had long been her muse. After misreading in an interview that Didion said she learned to write by copying Hemingway (Didion actually said she learned to type by copying Hemingway), Biss set about copying Didion’s essay ‘Goodbye to All That’ in order to learn to write. Eventually a friend suggested Biss not simply copy Didion’s essay but rewrite it – and that is what Biss did: there was already some nerve in me that believed I might make the essay mine, might close some of the distance between me and the page with only the alteration of a few details, the correction of a handful of situations. That delusion was dead by the third sentence of Didion’s essay.39 What Biss found, in an essay that far transcends a mere rewrite, was that as she ‘destroyed Didion’s syntax’ and as the essay became hers, ‘it felt less true, not more so’.40 In fact, the farther from Didion’s truth Biss moved, the less Didion’s essay, even as a shell, was able to hold Biss’s experience, her truth. Yet, Biss’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ does end with some form of truth, albeit an open-ended one, that invites further exploration and storytelling – this time with Biss, not Didion, at its complicated center:

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It is not that the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. It is that the heroine is not convinced she is the heroine or that the story is true. The heroine knows that New York is just a city – just a place to live. And, like any other place, it demands that you make your own story.41 In contrast, the essayist Alana Massey grew out of her infatuation with Didion not by writing Didion but by living Didion. Massey begins ‘Emparadised: On Joan Didion and Personal Mythology as Survival’ with a description of the ‘tasteful aloofness and thinness that lingers at the border between elegance and illness’ that writers like Didion seduced her into wishing to imitate.42 Massey writes that her adoration for Didion ‘was a private devotion that I could indulge without the attendant self-consciousness that comes with being too caught up in a cultural moment to really enjoy it’.43 This literary love affair, Massey admits, occurred before Didion was called out as the ‘patron saint of well-read white women’,44 before Massey herself deems she had acquired a more mature understanding of Didion’s influence, a maturation that happened to coincide with a break-up, a tumultuous affair and substance abuse. Massey’s ultimate rejection of Didion captures what Hayley Mlotek and others point out is the true reason for Didion’s appeal, and perhaps for her staying power as a go-to essayist in the female tradition: her connection as a white woman to other white women. Mlotek argues: Joan Didion is a living stereotype and I only mean that in the most literal definition of the term: Joan Didion functions as a mental shortcut. Joan Didion requires very little explanation to a very large group of people, representing a class of consumers who tend to be young, female, upper middle class, white, and somewhat inwardly tortured.45 Similarly tired of all the Didion retakes and critical assessments, Leah Finnegan contends in ‘There Are Too Many Joan Didions’ that frequent comparisons between Didion and contemporary women essayists are ‘boringly lazy’.46 She writes, ‘It would be nice to get to a place where writers could be considered on their own terms, but I’m not optimistic that we will ever be free from the Didion-comparison bear trap.’47 It is arguable, though, that Didion is any more of a bear trap than, say, Montaigne, or even that comparing women with other essayists need be a trap at all. Beyond their prowess as writers, one reason that Didion and Woolf are so often named as muses may be that in the male-heavy essay canon, as argued earlier, there are few women essayists who are taught as frequently, whose reach is as familiar. In that sense, our recognition of female influences in contemporary women’s essay writing is as much about limitations of the essay canon as about those influences themselves. That so many writers continue to converse with Didion in their essays even if, at least until recently, they have done so with little examination of Didion’s white-on-white draw, points to the success of women essayists once they have been embraced by others who identify with them, emulate them and afford them canonical status through repeated, textual sustenance. A similar argument might be made for Woolf, whose influence far surpasses Didion’s. Woolf herself understood the power of a woman writer pulling back the curtain for another even as – and perhaps this is key – the essayist must inevitably confront the limitations of her admiration for and imitation of another. In the early twentieth century, Woolf brought back into the critical orbit Margaret Cavendish, who in 1655

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had published The World’s Olio, one of the first collections of essays by a woman. Woolf considered Cavendish a ‘giant cucumber’ among ‘roses and carnations’48 as well as ‘crack-brained and bird-witted’,49 but Woolf’s attention to Cavendish helped cement Cavendish’s place in the female essay tradition, setting her up as a kind of web center for contemporary scholars attempting to understand women’s contributions to the field of the essay. Since at least the nineteenth century, women essayists have used their communal power to promote and support one another’s work. In fact, the surge of women essayists and article writers in the nineteenth century may be attributed, at least in part, to their knowledge that they each existed and to their willingness to promote one another in critical spheres. The #MeToo movement, which brought attention to the everyday sexual violence that women face, has likewise fueled in the twenty-first century a wave of politically personal – and personally political – essays by women, who seem to draw strength from the force of so many other stories publicly told. Yet still, in an article about contemporary women’s essay writing, Lydia Kiesling remarks that she is ‘committing a female hate crime by mentioning Daum and Leslie Jamison in the same essay, since to mention two women in the same profession is always to set them against one another’.50 There is something unmistakably and disappointingly gendered about Kiesling’s characterization, her suggestion that two successful women essayists cannot possibly occupy the same critical space without some kind of literary catfight ensuing. Certainly, there have been literary feuds worth noting in the world of women’s essays. Rebecca West’s early twentieth-century takedown of the essayist Max Beerbohm in ‘Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm’ is a rollicking mustread.51 But Kiesling’s framing, however tongue-in-cheek, dismisses the value of community for women essayists, a community that, historically, they have relied upon to their advantage. Today’s contemporary essayists benefit as much as ever from that collective, in which women interview one another and namecheck each other when asked to quantify this golden age. They also frequently write profiles of one another and review one another’s books, and they do so from a place of deep understanding of what it means to be a woman writing essays. But that empathy does not necessarily translate into fawning. The essayist Emily Witt, in her review of Daum’s 2019 collection of essays The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the Culture Wars, finds Daum too tentative in her politics, too nostalgic, too tied to her own stories and perspective as a privileged white woman who ‘mostly avoids the subject of race, which is probably for the best’.52 But even when essayists fall short in the eyes of their contemporaries, such criticism might offer insight into the project of essaying for women in the twentieth century, adding value to the conversation and validating the importance of women’s contributions to the field simply by their talking about each other. For writers of color, those conversations are even more crucial. In her essay ‘Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.’, Gay writes, ‘I think constantly about connection and loneliness and community and belonging, and a great deal, perhaps too much, of how my writing evidences me working through the intersections of these things.’53 As a successful author, Gay has used her status to actively promote the publication of other Black writers. Similarly, in ‘A Black Girl Like Me’, Jerkins describes what she feels is a responsibility to always respond to Black writers who email her to ask questions or get help making connections. Jerkins writes:

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One of the greatest mistakes for black women is believing that solidarity ruins their individual trajectories and that in order to protect themselves, they must repel those most like them in shared oppression. . . . We have the responsibility to bring other black women to the forefront of the culture we’ve helped to create and sustain.54 Gay provides that boost for Jerkins in an interview about Jerkins’s collection This Will Be My Undoing. In a prelude to that interview, Gay writes that while Jerkins’s book has flaws, it shows great promise, especially ‘[i]n a time when black women are fighting to be seen and heard’. During the interview itself, Gay offers Jerkins an opportunity to spin her own spider threads (to use Solnit’s metaphor), asking Jerkins about the Black women writers who have influenced her and ‘nurtured [her] work on the page’. Jerkins names Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Nikole Hannah-Jones.55 Indeed, Gay’s interview with Jerkins highlights the particular value of women essayists of color interviewing other women of color, for if conversations between women essayists reveal insights into the choices women make about their art and the way in which that work is received both broadly and by other women, the conversations between essayists of color tell us even more. Gay, for example, asks Jerkins how she overcame ‘trying to make whiteness comfortable’ or if she thinks about ‘how to appeal to whiteness’ when she writes. ‘That is a damn good question’, Jerkins responds.56 Soraya Roberts finds that Gay and Jerkins belong to a ‘tight group’ of Black women writing personal essays, who, as with other marginalized groups of writers, have historically harnessed their collective power: ‘[r]elating to each other’s oft-sidelined experiences, they gravitate together, establishing power in numbers, ensuring they remain visible where they weren’t for so long’.57 The commercial success of contemporary women essayists – accumulating power in numbers and in dollars – has reignited age-old debates about the personal (in the) essay, in part simply because it is women behind these numbers and in part because of what they are writing. The twenty-first-century essay will go down in history as the essay that took as its subject absolutely anything, with women essayists writing intimately and frankly about topics that those in earlier centuries would not dare to have touched – from menstruation (Emilie Pine) to rape (Lena Dunham) to sex (Sloane Crosley, Samantha Irby, Gabriela Wiener, Emily Witt) to drugs and substance abuse (Chloe Caldwell, Kristi Coulter, Jenny Lawson) to miscarriage (Ariel Levy) to abortion (Sinéad Gleeson, Leslie Jamison) to postpartum depression (Jessica Friedman). That intimacy also extends to conversations about race and otherness (Emily Bernard, Joy Castro, Roxane Gay, Issa Rae, Zadie Smith). The Internet, perhaps more than anything, has provided a conduit for that diversity of subjects and voices. According to Tolentino, during the period between 2008 – when Emily Gould wrote a first-person cover story, ‘Exposed’, for the New York Times Magazine – to about 2016, the Internet invited a flood of personal stories by women, primarily through websites and webzines like Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas, the Toast, the Awl and the Hairpin. The result was a boom of personal essays that, at least at first, seemed mutually transactional, helping to launch stories and careers until at some point, as the Internet always does, it began to feed upon itself and create a ‘host of other nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon’, which Tolentino writes about in her essay ‘The I in the Internet’.58 Tolentino suggests that ‘an ad-based publishing model built around maximizing page views

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quickly and cheaply creates uncomfortable incentives for writers, editors, and readers alike’.59 Laura Bennett further contends that this model, part of the ‘first-person industrial complex’, functions as click-bait for readers and a professional dead end for most writers; while exploiting women in order to bolster the online publishing marketplace, it ‘incentivizes knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling’.60 In some ways, Bennett’s position returns us to an argument bell hooks made nearly two decades before when she argued that feminists who rode, and praised, the wave of personal writing that emerged during the 1970s failed to hold that writing to standards of literary excellence, which ultimately ‘helped diminish the value and significance of the personal as a site for existential reflection’.61 Unlike Bennett, hooks seems to understand the value of a moment that generated so much confessional writing by women, even bad confessional writing; she calls it ‘a constructive process wherein the field of creativity was expanded’.62 The rise of the Internet confessional essay has been equally constructive. Even the worst of these essays has pushed cultural boundaries of what is perceived as acceptable for women to write about. While hooks worried that ‘misuses of confessional narratives’ risked ‘devaluation of the form itself’,63 waves of essays by women – from periodical essays in the eighteenth century to article essays and newspaper columns in the nineteenth century to genteel essays at the turn of the twentieth century – have always generated crises, mostly invented, over the health of the essay genre. Perhaps none captures such a crisis more acutely than the oft-cited 1933 essay by John P. Waters in which he mourns the loss of ‘that lavender-scented little old lady of literature’64 (gendered metaphor noted). Thus, it is not unexpected that if women essayists are having a moment, critics are going to worry that what they are doing is going to ruin it for others. In the twenty-first century, Waters’s little old lady has been replaced by a young, sexually active, potty-mouthed woman of literature who will not stop confessing. Essayists like Crosley bear the brunt of critical ire despite their commercial successes, or maybe because of them (so much influence! so much undoing!). Critic Michelle Dean says she was at first heartened by the injection of so many female voices into the essay genre. She found their ‘open embrace of subjectivity’ to be ‘a great challenge to the false universality behind which many male essayists tend to hide’. But Dean admits she has ‘mixed feelings’ now. She argues that when women write about their experiences without using the essay to write and think their way through them, they are simply leaving behind ‘records of underprocessed experience’.65 Crosley’s essay ‘The Doctor Is a Woman’, in which she writes about her decision to freeze her eggs, seems to illustrated Dean’s point. Crosley’s essay might be an essay about feminist empowerment and choice, but the reader has to read between the narrative lines to find that larger meaning beyond the act of telling something that is rarely told.66 By comparison, in her essay ‘Notes on Bleeding & Other Crimes’, Pine writes about the typically taboo topic of menstruation and blood, about what it is like to be a woman bleeding, spotting, leaking, having sex while bleeding, and the ‘confluence of bodies and silence’.67 ‘What if my body could tell the story?’, she asks. ‘What would it say?’68 That Pine’s story says something – out loud, for a reader – is part of the current moment, just as Crosley’s story is. But Pine moves beyond her anecdotes to a larger truth about shame and embarrassment and a woman’s body that finds its strength beyond merely the act of confessing and speaking the story aloud. This moment in Pine’s essay is, perhaps, the ‘existential reflection’ that, as hooks suggests, gives literary value to women’s confessional writing, even as we might acknowledge the

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cultural value of essays like Crosley’s which stop short of that reflection. Both are part of the current essay moment, an essential part of its ‘constructive process’. We have been here before – and we (the essay) will survive. And yet, in this moment, filled with so many women giving voice to their experiences, caught in quibbles over literary value, it is easy to forget that the very act of rendering those experiences for an audience is rooted in Montaigne’s privilege. In other words, we’ve come a long way, baby, to write about our eggs – only ‘we’ has never included everyone. In the sixteenth century, and for all that have followed, gender, race and class have influenced not only a writer’s ability to make himself the matter of his book but also the public’s willingness to receive it. For essayists of color, Wall argues that the Montaignian project of writing about oneself was never a goal. Unlike Montaigne, who was focused on the action of words within his text, Black essayists instead wrote to inspire their readers to act outside it: Montaigne ‘hoped only to communicate his thoughts and the process that produced them. Nothing seems less relevant to a tradition of African American writers.’69 For centuries, women essayists of color did not write freely of themselves, as themselves, at least in the manner that white men, and eventually white women, did. There were a few, earlier exceptions, beginning in the late nineteenth century: Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Zitkala-Ša and Hurston, for example. Today, simultaneously writing Black and personal might be the ultimate expression of ‘the personal is political’. In fact, for Roberts, ‘The personal essay isn’t dead, it’s just no longer white.’70 She argues that the essay’s contemporary moment has been rejuvenated by writers of color like Durga Chew-Bose, Gay, Irby and Scaachi Koul. Jerkins echoes this point, reclaiming confessionalism as an opening out, rather than a closing in: What cannot be ignored is what the art of the personal essay has done for women of color writers, or shall I say, confessionalists. For the most part, many of us have been trained to invoke the voices of dead white writers. Now, we have the opportunity to recognize and examine our own voices through our lens at our own individual paces.71 Pointing to writers like Gould, Nora Ephron, Daum and Crosley as examples, Roberts contends that contemporary confessional writing has long been the purview of white women, writing from unexamined places of whiteness for white readers.72 Thus, perhaps the most significant aspect of the contemporary women essayists’ golden moment is not simply the sheer diversity of voices participating in the genre but also the reexamination of both gender and whiteness within the form; that is, an understanding that just as we work to confront the maleness of the essay form, we must confront its whiteness. In that sense, the experiences that white essayists share with their readers might be offered less as human truths in search of reader connections and more as examined truths of racial privilege with readers who share the same. Since the sixteenth century, the debate about using the essay as a vehicle for selfdiscovery has often hinged on the ride rather than the driver. Is this a joy ride, fast and dangerous, someone mooning out the window, littering intimate details along the road like discarded cigarette butts? Or is it a Sunday drive, slow and thoughtful, no specific destination in mind until it finally reveals itself? Critics have always seemed to prefer the latter or, at least, some combination of both. Anything else is mere entertainment. If this age of women essayists has taught us anything, however, it is that who is behind

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the wheel matters as much as the ride. It always has. In our contemporary moment, there are many more, and many different, women behind that wheel. In the 2014 New York Times exchange between Strayed and Moser, Moser argues that what deserves celebration right now is that ‘women writers today no longer have to write as women. That does not mean writing as men; it means writing as writers.’73 No. The yellow brick road of women essayists does not lead to some shining, magical land of Oz that is free of qualifiers, free of subjectivity. That ‘false universality’, as Dean calls it,74 is simply a mirage, operated by a man behind the curtain. Scholars who have traced the origins of the term ‘golden age’ to the Greek poet Hesiod – and before – would lead us to understand that a golden age was always something imagined in order to detract from the realities, the hardships, of life.75 ‘With few exceptions’, writes Andrew Heisel, ‘in earlier eras nobody ever seriously declares, “This is the golden age.” Instead, they accuse opponents of saying it or put it in the mouth of a foolish narrator. It only exists in the present as a bill of goods.’76 In that sense, ‘golden age’ was not so much a historical correction as a critique of the present – though it needed a history in order to mark its beginning. It was, in some ways, too, a kick in the seat to motivate a better future in order to give it an ending. For now, in this complicated present, sprung from a complicated past, women essayists are busy writing. So, maybe that is enough for our narrator to say, ‘Yes, this is an age for women essayists.’ We are in an age for women essayists, as we have always been.

Notes   1. Cheryl Strayed and Benjamin Moser, ‘Is This a Golden Age for Women Essayists?’, New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 12, 2014.   2. Leslie Jamison and Roxane Gay, ‘Leslie Jamison and Roxane Gay: “Men are Crowned as the Gold Standard of the Genre. It’s Gonna Change”’, interview with Michele Filgate, Salon, April 24, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/04/24/leslie_jamison_and_roxane_ gay_men_are_crowned_as_the_gold_standard_of_the_genre_it’s_gonna_change/.   3. Elissa Bassit and Cheryl Strayed, ‘How to Write Like a Mother#^@*&’, Creative Nonfiction, no. 47 (2013): 6–11 (11).   4. David Lazar, ‘Queering the Essay’, in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 15–20.   5. Ibid., 17.   6. Ryka Aoki, Colette Arrand, Cooper Lee Bombardier, Grace Reynolds and Brook Shelley, ‘More Like This Than Any of These: Creative Nonfiction in the Age of the Trans New Wave’, Ninth Letter 15, no. 2 (2018–19), http://www.ninthletter.com/trans-new-wave.   7. Joy Castro, Island of Bones: Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 10.   8. For a fuller discussion of the most anthologized essayists in college textbooks, which mirror critical and editorial inclusion outside the college classroom as well, see Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘The Essay Canon’, College English 61, no. 4 (1999): 401–30.   9. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘f-Words: An Essay on the Essay’, American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 15–45 (35), square brackets in original. 10. Barrie Jean Borich, ‘The Craft of Writing Queer’, Brevity, September 17, 2012, https:// brevitymag.com/craft-essays/the-craft-of-writing-queer/. 11. Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), xxxiii–liv (xxxv). 12. William H. Gass, ‘Emerson and the Essay’, in Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 9–49 (30).

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13. Nancy Mairs, ‘Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva’, in Voice Lessons (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 71–87. 14. Emily Bernard, ‘Black Is the Body’, in Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine (New York: Knopf, 2019), 84–97 (97). 15. Ibid., xiv. 16. Griselda Murray Brown, ‘Women Essayists Shift the Rules and Boundaries in the Literary World’, Financial Times, August 2, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/e8126aec-b1e311e9-bec9-fdcab53d6959. 17. Roxane Gay, ‘Roxane Gay: “If I Was Conventionally Hot and Had a Slammin’ Body, I Would Be President”’, interview with Lindy West, Guardian, July 3, 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/03/roxane-gay-lindy-west-if-i-was-conventionallyhot-i-would-be-president. 18. bell hooks, ‘writing to confess’, in remembered rapture: the writer at work (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 58–68 (67). 19. Morgan Jerkins, ‘Monkeys Like You’, in This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2018), 1–24 (23). 20. Ibid., 23. 21. Lisa Low, ‘Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose’, Assay 7, no. 1 (2020), https://www.assayjournal.com/lisa-lowproleptic-strategies-in-race-based-essays-jordan-k-thomas-rita-banerjee-and-durga-chewbose-assay-71.html. 22. Rachel Cusk, ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’, in Coventry: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 163–76 (163). 23. Ibid., 176. 24. Ibid., 176. 25. Rachel Cusk, ‘On Rudeness’, in Coventry, 46–69 (47). 26. Ibid., 49. 27. Brown, ‘Women Essayists’. 28. Emily Donaldson, ‘Joan Didion Looms Large Over a Wave of Talented Female EssayWriters’, Globe and Mail, January 14, 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/ article-joan-didion-looms-large-over-a-wave-of-talented-female-essay-writers/. 29. Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 228. 30. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Grandmother Spider’, in Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 69–84 (81). 31. Morgan Jerkins, ‘A Black Girl Like Me’, in This Will Be My Undoing, 241–52; Marita Bonner, ‘On Being Young – a Woman – and Colored’, The Crisis 31 (December 1925): 63–65; Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, World Tomorrow (May 1928): 215–16. 32. Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 5. 33. Gail Hamilton, ‘Happiest Days’, in Gala-Days (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 411–36 (427). 34. Ashleigh Young, ‘On Going Away’, in Can You Tolerate This?: Essays (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 221–24; Vernon Lee, ‘Going Away’, in Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (Edinburgh: John Lane, 1928), 201–6. 35. Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Fat People’, in Re-echoes (London: Williams and Norgate, 1876), 20–26 (24). 36. Samantha Irby, ‘Fuck It, Bitch. Stay Fat.’, in We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Essays (New York: Vintage, 2017), 142–70 (170).

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37. Jericho Parms, ‘Immortal Wound’, in Lost Wax: Essays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 150–52 (151). 38. Jericho Parms, ‘A Normal Interview with Jericho Parms’, interview with Elizabeth Bolanos, The Normal School, February 22, 2018, https://www.thenormalschool.com/ blog/2018/2/22/a-normal-interview-with-jericho-parms. 39. Eula Biss, ‘In the Syntax: Rewriting Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”’, Fourth Genre 13, no. 1 (2011): 133–37 (134). 40. Ibid., 135. 41. Eula Biss, ‘Goodbye to All That’, in Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009), 57–71 (71). 42. Alana Massey, ‘Emparadised: On Joan Didion and Personal Mythology as Survival’, in All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017), 201–24 (202). 43. Ibid., 203. 44. Ibid., 203. 45. Hayley Mlotek, ‘Free Joan Didion’, The Awl, January 13, 2015, https://www.theawl. com/2015/01/free-joan-didion/. 46. Leah Finnegan, ‘There Are Too Many Joan Didions’, The Outline, January 15, 2020, https://theoutline.com/post/8535/there-are-too-many-joan-didions. 47. Ibid. 48. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 62. 49. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’, in The Common Reader: First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1925; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 69–77 (77). 50. Lydia Kiesling, ‘Meghan Daum Won’t Apologize: How She Forged a New Genre of Confessional Writing’, Salon, November 19, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/11/19/meghan_ daum_wont_apologize_how_she_forged_a_new_genre_of_confessional_writing/. 51. Rebecca West, ‘Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm’, in Ending in Earnest (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), 66–74. 52. Emily Witt, ‘Meghan Daum to Millennials: Get Off My Lawn’, The New Yorker, November 1, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/meghan-daum-to-millennialsget-off-my-lawn. 53. Roxanne Gay, ‘Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.’, in Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 3–14 (3). 54. Morgan Jerkins, ‘A Black Girl Like Me’, in This Will Be My Undoing, 241–52 (250–51). 55. Morgan Jerkins, ‘In This Will Be My Undoing, Morgan Jerkins Explores Being a Black Woman in America’, interview with Roxane Gay, Elle, January 31, 2018, https://www.elle. com/culture/books/a14464215/morgan-jerkins-this-will-be-my-undoing-interview/. 56. Ibid. 57. Soraya Roberts, ‘The Personal Essay Isn’t Dead. It’s Just No Longer White’, The Walrus, September 20, 2017 (updated April 5, 2020), https://thewalrus.ca/the-personal-essay-isntdead-its-just-no-longer-white/. 58. Jia Tolentino, ‘The I in the Internet’, in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (London: 4th Estate Books, 2019), 3–33 (14). 59. Ibid., 14. 60. Laura Bennett, ‘The First-Person Industrial Complex’, Slate, September 14, 2015, http:// www.slate.com/articles/life/technology/2015/09/the_first_person_industrial_complex_ how_the_harrowing_personal_essay_took.html. 61. hooks, ‘writing to confess’, 64. 62. Ibid., 63. 63. Ibid., 68.

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64. John P. Waters, ‘A Little Old Lady Passes Away’, Forum and Century, July 1933, 27–29 (27). 65. Michelle Dean and Michelle Orange, ‘Women with an Opinion – Oh Dear’, Literary Review of Canada, April 2018, https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/04/women-withan-opinion-oh-dear/. 66. Sloane Crosley, ‘The Doctor Is a Woman’, in Look Alive Out There: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 211–40. 67. Emilie Pine, ‘Notes on Bleeding & Other Crimes’, in Notes to Self: Essays (New York: Dial Press, 2019), 89–108 (107). 68. Ibid., 108. 69. Wall, On Freedom, 2. 70. Roberts, ‘Personal Essay’. 71. Morgan Jerkins, ‘The Personal Essay for Women of Color Confessionalists’, Book Riot, January 10, 2016, https://bookriot.com/the-personal-essay-for-women-of-color-confessionalists/. 72. Roberts, ‘Personal Essay’. 73. Strayed and Moser, ‘Golden Age for Women Essayists’. 74. Dean and Orange, ‘Women with an Opinion’. 75. See H. C. Baldry, ‘Who Invented the Golden Age?’, Classical Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1952): 83–92. 76. Andrew Heisel, ‘How the Golden Age Lost Its Memory’, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 22, 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/golden-age-lost-memory/.

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17 The Essay in Asian (American) Contexts Louise Kane

Introduction

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espite the emergence of increasingly transnational approaches to literary study, Asian writers’ engagements with the essay remain relatively overlooked. Comparative literature, Asian studies and world literature are, after all, relatively more recent sub-disciplines in the wider field of literary studies. In recent years, scholars have stressed the need to focus on the essay in eastern contexts.1 These accounts, however, remain sparse compared with those that focus on its western European contexts. As Jenny Spinner notes, criticism centered on the essay tends to explore the genre from a western focus: Depending on the type of essay in discussion, one of two progenitors is named: the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, father of the informal essay, or the Englishman Francis Bacon, father of the formal. In the years since 1580 and 1601, when, respectively, Montaigne and Bacon published their first volumes of essays, writers and critics have wrangled over the ‘true’ characteristics of the essay in an attempt to nail down the form.2 Plenty of studies have explored the essay through the lens of major American (and often modernist) writers and through wider anglophone contexts, but a more global consideration of the genre enables us to see how the form evolved in different contexts and with sometimes different purposes. Turning to Asia reveals a rich and varied essay tradition that can be traced back several centuries, with writer-philosophers such as Su Zhe, Wang Fu-chih and Sei Shōnagon all using the essay to different ends and purposes. Some studies have addressed the paucity of scholarship relating to the essay tradition in Asia. For Kirk A. Denton, the issue is one of pedagogy: the fact that ‘the essay is not often taught in the West in courses on modern Chinese literature’ implies, wrongly, that it is ‘a marginal genre’ for Asian writers.3 Far from existing as a marginal genre, the essay is a form that played a central role in the emergence of Asian migrant writing and transnational aesthetics across a variety of genres, including poetry and film. This chapter focuses on the Asian essay in English. This is not to discount or ignore the non-anglophone Asian-authored essay, but rather to acknowledge that the breadth, history and geopolitical contexts of this tradition cannot be covered in a single chapter. The Asian essay tradition in English encompasses a multitude of writers, many of whom have used the genre to negotiate the complex identity politics of belonging and

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being in the context of migration and movement. In this context, many of the writers this chapter explores can be broadly categorized as Asian American.4 From writers like the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi (the first Japanese writer to publish a novel in North America) who moved from Asia to the United States in the late 1890s, to contemporary authors like Amy Tan who identify as Asian American, these writers’ engagements with the essay in English relate the experience of moving between and beyond national and linguistic borders to English-speaking readers who would likely remain (at least relatively) unaware of these experiences. For example, in ‘Mother Tongue’, Amy Tan considers the unique identity politics experienced by Asian Americans: I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer.5 Today, Asian and Asian American writers like Cathy Park Hong (discussed below) and Haruki Murakami continue to use the English-language essay in a variety of contexts: from personal memoirs to musings on twenty-first-century American politics.6 This chapter begins by tracing the Asian essay in English back to figures like Noguchi, the British-Chinese author Sui Sin Far (1865–1914) and the Shanghai-born short story writer Zhang Ailing (1920–95). I argue that for these writers the essay was a form that allowed for profound reflection upon experiences of migration and displacement. Whilst Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing are not necessarily the best-known representatives of Asian American writing (this term denotes the transitional nature of their work rather than their heritage), their work is important as they were some of the earliest Asian writers to discuss relations between Asia and the Anglosphere in English-language essays.7 The chapter then considers the essay as a form through which mid-twentieth-century and contemporary writers like Katue Kitasono, Yasushi Ogino and Diana Chang engaged in increasingly transnational discussions about eastern and western aesthetics and interdisciplinary forms, their essays reflecting and advancing a cross-cultural comparative framework that, by the mid-1950s, had emerged to the point where literary exchange between countries like Japan and North America was almost de rigueur. Another subclaim underpins this chapter: that the Asian (American) essay in English is also closely linked to another genre: the periodical. The early twentieth-century boom in the periodical press saw editors of periodicals capitalize on a climate of intellectual debate in which voices of writers from diverse backgrounds were increasingly valued by audiences of magazines whose readerships, circulations and linguistic remit had begun to transcend national and cultural boundaries.8 Critics have long debated the purpose of the essay. For M. H. Abrams, the essay ‘undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis’.9 For Cynthia Ozick, the essay is a form of self-expression. ‘A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play’, she posits.10 Ozick is not alone in this viewpoint. William Hazlitt is just one of many proponents of the essay as a form of personal reflection, rather than as a purely polemical vehicle. His essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ (1826), in which

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Hazlitt considers loathing as an act of human nature and humorously reflects on the ‘mystic horror’ behind his hate of spiders, is a reminder that the essay’s nonpolemical tradition stretches back several centuries.11 Virginia Woolf also supports Hazlitt’s view, but emphasizes the essay’s purpose not only as a means of self-expression, but also as a form whose aim is to engage a sort of literary jouissance: 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 take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end.12 Polemical essays do not necessarily give pleasure as they are designed to provoke emotion, challenge points of view and can make readers uncomfortable. It would be inaccurate to claim that the essay in Asian and Asian American contexts is always polemical and invariably politicized, but definitions of the essay as a nonpolemical form do not translate to the specific contexts in which Asian migrants to the United States and other countries wrote essays. Migrant writers who sought to build careers writing for English-language magazines did not always have the luxury of eschewing the educational purpose of the essay or using it to express the thoughts of a ‘free mind at play’. Instead, they were hired frequently by periodical editors to inform western readers about eastern culture. For example, despite being an accomplished poet who had lived in America since 1893, Yone Noguchi only gained his first repeat commission when The Bookman hired him in 1904 to write a series of essays explaining various aspects of Asian culture to American readers. Of course, Asian and Asian American writers have used the essay to provide entertainment, humor and discussion of sometimes trivial topics. Noguchi wrote an essay on the hibachi grill for The Saturday Review.13 In her recent essay collection Minor Feelings (2020), Cathy Park Hong shares a candid account of trying to find a new psychologist. These discussions, however, are underpinned often by fundamental questions relating to identity and difference. For example, as Hong considers how her psychologist views her, she segues into musings about self-identity: Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness? Is it anything like the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois established over a century ago? The paint on the Asian American label has not dried. The term is unwieldy, cumbersome, perched awkwardly upon my being.14 Themes of identity and cultural difference have always been particularly prevalent in the essay in Asian and/or Asian American contexts. At the turn of the century, buoyed by a growing awareness of globalization and the stirrings of anti-imperialist thought, writers like Noguchi and Far employed the essay to consider the sense of in-betweenness or being ‘other’ (or ‘othered’) that accompanies the interstitial position of living between two cultures, especially as these cultures began to intersect more with the advent of foreign travel and mass migration. This tradition continues even in the works of contemporary writers like Hong and Tan. Jopi Nyman has argued that the ‘melancholia of displacement’ is a key trope of migrant writing that often results from colonialism and its associated acts of human subjugation, forced movement and oppression.15 The

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writers discussed in this chapter use the essay to reflect upon this displacement, especially in the context of sociohistorical events such as the first wave of Asian migration to the United States, the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing were, after all, migrant writers, some of whom directly experienced colonial rule. Noguchi moved to London via New York in the late 1890s. Zhang Ailing lived in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II and migrated to the United States in the 1960s. As a mixed-race woman living between Great Britain, North America and Jamaica in the age of Empire, Sui Sin Far negotiated a complex identity politics.16 Turning to Yone Noguchi offers ways of understanding the essay as a means of deconstructing concepts of othered space, and of viewing different perspectives on who, exactly, constituted this ‘other’ at a point when concepts like transnationalism, multiculturalism and postcolonialism were nascent and untheorized.

Space, Race, Migration: Yone Noguchi Born in Japan’s Chubu region in 1875, Noguchi moved to San Francisco in November 1893. He gained his first publication in January 1896 when his poems appeared in the literary magazine The Lark. When Noguchi began writing in the late 1890s, migration from Asia to the West was at an unprecedented high and interest in eastern cultures – aided by Japonism and Chinoiserie and the prominence of figures such as Ernest Fenollosa – was growing. The editors of two American magazines – The Bookman and The Critic – asked Noguchi to write several essays designed to introduce transatlantic audiences to Japanese culture. As such, the essays he wrote reflect the tendency toward explication and recognition of geographic and cultural differences that defines many Asian writers’ engagements with the essay in English during this period. For The Bookman, Noguchi’s pieces included ‘What English Books Are Known in Japan?’, ‘Journalism in Japan’, ‘Japanese Humour and Caricature’ and ‘Lafcadio Hearn’s “Kwadan”’. The Critic published ‘The Evolution of Modern Japanese Literature’, ‘Modern Japanese Illustrators’ and ‘Shakespeare in Japan’, amongst other work by the young writer. Noguchi recognized that he had been engaged as a sort of expert-for-hire and that his work was supposed to bring aspects of eastern history and culture to ‘the Western eye’ whilst detailing the impact western literatures had upon ‘the Japanese public’.17 In ‘What English Books Are Known in Japan?’, he details the tentative beginnings of American–Japanese literary exchange which saw ‘a few snatches from Longfellow – the first American poet [who] ever sailed toward Japan – appear[ing] in [Japanese] magazines’, and informs American readers that popular foreign books in Japan include Victor Hugo’s Things Seen, Sherlock Holmes and novels by the ‘promising American humourist’ Mark Twain.18 This early work fulfilled the requirements of magazine editors, so much so that by the end of 1904 he was ‘well known in America for his comments upon the literary tastes and tendencies of the Japanese people’.19 However, Noguchi’s early essays exhibit a tension between how American editors expected him to use the essay form, and how he sought to deploy it. Noguchi’s early engagements with the essay show him following the Japanese zuihitsu tradition – a form of essay which sees the writer flit between ideas in sometimes fragmentary fashion. The aforementioned ‘Hibachi’ essay exemplifies this tradition, veering between the domestic and the public, the personal and the literary. Noguchi’s contemporaries

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also use this technique: Natsume Soseki’s ‘My Individualism’, published in 1914, sees Soseki meander between defending the need for individualist domestic policies and admitting the desire to ‘fit in’ within societal groups.20 The zuihitsu is often used to contemplate external surroundings. In the early 1900s, Noguchi began to use the zuihitsu to flit between ideas about American society that expressed both explicit admiration and implicit criticisms. In his Bookman essays, he expresses admiration for North America but often subtly digresses into discussions that hint at misgivings about American culture and politics. As the Russo-Japanese War intensified in late 1904 and into 1905 and Japanese victories led to a widespread atmosphere of ‘anti-Orientalism’ in North America, Noguchi used the essay to vocalize in more explicit terms the disquieting experiences he suffered as an Asian émigré.21 ‘We are different countries’, Noguchi posits; ‘Americans will not understand things Japanese as we do.’22 Noguchi’s non-English-language essays from this period also reflect his turn toward nationalistic, rather than transnational, pronouncements about the relative merits of Japanese literature over western literature. In one piece for The Iris, the Japanese literary magazine he edited in the mid-1900s, Noguchi argues that ‘Japanese literature has come to compete with western literature’ and describes the need ‘to confront western literature’.23 By 1918, Noguchi’s essays exhibit open disdain for the United States and Americans: ‘Your Romanticism . . . usually innocent, healthy, fostered by geographical insularity, has made you . . . the incarnation of complacency.’24 The essay form, then, offered Noguchi ways of voicing mixed feelings about the West, especially those countries in which he lived as an émigré. In ‘My London Experience’, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1911, he describes England as ‘the most comfortable country’,25 but in the same year expresses his ‘lament’ over England’s ‘Westernisation of Japan’ in an essay published in The Graphic.26 In his column for the English-language Japan Times, he published an extended essay exploring ‘the black visaged sneak, called Racial Prejudice’ that he had encountered outside of Japan, whose citizens, he argued, were not treated like those of a ‘first class nation of the world’.27 Noguchi’s evolution of the essay from an educational to politicized form is representative of the wider turn-of-the-century discursive shift that saw writers of color and writers who held progressive viewpoints, such as prominent abolitionists, employ the essay to counter and challenge dominant views about race and equality, especially as the American Civil Rights movement gained pace in the early 1910s. In his now famous ‘Strivings of the Negro People’ essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, W. E. B. Du Bois, the future founder of The Crisis (the magazine established as the outlet for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), ruminates on the ‘peculiar sensation’ of ‘double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’, that defined the experience of those who, like Du Bois and Noguchi, found themselves living simultaneously within two cultural and racial frameworks.28 ‘One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body’, DuBois elaborates.29 Sui Sin Far’s essays also typify this turn-of-the-century shift which saw writers of color begin to use the essay to bring experiences of racism and ostracization to wide readerships. Rather than addressing her majoritively white, western readership in the informative tones Asian writers were expected to use as part of the tradition that saw them hired to educate readers about the East, Far’s essays instead adopt a tone

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that could be confrontational. As a woman from a relatively wealthy family, Far had the advantage of being able to use the essay to explore, to use Ozick’s phrasing, the thoughts of a ‘free mind at play’, but Far was distinctly aware that many of her readers, especially those from migrant backgrounds, did not have this intellectual liberty. As such, Far’s essays are of the ‘sociopolitical’ variety that proponents of the essay as a purely self-reflective form sideline. They exist as attempts to promote social equality for people from marginalized communities and set the discursive groundwork that would enable later generations of Asian and biracial writers to use the essay in English in less politicized ways.

Gender and Migrant Identity: Sui Sin Far Born in 1865 to an English father and a Chinese mother, Sui Sin Far (she adopted her Chinese name instead of her birth name, Edith Maude Eaton, in the early 1890s) spent her early years in England, New York and Canada, where she began publishing pieces in The Dominion Illustrated in the late 1880s. For Far, the essay was a medium through which to challenge popular opinion, confront racism and defend minorities, be they women, migrants or otherwise politically or socially oppressed peoples. Her early essays for the Montreal Daily Witness and Montreal Daily Star typify this use of the form, with pieces such as ‘A Chinese Party’ and ‘Chinese Visitors’ seeking to reveal the realities of daily life for Chinese migrants, particularly ‘the infinite pains taken by the Chinese to get into Canada and the United States’.30 In 1897, her essay ‘The Chinese Woman in America’ appeared in the Los Angeles magazine The Land of Sunshine. In the piece, Far criticizes the practice which saw Chinese women brought to America ‘to become an American bride’ with little regard to the ‘question of “Women’s rights”’.31 Interestingly, Far contrasts the position of being a Chinese ‘New Woman’ migrant – which she says means to submit to marriage with ‘some Chinaman who has been some years in the States or in Canada and has prospered in business’ and to enjoy the benefits of a westernized lifestyle – with the rather different idea of the ‘New woman’ seen in the United Kingdom.32 Far is careful to point out that, in her opinion, this sort of submission can have benefits, but that it is, nonetheless, based on an unequal transaction which posits women as objects. As her profile rose in both Britain and North America, so too did Far’s commitment to using the essay form to tackle racism and sexism. This was an era in which many western (and often male) writers regularly used the essay form to extol the supposed virtues of colonialism or express views against female suffrage. In ‘The Engaged Girl in China’, published in The Ladies’ Home Journal, one of North America’s leading women’s magazines, Far explores what she perceives as an inherent injustice in the Chinese marriage system, which operates as a sort of ‘lottery’, she says, in which ‘the Chinese girl . . . knows not what she is getting until she is actually married’.33 The mixed responses Far’s essays received from American readers reflect the fact that Far was writing as a pioneer; her promotion of female empowerment and exposure of racial prejudice were met with enthusiasm, but also hostility as praise for her work was often framed through the rhetoric of prejudice. One anonymous American critic praised the ‘pictures of life in Chinatown – the Chinatown of San Francisco and Los Angeles and Seattle’ Far brought to her readers as ‘intensely interesting’ and ‘something quite new in our literature’, whilst simultaneously dismissing Chinese

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people as ‘with us, but not of us’ and using highly racist language to describe the ‘American-Chinese, born in Chinatown’ as a ‘half-breed’.34 For Far, the essay represented a means of challenging this sort of casual racism. Her work played a central role in ‘inaugurating an ethnic American literary tradition and [for] examining the dynamics of race’, with pieces like ‘Chinese Workmen in America’ and ‘Her Chinese Husband’ – both published in the liberal New York Independent – evidencing her uniquely subjective use of the essay form.35 Ozick may have argued that ‘a genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use’ and exhibits ‘a free mind at play’, but Far’s essays combine these qualities. For Far, the essay is not only a space through which to reflect objectively upon the interactions and tensions between the new generation of ‘Chinese-Americans’ and ‘the American people’, but a space through which to express subjective opinions about the unjust treatment of migrants under American foreign policy. One of the most overlooked injustices, she argues, is the socioeconomic disparity that saw a particular type of migrant – the ‘Chinese workingman’ who had come to ‘labor in this country’ – doubly marginalized not only on account of race but also on account of class status.36 As she points out in an essay written for The Independent: one reads and hears much about Chinese diplomats, Chinese persons of high rank, who by reason of wealth and social standing are interesting to the American people. But of those Chinese who come to live in this land, to make their homes in America, if only for a while, we hear practically nothing at all.37 For Far, the essay form represents a means of highlighting and overturning this double prejudice. Far’s essays also explore the relationship between language and identity that would become a key concern in essays written by later Asian American writers like Amy Tan. Far’s observation that ‘their children do not care to talk Chinese, and even when addressed by their parents in their mother tongue, reply in English’38 seems to be confirmed by Tan, who regretfully declares that ‘when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English.’39 In ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian’, also published in The Independent, Far uses the essay to describe another element she identifies as crucial to the development of her sense of self: the experience of racism (‘I wouldn’t speak to Sui if I were you. Her mamma is Chinese’).40 Describing her identity as ‘an Eurasian’ as ‘a cross . . . that bore too heavily’, one which provokes uncertainties over ‘the question of nationality’, she laments, ‘Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised?’41 However, the essay arrives at a surprisingly compassionate conclusion: Fundamentally, I muse, all people are the same. My mother’s race is as prejudiced as my father’s. Only when the whole world becomes as one family will human beings be able to see clearly and hear distinctly. I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.42 Far’s musings on nationality and race evidence the sense of living between two worlds that Ketu H. Katrak terms ‘the simultaneity of geography – namely the possibility

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of living here [the United States] in body and elsewhere in mind and imagination’.43 This ‘sort of mind–body experience’ is ‘of a specific kind for writers with a colonial history whose socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural conditions require migrations and displacements’, as it creates an ‘intersection of geography with history’.44 This ‘simultaneity of geography’ is a defining feature of the in-betweenness explored in the early Asian-authored English-language essay. When writing for western periodicals, writers like Far and Noguchi are distinctly conscious of being physically present in North America or Canada or London, but mentally present in the places they think of as home, or in a strange interstitial in-between space. For example, Yone Noguchi’s ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’ introduces the haiku to English readers but simultaneously laments the ‘recent fashion for the Western critics to interpret, not only this “hokku” but all Japanese poetry (even my work included) by that one word’.45 ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’ was published in John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield’s modernist London-based little magazine Rhythm, which prided itself on its global contributor list (a typical issue of Rhythm brought together work by writers and artists from the United Kingdom, United States, France, Poland and Russia), so Noguchi would have been confident of having a readership consisting of like-minded cosmopolites sympathetic to his complaint. By writing the majority of her essays for liberal publications like The Independent, which was vocal in its support of abolitionism and women’s suffrage, Far addressed an implied readership whose members were more likely to respect and listen to migrant voices. Indeed, one of the most successful series in The Independent was its Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves, which consisted of several essays documenting the experiences of recent migrants to the United States.

Modern Concerns: Zhang Ailing Zhang Ailing (often referred to by the westernized version of her name, Eileen Chang) is another Asian writer whose work reasserts the link between the Asian (American) essay form and migrant writing. Born in 1912, Zhang Ailing grew up in Tientsin, Northern China, before living in Shanghai, Hong Kong and California. Like Far, she uses the essay to conduct similar explorations of the simultaneity of geography and the unique position of being a female Asian émigré. In one of her best-known essays, ‘Writing of One’s Own’, published in 1944, she explains that ‘the modern marriage system is irrational’.46 ‘For women who live with men out of wedlock,’ she explains, ‘their social position necessarily starts out somewhat lower than that of men.’47 As Nicole Huang recognizes, ‘[t]he essay form became a means for Eileen Chang constantly to redefine the boundaries between life and work, the domestic and the historic’.48 The essay was the medium through which Zhang Ailing envisioned newly imagined futures for female characters that were pro-female and proto-feminist in their domestic roles as wives and mothers and public roles as writers, critics and progenitors of literary movements. Barbara Green has argued that ‘[t]he archive of early twentieth century periodicals offers new ways of understanding the figure of the author, the category of the woman writer’.49 Revisiting this archive, especially those non-English language periodicals that have received significantly less scholarship, demonstrates how Chinese women writers like Zhang Ailing used periodicals not only to carve out careers, but also as spaces that offered opportunities to publish nonfiction essays countering prejudiced attitudes

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within worlds of writing, criticism and publishing. Other women essayists from a variety of backgrounds used periodicals in this way. The English writer Violet Hunt, for example, consciously developed her career by publishing proto-feminist essays in magazines like Black and White and The Century.50 Whilst Zhang Ailing contributed pieces to several Chinese-language periodicals, including Tiandi (Heaven and Earth) and Zi Luolan (Violet), from 1943 she began publishing essays in American English-language magazines such as The West Wind Monthly and The Reporter. Many of Zhang Ailing’s English-language essays follow the ‘Asian-writer-as-cultural-mediator’ model of Noguchi’s early essays; they focus primarily on collapsing perceived barriers between Chinese and non-Chinese readers. ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’ and ‘China: Educating the Family’ appeared in January and November 1943 respectively in The XXth Century, an English-language magazine dedicated to art and literary criticism that was targeted at westerners living in Shanghai. In ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’ Zhang Ailing uses the general topic of fashion as a means of exploring deeper sociopolitical concerns: ‘Under those layers of clothing the ideal Chinese female, petite and slender, with sloping shoulders and a hollow chest, made herself pleasantly unobtrusive, one of the most desirable qualities in a woman.’51 In ‘China: Educating the Family’, Zhang Ailing reflects on 1930s China, exposing ‘its bigotry, its touchiness, and its tiresome grandiloquence’, and considers the position of women in the changing dynamic of 1940s Japanese-occupied Shanghai.52

Interdisciplinarity, Aesthetics, Transnationalism: Wider Trends The 1930s saw the resurgence of the essay as a form through which several Asian writers sought to introduce eastern aesthetics to western readers. Surprisingly, many of these essays did not argue so much for a sense of inherent difference between eastern and western aesthetics, but instead pointed to lines of dialogue, shared cultural exchange and techniques between the East and West. New media forms such as the motion picture and wireless radio, the growth of the travel industry, the provision in the interwar period of several university lectures hosting foreign scholars, and the continuing circulation of periodicals and magazines across national boundary lines all played a part in emphasizing the international, universal nature of the disciplines with which writers, artists and filmmakers were experimenting. Of course, the discussion of transnational aesthetics was not unique to this period. Since the late 1800s, writers like Noguchi and the Japanese American Sadakichi Hartmann had used the essay form to relate Asian traditions in art, poetry and drama to audiences in the United States via the pages of periodicals like the Boston Daily Advertiser and Camera Work.53 However, whereas Noguchi’s works reflect the tensions of a writer who had to persuade western audiences to be interested in his culture, by the mid-twentieth century it was something of a given that cross-cultural exchange was essential to the fertilization of the humanities and arts. The essays the Japanese filmmaker Yasushi Ogino wrote for the Switzerland-based film journal Close Up epitomize the solidly transnational character of Asian writers’ engagements with the anglophone essay form during this period. Close Up (1927–33) was the first English-language film criticism magazine. The first issue in July 1927

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promised to explore ‘the Far East in their relation to the cinema’, in keeping with what would become the magazine’s consistently transnational agenda.54 In November 1930, Ogino’s first essay, ‘Characterization of Sound in Talkies’, appeared in Close Up.55 That Close Up published Ogino’s work at this point is significant; he would later become a professional film critic, but in 1930 Ogino was still a ‘student in Japan’.56 Although Close Up’s editor, Kenneth Macpherson, argued that Ogino’s essay ‘indicates that the unimaginative use of sound in talking films is exercising the minds of film-workers in Japan as much, and perhaps more, than in the Occident’, the essay was not designed as an East-meets-West piece, but instead existed simply as a space for Ogino to consider how new audio techniques altered ‘the expression of sound’ in talking films.57 By the early 1930s, then, the essay form had evolved for Asian writers: it was no longer a form through which marginalized writers needed first to gain sociopolitical ground, and had instead evolved to the point where writers like Ogino could use it simply as a means of reflection. Ogino’s further Close Up essays, such as ‘Film Criticism in Japan’ (June 1932) and ‘Japanese Film Problems, 1932’ (March 1933) evince the familiar ‘East-meets-West’ dynamic, but the tone of the essays suggests a confidence – rather than a hope – that readers will want to know about ‘the history of Japanese films’ and the ‘splendid and gorgeous camera-technics never before realised in Japan’.58 Whilst Ogino discussed the exchange of filmmaking techniques between Asian, European and American filmmakers, several Asian writers wrote essays for anglophone periodicals exploring literary exchange across other genres. For Katue Kitasono, the founder of Tokyo’s Vou Club poetry group, publishing essays in English-language magazines offered opportunities to assert innovative ideas about ‘the relation between imagery and ideoplasty’ in poetry.59 Already a fairly well-known poet and magazine editor in Japan, Kitasono had corresponded with the American poet Ezra Pound for almost three years when, in January 1938, Pound secured publication of several of the Vou Club members’ poems in a new London-based literary magazine, Townsman. Prefacing the poems are two essays: the first by Pound, ‘Vou Club’, introduces the poems (which had appeared in Kitasono’s Vou magazine in preceding years) and makes a bold statement that underscores strengthened literary relations between American writers like himself and Japanese writers: ‘from now on any man who wants to write English poetry will have to start reading Japanese’.60 The second, ‘Notes’, is written by Kitasono and explains how the Vou Club was ‘born as a most active, new club of poets in Japan’ before outlining how the Vou Club views poetry as a writing process.61 ‘The function of poetry takes such a course like below: (a) Language (b) Imagery (c) Ideoplasty’, Kitasono expounds, before providing an example of the process in practice: We get the first line, ‘a shell, a typewriter, and grapes,’ in which we have an aesthetic feeling . . . We add the next line and then another aesthetic feeling is born. Thus all the lines are combined and a stanza is finished. This means the completion of imagery of the stanza and then ideoplasty begins. This principle can be applied to poems consisting of several stanzas. In that case ideoplasty is formed when the last stanza is finished.62 This piece reveals the particular blurring of genre seen in essays by Asian writers: part craft essay and part ‘manifesto’ – this is how Pound would later refer to Kitasono’s essay for Townsman63 – the essay was a means for Asian writers to outline comparative

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approaches to writing for an audience who they assumed wanted to be global citizens, international readers who aspired ‘to recite poems in each own’s language’.64 Noguchi’s later essays suggest that by the late 1930s discussion of aesthetics was not defined by the distinct lines of nationality seen in early essays in English by Asian writers, but instead by questions of genre, form and style that were understood at this point to be universals that collapsed and resisted geographic demarcation. The essay appears then as a mediator, a form through which Asian writers like Noguchi and Far communicated culture to foreign audiences so successfully that the sense of alterity accompanying this culture soon became almost mainstream. By the mid-twentieth century, American and British audiences were used to reading work by writers from East Asia. In ‘Three Scenes from Japanese No Plays’, published in late 1935 in the British magazine Life and Letters To-day, Noguchi enters into a discussion of ‘The Pine Wind’, a ‘[r]are and distinguished’ example of Japanese Noh theatre, with no prior explanation of the genre.65 It was expected, at this point, that readers were transnational in their literariness. As Asian migration into the United States continued, the 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of Asian American writers such as Diana Chang. Born in New York City to a Chinese father and American mother, Chang published her first work in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1946, before writing essays for literary magazines. ‘Wool Gathering, Ventriloquism, and the Double Life’, published in The American Pen in 1970, expresses a similar sense of dual identity seen in Noguchi’s and Far’s essays.66 In their probing of the feeling of being ‘in and out of identities – Chinese, Caucasian’, Chang’s essays echo Far’s in their negotiation of complex questions of identity and selfhood sometimes posed by mixed-race heritage or, more frequently, by society’s reaction to this heritage.67 This marks a turning point for the Asian essay tradition: by the mid-twentieth century, many Asian writers were now born in North America. Whilst Noguchi’s and Far’s essays represent the Asian-authored essay in North America, Diana Chang’s work is distinctly Asian American. In one of her early essays, she makes this switch clear by using the term ‘Chinese American’ to describe her work. ‘I don’t produce only Chinese American, or minority/ethnic stories exclusively’, she cautions readers.68 Contemporary scholars like Amy Ling have identified Diana Chang as a ‘writer in the hyphenated condition’, the term ‘hyphenated’ denoting the awareness of belonging to multiple cultures that Chang’s mixed heritage prompts.69 Chang inherits this sort of ‘hyphenated’ writing from the traditions of earlier Asian essayists like Far, Noguchi and Zhang Ailing, who used the essay to explore their betweenness before any real theorization of this state of being had occurred. One of Far’s last pieces, ‘Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career’, published in the Boston Globe in 1912, elaborates on the multiple geographies that form the backdrop to Far’s life. ‘In the beginning I opened my eyes . . . in the county of Cheshire, England’, she explains, before detailing her ‘arrival in America’, her time in Jamaica ‘working as a reporter on a local paper’, and her travels between Montreal, Seattle and Boston.70 Physical travel between geographic space is bound up with a conceptual movement between identities and readers: she tells the reader that she has ‘come to Boston’ with ‘the intention of publishing a book [Mrs. Spring Fragrance] and planting a few Eurasian thoughts in Western literature’.71 In one of Noguchi’s later pieces, he discusses his relief at returning to ‘my home not far from Tokyo’, but reminds readers that he belongs simultaneously to a circle of ‘western critics’.72

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The sense of belonging somewhere between China and America forms a continued source of interest in Zhang Ailing’s later essays, especially after she became a US citizen in 1960.73 This sense of identity as a contested, internalized, between space is represented, then, in the external space of the essay, which is in itself a contested genre. As we have seen from the different definitions of the essay outlined by writers like Hazlitt, Ozick and Woolf, the essay is also viewed much in the same way as the people who write it are: subjectively, as something to be construed through multiple and sometimes contradictory labels, purposes and meanings.

Conclusions: Neither ‘Here’ Nor ‘There’ Carine M. Mardorossian has urged for the use of the term ‘migrant literature’ (instead of ‘exile literature’) when discussing the works of transnational writers. The notion of an exiled writer, she points out, ‘constructs a binary logic between an alienating “here” and a romanticized “homeland”’.74 Shifting from the term ‘exile literature’ to ‘migrant literature’ ‘challenges this binary logic by emphasizing movement, rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages. The world inhabited by the characters is no longer conceptualized as “here” and “there”.’75 Reframing the aforementioned writers’ contributions to the essay form as part of this shift from notions of exile to migration reveals the ways in which Asian writers like Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing used the essay to explore betweenness as a state of being in its own right, one in which rootlessness, movement and cultural exchange are treated with celebration as well as consternation. For Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing, notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’ gradually dissolve or become less important in their essays. It is a sense of acceptance, of realizing one’s place as neither fully within nor outside of a given culture, that offers, paradoxically, a sense of resolution in their works. Again, this relates to the essay form: its function as a genre designed to allow writers to weigh up and evaluate points of view, as well as to persuade or entertain, means that for many Asian – and later Asian American – writers, the essay is a hybrid form that can be at once analytical, expressive, deeply personal and, at times, unresolved in a way that poetry or a short story cannot. The essay is a form that refuses simplistic definitions or labels. This quality makes it particularly suitable for negotiating nuanced questions of transnational self-identity. Essayists like Far, Noguchi and Zhang Ailing could, on the one hand, express feelings of longing or cultural dislocation and, on the other, explore the positive aspects of being amongst new countries and cultures. For Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing, the essay offered a vehicle through which to emphasize their status not as helpless exiles who could not return home, but as travelers who chose to operate as global citizens in a newly transnational world. The essay provided ways of exploring this sort of transnational, label-free mindset at a point when magazine editors continued to introduce Asian writers only as the ‘abroad’ contributors to ‘home and abroad’ sections of periodicals (their voices were inevitably presented as belonging to countries that were othered). An excerpt from one of Zhang Ailing’s last pieces – ‘What Are We to Write?’ – shows the extent to which the advocacy of ‘freedom of movement’ in her essays, much like that seen in Far’s and Noguchi’s, was central to promoting forms of global literature long before comparative and world literature emerged as established disciplines:

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writers themselves should be like trees in the garden . . . As they grow, their viewpoint will begin to grow wider, and as their field of vision expands, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to develop in new directions, for when the wind blows, their seeds will disperse far into the distance, engendering still more trees. But that is the most difficult task of all.76 For Noguchi, Far and Zhang Ailing, the essay, an age-old form, offered new opportunities to make this task a little more possible.

Notes   1. See, for example, David E. Pollard, The Chinese Essay (London: Hurst, 2000).  2. Jenny Spinner, ‘The Essay in America’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore9780190201098-e-545.   3. Kirk A. Denton, ‘Historical Overview’, in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2016), iii–xxxii (iv).   4. The figures this essay focuses on are from China and Japan, or can trace their heritage back to these countries, but the term ‘Asian American’ also encompasses people from other countries and territories, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and the Pacific Islands. Writers like Le Ly Hayslip, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Trần Văn Dĩnh have written on the experience of navigating Vietnamese and American identities. See, for example, Trần Văn Dĩnh, ‘Huế: My City, Myself’, National Geographic 176, no. 5 (November 1989): 595–603. Estrella Alfon, Dominador Ilio and Bienvenido Santos have written extensively on the identity politics of living between the Philippines and the United States. See Bienvenido Santos, ‘The Filipino Novel in English’, in Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, ed. Antonio G. Manuud (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967), 634–38.   5. Amy Tan, ‘Mother Tongue’, The Threepenny Review, no. 43 (Autumn 1990): 7–8 (8).   6. See, for example, Haruki Murakami’s essays in The New Yorker, such as Haruki Murakami, ‘Boston, from One Citizen of the World Who Calls Himself a Runner’, The New Yorker, April 30, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/boston-from-one-citizenof-the-world-who-calls-himself-a-runner and ‘Abandoning a Cat’, The New Yorker, September 30, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/abandoning-a-cat.   7. In using the term ‘Asian American’, I do not imply that these writers viewed or defined themselves through it. Noguchi may have spent time in North America but would never have used the term ‘Asian American’ to define himself. Indeed, when Noguchi and Sui Sin Far were writing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the term was not commonly used, with terms like ‘Chinese-American’ used instead, and as a relatively new term, by Far. In addition, it is important to note that the term ‘Asian American’ does not, and cannot, represent the complex heritage of many writers, especially figures like Far who traced their heritage to many countries.   8. The essay’s affiliation with the periodical is, of course, long-standing, but accounts of it tend to focus on the western ‘periodical essay’ genre that, pioneered by Thomas Addison, Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Johnson, took shape through the pages of nineteenth-century heavyweight reviews such as Blackwood’s, The Edinburgh Review and The Spectator.   9. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Rinehart, 1957), 42. 10. Cynthia Ozick, ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’, Atlantic Monthly 282, no. 3 (September 1998): 114–18 (114). 11. William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 189–98 (190).

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12. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Modern Essay’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 216–27 (224). 13. Yone Noguchi, ‘Hibachi’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art; London, December 2, 1911, 702–3. 14. Cathy Park Hong, ‘United’, in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 3–35 (29). The title of Hong’s essay collection demonstrates her status as an inheritor of a politicized essay tradition begun by writers like Sui Sin Far. ‘Minor feelings’, Hong argues, are ‘the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed’. Hong, Minor Feelings, 55. 15. Jopi Nyman, Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 2. 16. My reference here to the age of empire refers to the British Empire’s aggressive pursuit of colonies and territories during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 17. Yone Noguchi, ‘Shakespeare in Japan’, Critic 46, no. 3 (March 1905): 230–37 (231). 18. Yone Noguchi, ‘What English Books Are Known in Japan?’, Bookman: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life (March 1904): 76–78 (76, 77). 19. ‘Asia’, Christian Observer, December 21, 1904, 24. 20. Natsume Soseki, ‘My Individualism’, in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2011), 161–73. 21. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 170. 22. Yone Noguchi, ‘VIII. Tokutomi’s “Nami-ko”’, Bookman: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life (May 1904): 313. 23. Yone Noguchi, ‘Introduction’, The Iris, no. 1 (June 1906): 1. 24. Yone Noguchi, ‘To the Americans’, Bookman: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life (July 1918): 473–79 (473). 25. Yone Noguchi, ‘My London Experience’, Fortnightly Review 95 (April 1911): 608–16 (608). 26. Yone Noguchi, ‘The Westernisation of Japan: A Japanese Poet’s Lament over the Disappearance of Old Tokyo’, Graphic, June 10, 1911, 888. 27. Yone Noguchi, Untitled Article, Japan Times, May 2, 1913, 17. 28. W. E. B. DuBois, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, Atlantic Monthly 80 (August 1897): 194–98 (195). 29. Ibid., 194. 30. Sui Sin Far, ‘Chinese Visitors’, Montreal Daily Star, July 6, 1895, 4. 31. Sui Sin Far, ‘The Chinese Woman in America’, Land of Sunshine 6, no. 2 (January 1897): 59–64 (60, 64). 32. Ibid., 60. 33. Sui Sin Far, ‘The Engaged Girl in China’, Ladies’ Home Journal 29, no. 2 (January 1902): 14. 34. Unsigned review of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by Sui Sin Far, The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 35 (July–September 1913): 181. 35. Mary Chapman, introduction to Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton, ed. Mary Chapman (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), xiii–xlvii (xv). See also Sui Sin Far, ‘Her Chinese Husband’, Independent, August 18, 1910, 358. 36. Sui Sin Far, ‘Chinese Workmen in America’, Independent, July 3, 1913, 56. 37. Ibid., 56. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Tan, ‘Mother Tongue’, 8.

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40. Sui Sin Far, ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian’, Independent, January 21, 1909, 125. 41. Ibid., 125. 42. Ibid., 125. 43. Ketu H. Katrak, ‘South Asian American Literature’, in Asian American Writers, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 5–28 (15, emphasis in original). 44. Ibid., 15. 45. Yone Noguchi, ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’, Rhythm 11 (January 1913): 354–59 (355). 46. Zhang Ailing, ‘Writing of One’s Own’, in Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 15–22 (15). In keeping with her own preference, I have chosen to refer to the author as Zhang Ailing, her Chinese name, rather than the westernized version of her name (Eileen Chang). 47. Ibid., 15. For a detailed account of the essay exchange between Zhang Ailing and Lei, see translator’s note by Jones, in ibid., 15n1. 48. Nicole Huang, introduction to Written on Water, ix–xiv (xii). 49. Barbara Green, ‘Recovering Feminist Criticism: Modern Women Writers and Feminist Periodical Studies’, Literature Compass 10, no. 1 (2013): 53–60 (58). 50. See Louise Kane, ‘Violet Hunt, Periodical Culture, and Emergent (Female) Modernisms’, in Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period, ed. Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 213–25. 51. Zhang Ailing, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, XXth Century 4, no. 1 (January 1943): 54–61 (54). 52. Zhang Ailing, ‘China: Educating the Family’, XXth Century 5, no. 5 (November 1943): 358. 53. A prolific essayist, Hartmann contributed articles on literary (and later filmic) aesthetics to periodicals from the early 1880s when he began working as the Boston Daily Advertiser’s arts writer. See, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann, ‘The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture’, Camera Work, no. 38 (April 1912): 19–21. 54. Kenneth Macpherson, ‘As Is’, Close Up 1, no. 1 (July 1927): 5–15 (15). 55. Yasushi Ogino, ‘Characterization of Sound in Talkies’, Close Up 7, no. 5 (November 1930): 340–45. 56. ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Yasushi Ogino, ‘Characterization of Sound in Talkies’, Close Up 7, no. 5 (November 1930): 340. 57. Ibid., 340. 58. Yasushi Ogino, review of Before Daybreak, directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, Close Up 8, no. 4 (December 1931): 290–92 (290). 59. Katue Kitasono, ‘Notes’, Townsman 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 4–5 (4). 60. Ezra Pound, ‘Vou Club’, Townsman 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 4–5 (4). 61. Kitasono, ‘Notes’, 4. 62. Ibid., 5. 63. Ezra Pound to Katue Kitasono, January 18, 1938, in Ezra Pound & Japan: Letters & Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Oxford: Andesite Press, 2017), 53. 64. Katue Kitasono to Ezra Pound, January 25, 1938, in Ezra Pound & Japan, 54. 65. Yone Noguchi, ‘Three Scenes from Japanese No Plays’, Life and Letters To-day 13, no. 2 (December 1935): 32. 66. Diana Chang, ‘Wool Gathering, Ventriloquism, and the Double Life’, American Pen (Summer 1970): 1–4. 67. Quoted in Janet Hyunju Clarke, ‘Diana Chang’, in Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 46. 68. Ibid., 46. 69. Amy Ling, ‘Writer in the Hyphenated Condition: Diana Chang’, MELUS 7, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 69–83 (69).

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70. Sui Sin Far, ‘Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career’, Boston Globe, May 5, 1912, 32. 71. Ibid., 32. 72. Yone Noguchi, ‘Insect Musicians and Others’, Dial 86, no. 7 (July 1929): 549. 73. See, for example, Zhang Ailing, ‘Westerners Watching Peking Operas and Other Issues’, Journal of Ancient and Today 36 (1943): 100–2. Reprinted as ‘Yangren kan jingxi ji qita’, in Huali yuan (Xianggang: Huangguan chubanshe, 2010), 13–15 (13). 74. Carine M. Mardorossian, ‘From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature’, Modern Language Studies 32, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 15–33 (16). 75. Ibid., 16. 76. Zhang Ailing, ‘What Are We to Write?’, in Written on Water, 129–30 (129).

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18 Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present Sarah Allen

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hough nature writing is produced across genres and fields, it is especially important to the genre of the personal essay. In the American essay tradition, for example, American Transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, wrote nature essays to explore and celebrate the relationship between the individual and nature, seeking ‘an original relation to the universe’.1 This dedication to exploring the relationship between humans and nature continues in the tradition of the American nature essay, such as in the works of John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard and Scott Russell Sanders, just to name a few.2 These essayists range in their explorations from the positions of observers and lovers of nature to activists fighting to save the environment from further destruction. Given essayists’ attentiveness, in a variety of ways and roles, to the human–nature relationship in the tradition of nature writing, the genre of the essay might be well suited to meet and, perhaps, even lead in the contemporary posthuman turn. While the posthuman turn seeks to address a variety of ideas that are central to humanism – including its overemphasis on human perspective, as well as its privileging of the rational and the autonomous individual over affect and social practices – it also in no small part attempts to head off (or at the very least address) ecological crises.3 To do so, however, the essay would have to confront its humanist tradition of privileging the essayist’s perspective as the source of meaning-making. In a characteristic (if provocative) example of the essay’s embrace of humanism, ‘Emerson and the Essay’ (an essay itself), essayist William H. Gass responds to, reinterprets and expands on Emerson’s famous claim that life is ‘but the angle of vision’.4 In ‘Experience’, Emerson states: Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.5 Clearly, human perspective is privileged here, so much so that nature’s very possibilities depend on the human’s perspective. Gass reorients this passage, however, and indeed the whole of Emerson’s work, by thinking about the essayist as especially capable of

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such seeing in such ways. He explains the passage above by pointing to the ways in which the essayist, like Emerson, makes ‘a mood into a metaphor, and a metaphor into a metaphysics’.6 Gass continues: the philosopher, the theologian, takes over from the poet like the Hyde in Jekyll, and wearily works his world out, describing the mechanisms of its perception, its hierarchies of value, the limits of our knowing and unknowing within that image, since he is at once the owner and surveyor and policeman of the dream.7 It is this last piece (‘the owner and surveyor and policeman of the dream’) that grants the essayist the potential for creative genius. But more to the point here: it is an idea, too, that is complicit in the humanist tradition, which privileges the value and agency of the human being – granting, in this case, the status of meaning-maker to the human. As meaning-maker, the essayist is the center of an essay, constructing the world according to the essayist’s mood and perspective. Consequently, the construction (the essay) reveals more about the essayist’s temperament than it does about the world itself. The posthuman turn problematizes the privileging of the individual and, indeed, of the human more generally. It decenters the human by openly critiquing anthropocentrism, which is based on the assumption that humans are, to put it simply, the most important species. Anthropocentrism is a belief that is at least as old as Western philosophy, as it is captured in the words of the fifth-century bce philosopher, Protagoras: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Though posthumanist scholars’ investments in the posthuman turn might vary, posthumanist thought questions the primacy of the human individual, as superior to and meaning-maker for the rest of the world. The thinking about ecologies, in particular, makes visible the ways in which humans – as individuals, groups and as a species – are entangled in the world, entangled with other beings and objects so thoroughly and so deeply that we, humans, can no longer afford to ignore our entanglements. If we do, we will drive ourselves and many other living and nonliving things on the planet to catastrophe.8 According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), about one million animal and plant species face extinction in the near future. That is the highest rate of extinction in human history, and it affects far more than a set of distinct species. As explained by Josef Settele, one of the co-chairs on the assessment, ‘Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.’9 In response to this ongoing ecological crisis, posthumanist thinkers, working across disciplines, find themselves in the midst of what might be called the ‘Ecological Turn’ – which marks a more particular shift within the larger and ongoing posthuman shift. In the Ecological Turn, thinkers focus on ecologies to explore ways of moving forward in a fragile world with an uncertain future. The key concepts and arguments that are entangled in and driving this turn are various and often contentious, but those who participate in these conversations seem to agree that ecological crises are real and that we humans have a responsibility to address them – ideally, to find ways forward in the midst of them. In general, ecological theory – including the various frameworks which guide conversations in the Ecological Turn – is a posthumanist enterprise because it topples the

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species hierarchy that has traditionally set the rational human at the top. This is deep and difficult work: intended to undo the privileging of the human, who is most responsible for the ecological crises we find ourselves in (thus, the terms ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘anthropogenic’ climate change), while at the same time acknowledging that our work to undo our privilege is inevitably limited by the very human perspectives that are driving that work.10 In place of that hierarchy, ecological theory traces webs of relations, exploring entanglements among living beings (across species of animal and plant) as well as objects, in an attempt to demonstrate how we (beings and objects) are dependent on and responsible to each other. A few of the leading ecological theorists who are thinking about the entanglements among living beings and nonliving objects are Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold.11 Timothy Morton’s work is particularly interesting for thinking about ecological posthumanist thought and the essay because he explores ecological questions and concepts by relentlessly interrogating the binary of human and nature. He decenters the human being, in part, by casting us as beings entangled in the ‘mesh’ – a term that refers to the interconnectedness of all things (beings and objects). He explains: All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. . . . We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria.12 Thinking about scales of objects inside the mesh, Morton eventually shifts his focus (see The Ecological Thought and Hyperobjects) to the ‘hyperobject’ – an enormous part (in terms of space, time and interaction) of the mesh – which decenters the human being even more thoroughly than his theory of the mesh. Hyperobjects are ‘entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place’.13 Humans are caught in these hyperobjects, like climate or plastic, and they are so huge and pervasive that we cannot perceive them in the usual ways (for example, with simple observation). If we are caught within a saturation of objects (within hyperobjects), then the long-standing Western project of knowing the world or nature as separate from the human self, as object to our subjects, no longer makes sense. Rather, we humans are irrevocably entangled in, even embedded in, ‘things’ that are too big to see, certainly too big for us to sit at the center of and observe in their totality. This is Morton’s more particular contribution to the Ecological Turn’s project to decenter the human. Considering how such efforts might change the ways in which essayists write, it is clear that in an ecological framework, the essayist is no longer responsible for (or, indeed, capable of) ‘wearily work[ing our] world out’, as Gass has said. Instead, the essayist is responsible to (response-able to) the mesh and to the hyperobjects in which we are entangled. That is, the essayist responds to the mesh because they are implicated in it. The essayist is well poised to respond to/within the mesh because nature essays, in particular, have generally insisted on an ‘objective’ world that essayists might observe and contemplate but that exists prior to and acts on the essayist and the essayist’s observations – a world that consists of nonhuman agents, like animals, plants, computers and other things. As Edward Abbey warns in ‘The Great American Desert’, for example, the

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desert is not a suitable dwelling for humans, suggesting not only that we should, therefore, ‘stay out of there’, but also that the desert exists without the need for human interpretation of its value and meaning.14 Instead, it exists prior to our interpretations and in fact enters into the interpretative act, acting on humans – even potentially destroying us. Morton, too, recognizes that ‘there are real [objective] things’.15 He goes further, though, in stating that not only are there real things that exist prior to our casting them into their appropriate (phenomenological) positions in our world, but human thinking is actually immanent to the physical.16 As he explains, ‘hyperobjects end the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality. Hyperobjects force us to acknowledge the immanence of thinking to the physical.’17 But this does not mean that we are surrounded by a world. Rather, this acknowledgment about how our thinking is immanent to the physical is born of the stunning and discombobulating reality that has burst upon us in the Anthropocene – a reality that reveals to us that ‘the physical’ is constituted by hyperobjects, which are so immense, pervasive and invisible (in a toohuge-to-be-seen kind of way) that they make the concept of ‘world’ no longer possible. If we cannot examine the world from a position that is separate from it, then it is no longer an ‘it’ (an object separate from us). But more than that: if there are hyperobjects (and, indeed, there are), then ‘world’ becomes impossible because we cannot know these things empirically; we can only gather data about them. For example, it is not through direct observation, but through and with data that we think about climate. Our inability to see climate except through data means that our understanding of climate is obscured – ‘climate’ is elusive, mysterious. These are the conditions of ecological awareness, and these conditions suggest that not only are ‘we not in the center of the universe, but we are not in the VIP box beyond the edge, either’.18 Morton continues, ‘To say the least, this is a profoundly disturbing realization. It is the true content of ecological awareness.’19 Given that the essay has always taken as one of its central questions the relationship of humans to nature, one could argue that the genre might be the perfect place to grapple with the profoundly disturbing realization that human beings are actually not ‘the owner and surveyor and policeman of the dream’, as Gass says, so much as we are entangled in a web of far larger beings and objects, which is part of an even larger and expansive web whose limits, arguably, might not be determined by atmosphere and outer space. Especially given the genre’s humble self-description as essais, attempts or tests, it could be an appropriate genre for writers to explore what might be possible for ‘us’ (conceived in the broadest terms) who are part of this expansive web, which is elusive to us, but who are also caught in it in the midst of ongoing ecological crises. However, the problem, again, is that the essay has traditionally been understood as a space in which writers might ‘meet themselves in their writing’, even and especially while they sojourn in nature.20 For example, in ‘An Entrance to the Woods’, the American nature writer and essayist Wendell Berry writes of walking through the woods and shedding ‘all superfluities’ of his life.21 For Berry, this shedding or ‘stripp[ing] away’, as he calls it, is made possible only in nature, in ‘the absence of human society’.22 It is as though his self is put through a sieve. He states: The necessities of foot travel in this steep country have stripped away all superfluities. I simply could not enter into this place and assume its quiet with all the belongings of a family man, property holder, etc. For the time, I am reduced to my irreducible self.23

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By walking through the woods, Berry is shedding the cumbers of all his worldly obligations. He experiences the quieting of his worldly self, and some other self is able to emerge – what he calls his ‘irreducible self’. In this transformative experience between self and nature, Berry becomes a self that is distilled into all that it actually is, uninhibited by all that it is otherwise expected to be. Berry suggests in this walk into nature that nature is somehow more essential than human society, which is the making of all of the ‘superfluities’ of his life. He also suggests that there is a human self that, like nature, is more essential than the social self. One could dwell on this binary of the essential versus social self at great length.24 More to the point of this chapter, in nature and in the essay-that-is-set-in-nature, the essayist embarks on this most anthropocentric quest: discovering who the essayist is, really. This quest can be traced to (European) Romanticism with its emphases on individualism, emotion and nature, as well as American Transcendentalism, a movement in which two notable and generative American essayists participated – Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.25 Both writers employed the essay as a space to discover a more autonomous self, one that both men sought in solitude in nature, where they could commune with nature without having to conform to society’s expectations. Contemporary nature essayists seem to have inherited some of these values – particularly, the exercise of seeking solitude in nature in order to meet their selves (perhaps a distilled self) beyond social expectations. Still, in Berry’s essay, one can see a different relation between self and nature also being acknowledged. He reflects, ‘Slowly my mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of.’26 His reflection certainly might be read as participating in the traditional binaries of nature versus society or of an essential self versus a social self, but it simultaneously begins to destabilize these oppositions. As he notes, he is now ‘a part of’ the woods; he is no longer simply observing. He is no longer subject to object. This transformation is possible because there is a ‘wilderness’, as Berry calls it, that is at the center of us, that is, perhaps, more essential, more fundamental. As he explains: Wilderness is the element in which we live encased in civilization, as a mollusk lives in his shell in the sea. . . . It is a wilderness that for most of us most of the time is kept out of sight, camouflaged, by the edifices and the busyness and the bothers of human society.27 But, alone in nature, the essayist might ‘strip away this human façade’ and discover that ‘all wildernesses are one’, his (Berry’s) ‘wilderness’ included.28 Put another way, Berry’s reflection on his walk in the woods is not simply an act of anthropocentrism – the reading of nature according to the primacy of the human self. Rather, Berry notes a transformation: he is no longer simply subject to object, self to world. He has become part-of, suggesting perhaps the blurring of the boundaries of the self. Annie Dillard, whose nature essays participate in the same traditions that Berry inherited from Emerson and Thoreau, does much more work to blur the boundaries of the self through a kind of inversion of the human/nature binary – privileging nature over our inadequate, human capacity to perceive it. For example, in ‘Seeing’, after spending an evening at Tinker Creek, where she observes strange, glinting and

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dizzying displays of life at the darkening creek, Dillard stumbles home. It is only in interspersed and tangential moments that she seems to remember her self, and it is a self that is totally destabilized, caught in a kind of dispersal or expansion. She reflects: I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. . . . I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone.29 Dillard not only describes but also invites readers into an expansion of self that moves so quickly, so hugely, that any autonomous ‘self’ seems to disappear. We cannot help but spin with her and feel our own tiny selves disappearing into the whirling darkness. The passage above does not move logically; it jumps from latitudes to creek to sky. But ‘logically’ is not the point. This passage is about movement or, more precisely, about transformation – the experience of a swiftly vanishing human-centric, rational world. Ecologically invested writers today also take note of the swiftly vanishing humancentric, rational world, and, perhaps surprisingly, they too are often interested in personal writing (like the essay) for exactly this reason. Timothy Morton, for example, often conducts his critiques of anthropocentrism in what he calls a ‘personal style’ of writing.30 He chooses this style because he is acutely aware that writers cannot simply set aside perspective. As Morton explains in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, ‘it is not possible for me not to anthropomorphize [in writing], since I am human’.31 Thus, he is not so much interested in simply eliminating human perspective as he is in destabilizing its privileged status, and he does so by writing in a personal style that allows him the freedom to acknowledge perspective, while at the same time undermining that privileging. Essayists, like Dillard and Berry, have accomplished the same, though perhaps not with the same purpose as Morton. As Morton explains, ‘I frequently write in a style that the reader may find “personal” – sometimes provocatively or frustratingly so. . . . [I do so because] I am one of the entities caught in the hyperobject I here call global warming.’32 It is important that his style of writing also align, then, with the ecological reality that he seeks to reveal glimpses of in his work. It should acknowledge his entanglements in ‘the mesh’, instead of performing some kind of transcendent positionality from which he can speak about the Earth. The point is that he is not trying to erase perspective or history or ideology or any of the ‘stuff’ that makes humans human. Perspective is part of the mesh, even if human perspective is not at the center of it. We humans, too, are part of the mesh, though we are not ‘the measure of all things’. There are already glimpses of this ecological awareness in the work of several essayists, as has been shown above. As explained in regard to Berry’s and Dillard’s essays, they can level the playing field so that nature and the human self might be explored in their deep entanglements and even in their moments of absorption into each other – an experience that some writers call ‘awe’. In fact, the American nature essayist’s conception of nature is often centered on the experience of awe and of the profound awareness that the human being, despite our immense rational processes, is comparatively

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far less powerful. Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, for example, somehow manages to keep both at the front of her readers’ minds – that treacherous balance between awe and life-threatening confrontations with ‘nature’ – as does Nan Shepherd (a Scottish nature writer), Craig Childs, Barry Lopez and too many more to count.33 So, Morton’s critique of the human being’s treatment of nature as ‘basically featureless’ until it is made meaningful through the processes of capitalism might not hold true in all essays.34 To many of the nature essayists mentioned here, whatever it is that they call ‘nature’ is more formidable and far more present than ‘basically featureless’. Thus, these essayists might already be a part of the curve that is the Ecological Turn, as they already know that nature is something more; it is how to make less of the human that essayists are still learning. To fully make the transition so that the nature essayist’s work intervenes in the larger ecological problems that the Earth faces today, the essayist might learn to write in more ecological ways of engaging-in-writing. More precisely, the nature essayist could meet and lead in the Ecological Turn by reorienting the essay to a couple of familiar practices in the genre: namely, contradiction and presence.

Contradiction In Berry’s and Dillard’s experiences, nature is the way inward, but it is also more than human, beyond the human, certainly beyond any particular human self. Not unlike readers of Morton’s work, who have exclaimed to him, ‘Oh, now I have a term for this thing I’ve been trying to grasp!’ when they read about his concept of the hyperobject,35 essayists have long used ‘nature’ not simply as the setting of the nature essay, but as a way to describe a certain kind of transformative experience that is difficult to grasp. To put this another way, nature essays are not so much about (human) being, but essaying is the human being thrust into the process of becoming. The Ancients (for example, Heraclitus) understood becoming as a process that is born of contradiction. As Plato states in Cratylus, ‘Heraclitus . . . says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.’36 According to his many commentators, Heraclitus explained the flux of the world (the fact that we cannot ‘step twice into the same river’) through contradiction. That is, life is constituted not only in an interconnected web – a mesh, as Morton would say – but also in interconnected and opposite states: life–death, wakefulness–sleep, hunger–satiation, light–dark, young–old. According to Phillip Lopate, essayists have always valued contradiction, though perhaps not as a way of structuring the cosmos, like the Ancients. Rather, as Lopate explains, the essayist ‘should be alert for contradictions that open up new ways of looking at old subjects’.37 This is because ‘[t]he enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness’; ‘it slows down the dialectic of self-questioning’.38 Here, in the Ecological Turn, contradiction can be (and is being) employed differently in essays – not so much as the engine for self-questioning as the engine for becoming. This change is already visible in nature essays that are concerned with ecological crises, for example in the works of Elizabeth Kolbert and Roy Scranton. As journalist and essayist Elizabeth Kolbert aptly shows in The Sixth Extinction, nature has never been; it is always caught in the process of becoming. She never uses these terms – ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – but she does show that the biosphere has always been in flux, caught in the processes of change. She makes this point again and again

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in the book, and that process of becoming comes to mean something important to us when she shows us how extinction events are entangled with living and, thus, are part of the biosphere’s process of becoming. For example, in the braided essay ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’, Kolbert shows how becoming emerges in contradiction by explaining how one previous major extinction event actually helped to produce life as we know it today.39 In this essay, Kolbert includes scientific research as well as narrative about her hike with a few scientists (in various specializations) to Dob’s Linn in Scotland, where there are rocks that date to the last part of the Ordovician Period,40 before the Ordovician extinction ‘went on to make the modern world’.41 On the surface, it may seem that her choice of genre might simply be to make the scientific research more palatable to a broader audience or that she chose it because it is a genre in which she has a lot of practice and expertise, as a journalist. Both may be true; however, the genre of the essay has the added effect of permitting her a number of contradictions that a more ‘logical’ form might not: for example, the temporality and fragility, as well as the impact and influence, of human existence, its science and its stories. These are the sorts of ecological contradictions that the essayist can not only make visible but can also elucidate. In the same chapter, for example, Kolbert explains the following contradiction: that because of a prior extinction event – at the end of the Ordovician Period – the Earth saw a major loss of life and of the diversity of species on the planet, but also because of that extinction event, the biosphere as we know it today was made possible. Out of life, death; out of death, life. This is the process of becoming which the Ancients knew so well. As Kolbert explains, the Ordovician Period ‘was a time when life took off excitedly in new directions’, but at its end, ‘the oceans emptied out. Something like eighty-five percent of marine species died off. . . . Today, it’s seen as the first of the Big Five Extinctions.’42 Quoting the paleontologist Richard Fortey, Kolbert explains that ‘the Ordovician extinction “went on to make the modern world”’, and that ‘“[h]ad the list of survivors [from that extinction event] been one jot different, then so would the world today”’.43 So, not only was life blooming and, then, destroyed, but that destruction made possible a whole new world in which many new species would emerge, species that would not have been possible in the Ordovician Period. Out of life, death; out of death, life – the biosphere becomes in contradiction. Strangely and significantly, though, after all of this explanation – just a line break and one sentence later – Kolbert suddenly shifts to describe her guide, an expert on graptolites. She states, ‘Zalasiewicz – my guide at Dob’s Linn – is a slight man with shaggy hair, pale blue eyes, and a pleasantly formal manner.’44 The shift is jarring, but it is dramatic in its effect, suggesting something of the very real manifestations, the very real results, made possible by the previous extinction event – in the form of this human (her guide) and of this science (paleontology). Neither human nor science would have been possible without the terrible shift that was one of the great five mass extinction events that the Earth has known (so far). Again, out of destruction, possibility; out of possibility, destruction. In this strange but significant shift in the text, the kind of shift that is par for the course in an essay, Kolbert brings home to her readers the inherent contradiction that is our species’ undeniable effects on, but also our undeniable fragility in relation to, the ongoing-ness of the Earth. Unlike their academic siblings (for example, in the

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traditional academic argument), essayists can suddenly lurch from one topic to the next, and readers know that those lurches are purposeful. By suddenly lurching from a narrative of an extinction event to the present, Kolbert takes us, very deliberately, from one extinction event to another (in the present, it is the Sixth Extinction), thus knitting together a series of extinction events and casting her project, as well as herself, her guide and his work, within this larger history of ongoing life and death. In this way, she reminds her readers of how significant, but also how insignificant we are. As she explains at another point in the book: a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man – the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and museums, the cities and factories – will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.45 Yet, as her guide Zalasiewicz explains, even in this thin layer of sediment, ‘[Humans] have already left a record that is now indelible’.46 Again, a contradiction. It is the possibility of such strange contradictions in the essay that might enable a profound experience – a transformation – in readers, where they might know (through the movement of Kolbert’s essay, for example) the strange and discomforting contradiction that is anthropogenic environmental change. Again, even in this single example, the essay is shown to be capable of enabling such experiences in readers.

Being Present ‘Experience’ is what the essay has always been good at both exploring and enabling – as Michel de Montaigne knew well. And here, in the midst of the Anthropocene, experience is our best bet, certainly not ‘making an imagined future safe, [or] stopping something from happening that looms in the future’.47 Rather, according to Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, ‘staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’.48 For Haraway, being truly present means ‘learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’, but to do so, we must ‘make kin’ across species.49 We must think about ‘to whom one is actually responsible’50 and, of course, what that response-ability might look like, which is much of the focus of her book. In an essayistic style that allows her to do the work of ‘learning to stay with the trouble’, Haraway explores connections among people and pigeons, dogs and horses, Navajo people and coral reefs, not to mention feminism and speculative fiction and anthropology and hard sciences, plus weaving and string-figuring and blogging and gaming. Such entanglements are par for the course in Haraway’s work. In When Species Meet, for example, she writes at length about the possible connections and collaborations, the painful and joyful experiences, of cross-species relationships, but of course she is not the only writer to use an essayistic style to explore such entanglements.51 Craig Childs, for example, explicitly works within the genre of the essay when he writes in one chapter of The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild of

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his encounter with several bears over the course of his life. In one episode, he is following a bear past the boundaries of the Apache National Forest. When he inexplicably (almost) runs into the bear, the two stop to study each other. Childs describes the experience in a kind of uncanny stillness and being-in-the-present in which time falls away: ‘We were standing in an aspen forest, face-to-face, watching. Nothing had ever been as silent as this. No afternoon nap, no light snowfall.’52 He reflects that ‘you encounter an animal like this, and it is so vivid it detaches from time. The cogs and wheels of convention instantly unravel.’53 His experience is similar to Dillard’s experience of the creek at night. Convention, even the convention of time, seems to fall away, and there is an opening into present experience. A different kind of connection is possible – perhaps one as intense as Childs’s, in which the world falls away as connection becomes all that there is in the moment. Dillard’s ‘Seeing’, too, is its own meditation on the present. She opens the essay with a story of her childhood self, who loved to leave pennies in hidden places, drawing chalk arrows and enticements like ‘Surprise this way!’ for any curious and lucky passerby.54 Her point, as she explains early in the essay, is this: But . . . who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.55 For the rest of the essay, she demonstrates what it means to follow arrows and to find pennies, to cultivate a kind of openness and curiosity. She also reveals, again and again, just how transformative our experiences of nature can be, if we stay open and curious. For Dillard, much of that cultivation is only possible if we are fully present to and in experience. Botanist and indigenous essayist Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests something similar in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, though she takes the idea of being present further by exploring it within an ethical framework of reciprocity. In reciprocity, we might explore the question of ‘to whom one is actually responsible’ and what that response-ability might look like.56 In the chapter titled ‘The Gift of Strawberries’, for example, Kimmerer explains that strawberries, much like Dillard’s pennies, ‘shaped [her] view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet’.57 Again, this experience of the gifts of nature is entirely dependent on – is enabled by – being present. As she explains, ‘[A gift] is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.’58 In demonstrating what it might mean to be present, Kimmerer calls her readers to consider a different (an indigenous) way of living in the world. Her essays ‘provide an orientation’,59 not unlike the indigenous stories that she retells in her work, of humans making a home in the world through reciprocity, gratitude and humility, which are all only really possible when we are fully present, attuned to the world in which we live.

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Being fully present, thus, is not about constructing the world in our own image on the page. Instead, it is about ‘our’ (broadly conceived) relationships. Kimmerer states, ‘Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.’60 This is not a consumerist exchange; rather, ‘[t]he currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.’61 What are our responsibilities to each other? It is this question that so many indigenous and environmental essayists are dedicated to today, and it requires, at least, that the essayists engage in their craft differently. The environmentalist Rob Nixon dedicates his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor to an exploration of the ‘slow violence’ done by ecological crises, like climate change and deforestation, which have disproportionate effects on vulnerable groups of people and ecosystems that are made so by capitalism and imperialism. Indoing so, he calls for an attentiveness to much larger systemic and global problems made or exacerbated by ecological crises. Along the way, he points to the limits of the American nature essay’s canon (for example, the works of Emerson and Thoreau, Abbey and Berry) for being complicit in American exceptionalism, among other things. Indeed, Nixon argues that we need a ‘more historically answerable and geographically expansive sense of what constitutes our environment and which literary works we entrust to voice its parameters’.62 No doubt, essayists are responsible for addressing such needs in a world that is slipping further and further into ecological crises. For what might be an emerging breed of essayists who live in and respond to the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction, the present matters most – in all of its violence and possibility. As essayist Roy Scranton explains at the end of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: There is no outside, [the universe] lacks nothing, and it cannot be other than what it is. A slight tweak in any variable and everything would be completely different. To have this moment, as you breathe and read, everything that happened for the last thirteen billion years had to happen in exactly the way it did. Not a single atom can have been out of place, not a single muon faulty. Nothing went wrong. No mistakes were made. There was no sin, no error, no fall. There was only necessity.63 At least one point here might be a theme in nature essays: the importance, the necessity, of being present in the moment and, for essayists like Childs, Kimmerer, Dillard and Berry, the necessity of becoming, of experiencing. It is a radical affirmation – a saying ‘yes’ to life even while life as we know it is tipping into oblivion. Thus, all that essayists think and write might be anthropocentric, but the essayist today is well positioned to respond to and even intervene in that anthropocentrism precisely because of the essay’s long tradition of thinking about and, sometimes, embodying this experience of becoming that might be called ‘nature’. As shown above, nature has become something more than a setting in the essay. It has become experience, or it has become a way of describing experience in which the essayist is utterly present, even to the point of destabilizing the self in becoming a ‘creature of the moment’, as essayist William Hazlitt says.64 Ecological theorists like Morton and Haraway may focus on environmental issues and avoid the term ‘nature’, except perhaps to critique it, but whatever they call it,

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they are interested in living – and they call us to live – in the present, in an intractable present that makes us wary of the inevitability of and the fantasy that is our anthropocentrism. As the genre that has always been about meeting the self on the page, the essay proves again and again to provide essayists and readers the opportunity to face our anthropocentrism and to write/live in the moment so that we might become something more than we are. As Emerson reminds us in ‘Nature’, ‘Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.’65 How true, when we consider what ‘nature’ has done to reshape our thinking and living (and dying) into something more than the idea that it is simply ‘ancillary to a man’.66 Even as we write and read essays from inside hyperobjects that mark ecological crises and environmental catastrophe, we have, as Morton notes, found a new intimacy.67 As he states at the end of ‘Unsustaining’: Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for humans alone – the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and nonhumans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world.68 Indeed, if ‘nature’ is the name that essayists give to experience that is beyond such binaries and confines and limits, then the nature essay might open up possibilities for whatever might come, beyond the cocoon of humanism and at the end of the world.

Notes  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in The Annotated Emerson, ed. David Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 29–71 (27).   2. Berry and Dillard belong to the American tradition of the nature essay, which stems, in part, from American Transcendentalism. Essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are central figures in the movement, and they, in keeping with it, wrote about the goodness and beauty of nature and of the individual’s potential to become self-reliant and uncorrupted by society if they return to nature. Of course, there are also many essayists who do not engage with nature in this way; indeed, there are many who do not engage with nature at all.  3. See Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).   4. William H. Gass, ‘Emerson and the Essay’, in Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 9–49 (20).   5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Experience’, quoted in ibid., 20–21.   6. Ibid., 21.   7. Ibid., 21.   8. For example, see the ecofeminist works of Val Plumwood and Vandana Shiva, the antispeciesist works of writers like Peter Singer, Derrick Jensen and Marc Bekoff, and/or the indigenous works of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Dina Gilio-Whitaker.  9. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline “Unprecedented”: Species Extinction Rates “Accelerating”’, news release, May 6, 2019, https://ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment.

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10. ‘Anthropocene’, a term that was coined by Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning meteorologist and atmospheric chemist, is the proposed name given to the geological epoch that marks the significant impact that humans have had and are having on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. The term has not yet been adopted by all official parties who have the final say on such decisions because there is still some debate about just how much humans have changed the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. See Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–67. 11. Of these theorists, only Morton is actually working in English studies. The rest are in anthropology, sociology, biology, physics and political science, though because they are ecological theorists, their work necessarily extends beyond the parameters of the fields in which they were trained. 12. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 29. 13. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), book cover, Kindle. 14. Edward Abbey, ‘The Great American Desert’, in The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (New York: Penguin, 1977), 12–22 (13). 15. Timothy Morton, ‘A Quake in Being: An Introduction to Hyperobjects’, in Hyperobjects, loc. 153 of 4946, Kindle. 16. Ibid., loc. 131 of 4946, Kindle. 17. Ibid., loc. 133 of 4946, Kindle. 18. Ibid., loc. 395 of 4946, Kindle. 19. Ibid., loc. 395 of 4946, Kindle. 20. Wendy Bishop, ‘Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-Ends Composition’, College English 65, no. 3 (2003): 257–75 (273). 21. Wendell Berry, ‘An Entrance to the Woods’, in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 670–79 (677). 22. Ibid., 677. 23. Ibid., 677. 24. See Sarah Allen, Beyond Argument: Essaying as a Practice of (Ex)Change (Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2015). 25. A few key essay writers of the Romantic era were Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. 26. Berry, ‘Entrance to the Woods’, 678–79. 27. Ibid., 673. 28. Ibid., 674. 29. Annie Dillard, ‘Seeing’, in Art of the Personal Essay, 692–706 (697–98). 30. Morton, ‘Quake in Being’, loc. 493 of 4946, Kindle. 31. Ibid., loc. 493 of 4946, Kindle. 32. Ibid., loc. 131 of 4946, Kindle. 33. Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin Press, 1986). 34. Timothy Morton, ‘Unsustaining’, World Picture 5 (Spring 2011), http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_5/Morton.html. 35. Timothy Morton, ‘Introducing the Idea of “Hyperobjects”: A New Way of Understanding Climate Change and Other Phenomena’, High Country News, January 19, 2015. 36. Plato, Cratylus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 402a, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html. 37. Phillip Lopate, introduction to Art of the Personal Essay, xxiii–liv (xxx). 38. Ibid., xxx. 39. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 92–110.

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40. The Ordovician Period, beginning 488.3 million years ago and ending 443.7 million years ago, is best known for the flourishing of marine life, as well as the later extinction of more than half of all marine invertebrate genera and one in four of all families, which marked the end of that period. 41. Kolbert, Sixth Extinction, 97. 42. Ibid., 96–97. 43. Ibid., 96–97. 44. Ibid., 96–97. 45. Ibid., 105. 46. Ibid., 105. 47. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1. 48. Ibid., 1. 49. Ibid., 1. 50. Ibid., 1. 51. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 52. Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), 19. 53. Ibid., 19. 54. Dillard, ‘Seeing’, 693. 55. Ibid., 693. 56. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1. 57. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013), 23. 58. Ibid., 23–24. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. Ibid., 25. 61. Ibid., 28. 62. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 262. 63. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2015), 116–17. 64. William Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Art of the Personal Essay, 181–89 (185). 65. Emerson, ‘Nature’, 43. 66. Ibid., 40. 67. Morton, ‘Unsustaining’, 9. 68. Ibid., 9–10, emphasis in original.

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Contemporary Essayists in Focus

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Leslie Jamison on the Essay On the Essay as a Mistress

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sometimes say that I came to the essay as a mistress genre. I always thought of myself as a fiction writer; my first published book was a novel, and I studied fiction when I was getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But as a lark, during my last semester at Iowa, I took an essay-writing workshop – and found something immediately compelling about the form: it let me weave together personal narrative, historical narrative, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and all kinds of research. It’s what we call the ‘hybrid essay’, but at the time I just thought of it as freedom – more than anything, as a kind of intellectual honesty. All those materials were already jostling around together in my head, crossing wires and sharing stories. Something about the form of the essay always felt freeing and unencumbered. The essay was allowed to be messy. This had something to do with the form itself, and something to do with the fact that my ‘training’ was in fiction, which meant that whenever I wrote fiction I had all these ghostly voices from workshop perched on my shoulder, backseat-driving the work. In the essay, I didn’t have that. Plus, I was allowed to tell the reader things directly! In fiction workshops, I’d been instructed in various versions of the ‘show-don’t-tell’ ethos, and it was refreshing to tell as much as I pleased. I love telling. I believe in telling that deepens complexity rather than reducing it. Years after that first nonfiction workshop, I started writing essays when my second novel was going badly. That’s when the essay really started to feel like a mistress, I suppose: a secret, almost illicit zone of exploration and play. Essay writing wasn’t the thing I was supposed to be doing, which was writing a big historical novel that felt ambitious – far away from my own life, stuffed with research. But it was dead on the page. And my essays felt alive. Of course, at a certain point I began to feel married to the essay. After my first collection, The Empathy Exams, came out in 2014 and did better than anyone ever expected it to do, I became professionally associated with the essay, almost a spokesperson for the essay. Editors began to associate me with a certain style of hybrid essay writing, that style I’d initially fallen in love with: a mode that brought the personal, the critical, the researched and the reported into conversation. These essays often had a kind of rigorous ambivalence as their engine, maintaining an investigative doubt and an ethics of remaining agnostic/empathetic/compassionate in relation to other people’s lives. There was philosophical cast, and an emotional/tonal range that got associated with my work and my name. It felt right, but also limiting. This kind of recognition was enormously gratifying, and I never took it for granted – always felt the stupendous luck and good fortune of it – but at a certain point, I started to become suspicious of myself: had I fallen into a kind of groove, a sort of creative algorithm? I wanted to keep my creative practice vital and energized and alive rather than striking the same

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few familiar notes. I was hungry to keep reinventing the possibilities of the form for myself.

On Pushing the Boundaries of the Essay My third book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, is often described as a memoir, but to me it is a 450-page essay. Just what everyone always wanted, right? I’m not sure I narrated it that way to myself at the time – as a long essay – but that’s what it was: a way of experimenting with the possibilities of the essayistic mode across a much bigger canvas. Sometimes I think you can’t name experiments as you’re conducting them; it can make the magic fizzle out to understand too well what you’re doing. Certainly, the spine of that book is my own personal narrative of alcoholism and recovery, but there’s a lot of literary criticism, a lot of history, a lot of interviews – not just as props, or proof, but as articulations of faith in a prismatic mode of approaching questions. The core questions of the book are: How do we tell the story of addiction? And how can we get better at telling stories about getting better – how can we make them as gripping as the story of falling apart? How can the story of recovery become something more than a dull final chapter about church basements after the dark maw of all those benders? I wanted The Recovering to have a narrative arc – the spine of my own personal narrative – alongside a conceptual arc – how do the narrative tropes of addiction shift when you turn your gaze to recovery? I tracked that question inside my own life, and the lives of others – from writers like John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Stephen King, George Cain, singers like Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse, digging into their biographies, art and archives; and also looking at the lives of so-called ordinary people I approached as a journalist. Ultimately the stakes of that choral expansion were also political: How was my own ‘story’ of addiction structured by my identity as a white woman? How was Billie Holiday’s addiction narrated in different ways – and not just ‘narrated’ as something abstract, but ‘narrated’ in legal terms that sent her to prison – because she was a Black woman? Part of the project of the book was to bring together critical, personal, reported modes, both intellectually and structurally, to make a chorus of voices not entirely unlike you’d find in a hybrid essay – or in one of those church basements, which are usually anything but dull. In a 12-step recovery meeting you’re moving between different voices and different lives, just as you might in a scale-shifting work of nonfiction – but the stakes are different. At first, I saw the book as a big mosaic composed of chunks of narrative: all those voices around the room. But gradually, I came to understand that it needed to be more essayistic – in the sense that I wanted each piece of the book to have a few key questions at its core. Each of my essays is usually motivated not by a single question, but by a constellation of questions. All this weaving together of stories and sources is a different proposition when you’re talking about a 450-page book rather than a 20-page essay. In that sense it felt daunting but also exciting. I am a bit skeptical at the outset of a project if I don’t feel mildly terrified in some way. If I’m not mildly terrified, it means I’m doing something wrong because I’m doing something I already know how to do.

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On Showing and Telling It’s a cliché that all writing workshops push the gospel of ‘show-don’t-tell’, but it’s also a cliché with some truth – and there are good pedagogical reasons for it: dramatizing with particular scenes and situations almost always pushes the writing toward specificity and nuance, and I think it’s easier for ‘telling’ than ‘showing’ to fall flat, to fail absolutely – to feel familiar, reductive, tedious. But I believe good telling is nothing like that. It deepens and complicates a situation, rather than reducing it to any single pat meaning. It’s thinking on the page. Isn’t that – in some sense – the point? Isn’t all showing, without any telling, evading some of the primary work that writing might do? If you are simply ‘trusting a reader to figure it out for themselves’ (an argument often proffered for showing rather than telling), doesn’t that imply a claustrophobic understanding of the relationship between experience and insight? That some ‘it’ exists as the singular meaning that might be extracted from a given piece of narrative? That the reader is not – to some extent – looking to the writer not simply to narrate experience but also to analyze it? There can be a stark gestural beauty – a kind of safety, almost – in showing without telling. Just the clean lines of incident and detail, without the risk and clutter of a mind swooping in. But I find this kind of ‘showing’ often verges into a kind of cowardice, or alibi – letting the meaning remain open-ended as a way to defer to ambiguity or vagueness. When I resist telling, it’s often because I don’t yet know what I think, or what I want to say. When I push myself to tell, or give myself permission to tell, it’s also a way of calling my own bluff. It’s a way of asking myself: What meaning do you make of this? Why are you narrating this moment from your life? I might be drawn to narrating something from my own experience but not necessarily quite sure why. It’s stuck with me, it’s a bit of a splinter under the skin, it’s an underground fire raging on. Telling is how I pull it out, dig it up, start to risk the stakes of trying to figure it out. For me, personal narrative never entails just sharing an incident for its own sake. My life isn’t particularly extraordinary, the incidents themselves don’t necessarily carry that much dramatic weight. Instead, personal narrative acts as a scaffolding from which to think or from which to explore questions. In that framework, if you’re not doing the ‘telling’ part of the work, then it’s almost as if the most significant part of that intellectual labor is getting skipped over or elided.

On the Essay as Political After Trump’s election in 2016, my students all went through a crisis of purpose. I mean, we were all going through a crisis: How has this man been elected? How do we save our country from whatever he’s about to do to it? How do we protect the most vulnerable? But in an MFA program, our crisis was also vocational: Why and how does any of this matter? Why does writing matter? Why do essays matter? Many of my students started writing essays that looked political op-eds, as if this was the only kind of writing that could matter. Only writing that was explicitly political could matter. I felt some of this too. (The first essay I wrote after the election was about canvassing the day of the election.) But I also tried to help my students think about the politics of the essay – or the possibilities of a political essay – in a slightly different way. What if they thought less about making their essays political, and more

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about finding the politics that were already in their essays? How are the topics you are writing about already charged with political electricity and complexity? The plastic surgeries, the nuances of Armenian identity, the abortion discourse at an urban megachurch, the CEO father and his traumatized employees . . . It’s all already political. If you think about unpacking and confessing and exploring that, there’s something much more honest and necessary happening. For the last five or ten years, we’ve been witnessing an explosion in so-called hybrid essays (my own among them) that bring together various strands of inquiry: personal narrative, critical investigation, literary reportage. But to me, this kind of hybridity doesn’t exactly feel like innovation. For starters, writers have been doing it for a long time. And also, it feels less like innovation and more like acknowledgment – aren’t the personal and critical already in relation inside of us? It feels counterintuitive that those modes would ever be seen as wholly distinct. At least, that’s not my experience of being in the world. Personal experience is always heavily structured by so many larger social, political, cultural forces. No personal experience has to be forcibly embedded in its context; it’s already embedded in its context – it’s just a question of how you illuminate this context. Writers need to recognize that many overtly political topics are already baked into the material we’re exploring, rather than think of ‘political awareness’ as a gloss that we’re going to lacquer on top of our work. I think there’s a craft question here, too: How do we get to these political dimensions of our work that might already be there but are transparent or invisible to us? The process of working on The Recovering was an important example of this, for me. A few years into reading as many literary works about addiction as I could – novels, poems, memoirs – I began to ask myself why so many of the prominent works in the addiction canon were by white people. What had happened to narratives of addiction written by people of color, and how were these narratives telling a story? How had race shaped the ways narratives of addiction were told in other public spheres, as well – in media, in policy discourse, in legal discourse? Which addicts get narrated as victims, and which ones get narrated as villains? These questions took me to some largely forgotten literary texts, like George Cain’s 1970 novel, Blueschild Baby, in which Cain examines the criminalization of heroin addiction, especially for African American men in urban settings. The novel anticipates, in nearly prophetic ways, the war on drugs that Nixon was about to wage just a couple of years after it was published. Thinking about the relationship between race and stories of addiction also forced me to look at the ways in which addiction became yet another theatre for scapegoating and persecution of people of color that has been part of our country’s history from the beginning: everything from mandatory sentencing for drug crimes, to sensationalizing certain drug scares, from scare tactics around Hispanic marijuana users in the 1930s, to the media construction of the villainous ‘crack mother’ in the 1980s. And of course, the politics weren’t just ‘out there’. The politics were also ‘right here’, in my own personal narrative – my whiteness has structured my experience of addiction and recovery all along. I wanted to write a book that acknowledged that, too – that acknowledged certain negative spaces in my story – never getting pulled over for drunk driving, never imagining that my addiction would land me in prison – as gaps that were also telling the story of my whiteness, and the story of American whiteness more broadly.

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On the Uses of Resistance To identify what is ‘already there’ in my work – in terms of emotional complexity, cultural context, or political charge – I have to clarify the questions I’m asking, or what questions might be buried underneath the questions that I think I’m asking. In 2015, an editor at The Times Sunday Review asked me to write an essay about three female joggers who had been murdered that summer. She knew I was a runner. She asked if I was interested in writing about vulnerability and the female body in relation to these horrible crimes. At first, I thought the answer was no. I didn’t want to write an essay about female joggers, and I certainly didn’t want to write a personal essay about my own experience as a female jogger. But I sensed something underneath my resistance – my irritation, even – that seemed worth probing. Eventually, I realized that I didn’t necessarily want to write about this violence; I wanted to write about our collective cultural fascination with this violence. What was particularly compelling or sympathetic about the figure of the endangered white female jogger? This was the question that fascinated me. And it had everything to do with race. The process of writing the essay eventually took me all the way back to the Central Park Jogger – Trisha Meili, who was brutally assaulted and raped in Central Park in 1989 – and the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five. It was painful to consider all the forms of victimhood across that story. I read everything I could about those five boys – who were so young when they were arrested, and spent so many years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. I ended up doing a close reading of Trisha Meili’s memoir – to analyze its craft, how she told the story of the violence she had endured; how she deployed the third person to construct memories she couldn’t herself remember. I started to explore the particular combination of vulnerability and willpower that gets projected onto the figure of the jogger – particularly, the figure of the white female jogger; and how this projection connects to racist ideas of urban villainy and danger. But that essay never would have existed if I’d simply said no to the assignment – if I hadn’t paused to consider what sorts of complexities – and in this case, a kind of racial guilt – lay underneath my resistance.

On Misreading the Personal as Uncrafted I wonder if there’s any writer out there who would answer the question, ‘Do people misread your work?’ with the answer, ‘No, never.’ Every writer has some feelings about how their work is misread. When writing draws from personal experience, my own included, it’s often misread as uncrafted – as if personal narrative is simply a transcription of feelings, or a diary entry broadcast to the whole world, rather than heavily crafted and revised form. Often, my personal narrative goes through many, many more drafts than my more journalistic or reported narratives – it’s actually much more revised, sculpted, made, which isn’t to say it’s false – but that it’s deeply crafted. Often these misreadings are attached to old, unspoken notions of what authority and rigor look like – that it’s male, and white, and ‘impersonal’. When Chris Kraus released her autofiction novel I Love Dick, it was often described as a kind of bodily secretion – as if it had simply been sweated out – and so often the demeaning language around female personal writing invokes metaphors of the body: bleeding or vomiting on the page. These ways of speaking emphasize that there’s no intellect or artistry

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in this work, it’s this corporeal process. It’s no accident – there’s a lot of unspoken misogyny in the ways we think of the female body as overly present, with all its foul secretions, the notion that what should be kept hidden isn’t being kept hidden. The First Nations writer Terese Marie Mailhot has expressed frustration about how frequently the word ‘raw’ was used about her work – as a term of praise, often, but always a failure to recognize how much work had gone into it. How cooked it was. She said, ‘The danger politically or artistically is that people won’t give me my craft.’ This denial had to do with being a woman, but specifically with being a First Nations woman. I’d like to give back craft to personal narrative – to let its artistry be recognized. Another misunderstanding of the personal? I think writers are often understood to be ‘confessing’ for the sake of exposure, absolution, or sympathy – for the sake of making the self visible – rather than using personal narrative as another kind of artistic material, the same way you might use an imagined story in a novel. Lived experiences are just a resource you can use to explore the same things any art wants to explore, questions like: What does consciousness feel like? What does intimacy feel like? What meaning rises from experiences of pain? How can language summon experience – or what representational limits does it run up against? My students sometimes believe that if you invoke personal narrative in your work, it’s because you somehow think your life is exceptional – or more interesting than everyone else’s. But I think there’s a different way of looking at it. If you believe all lives contain infinite material for meaning-making, and that your life is just the one you happen to have lived, then it’s the one that’s most available to you to do that work of meaning-making. There is no implicit assertion that your life is any harder, any more meaningful, any more exceptional or profound than anybody else’s. You tell your own story in the way you would use a nail in your drawer – not because you think it’s the best nail ever made, but because it’s the nail you have.

On Problems Becoming Subjects I’ve been lucky enough to work with many great teachers, but no teacher has been more important to me than Charlie D’Ambrosio – a probing, curious, tender essayist in his own right. I’ve learned from his writing and I’ve learned from his questions. I’ve learned from his belief that the deeper issues facing a piece of writing are almost always legible in its sentences. I’ve learned from his credo, Abandon your citizen self. I’ve learned from his mode of revision: rather than correcting, he has always encouraged me to look into the layers underneath what’s already there. More than anything, however, I’ve learned from his conviction that the problem facing an essay can ultimately become its subject. What does that mean? Well, my essay about jogging is a great example. Initially, my problem with the essay was, Why are we so collectively obsessed with the violence that a particular figure – the white female jogger – has suffered? But instead of obstructing the writing of the essay, that problem ultimately became the subject of the essay. It’s a great piece of wisdom because it means something slightly different each time. When Charlie read an early draft of the essay that would eventually become the title essay in The Empathy Exams, he pointed out that I seemed to be approaching several personal narratives of pain – an abortion, a heart surgery – but also backing away from them, getting really clinical and detached in my tone, whenever I got close.

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He wondered, why was I shying away? And that question – that ‘flaw’ – ended up inspiring the form of the essay, in which I turned my own experiences into ‘clinical case studies’ – which ultimately ended up liberating me to write about them in an emotionally expressive way. Charlie has not only encouraged me to ask harder questions in my work; he’s helped me understand that these harder questions are often already contained in a first draft – just buried underneath. You can hear them echoing in those moments of prose that feel evasive or hollow. It’s a great teaching practice – to look at where and how the language of a piece is faltering. That language can indicate when the writer is backing away from the deepest questions that this piece is asking. This practice is something I try to bring to my students: to see the moment where the prose gets weak not always as a moment that should be cut from the essay – which is one knee-jerk response – but as a place where excavation is called for: maybe this moment is weak because you want to get at something here, but you just need to go deeper.

On the Pandemic Diary as a Genre During the last three months – amidst all the pain of COVID and quarantine – is the emergence of the pandemic diary as a genre. I think the resonance of the genre rises from a particular confluence of conditions. Everyone is affected by this virus, but within that universality are all of these supremely important distinctions: the particular contours of your domestic life, your income, your employment, where you live, who you live with, who you are a caregiver for, whether you got sick, what kind of care you could receive – all of these variables make everybody’s experience of this universal virus incredibly distinct. (Not to mention that all of these factors shape who gets to tell their stories.) But I was heartened to see so many wonderful magazines running pandemic diaries: The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Point, N+1 . . . These were short dispatches from a middle of an experience that we couldn’t see the end of. We didn’t know the larger narrative arc, so the diary entry (even if it was still crafted) felt more possible than other forms. More honest. It wasn’t making any claims about where the story would go. It’s always true that personal writing holds the universal and the particular in a tense, evocative dance; but this conversation – between the shared and un-shared – reached a fever pitch, a supreme distillation, in the pandemic diary. As I was recovering from COVID, caring full-time for my toddler daughter – we were quarantined in our apartment for several weeks – I ended up writing a pandemic diary (after she went to bed one night, which was the only time I had). It felt so liberating to write about the experience without needing to assign any narrative arc to it, any retrospective meaning – to simply write about the experience while I was still close to it, without really editing the piece much at all. This is not how I usually write, and it’s certainly not my usual MO for personal pieces – which I usually revise a bunch before I’m pleased with them. But that version of the essay, the essay as diary, was all I could manage, and it ended up feeling like a generative constraint. I ended up publishing the piece almost immediately because it felt like that moment in time – early quarantine, when we were all trying to get our footing – was when it would be most useful. And that’s a question I often return to: How can this writing be useful? In a time of radical distancing, it felt – in whatever partial way – like a bridge.

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Robert Atwan on the Essay On Writing Three Decades of ‘Forewords’ for The Best American Essays

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hen I began the series in 1986, I decided to contribute a ‘Foreword’ to each edition but I did so hesitantly. For one thing the publisher’s companion volume, The Best American Short Stories, did not include one, and so none was expected for the essays. For another, I was worried that – should the series be successful and continue – I would run out of things to say within a few years. So I decided to write forewords of just seven paragraphs and I stuck with that model, though with each new annual edition the paragraphs grew longer. Then with the 2002 volume I gradually began slightly expanding the forewords. The foreword to the 2020 book, which focuses on Gertrude Stein, is the longest in the series. Although I may at times comment on some of the volume’s contents, I try in each foreword to say something about the essay as a literary genre – its forms, major practitioners, history, criticism, relevance, and so forth. I can’t recall ever knowing – that is, in an outline sense – what I was going to write until I was about to get started. I don’t possess an especially disciplined mind. My thoughts tend to wander and will sometimes cluster into an idea provoked by a serendipitous event. Here are two examples: in the 1993 foreword I was struck by a letter I received from Pakistan in an envelope covered front and back with postage stamps. The writer thanked me for the editions of Best American Essays he had discovered in a Lahore library that offered him the ‘best introduction of America, ever’. The remark – very appreciated, by the way – prompted me to write about the ways essays can offer readers a close acquaintance with a unfamiliar culture. A second example: the April morning I sat down to begin the foreword to the 2017 edition, I had just come across a message in my inbox reminding me that this day marked the one hundredth anniversary of our entry into World War I. As I reflected on that moment, I thought of an essayist who powerfully opposed our participation in that conflict, Randolph Bourne. I decided to devote the entire foreword to a discussion of Bourne, his relationship to the essay, and the significance of irony in political writing. I had no idea when I sat down to write that the foreword would take that direction. Since I believe essays are a form of discovery – that the departure is more delightful than the destination – I enjoy the act of composing the forewords. Always eager to begin and curious as to where I will wind up.

On Reclaiming a Literary Genre in The Best American Essays When I launched the series, I did so with a very definite ambition: I hoped to restore the status of the essay as a serious literary genre. I’ve written extensively on this subject in

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various forewords and essays on the essay. (For the most comprehensive treatment, see ‘The Essay – Is It Literature?’, which was first published in Janis Forman, ed., What Do I Know? Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Essay, 1996; and more recently reprinted in David Lazar, ed., Essaying the Essay, 2014.) Briefly, the essay had begun to shed its literary status in the 1920s, as ‘belletristic’ became a pejorative term in a magazine world that was more intent on publishing urgent journalism than the traditional genteel essay. Then its status was further diminished in the 1930s and 40s as New Criticism relegated the essay to a sub-literary genre. Literature was poetry, fiction and drama – period. Essays, as I emphasized, were written to be about literature but were not in themselves literature. The essay suffered a double whammy, crushed by two ascendant mid-century forces: the rise of modern journalism and the academic domination of a new critical theory. Despite the work of several major essayists – like James Baldwin, Joan Didion and E. B. White – the essay limped into the 1970s and 80s as both magazine and book publishers tried their best to avoid the term ‘essay’. As is fairly well known, E. B. White in the preface to his 1977 collection lamented that in the world of letters the essayist is a ‘second-class citizen’. As late as 1990, the critic Wilfrid Sheed wrote in his collection Essays in Disguise that few books ‘actually have the nerve to call themselves collections of essays’. It’s important for readers to know what an uphill climb it was to interest a publisher in a book that planned to use Essay in its title and to do so year after year. So today, I feel gratified that the series has flourished for some thirty-five years and that the E-word is no longer a publishing taboo. Writers now proudly regard themselves as essayists. It took time, but I think The Best American Essays played a role in the genre’s restoration and revival. In retrospect, I’m surprised that The Best American Essay series was such a hard sell. As I was shopping the project, I knew that publishers were skittish when it came to essay collections, yet I now wonder why exactly that was the case. In the thirty years between Baldwin’s 1955 collection and 1985 when I began collecting essays for the first edition, so many major essay collections and volumes of literary nonfiction (many now considered classics) were published – far too many to list here – that it’s difficult to know what the resistance was on the part of publishers. I think to get to the heart of the problem we need more research on the publishing industry and the marketplace for literary essays and nonfiction during this period, especially between the early 70s and late 90s.

On Categorizing Essays Over the years I’ve taught a number of courses on the essay. I’ve also published a number of college books on the subject. Many of these courses focused on learning the art and craft of effective composition. Such courses required writing essays. But when I could, I preferred to teach courses on the essay as a literary genre – its essential characteristics, its various types and its history. Such courses required reading (and writing about) essays. For convenience, I often classified essays into three basic kinds: essays that explored personal identity; essays that examined ideas; and essays that engaged with issues. Identity. Ideas. Issues. One could also call these the personal essay; the reflective or ruminative essay; and the polemical essay. These categories often reinforced the traditional, so-called rhetorical categories: narration (personal stories and

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incidents); exposition (explanations of ideas, concepts); and argument (opinion on social, political and cultural issues). These are not airtight categories but the distinctions work fairly well and it’s often not difficult to place an essay into one of the three categories by considering its dominant focus – is the writer relating autobiographical experiences? Is the writer explaining some concept or phenomenon? Is the writer taking a position on an issue? As can be seen, these are also three of the leading motives for writing: telling, explaining, persuading. I should have said above that for a long time it was not difficult to place an essay into one of the three above categories. But something began to change at some point. I need to conduct more research (and of course the change was very gradual), but I would say by the mid-1990s the categories began to morph into each other; that is, the personal, the exegetical and the polemical were now coexisting more comfortably in the same work. William H. Gass’s famous 1982 distinction between the essay and the article – an invidious distinction cited by Elizabeth Hardwick in her introduction to the first volume of The Best American Essays in 1986 – no longer seemed to apply. Though as a rule of thumb I could still make a distinction between a literary essay and a nonliterary article, the process had become more difficult. Nonfiction prose had become increasingly hybrid.

On the Particular Contribution of James Baldwin to the American Essay If we go back to the mid-1950s and look at Baldwin’s groundbreaking collection Notes of a Native Son, we can see how purposefully he interweaves into the personal essay both the exegetical and the polemical. The effect is so seamless that it seems to occur beneath our critical radar. Although at the time and for many years to come, he would be known primarily as a novelist, Baldwin, I believe, can lay claim to being the most influential essayist of modern-day America. He was relevant then and is relevant today. That’s what Ezra Pound meant when he said ‘literature is news that stays news’. Baldwin’s way of shaping a personal essay to include both argument and exposition (something David Foster Wallace would also do) in many ways changed the course of the essay – but not immediately, as even his outstanding efforts could still not endow the genre in general with literary status. Academia and publishing were still not welcoming America’s essayists.

On Memoirs and Essays in the 1990s By the 1990s, the racial and sexual politics that had been brewing for a few decades – and that received an enormous impetus from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – began to jell and for so many writers the essay and the extended personal narrative became irresistible forms of expression. True, the 70s and early 80s had seen a good number of essays and autobiographies that explored race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, but it wasn’t until the 90s when autobiography became memoir that publishers finally began to grow enthusiastic about extended forms of personal nonfiction that also merged into public concerns. To put it rather bluntly, what I believe happened by the mid-1990s was that the personal narrative had discovered

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identity politics. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father. The subtitle is, fittingly, A Story of Race and Inheritance.

On Giving Advice to New Essayists A first-year composition instructor I knew years ago once presented me with the following syllogism: We write best about what we know best. What we know best is ourselves. Therefore, we write best when we write about ourselves. Further thinking and experience led me years later to decide that every part of the syllogism is wrong. 1. We write best about what we know best. How many experts and researchers in all sorts of fields fail to make their ideas clear and comprehensible? 2. What we know best is ourselves. How would most psychotherapists respond to that statement? Though the syllogism is valid, the conclusion is incorrect because both propositions are empirically not true. But this syllogism may be overly appealing to writers attracted to the personal essay and memoir because it suggests that if we want to write compellingly, we need to focus our attention on ourselves. Of course, there are many great memoirs that focus on an individual life and experience but in their literary styles, methods and range of information they do not necessarily confirm the syllogism. I think too many younger writers become infatuated with their self-narratives – especially if these focus on adversities, traumas and tribulations – and they in turn undervalue a search for innovative compositional methods that would enhance their life stories. Instead, they rely on sincerity, candor, identity and authenticity to do all the hard lifting and eschew experimentation, innovation and the essaying that comes with confronting complex ideas and issues. Perhaps writers should entertain the notion that maybe we write best about what we don’t know and essay to find out. Montaigne inscribed mottos from ancient Greek and Latin works on the beams of his cozy circular library. They served him as inspiration and aspiration. If I were to surround myself with similar mottos, the first I would choose would be the quotation from Gertrude Stein that inspired a young John Ashbery: ‘If it can be done why do it?’ My advice to young writers, especially those in MFA nonfiction programs, is simple: read more. That doesn’t mean you will turn out like one of Alexander Pope’s dunces in his Dunciad: ‘always reading/never read’. But read selectively. Read works that are challenging and innovative even though they are over a century old. Try reading some writers who represented the cutting edge of their time: Baudelaire, the Surrealists, Kafka, Beckett, Borges and, one of my favorites, Gertrude Stein. You will find that they are still cutting-edge. It doesn’t matter if the prose is fictional or poetical. In my opinion, an essayist or memoirist can learn more about writing creative nonfiction from Stein’s Tender Buttons, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Borges’s Other Inquisitions than from E. B. White’s essays.

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On Underread Essayists So many wonderful essayists are underread and many largely unread. But even the essayists that I expect command a considerable readership – Montaigne, Woolf, Orwell, Baldwin, Didion – might also be considered underread in the sense that readers know perhaps only a few of their essays. My guess is that outside of specialists most readers and students have an anthology-knowledge of many major essayists. They may have read at most just three to four essays of the writers I mentioned above, the selections we once called ‘chestnuts’: ‘Death of a Moth’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’, etc. It’s worth keeping in mind that Harcourt Brace published its splendid 1967 Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf as a four-volume set – 1,130 pages! Here are just a few American essayists in alphabetical order whom essayists should know: Guy Davenport, Loren Eiseley, Stanley Elkin, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Fiedler, Vivian Gornick, Stephen Jay Gould, Vicki Hearne, Langston Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, Barry Lopez, Nancy Mairs, Cynthia Ozick, Oliver Sacks. All of these writers have something to say and say it powerfully and memorably. There’s another group of essayists that write in a more experimental fashion and that I also think deserve a wider readership. At the top of this list would be Gertrude Stein, one of the most important essayists in American literature. A few others that come to mind are: Anne Carson, Mark Doty, Albert Goldbarth, Wayne Koestenbaum, George W. S. Trow and David Foster Wallace. I’m always urging younger essayists to read these writers to get a working knowledge of what imaginative nonfiction can do.

On the Future of the Essay Since Montaigne, the modern essay has largely served as the ideal literary form to communicate a skeptical, open and inquiring mind. It values a suspension of judgment, the free expression of opinions, a willingness to see all sides of an issue, and the ability to accommodate many competing viewpoints. These characteristics are so closely identified with essays that they practically define the genre. Even the very name essay – as a noun or a verb – emphasizes as does no other literary genre an act of writing rooted in a tentative, inconclusive, inquiring consciousness. One concern I have about the essay’s future is that these traditionally liberal values are increasingly challenged today by many who find free speech, open inquiry and numerous legacies of the Enlightenment simply disguised tactics of oppression. Moreover, in what’s being called an ‘age of disinformation’, there are also growing questions about America’s persistent faith in the value of the First Amendment. (For an excellent account of these trends, see Emily Bazelon’s ‘Free Speech Will Save Our Democracy’. The title’s claim is adroitly contested by a warning alert: ‘Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers’. The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2020.) Though threats to free speech can be exaggerated, especially regarding isolated instances, I do wonder what impact such discernible trends as Bazelon outlines – if they gain wider traction – will have on the essay, a genre that has long championed the principle of free, open and even risky discussion. Will a new generation – as a 2015 Pew Research Center poll and a 2018 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey suggest – find more and more discourse in need of regulation and restraint? The censorial movement, however, is not entirely

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new: how often in the past decade have we heard on a daily basis the following words: offensive, objectionable, inappropriate, insensitive, unacceptable, disrespectful, irresponsible, hurtful, inexcusable, unsuitable? I can see restrictions on expression coming from many directions and accompanied by many motives – political, social, economic, cultural. My guess is that an undesirable end result could be an increasing conformity of thought and opinion, as writers themselves may feel a need to modify or ‘self-censor’ language and views that might be troublesome enough to be deemed unpublishable. In the conformist 1950s, the Beats pushed successfully against censorship and I hope that, if my concerns are correct, a new wave of essayists will – as Baldwin did in the 50s – find the courage (and the literary methods) to confront ideas and issues that challenge conventional thought and the ‘received wisdom’ of the day. Another concern I have about the essay’s future – and perhaps not unrelated – is its continuing deference to the restrictions that standardized journalism has imposed upon this literary genre for several generations. I’d be happy to see the essay return to its more imaginative, expansive and flexible origins. For centuries an essayist could assume readers were savvy enough to know a character or incident was made up, a tone of voice was satirical or ironic, or a first-person narrator fictional. Earlier essayists might have tried to be as truthful as possible but they also enjoyed more freedom to invent. Once the memoir became fashionable, however, it began to be regulated by journalistic standards. Some of this was presumably on the insistence of publishing’s legal departments for liability protection. Soon the personal essay found itself burdened by similar restrictions. Vivian Gornick has made excellent points about the differences between the literary memoirist’s creative resources and the journalist’s professional obligations. Truth for the news media should remain different from truth for the autobiographer. It can be potentially dangerous when a newspaper uses its imagination. But personal essayists should not be afraid to use theirs.

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Kaitlyn Greenidge on the Essay On the Personal and Political in the Essay

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think there is a sleight of hand that happens with writing personal essays. For most essayists that I know, myself included, the question of course is always: How much of your personal life are you going to reveal and divulge in an essay? Especially when you are writing about the people in your life, how you are exploring those people and allowing space for those people to still have a life of their own outside of how you characterize them. For me, that is a political question in and of itself: Who gets to be observed and who gets to be an observer, who gets to have an interior life, or is afforded an interior life, on the page, and who is not? When I create pieces of nonfiction, I’m hyperaware of that and I try to acknowledge both the power I have as the author and also the fact that I am drawn to writing about people who, historically, in western literature, on the page, are denied interiority or are usually there as props, or as comic relief, or as examples of the worst of the worst. By which I mean, that’s usually how black women and girls are positioned in most literature if we’re written about at all. And so, knowing that’s sort of a loaded history of how the ideas that I embody appear on the page in western literature, I’m pretty cognizant of that and the essay as a way of writing against that whole lineage, that whole tradition.

On the Personal Essay in the US For the last couple of years in the US, personal essays have been really derided. And there’s a lot to say about the economy of the personal essay right now, especially in online spaces, and, you know, we’re seeing, on the backs of personal essays by women in particular, a lot of online media empires were built in the 00s and into the teens too. So for the last fifteen years or so there was a rise in online publishing that was really on the back of personal essays being published oftentimes by women writers who had been unpublished before and who were really encouraged to be as base as possible in the personal essay. Not meaning that they were talking about vulgar things but really to write the most sensationalistic experience they could think of. And black writers of all genders – black men, black women, black trans people – have also been asked to write the most deriding moment they’ve had with racism, and they’ll be paid 3,000 dollars for it and hopefully get lots of clicks. There’s a whole generation of writers of color, black writers, women writers of all races who are now reckoning with, coming to terms with what that meant, and to see that those media empires that were built on all that pain – they died anyway. It’s not like people were publishing those things and it was painful but it built a lasting place where other things could be explored. People wrote those things for huge media

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conglomerates that got bought out by a bunch of capitalists and, you know, it doesn’t matter. So, on that level, I think there’s a big reckoning happening around the personal essay right now; earlier, the personal essay was seen as the easiest way to get published and in that way it should be looked down upon – which I don’t believe at all, but I think that was the unspoken discourse around it for a long time, that there wasn’t a lot of craft around those things that were being published, when of course there was – and I think now there is a real reckoning to be done with this personal essay-industrial complex being now dead. And so what was all that for? And what do we actually do with that?

On Anger In the MFA School of Writing, and in many writing courses that follow the MFA School of Writing that most people in the US who are interested in writing are encouraged to take, there’s a big fear of anger. Anger and aggression are seen as the thing to avoid in all of your writing; that somehow anger, aggression and strong feeling will scare a reader away or somehow invalidate your work and craft. I think that’s more a result of the fact that MFA programs have a very particular history; they come from a particular space of post-World War II artists really trying to move away from what they saw as ‘the political’. MFA programs are all wrapped up with anti-communist propaganda in the US and the reification of a very particular class of people, mostly upper-class and upper-middle-class white men, and some women, and so the values of that class and racial designation became the values of good taste, became the values of what made good writing. And so things like [avoiding] anger and aggression are still very much embedded in how we learn to write [in the US], and the idea that you would allow the anger on the page is a really difficult one for people to wrap their heads around. The idea that anger can be tempered through a craft, in writing, is an extremely difficult idea. Oftentimes, when you’re writing as a woman, especially when you’re writing as a black woman, especially when you’re writing as a black woman writing about race or about politics, the biggest critique is always that this is too angry or you’re too angry or it’s wonderful that you were not angry. And the expectation that you leech out that anger is to make sure that you’re actually going to be published by anybody; so you’re already self-censoring just to get in the door. In this next decade, I really hope to push back in my own writing, and any writing that I get to teach to others, the idea that somehow anger is not a helpful emotion. I think it can be a clarifying emotion. Like all emotions it has its place, and the idea of writing rage and anger without physical violence is the next frontier of writing. I believe in writing around race and being really clear and clarified in that anger. Here in the US we have the stereotype of the angry black woman, a resounding cultural stereotype that has been around at least since the 1960s, and I’m sure it traces back earlier. That is the thing that if you are black woman, creating anything or really trying to do anything in this country, that’s something you’re contending with and you’re immediately asked to suppress that part of yourself just simply to be heard. So I’m really interested, moving forward in my own work, in how much to lean into that anger, that rage, all of that stuff, and find creation in that space. That space isn’t something to be afraid of; that space is actually a helpful space at certain points.

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On the Digital Afterlives of Essays I think more about the digital afterlife of a piece. The economy of circulating a piece on Twitter is always interesting to me; it was most successful, I think, when I wrote a piece for Lenny Letter, [in 2017,] on this black woman secret society called the Tents. And that was a piece where I was hyperaware of the audience – there were ‘black woman’ and ‘secrets’ in the title – so it’s probably going to be pretty interesting for people to click on it – but what I was really excited about was the idea that this piece would go out into the world, and then online I could begin to hear from people whose family had been part of this organization who maybe had not realized what this organization had actually done. It was this black women secret society which had been founded to help women escape from slavery and is still running today, 150 years later, and it’s been entirely run by black women for black women – they don’t receive any outside funding or help, they’ve always been self-financed, which is an incredible feat. I’m sure there are people out there who have a grandma who goes to a Tents meeting but they don’t really understand the context of where she’s going. So I was excited about the digital afterlife of that piece, to have people like that contact me or comment on the piece and continue that conversation, and that’s the most beautiful part of it. I’ve had other times when things go viral; I’ll tweet it out to the world and then I’ll just turn off the comments on that thread because I don’t actually want to have the back-and-forth conversation, kind of like an ‘I said what I said’ situation – that part doesn’t interest me. But when I feel that a conversation with the readers can enrich my own knowledge and trouble some of the things that I’m thinking about in a piece, I find that the fun part of publishing digitally versus publishing in print. Someone can write you a letter but it’s much less immediate; you’re not necessarily getting that back and forth that can happen.

On the Future of the Essay I think there’s definitely a future of the essay. Right now [2020] it’s very popular in the US to talk about trauma – generational trauma, personal trauma and the trauma of the essay. I see that the conversations around this are becoming even more sophisticated, even in the last year and a half. And so I’m excited for that round of essays that are going to be tipped off by this more sophisticated discourse around harm and who causes harm and what we do with those who cause harm and what is our moral response to harm. And that of course encompasses both the incredibly intimate harms that can happen between people in the family to the harm that we talk about when we talk of what police and the state do to people and how do police and the state respond to harm that people do to others. I see people digging a little bit deeper past initial hurts to write about what is really an important part of the human experience that oftentimes is either moralized or overlooked in some sort of way.

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Part III: Form and Genre

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19 On the Interface Between Philosophy and the Essay: Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos Kurt Borg

Introduction: Philosophy and the Essay

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heoretical debates on the essay have been largely dominated by attempts to understand the essay in its relation to literature and literary criticism. Studies on the essay have centered on its different facets: its forms, its styles, what it can capture, what it can reveal about authorship. This chapter approaches the debate by looking at the interface between the essay and philosophy. Alongside the literary genealogy of the essay and essayists, the history of the essay indicates that philosophical activity has long been associated with this form, right from the beginnings of Western philosophy. Indeed, in an important study on essayism, Claire de Obaldia refers to Plato’s dialogues, Seneca’s epistles and Augustine’s confessions as having a role in the history of the essay.1 Discussions about the relation between philosophy and the essay have been largely influenced by the work of Theodor W. Adorno and György Lukács. These analyses have considered the status of the essay as an art form, regarding the genre of the essay as a challenge to the conception of philosophy as the construction of theoretical systems. More recent work, such as Erin Plunkett’s, sought to expand the epistemological question of the relation between philosophy and the essay by considering how the essayistic, as a style of writing, is present in a diversity of writers that includes Michel de Montaigne as an essayist alongside modern philosophers such as David Hume, Søren Kierkegaard, figures in German romanticism such as the Schlegel brothers and, into the twentieth century, Stanley Cavell.2 This chapter approaches the relationship between philosophy and the essay from a different but complementary angle: namely, self-transformation. It reads the relation between philosophy and the essay in light of their mutual concern with self-transformation, whereby both philosophy and the essayistic can amount to practices of the self – askesis – which can have an ethical and political dimension. To explore this shared aspect of the essay and philosophy, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault. A discussion of the essay – often associated with a form of writing reliant on notions of a transparent subjectivity and radically honest confession – in relation to Foucault’s work might seem paradoxical. This is in view of his critique of such notions in the ‘anti-humanist’ or ‘post-subjective’ theoretical climate of his day, when subjectivity itself was an object of inquiry rather than a foundational premise. However, Foucault’s later writings reveal a different and qualified approach to subjectivity, as can be seen in his work on classical antiquity, ethics and practices of the self. Drawing on these late

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works on the ethics of the self, this chapter takes as its guiding thread a brief remark by Foucault, in which he characterized the essay as the living substance of philosophy. The essayistic ethos that Foucault traces is used throughout this chapter as a lens through which to read one particular relation that can be drawn between philosophy and the essay. This is done via a reading of Montaigne’s essayism as a philosophical practice, whereby philosophy is understood as askesis, that is, a practice of the self. This chapter also identifies the essayistic ethos as it manifests itself in Foucault’s own philosophical practice and ethos. This dual relation shows that an engagement with the notion of self-transformation, a notion which certain conceptions of both the essay and philosophy seem to share, sheds important light on how to understand the essayistic as well as the philosophical. While the category of ‘the essay’ has developed in a multitude of ways beyond Montaigne, Foucault’s works and his conception of the essayistic present an instructive path by which the question of the relation between philosophy and the essay can be reinvigorated.

The Essay as the Living Substance of Philosophy In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate gives an account of – while avoiding an essentialization of – the essayistic. Lopate remarks that ‘[t]he hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy’ coupled with sincerity, whereby ‘the struggle for honesty is central to the ethos of the personal essay’.3 Such vulnerable disclosure of the author is essential to the essay and, beyond correspondence to truth, what is admired in the essayist is ‘his or her core of sincerity’.4 As opposed to a conclusive and factual truth, the essay can destabilize or reveal in a new light, in such a way that it can harbor ‘contradictions that open up new ways of looking at old subjects’.5 For Lopate, this is the transformative potential of the essay and its virtues, which include ‘curiosity; openness; appetite for pleasure; willingness to reflect, to give oneself to “random provocations,” nature, beauty’.6 Much has been said about the rich and plural meanings of the term essai, particularly as practiced and used by Montaigne.7 The essay is experimental; it attempts and risks. The essay is a trial, provisional, inconclusive; sometimes aimless, other times forceful. The essay searches, suggests, proposes, pursues and probes. To essay is to put a thought to trial, to test, to proof. To essay is also to craft, to draft and sketch. The essay is, or can feign to be, incomplete, partial, momentary, tentative, fragmentary, with style. It sways between or beyond the personal and the political. Its topics, like its length, can vary: from the trivial to the humorous, to the self-reflective, the philosophical or the political. To essay is also to exercise and to experience. These two senses are central to this chapter since they show how the interface between the essay and philosophy can be approached through their mutual concern with askesis, which is an exercise of the self through which the self experiences and transforms itself. Montaigne describes his essayistic gestures as a willingness to exercise his judgment as a tool on various subjects, irrespective of his expertise on that matter. He describes how he intends to keep his explorations tentative and that he has no ‘plan to develop them completely’.8 Montaigne stylized himself as ‘[a] new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher’.9 Lopate interprets this unassuming claim as ‘expressing the mocking hope that his impromptu approach – seemingly the opposite to that of traditional philosophers, with their patient construction of logical systems – might almost

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by chance add up to a philosophy’.10 This anti-systematic affect of the essay is alluded to in Adorno’s famous 1958 essay on the essay. Lopate remarks how, for Adorno, the anti-systematic properties of the essay are what can enable it, in an age when grand systems and narratives have collapsed, to ‘[step] forward as an attractive way to open up philosophical discourse’.11 For Adorno, the essay proceeds ‘methodically unmethodically’ and ‘without apology’; it ‘revolts’ against, ‘gently defies’ and ‘does not obey the rules of the game of organized science and theory’.12 Adorno argues that it is due to this subversive potential that the essay has not always been well received by disciplinary philosophy: ‘the academic guild only has patience for philosophy that dresses itself up with the nobility of the universal, the everlasting’.13 Nonetheless, Adorno praises the essay since it ‘[shies] away from the violence of dogma’, and it ‘remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence; . . . it is the critique of ideology’.14 Adorno is not alone in identifying the philosophical importance of the essay, as well as identifying the essayistic mode as embodying critique. In an important remark in The Use of Pleasure, Foucault writes: The ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an ‘ascesis,’ askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.15 It is necessary to provide the context for Foucault’s remark on the essay. The Use of Pleasure, the second volume in The History of Sexuality series, opens with a section titled ‘Modifications’, in which Foucault explains why the follow-up to the first volume of the series of books on sexuality was ‘published later than . . . anticipated, and in a form that is altogether different’.16 Foucault refers to how the initial research into the promised later volumes of the series led him to revise and modify his approach to the research questions he posed. This forced him to choose between either broadly sticking to the original plan while adding some supplementary survey of the new themes or else abandoning the plan (which he had publicly committed to) and reorganizing the entire study. Foucault writes of the risks, difficulties and dangers associated with these changes and with opening himself up to research questions which he felt he was insufficiently acquainted with. Foucault describes the toll associated with pursuing the detour that he did: ‘to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next’.17 He continues this impassioned passage by addressing an imagined reader and remarks that if such a reader thinks that to engage in such a difficult process, which entails working in the midst of uncertainty, amounts to failure, then ‘all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet’.18 This revelatory introductory chapter contains a passage, the excerpt that Gilles Deleuze read at Foucault’s funeral,19 in which Foucault describes the philosophical ethos that convinced him to go along with the riskier path: As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity

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that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.20 It is right after this point on curiosity that Foucault presents his remark on the essay as being the living substance of philosophy as askesis. Foucault’s understanding of philosophy as askesis – that is, as an exercise in the formation and transformation of the self – can be considered as an essayistic ethos. This way of approaching the relation between philosophy and the essay sheds light on what is meant by the essayistic (which this chapter considers through Montaigne’s essayism), as well as providing an image (through Foucault’s practice of philosophy) of what an essayistic philosophy is. For Foucault, congruent with Adorno’s conception of the essay, philosophy is not ultimately about the solid certainty of systematic philosophy. Rather, philosophy and writing books would not be worth their name if they ‘did not lead to unforeseen places, and if they did not disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and pleasure of the book is to be an experience.’21 Foucault’s conception and practice of philosophy offer an important contribution to the debate on the relationship between philosophy and the essay. This chapter pursues two main aims in this regard. First, notions from Foucault’s work – particularly confession, self-writing, parrhesia and Foucault’s brief references to Montaigne – are drawn upon to understand the philosophical stakes of Montaigne’s essayism. Second, Foucault’s own work is considered as embodying the essayistic spirit of philosophy, whereby this is taken to mean that philosophy is conceived as an askesis, an exercise through which the self is formed and transformed. This way of reading Montaigne alongside Foucault can inform the debate on the relation between philosophy and the essay, in view of Foucault’s remark on the essay as being the living substance of philosophy.

Montaigne Confessing Himself ‘I am myself the matter of my book’, Montaigne tells the reader at the beginning of the Essays.22 This accidental philosopher intends neither to preach nor to teach. Rather, as Raymond Geuss argues, ‘he wishes simply to recount (réciter) the flow of his thoughts and reactions’.23 One may thus easily read Montaigne’s style through the analytic of confession developed by Foucault. Foucault locates the logic of confession manifesting itself beyond practices of religious confession in phenomena such as the development of scientific discourses on sex. This drive grounded what Foucault calls ‘scientia sexualis’24 (the knowledge of sex), and formed the basis of an apparatus whose aim was the production of truth about individuals. The pervasive, and potentially violent, will to knowledge demanded that individuals ‘[pass] everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech’.25 Self-narration, according to this scheme, becomes a prime locus through which power functioned by deciphering and thereby creating governable identities: ‘One confesses – or is forced to confess. . . . Western man has become

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a confessing animal.’26 For Foucault, confessional practices oblige the individual to adopt a hermeneutic, and possibly suspicious, attitude towards themselves, whereby the self is constituted as a phenomenon to be interpreted and constantly deciphered. Moments in Montaigne’s essays facilitate the interpretation of his work as an episode within this broader history of confessional truth-telling, particularly when he writes about the demand he imposes upon himself to confess his innermost thoughts, even if this comes with difficulty. He writes: I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I dislike even thoughts that are unpublishable. The worst of my actions and conditions does not seem to me so ugly as the cowardice of not daring to avow it. Everyone is discreet in confession; people should be so in action. Boldness in sinning is somewhat compensated and bridled by boldness in confessing.27 Nonetheless, as Virginia Krause notes, Montaigne was critical and distrustful of certain exploitative uses of confessional practices in institutional and judicial applications of power. For this reason, she argues that ‘Montaigne should find a place not as a chapter in Foucault’s history of the modern bête d’aveu, but rather as an unacknowledged predecessor and ally in the Foucauldian project to formulate a critical history of confession.’28 It is true that Foucault was suspicious of certain notions of humanist subjectivity which view the human subject as self-constituting and self-transparent, while neglecting the crucial role of discourses and power relations in constituting experience. As Sanna Tirkkonen writes, ‘[i]t is not uncommon to interpret Foucault’s thought as profoundly anti-experiential and anti-subjectivist’.29 However, Amy Allen points out that to read Foucault as endorsing the ‘anti-subjective hypothesis’ – that is, as implying that ‘the subject is merely or nothing more than an effect of power/knowledge regimes’ – is an incomplete reading.30 Alexander Nehamas too embraces the view that Foucault’s ideas on subjectivity are more complex than an unqualified anti-humanism: But hadn’t Foucault simply eliminated the very concept of the self during his earlier antihumanist phase? Was he now rejecting all that he stood for? Not quite. Blanchot had once again read him correctly: ‘Were not his principles more complex than his official discourse with its striking formulations led one to think? For example, it is accepted as a certainty that Foucault got rid of, purely and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative writing. But things are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question.’ Foucault sometimes wrote as if the self is a fiction, but in fact he had never denied that the subject exists. What he had tried to show is how different periods constitute subjects differently and how the subject is not the final ground of thought and history but their complex product.31 Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and practices of truth-telling is multifaceted. The different ways in which Foucault analyzed this relationship – through the entanglement of truth and power, or through the power of confession, or through his late account of parrhesia – can inform this study of the relation between philosophy and the essay. While Montaigne’s Essays can be analyzed in terms of Foucault’s analytic of

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confession, they can also be productively approached through his later analysis of ethics as askesis, which includes a concern with the role of writing practices in constituting the self as well as the exploration of practices of truth-telling (parrhesia).32 Foucault did, in fact, briefly refer to Montaigne in his discussion of these notions. The next section expands on these brief references insofar as they inform how one approaches the relation between philosophy and the essay.

Foucault on Montaigne: The Ethics of Crafting Oneself Montaigne plays a role in Foucault’s early work on madness. In History of Madness, Foucault cites the work of Montaigne, alongside that of figures such as Pierre Charron, Blaise Pascal and Erasmus, as problematizing the relationship between reason and madness by suggesting that ‘[m]adness then becomes a form of reason’ and that there is ‘a form of madness immanent within reason’.33 As Foucault maintains, upon Montaigne’s encounter with the mad Italian poet Torquato Tasso, ‘there was nothing to assure him that all thought was not haunted by the ghost of unreason’.34 For Foucault, this was the prelude to the later triumph of reason and the exclusion of madness in the Baroque age. As Foucault writes, ‘Between Montaigne and Descartes an event has taken place, which concerns the advent of a ratio’,35 leading to the banishment of madness and its division from reason. Foucault returns to Montaigne in a different context in his late work on ethics and practices of the self. In a 1983 interview, the interviewers remark on how Foucault’s work on ancient practices of self-writing challenges the ‘commonplace’ view that ‘Montaigne was the first great autobiographer’.36 Foucault responds by suggesting that all ‘literature of the self’, including Montaigne’s, must be understood in the context of a long tradition of practices of self-writing.37 He argues that in classical philosophy, practices of the self were tied to knowledge in such a way that ‘a subject could not have access to the truth if he did not first operate upon himself a certain work that would make him susceptible to knowing the truth’.38 For Foucault, despite the fact that Descartes wrote meditations, which are practices of the self, his work started to dissolve this link between askesis and knowledge. Foucault situates Montaigne’s work as being prior to what he calls the ‘Cartesian moment’,39 before which askesis was a condition for access to truth. A key component of askesis was writing, which occupied an important role in the ancient regimen of the art of living.40 One wrote in order to transform and cultivate oneself into an ethical subject, not by passively writing accepted principles but by memorizing and actively taking up these ethical principles as guides to one’s actions. As an example of this form of writing, Foucault considers the hupomnēmata, which were individual notebooks used as memory aids in antiquity. The user of the hupomnēmata jotted down wisdom of the ‘already-said’ in them so as to memorize it through writing.41 It was stored within easy reach (as reflected also in the title of Epictetus’ work Enchiridion, the ‘Handbook’42) for when the user would need to reactivate this wisdom in trying times. Montaigne’s writing echoes the genre of the hupomnēmata. The link between essayistic writing and the hupomnēmata is well established. Lopate argues that ‘the Renaissance essay partly grew out of the custom of keeping “commonplace books,” which were filled with favorite quotations’,43 while Peter Mack suggests

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that ‘Bacon probably worked his essays up from a commonplace book.’44 Characterizing Montaigne’s Essays as being a form of hupomnēmata is backed by the manner in which Montaigne quotes freely, sometimes without citations, and includes fragments of writing from other sources intended to reactivate his memory of what he deems to be useful knowledge. This practice also explains Montaigne’s eclecticism which, as Pierre Force clarifies, rather than philosophical consistency can be considered as a coherence of the self that ‘is the product of writing as a philosophical activity’.45 Montaigne, in fact, criticized organized knowledge and, instead of theoretical consistency and system building, he prioritized the ancient practice of philosophy as a continual exercise of the soul that has a direct bearing on the philosopher’s manner of living. Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies this ethos in Montaigne when he writes that while Montaigne’s frankness on his mood could amaze some readers, this is necessary since for him every doctrine, when it is separated from what we do, threatens to be mendacious; and he imagined a book in which for once there would be expressed not only ideas but also the very life which they appear in and which modifies their meaning.46 Montaigne hoped that his work would elicit an ethical response from the reader who approaches the Essays as an invitation. This sense of the ‘use’ of Montaigne’s essays is captured by the way he writes of the task of philosophy as that activity through which one shapes one’s life and character, and as not simply a theoretical exercise. Writing on Pyrrho, a figure whom he deeply admired, Montaigne proposes that Pyrrho had ‘tried, like all the others who were truly philosophers, to make his life correspond to his doctrine’.47 This latter characterization echoes the notion of parrhesia, which translates as frank free-spokenness and courageous truth-telling. Foucault’s late lectures deal specifically with how the meaning of parrhesia changed: from that of Socrates’ last moments to the Platonic ‘true life’, from Stoic and Epicurean practices of the self to an early Christian context which ascribed a pejorative sense to parrhesia as loose speech.48 The first appearance of the notion of parrhesia in Foucault’s lectures is in the context of a discussion of Epicurean practices of spiritual direction, where Foucault argues that Epicurean guidance was only possible on the condition of an intense friendship that necessitated a way or attitude of speaking: namely, parrhesia. Foucault preliminarily defines this way of speaking as ‘opening the heart, the need for the two partners to conceal nothing of what they think from each other and to speak to each other frankly’.49 Foucault describes parrhesia as a symphony of discourse and action; it marks the manner, attitude, ethos and style of one’s living. Parrhesia demands harmony between one’s words and deeds, one’s logos and bios, whereby one’s free speech is authenticated by one’s mode of living. The truth of parrhesia, for Seneca, ‘must be sealed by the way he conducts himself and the way in which he actually lives’.50 For an utterance to qualify as parrhesia, one must be convinced . . . that I myself really experience (sentire) the things I say as true. . . .: and not only do I feel and consider the things I say to be true, but I even love them, am attached to them and my whole life is governed by them.51

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Thus, in view of how Montaigne wrote of the true philosopher as the one whose words correspond with their actions, one must not only consider what he discloses in his essays but how he does so. Zahi Zalloua points to how Montaigne’s own writing invites an approach that considers ‘this sensibility to, or preoccupation with, form (vs. content), or manner (vs. matter)’.52 Zalloua details excerpts that capture this spirit of Montaigne’s essays: ‘we are concerned with the manner, not the matter, of speaking . . . . And every day I amuse myself reading authors without any care for their learning, looking for their style, not their subject’;53 ‘[l]et attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it’.54 These quotations highlight how Montaigne’s essays harbor within them traces of parrhesia, including the role that this played within the ancient ethics of care of the self, namely that practices of the self were central to what the ancients regarded as crafting the self as a work of art. It is in this sense that Foucault referred to the importance of Montaigne in the genealogy of subjectivity: To be sure, there is an ethics and also an aesthetics of the self in the sixteenth century, which refers explicitly, moreover, to what is found in the Greek and Latin authors I am talking about. I think Montaigne should be reread in this perspective, as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self.55 To clarify what Foucault meant by ‘an aesthetics and ethics of the self’, one must consider how he defines ethics as ‘the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport à soi, . . . which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’.56 He analyzed this ethical relationship as composed of four components (echoing Aristotle’s fourfold account of causation), whereby it is configured differently in different ethical frameworks: the ethical substance (the part of the self that is the subject of moral consideration, such as intention, desire or feelings); the mode of subjection (the manner in which the self subjects itself to moral obligations, for example through divine law, rational rules or self-creation); techniques of askesis (ethical practices which the individual employs for moral development, such as practices of self-examination, confession or asceticism); and the aim or aspiration of ethical behavior (the telos of ethics, such as purity, immortality or self-mastery). Aesthetics of existence is, for Foucault, one example of a ‘mode of subjection’. This attitude of adopting an aesthetic approach to the self was a dominant one in ancient Greco-Roman ethics, as can be seen in how philosophers such as Epictetus, Plotinus and Seneca compare the self to an art work or object.57 Foucault suggests that, in antiquity, ethics was a free choice about the form one would like to give to one’s existence, that is, ‘a question of making one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a tekhnē – for an art’.58 Foucault’s argument is that Montaigne’s work inspired a re-engagement with the tradition of an ethics and aesthetics of the self as found in classical antiquity. This was followed by figures and movements in the nineteenth century who, like Montaigne before them, attempted to constitute an aesthetics of the self: Stirner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, dandyism, Baudelaire, anarchy, anarchist thought, etcetera, . . . are, of course, very different from each other, but . . . are all more or less obsessed by the question: Is it possible to constitute, or reconstitute, an aesthetics of the self?59

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The influence of Montaigne on Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, is evident in remarks such as: ‘I know of only one writer whom I would compare with Schopenhauer, indeed set above him, in respect of honesty: Montaigne. That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.’60 The genealogy of an aesthetics and ethics of the self which Foucault hints at coincides with the genealogy of philosophy as a way of life traced by Pierre Hadot. For Hadot, Montaigne is one of the Renaissance figures who renews the ancient philosophical attitude which ‘considered philosophy not as a simple theoretical discourse but as a practice, an askēsis, and a transformation of the self’.61 Hadot lists Montaigne, whom he cites as an important influence on him, alongside other significant philosophers, writers and essayists who kept alive the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life: It would take a large volume to tell the entire history of the reception of ancient philosophy by medieval and modern philosophy. I have chosen to concentrate on a few major figures: Montaigne, Descartes, Kant. We might mention many other thinkers – as different as Rousseau, Shaftesbury, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and still others. All, in one way or another, were influenced by the model of ancient philosophy, and conceived of philosophy not only as a concrete, practical activity but also as a transformation of our way of inhabiting and perceiving the world.62 An argument pursued throughout this chapter is that this attempt to trace a historical lineage in the practice of philosophy as a way of life intersects with the genealogy of the essayistic. Indeed, in her attempt to reconstruct the historical lineage of the essay (while acknowledging its problematic nature and its refusal to be essentialized), de Obaldia includes the work of some canonical philosophers as part of this lineage. Apart from the figures who she claims occupy the ‘great tradition of essayists’ – from Montaigne and Francis Bacon, to Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, right down to Virginia Woolf and George Orwell – she also refers to philosophical works, such as Pascal’s Pensées, Denis Diderot’s letters, Nietzsche’s aphorisms, some mystical texts, Kierkegaard’s imaginary diaries, and poststructuralist writing such as Roland Barthes’s.63 By approaching some of Montaigne’s work in this spirit, it is hoped that this chapter proposes another important dimension of the relation between philosophy and the essay: they both embody an ethopoetic concern. Foucault’s genealogy of confessional practices, subjectivity, self-writing and parrhesia – which makes slight but instructive references to Montaigne’s work – offers a theoretical framework through which to approach the philosophical stakes of the essay and the essayistic. In turn, Montaigne’s essays can be read as embodying the living substance of philosophy as askesis, as Foucault characterizes it. Moreover, it can be argued, as I do in the next section, that Foucault’s own philosophical outlook, as he describes it in various interviews, is itself a continuation of the tradition of philosophy as a way of life and of the essayistic as the living substance of philosophy.

Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos Foucault does not hold an image of philosophy as a transcendental privileged discipline; if this were the case, he says, ‘I don’t regard myself as a philosopher.’64 Instead,

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his interest in philosophy stems from a concern with experience, as can be attested by the influence that the transgressive work of Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski had on him. Rather than a construction of a system, these figures all prioritized personal experience. This interest in experience is not a phenomenological one but a more radical approach which ‘has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution’.65 Foucault describes his own books as ‘direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same’.66 It is within this context that he suggests that what he attempts to write is ‘an experience book, as opposed to a truth book or a demonstration book’.67 In this regard, it is worth dwelling on one of the meanings of essai as ‘experience’. This sheds further light on what an essayistic philosophy might mean: specifically, following Foucault, a philosophy concerned with the construction of experience and that is intended to be a transformative experience in its own right. Interestingly, as Thomas Lemke notes, the French word expérience can be translated as both ‘experience’ as well as, like essai, ‘experiment’.68 Moreover, as Martin Jay indicates, besides ‘experiment’, the etymological roots of ‘experience’ denote trial or proof, which have connotations of danger and risk.69 Writing, like parrhesia, is risky not only as a critical activity but, especially, because of the transformations it can effect on the writer. Practicing philosophy essayistically, in keeping with Foucault’s claim that the essay is the living substance of philosophy, is to be willing to risk being transformed through thinking and writing. This is the attitude adopted by Foucault towards writing his books, as demonstrated by the transformation of his original plans for The History of Sexuality series: for me my books are experiences, in a sense, that I would like to be as full as possible. An experience is something that one comes out of transformed. If I had to write a book to communicate what I’m already thinking before I begin to write, I would never have the courage to begin. I write a book only because I still don’t exactly know what to think about this thing I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think.70 Foucault’s fascination with the inherent risk and transformative power of writing philosophy is also reflected in an oft-quoted passage from the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge which captures Foucault’s ethos of writing: I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.71 In this essayistic ethos embodied by Foucault, the link between philosophy and the aesthetics of the self becomes apparent, echoing nineteenth-century dandyism, Nietzsche, Montaigne and their ancient inspirations. This can be seen in Foucault’s use of the language of aesthetics to describe the manner in which the love of wisdom transforms the philosopher:

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I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. . . . This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?72 This description of philosophy also echoes Kierkegaard’s conception of philosophy, which too can be considered essayistic in view of its unequivocal characterization of philosophy as self-transformative. In a remark intended as a jibe to broadly Hegelian ways of doing philosophy, Kierkegaard laments: And what use would it be in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers’ systems and were able to call them all to account on request, point out inconsistencies in every single circle? And what use would it be in that respect to be able to work out a theory of the state, and put all the pieces from so many places into one whole, construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see?73 The reference to Kierkegaard is not an incidental one. As Frédéric Gros notes, ‘Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard, although he hardly ever mentions this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive’,74 and perhaps their shared conception of an essayistic way of doing philosophy is among what Foucault inherited from Kierkegaard. Further essayistic gestures can be found in Foucault, particularly in how he opposes an idea of philosophy as system building in favor of a more experimental understanding of the practice of philosophy: ‘I am an experimenter and not a theorist’; ‘[m]y books . . . are more like invitations or public gestures’.75 For Foucault, his intention when writing a book is that ‘people read it as an experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relation with things, with others, that they had before reading it’.76 The essayistic language persists when Foucault describes the nature of his own ideas: ‘What I’ve written is never prescriptive either for me or for others – at most it’s instrumental and tentative.’77 This tentativeness and necessary provisionality is also an intrinsic feature of Foucault’s ‘methods’ – archaeology and genealogy – which he contrasted with attempts at providing totalizing histories of the phenomena that he analyzed, such as madness, imprisonment and sexuality.78 Foucault’s way of doing philosophy, like the essayistic form, does not aspire to close off a topic or argue conclusively for a view, but manifests plurality, contingency and, importantly, ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’.79 Ultimately, this is the philosophical ethos that Foucault describes in his late essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ as the ethos that captures the Enlightenment attitude, as he reconfigures it after Kant’s attempt to answer the same question in his 1784 essay.80 The terms Foucault uses to describe the Enlightenment ethos in his essay come very close to the terms often invoked to characterize the essayistic: it embodies an experimental attitude that must be activated and reactivated; it stands for a permanent critique of one’s historical era; like Baudelaire’s dandyism and (aesthetic) asceticism, it implies a relationship with the present and with one’s self, with the flux of fleeting moments in an attempt to ‘make of his body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art’.81

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Foucault shared with Montaigne this essayistic impulse to link philosophy and life. Although wary of the possible dangers of confession and unnecessary self-disclosure, Foucault did see his work and his life as deeply connected. As he put it in an interview, ‘[e]ach of my works is a part of my own biography’.82 This echoes Montaigne’s description of his essayistic practice: ‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me – a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.’83 Ultimately, this is what philosophy and the essay can share: an askesis, a concern with the formation and transformation of the self in writing.

Conclusion: The Truth of the Essay; or, the Essay as a Way of Life What this chapter attempted was an engagement with the question of the relation between philosophy and the essay, by foregrounding the dimension of self-transformation and askesis as an important one in understanding this relation. Building upon the reflections of figures such as Adorno and Lukács on this matter, this chapter used the work of Foucault, particularly his later work, to suggest that what philosophy and the essay – or, at least, some exemplars of each, lest this be read as an attempt to essentialize either philosophy or the essay – share is a mutual concern with self-formation and transformation. Foucault’s remark in The Use of Pleasure on the essay as the living substance of philosophy was unpacked and contextualized by drawing on his views of ethics, askesis and truth-telling. This enabled a reading of Montaigne’s essays as practices of the self, in Foucault’s sense, through which the individual effects self-creation and transformation. This essayistic spirit was traced in Foucault’s own philosophical outlook and his manner of pursuing the activity of philosophy as a concern with his own self-transformation. This practice of philosophy was situated within the tradition of philosophy as a way of life, as outlined by Hadot, in which both Foucault and Montaigne play a significant role. This tradition includes other figures, including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who practice philosophy as a way of life, or an essayistic philosophy. Essayistic philosophy brings together aesthetics (self-fashioning, or giving a style to one’s existence), ethics (askesis, or the relationship of the self to itself) and politics (subject-formation, or the social and historical conditions that determine what one can be). Essayistic philosophy implies an attitude or an ethos. In the case of Foucault, this meant ‘a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’.84 This is the ethos which Foucault captured in his various essais on philosophy itself, namely his essays on critique and the Enlightenment. As he put it in ‘What Is Critique?’, ‘[t]here is something in critique that is related to virtue’.85 Virtue, in this sense, is the essayistic ethos of self-fashioning and transformation pursued, among other practices, through writing. This virtue is inscribed in critical practice, which Foucault characterized through a twisting of La Boétie’s book title: ‘Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential function of critique would be that of desubjectification in the game of what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth.’86 Philosophy and the essay, ultimately, share a mutual concern with the plural faces of truth. This proposal concurs with Plunkett’s claim: in virtue of its position between subjectivity and objectivity, the essay

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represents the phenomenal character of the world and thus suggests an alternative to the model of truth as conceptual precision, abstracted from lived experience. Truth becomes the activity of subjects in the world rather than something independent of subjectivity or history.87 Montaigne’s self-disclosure can be read through a confessional register, with Augustine before him and Rousseau following him. Yet, by reading Montaigne alongside Foucault, their work emphasizes a further dimension of truth, namely its entanglement with subjectivity, its power to constitute and authenticate the self, and its risks and dangers in the practice of parrhesia. It is this risk which unites philosophy and the essay as an embodiment of ‘the courage, the audacity, to know’.88 Not every essay is or must be philosophical, and not every philosophical activity manifests these essayistic traits. The elusive relation between philosophy and the essay will continue to highlight the unsuitability of seeking essences of such inexhaustible activities and bears witness to their power.

Notes   1. See Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 6.  2. Erin Plunkett, A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience and Style (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).   3. Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), xxiii–liv (xxiii, xxv).   4. Ibid., xxvi.   5. Ibid., xxx.   6. Ibid., xxxiv.   7. See Christopher Edelman, ‘Essaying Oneself: Montaigne and Philosophy as a Way of Life’ (PhD diss., Emory University, 2010), 108–16, https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/ f7623d11b?locale=enPublished.  8. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 219–21 (219).   9. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, in Complete Essays, 318–457 (409). 10. Lopate, introduction to Art of the Personal Essay, xlii. 11. Ibid., xliii. 12. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (161, 160, 158, 161, 158). 13. Ibid., 151. 14. Ibid., 158, 166. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 9. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Ibid. 19. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 329–30. 20. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8. 21. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1997), 199–205 (205).

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22. Michel de Montaigne, ‘To the Reader’, in Complete Essays, 2. 23. Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 118. 24. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 58. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Ibid., 59. 27. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, in Complete Essays, 638–85 (642). 28. Virginia Krause, ‘Confession or Parrhesia? Foucault After Montaigne’, in Montaigne After Theory, Theory After Montaigne, ed. Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 142–60 (156). 29. Sanna Tirkkonen, ‘What Is Experience? Foucauldian Perspectives’, Open Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2019): 447–61 (448). 30. Amy Allen, ‘The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject’, The Philosophical Forum 31, no. 2 (2000): 113–30 (120), italics in original. 31. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 176–77, quoting Maurice Blanchot, ‘Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him’, in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 61–109 (76). 32. See Reinier Leushius, ‘Montaigne Parrhesiastes: Foucault’s Fearless Speech and Truth-Telling in the Essays’, in Montaigne After Theory, 100–21 (101). 33. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 32, 35. 34. Ibid., 45­–46. 35. Ibid., 47. 36. Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 253–80 (276). 37. Ibid., 277. 38. Ibid., 278–79. 39. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 14. 40. See ibid., 355–70. 41. Michel Foucault, ‘Self Writing’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 207–22 (211). 42. See Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 43. Lopate, introduction to Art of the Personal Essay, xli. 44. Peter Mack, ‘Rhetoric and the Essay’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1993): 41–49 (44). 45. Pierre Force, ‘Montaigne and the Coherence of Eclecticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 523–44 (524). 46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Reading Montaigne’, in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 198–210 (199). 47. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Virtue’, in Complete Essays, 532–38 (533). 48. See Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 49. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 137. 50. Ibid., 405–6. 51. Ibid., 405. 52. Zahi Zalloua, ‘Introduction: What Is Theory?’, in Montaigne After Theory, 3–18 (11). 53. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Art of Discussion’, in Complete Essays, 703–21 (708), italics added, quoted in Zalloua, ‘Introduction: What Is Theory?’, 11.

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54. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Books’, in Complete Essays, 296–306 (296), italics added, quoted in Zalloua, ‘Introduction: What Is Theory?’, 11. 55. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 251. 56. Foucault, ‘Genealogy of Ethics’, 263. 57. See Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2002), 134. 58. Foucault, ‘Genealogy of Ethics’, 271. This characterization of ethics in antiquity has been contested by critics, including Pierre Hadot. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 206–13. 59. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 251. 60. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125–94 (135). 61. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 275. 62. Ibid., 270. 63. De Obaldia, Essayistic Spirit, 6–7. For a study on Barthes’s essayism, see Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, trans. Pat Fedkiew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 64. Michel Foucault, ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 2000), 239–97 (240). 65. Ibid., 241. 66. Ibid., 242. 67. Ibid., 246. 68. See Thomas Lemke, ‘Critique and Experience in Foucault’, Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 4 (2011): 26–48 (40n3). 69. See Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10, quoted in Lemke, ‘Critique and Experience’, 43n21. 70. Foucault, ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, 239–40. 71. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 19. 72. Michel Foucault, ‘An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 121–33 (131). 73. Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. 1, Journals AA–DD, ed. Bruce H. Kirmmse et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 19. 74. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 23n46. 75. Foucault, ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, 240, 245. 76. Ibid., 245–46. 77. Ibid., 240. 78. See Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71n2. 79. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 315–16. 80. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)’, trans. James Schmidt, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64. 81. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 312. 82. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988), 9–15 (11).

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83. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Giving the Lie’, in Complete Essays, 503–6 (504). 84. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 312. 85. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’, trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in What Is Enlightenment?, 382–98 (383). 86. Ibid., 386. The title of La Boétie’s book is Discours de la servitude volontaire [The discourse of voluntary servitude]. 87. Erin Plunkett, ‘The Essay as Phenomenology’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 23–36 (29). 88. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 306.

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20 The Essay as Brinkmanship: Cioran’s Fragment, Aphorism and Autobiography Arleen Ionescu

Cioran’s Essay: Influences, Affinities and Debts

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mil Cioran (1911–95), a key figure in the development of the philosophical essay as praxis, was regarded as one of the greatest Romanian-born French philosophers of the twentieth century, who contributed to the ‘splendor’ of French culture.1 However, in the Anglo-American world of letters, Cioran remains little known despite being translated into English by Richard Howard, having one major biography in English, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston’s Searching for Cioran, entries in Encyclopedia of the Essay, Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought and The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief and an introduction to his work written by philosopher Susan Sontag.2 On the one hand, we may ask why Cioran was included in Tracy Chevalier’s and John Murray’s encyclopedias with consistent entries in which Marc Lits presented Cioran as a philosopher and essayist who ‘rejects all systems and exorcises his fears by means of incisive aphorisms’3 and escapes ‘the overweening presumption of philosophy while still writing rigorously’;4 on the other hand, we may wonder why Sontag equated his work with ‘the convulsive manner of German neo-philosophical thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eternity’.5 The answers cannot be found in any statements that Cioran would have made about the essay, since, in his position of enfant terrible, he was never interested in theorizing it but rather in using its form. As far as the form of the essay is concerned, G. Douglas Atkins has demonstrated that the essay occupies a middle position between fiction and philosophy and ‘can be so distinguished precisely because it is not absolutely different from either’.6 According to Atkins, the essay borrows ‘reflection, analysis, and judgement’ but also brings its own unicity, which consists of ‘reflection upon experience’, from philosophy in which reflection is ‘the province of philosophy’ and ‘experience is that of fiction’.7 Atkins states that while the former involves ‘the transcendent world of ideas’ and ‘works on questions of being’, the latter involves immanence, being rooted ‘in the material’ and presenting ‘ideas embodied in form, in characters, and events’.8 Cioran’s essays put forward his judgments without the intention of creating a continuous argument, which may often frustrate the reader. His essays make use of many figures of speech that literature uses, balancing his texts between philosophical ideas (which are not exposed in the form of a treatise, with footnotes and annotations to the authors’ works he invokes) and a lyrical prose in which a disguised ‘I’ is always present.

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Moreover, following Graham Good’s characterization of the essay as a ‘provisional reflection of an ephemeral experience of an event or object’,9 we can say that Cioran neither claimed to contribute to ‘a common system of knowledge’, since he used ‘his own personal learning’,10 nor did he formulate general truths, which he replaced with the truth of ‘the here and now’.11 This is actually a very essayistic gesture (ethos or style) which can be connected to a different way in which one can theorize the essay. We may include many of Cioran’s works in the category that Good featured as the ‘skepticism of the essay’: a ‘spontaneous and unsystematic’ form that resists ‘any organization of knowledge’.12 In this context of the skepticism of Cioran’s essay that refers to the fact that he doubted everything, I would like to correct the fallacy that Cioran’s essay is nihilist. Donald A. Crosby placed Cioran in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the volume on nihilism as ‘a relentless, uncompromising exponent of existential nihilism’, drawing his rationale from a single book, namely A Short History of Decay, where Crosby thinks that Cioran asserted against Camus that ‘we all should commit suicide . . . the only consistent way of dealing with the absurdity of our lives’.13 Among Cioran’s favorite themes we may list: the decadence of Western liberal thought, the unbeliever’s religious hopelessness (which, however, alternated with his admiration for saints), contempt for history, solitude, decay and decomposition. A recurrent theme throughout his essays is insomnia, presented as ‘a noble affliction’ in his early work, and as ‘glory’ in his late work.14 In Cioran’s first six French books insomnia is indeed replaced by suicide.15 However, although the obsessive theme of suicide may seem a strong argument in favor of nihilism, the philosopher does not essay (try) to convince that suicide should be taken as a programmatic decision but rather that it should be taken as an abstract idea. ‘Without the idea of suicide, I would certainly have killed myself’,16 Cioran wrote, toying with this idea, without ever attempting to put his words into action, which confirms, as the final section of this chapter will demonstrate, that his essays often resorted to rhetorical figures that deface the author and that dramatize his self for the reader, who becomes a spectator in this staging of the ‘idea’ of suicide. Shane Weller suggests the same term to define Cioran’s essay: skepticism, ‘an undoing of values that never arrives at their complete annihilation’.17 Indeed, his essays questioned the rationality of belief rather than negating them, Cioran disclosing exactly in A Short History of Decay, ‘I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.’18 Pyrrhonism, as Erin Plunkett has shown in her analysis on the relation between the essay and skepticism, came into the essay via Michel de Montaigne and gave it ‘a kind of epistemological modesty that is therapeutic in aim – both a limiting of the scope of knowledge and a limiting of the relevance of knowing as an approach to the world’.19 Cioran mentioned Montaigne only in passing in The Trouble with Being Born, hence making it impossible for scholars to trace a clear influence; more likely the skepticism of the essay came into Cioran’s work via Nietzsche’s project of radical self-transformation, which partially advocated the practice of Diogenes and Pyrrho.20 Plunkett has also contended that [t]he most common philosophical reading of essays is . . . that the stylistic features which mark essayistic writing – heterogeneity, discontinuity, circularity, reflexivity,

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open-endedness, a focus on particular experience – can be read as an outgrowth of sceptical enquiry into the grounds of knowledge claims or, more generally, as a metaphor for our necessarily provisional and uncertain relationship to what is.21 From this point of view, following Plunkett’s rationale, Cioran’s essays can be read as an endeavor to inscribe his uncertainties presented as personal experiences. When trying to delineate the debts and influences that can be traced in Cioran’s philosophical essays, one needs to take into account that he was a passionate reader who ‘devoured’ whole libraries,22 an ardent admirer of Blaise Pascal and of Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, a reader of Ludwig Klages’s Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele [The spirit as the adversary of the soul], which ‘reinforced his skepticism about the capacity of reason to grasp the essence of reality’, and of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The decline of the west], which ‘exercised the most profound and enduring influence on Cioran’, teaching him about ‘great’ versus ‘small’ cultures.23 Sontag included his essays in the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein,24 and Matei Calinescu aligned them with the style of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralistes: La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Chamfort, Vauvenargues.25 In spite of all these influences, Cioran was often regarded as ‘a specialized taste, too sharp and bitter for many palates and yet, paradoxically, too lyrical or too “unserious” for others’.26 In other words, he passes for a heretical figure who proceeded, to follow Theodor W. Adorno’s findings about the essay, ‘methodically unmethodically’.27 Adorno, who wrote on the connection between philosophy and the essay, considered that the essay denies any ‘primeval givens, so it refuses any definition of its concepts’.28 These verdicts are also key to deciphering Cioran’s philosophical essay, which refuses to define philosophical concepts. Beyond the maze of intricate, sometimes contradictory, alleged influences and affinities, Cioran’s formal choice of the essay can be linked to a certain response to the dramatic changes that occurred in the aftermath of World War II, when thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Adorno, among many others, attested de facto to the failure of the Enlightenment project and ushered in a new historical era in which morality, ethics, forgiveness and representation changed meanings completely. With no possibility to give moral lessons after one of the greatest atrocities against humankind, the Holocaust, a whole postNietzschean generation of thinkers questioned the traditional view that philosophy must be written in an argumentative form that should convince the reader through reasoning and logic. Cioran is one of these thinkers who often voiced ‘the futility of philosophy’29 and who, according to Sontag, put forward ‘a new kind of philosophizing: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic’.30 Taking Sontag’s challenge further, I believe that three main elements are essential for Cioran’s practicing philosophy through the essay: the fragmentary, the aphoristic and the autobiographical. The way Cioran imparts his provisional reflections to his readers is by intertwining the fragment with the aphoristic and, at the same time, by defacing his self in/through his essay. Proceeding from the general to the particular, the next section will deal with what I believe is characteristic of Cioran’s essays – fragmentary writing – and its close relation to aphorism, while the final section will reply affirmatively to the question of whether some parts of Cioran’s essays can be read as autobiographies.

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The Fragmentary and the Aphoristic In a thought-provoking article on Cioran’s fragmentary writing, Florin Oprescu sees the fragment as originating in ‘two elementary traditions of critical thinking, that require the reorganization and expression of meaning, one of categorial nature and one fragmentary, of expressive nature’.31 This predisposition carved out a space for a style of writing in the form of the essay as fragment, yet cultivating a certain conciseness that Brian Dillon equates in Essayism to ‘its formal apogee’, the aphorism.32 Cioran looked for the best formula of writing philosophy by refusing systematization: No sooner will you try to write than the image of your reader will loom up before you . . . And you lay down your pen. The notion you want to develop will be too much for you: what is the use of examining it, of getting to the heart of the matter? Couldn’t a single formula translate it? . . . If you are obsessed by a verbal economy, you will be able to read or re-read any book without detecting its artifices and its redundancies. You will finally discover that even the author you continually return to pads his sentences, hoards pages and collapses on an idea in order to flatten it, to stretch it out. Poem, novel, essay, play – everything will seem too long. The writer – it is his function – always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words.33 It would seem paradoxical that Cioran included not only literature but also the nonfictional essay among the forms of writing which he refuted, but he ended up finding his style only in and through an extended collection of essays. However, he makes it clear that it is the essay aspiring to fully express thoughts on a given topic that he rejects, proposing instead a form featuring brevity as its main characteristic. The fragmentary form which Cioran chose was, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy showed, the Romantics’ form of expression.34 Analyzing many of the ‘fragments’ from the literary magazine Athenaeum established by the Schlegel brothers in Germany (1798–1800), Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy investigated the fragment as a literary category, returning to Montaigne’s (re)opening in the ‘modern’ age of the tradition of the Moralists35 which led to his popularization of the essay as a literary genre. They compared Athenaeum fragment 22 where the fragment was defined as ‘a project’, hence incomplete, with Athenaeum fragment 206 where the fragment was associated to ‘a hedgehog’, a ‘small work of art’,36 the latter being connected to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s traditions, which valued the fragment for its individuation. Taking into their structure both the fragment’s incompleteness and its completeness, the Schlegel brothers’ essay, written as dialogue form and aphorism, ‘precludes systematization and reminds us of an older meaning of “essay”: a tentative approach to a subject that laid the foundations of the German Romantic theory of literature’.37 Cioran was aware of this praxis of the essay (otherwise described by Dillon as the aspiration ‘to express the quintessence or crux of its matter’ doubled by an insistence on impartiality38) and, as a connoisseur of German Romanticism, often alluded to this tradition. In an analysis of the fragment, Camelia Elias contends that Cioran’s writing can be entered by passing across ‘the threshold of the back door, which is the fragment’.39 Indeed, we cannot ignore the fragment when talking about Cioran’s essay, since the philosopher had declared to Laurence Tâcu, ‘I’m an author of fragments.’40 For Elias,

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Cioran’s fragments are characterized by subtlety. I agree with her and link the subtlety of his fragment to the attention Cioran gave to language, which made him a stylist who was very preoccupied with Mallarmé’s ‘pure, abstract language’.41 After a failed attempt to translate Mallarmé into Romanian, he set about writing his first book in French: A Short History of Decay, which although written in another language, and intended as a philosophy book concerned with several major twentieth-century issues (human progress, fanaticism and science), soon falls back on both the form of short titled essays of three to four paragraphs from his major Romanian book On the Heights of Despair,42 as well as on its lyricism. Cioran’s lyricism makes me go back to Atkins’s characterization of the essay as an ‘intellectual poem’, a term György Lukács used for the essay, following Friedrich Schlegel.43 Both Romanian and French scholars validate Cioran’s essay as poetry: while Nicolae Florescu calls Cioran ‘a poet of the idea in Romanian literature’,44 Sylvain David notes that Cioran follows Nietzsche in the latter’s attempt at ‘“pillaging” poetry’s material in order to give back a little vigor to philosophy’,45 which is confirmed by Cioran’s own allusions to poetry in characterizing one of his essays, Syllogismes de l’amertume, as ‘bits of sonnets, poetical ideas, annihilated by derision’.46 Howard’s choice for translating this title was All Gall Is Divided, and the added subtitle The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast, equated through his translation ‘syllogism’ to an ‘aphorism’ essentialized to paradox. Cioran was convinced that the aphorism which is short and does not explain is the best form to express the refusal of integration into any system or dominant order of thought.47 He confessed in his Notebooks, ‘I loathe developing, explicating, commenting, emphasizing; I loathe everything that is reminiscent of the philosopher, therefore of the professor.’48 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘aphorism’ comes from the Greek ἀϕορισµός (aphorismós): ‘distinction, definition’, itself from ἀϕορίζειν (aphorizein): ‘to define’, ‘to lay down determinate propositions’.49 A fuller definition of ἀφορίζειν can be found in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s A Greek–English Lexicon: ‘to lean toward limiting, end-stopping, pronouncing a halt’; ἀφορίζειν is composed of ᾰ̓πό (apo-): ‘from, away from’ and ὁρίζειν (horizein): ‘to divide, separate, bound’, hence the word ‘horizon’, or ‘bounding (circle)’.50 For Andrew Hui, the aphorism remains connected to the horizon which ‘beckons the promise of hope’, a horizon ‘always visible yet never tangible’.51 With Cioran, finitude is likewise visible but not tangible. He held the view that ‘[t]he aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words’.52 Thus, for Cioran, who related all genres to failure, aphorism became hope. Several theorists have discussed the similarities between the essay and the aphorism. Ben Grant suggests that the essay may conceived as ‘an expanded aphorism’ or, conversely, ‘the aphorism as a miniature essay’.53 Dillon notes a genetic relationship between the two, adding that the essayist’s predilection is to accumulate disparate material whose connections are not immediately visible but rather left for the reader to develop.54 R. Eric Tippin shows that the essay and the aphorism express ‘doubt formed through certainty’ and often have in common a writing ‘I’.55 Linking the two, he shows that even when referring to past events ‘I’ has a voice that can be located in the present.56 Cioran’s favorite tense is Present, which imparts to his aphorism morphological features such as discontinuity and a significant number of repetitions. Let us consider one example from Tears and Saints, whose title alludes to the Catholic tradition of the ‘gift of tears’: penitential, purifying tears, tears of love or

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compassion that saints wept for the Passion of Christ (the last being the characteristic feature of Western European mysticism, a symbol of the passive experience of God’s presence):57 * My Lord, without you I’m mad, and with you I shall go mad! * Love for mankind renders saints uninteresting. Their virtue has no biographical interest. When we talk of love, only God can make us ward off banality. . . . * Without the voluptuousness of suffering, saintliness would not interest us any more than a medieval political intrigue in some little provincial town. Suffering is man’s only biography; its voluptuousness, the saint’s.58 These discontinuous aphorisms comprising Cioran’s unfinished, controversial, both mystical and blasphemous dialogue with God lack structure but are fluid because of the use of repetition. The small enunciations broken by white spaces and graphically separated on the page are linked: whereas in the first aphorism Cioran talks about his controversial relation to God (his need to believe versus his unbelief), in the second one he returns to God but in relation to saints, and in the third he picks up where he left off: his unfinished remark on saints. Throughout the whole book, written as a group of mini-essays varying from two lines to several pages that remind us of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Cioran pendulates in the space of a single page from supreme admiration for the saints to the fierce denial of divinity. At this point, a few considerations on the relation between Cioran and Nietzsche are necessary, since on the one hand, Cioran’s interest in philosophy originates from a concern with experience, which came from Nietzsche, and, on the other hand, Cioran cultivated aphorism, which for Nietzsche was ‘the object for his model of an “art of exegesis”’.59 For Sontag ‘the “fact” of Nietzsche has undeniable consequences for Cioran’.60 Indeed, in some of his Romanian texts, Cioran chose similar titles to Nietzsche’s (Twilight of Thoughts alludes to Götzen-Dämmerung), or built on Nietzsche’s concepts (Tears and Saints concludes that the will to power by aspiring to knowledge through love ultimately results in a ‘meaningful nothingness’61). Moreover, Cioran shared ‘Nietzsche’s aversion to systems’.62 Nietzsche had stated, ‘I do not write treatises: these are for jackasses and magazine readers.’63 Equally unsatisfied with treatises, after writing his BA thesis on Bergson, the young philosophy student Emil Cioran ‘began to switch his allegiance to the Nietzschean model of philosophy conceived as attack and provocation’.64 However, Nietzsche remained a ‘passion’ of Cioran’s youth, which later lapsed.65 Cioran asserted his independence from Nietzsche: ‘we loved Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown-show . . . Thanks to the maturity of our cynicism, we have ventured further than he.’66 The distancing from Nietzsche appears with more clarity in The Trouble with Being Born, a summum of aphorisms between two and twelve lines,

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where the philosopher alluded to Nietzsche’s ‘naïveté’ in demolishing ‘idols only to replace them with others’.67 The essay that suggests that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth avoids Nietzsche’s writing style, which Cioran described as ‘prolix padding, diffused’ in Cahiers.68 In The Trouble with Being Born Cioran made a sort of bet with himself: everything he affirmed he also denied, as if ‘in him coexisted permanently and about all subjects the affirmer and the negator, the ideologue and one who contests him, the pleader and the judge, in an eternal contradictory soliloquy’,69 a modality of the essayistic that is very much connected to the autobiographical element.

The Autobiographical In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack proposes a ‘[r]eading for the “writer’s presence”’ that ‘involves following the ways the writing “I” makes sense – explicitly or implicitly – of the experiences recounted or constructed as evidence in the essay’.70 Cioran’s belief was that philosophy was ‘the personal task of the thinker’71 and, accordingly, the writer’s presence is felt throughout his whole work. Cioran’s practice of philosophy is related to a disguised ‘I’. From this perspective, a discussion on how the performative function of writing and how many of Cioran’s themes relate to the biographical in a veiled manner can offer an instrumental contribution to analyzing the relation between philosophy and the essay in the twentieth century, when other thinkers included the personal in a veiled manner in their works.72 Following Good’s and Carl H. Klaus’s thinking of the self in the essay and Paul de Man’s conception of autobiography as a mode of reading in which the reader becomes ‘the judge, the policing power in charge of verifying the authenticity of the signature and the consistency of the signer’s behavior’,73 this section will verify the authenticity of Cioran’s signature, since my claim is that Cioran’s self was rather disguised in/ through his writings. The personal or autobiographical essay that scholars like Klaus, Good and Phillip Lopate have theorized takes at its center the concept of the self. Klaus contends that the voice in a personal essay often seems so engaging that it leads one to feel in touch with something animate and sentient beyond the essay – a human presence, or some aspect thereof, that for lack of a better word one may refer to as the essayist, or the mind of the essayist, or the personality of the essayist, or the persona of the essayist.74 For Lopate, the core of the ‘personal essay’ lies in its ‘intimacy’.75 Good thinks that the self holds together ‘the unsorted “wholeness” of experience’ that the essay represents and ‘the essayist’s truths are “for me” and “for now”, personal and provisional’.76 If Montaigne wrote, ‘I am myself the substance of my book’,77 Cioran asserted, ‘All my books are more or less autobiographical – rather abstract form of autobiography, I admit.’78 In order to explain the nature of this abstraction and to look into its textual and conceptual effects, I turn to de Man’s thought-provoking study on autobiography, which offers a very useful tool to deconstruct the presence of the writer. De Man’s equation of prosopopoeia with ‘the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name . . . is made as intelligible and memorable as a face’ is very apt for my exploration of Cioran’s ways of ‘the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration

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and disfiguration’.79 Prosopopoeia (from the Greek πρόσωπον/prosopon: ‘face, person’, and ποιεῖν/poiein: ‘to make’) is ‘a rhetorical figure by which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting’ or ‘by which an inanimate or abstract thing is represented as a person, or with personal characteristics’.80 According to Jean Lallot, ‘[s]ince Homer, prosôpon [πρόσωπον], etymologically “what is opposite the gaze”, has designated the human “face” . . ., and synecdochically, the whole “person” bearing the face’.81 As a compound, prosopopoiein (πϱоσωπо-πоιεῖν) means ‘“to compose in direct discourse,” that is, to make the characters speak themselves’.82 Cioran often used the pronoun ‘I’ in alternation with ‘you’ or ‘he’ as a rhetorical device to de-face himself and to introduce to the readers what Klaus calls the ‘Chameleon “I”’.83 For example: Have you ever had the brutal and amazing satisfaction of looking at yourself in the mirror after countless sleepless nights? Have you suffered the torment of insomnia, when you count the minutes for nights on end, when you feel alone in this world, when your drama seems to be the most important in history and history ceases to have meaning, ceases to exist? When the most terrifying flames grow in you and your existence appears unique and isolated in a world made only for the consummation of your agony?84 The sleepless nights are not those of an impersonal ‘you’, but the recollection of his own chronic insomnia, ‘a tragedy that has lasted many years’.85 Presenting his thoughts and divagations as someone else’s makes his life story mutable to someone who changes further from ‘you’ to ‘he’, sending a hint to the intelligent reader: ‘Whoever has seen his face grotesquely disfigured can never forget it, because he will always be afraid of himself.’86 One of the textual effects of disguising ‘I’ as a ‘you/he’ is that the essayist can freely jump from one experience to another, exactly in the order that he perceived them, which is completely aleatory: When you master your fever, you arrange your thoughts like puppets; you pull ideas by the string and the public does not deny itself illusion. But when you look inside yourself and you see nothing but fires and shipwrecks, when the inner landscape is a sumptuous devastation of flames that glide on the horizon of seas, then you set your thoughts, tormented columns of epileptic inner fire, in motion.87 ‘You’ actually shows the constant preoccupation with his self, portraying his own cogitations, thus in keeping with Montaigne’s definition of the essay as having at its center the self as an object of his thoughts. An incursion into some details of Cioran’s biography will perhaps help us understand his praxis of the essay as self-defacement. For Costica Bradatan, ‘Cioran did not content himself with being a distant observer of failure’ but he practiced it ‘in style’.88 Almost every detail of Cioran’s biography is related to failure. As a student, Cioran belonged to a group of Romanian intellectuals89 who ‘ostentatiously styled themselves the “Young Generation”’;90 many were also part of the cultural group Criterion, which organized public events (conferences, symposia, art exhibitions) in Bucharest (1932–34).91 Cioran’s model was his professor Nae Ionescu from the University of Bucharest, whose lectures were either plagiarized or improvised on

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the spot. In 1933 Cioran was awarded a fellowship to study in Berlin where he failed to see Hitler’s ascension to power and the national-socialist experiment as the future of a European nightmare.92 After a failed attempt to teach philosophy at Andrei-Şaguna High School in Braşov (1936), where he shared with his pupils that ‘there is no such thing as morality’,93 Cioran left for Paris on a doctoral fellowship (1937), never returning to Romania except for a short trip, yet never writing his PhD thesis either. Assuming his academic failure and embarking on ‘both a cultural and linguistic self-exile’,94 he signed his first book in French as E. M. Cioran, which does not designate Emil(e) Michel (as the Library of Congress mistakenly lists him), but in order to allude to an anonymous identity, like that of E. M. Forster.95 Cioran’s revelation that ‘[a] book is a postponed suicide’96 made many scholars regard his work as therapy. For me, Cioran’s writing is rather apotropaic, his sense of autobiography deflective and invested with ‘the power of averting evil influence or ill luck’.97 In order to show how Cioran managed to turn away harm or evil influences (the political passions of his youth, his thoughts on suicide), deflecting them within his essays, I return to Klaus’s thoughts on the essay and de Man’s on autobiography. Klaus writes, ‘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’.98 De Man’s essay ends on a revealing argument: ‘Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.’99 Both assertions are important in order to show how the essayist manages to include introspection and reflexive action by disguising his different selves that via role-playing invite the reader into the personal reflections of the essayist. Cioran’s philosophical essay wards off evil, including that in himself by appointing different roles to his self. As Bradatan also showed: For Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a distinctive performative function: you write not to produce some body of text, but to act upon yourself; to bring yourself together after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend.100 Cioran was aware how much he failed in his articles and in The Transfiguration of Romania, whose anti-Semitic comments he excised in its second edition. His subsequent essays contain no comments on politics, to which he had become immune, and can be interpreted as autoimmunity rather than writing as cure: When you detest someone to the point of wanting to liquidate him, the best thing is to take a sheet of paper and to write on it any number of times that X is a bastard, a fool, a monster, and you will immediately discover that you hate him less . . . This is more or less what I did with regard to myself and the world. The Précis I drew from my lower depth in order to insult life and insult myself. The result? I have endured myself a little better, as I have better endured life.101 Cioran makes it explicit that the ‘he’ in his text is nobody else but himself: after his profound failure of thought, he exiled himself from his own country, language and ideas, against which he created his own antibodies that identified, attacked and finally

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destroyed evil. Yet autoimmunity can sometimes attack the body’s own organs. In the 1990s Cioran fell ill with Alzheimer’s and started to forget who he was. Bradatan relates that once a passer-by asked him, ‘“Are you Cioran by any chance?” His answer was: “I used to be.”’102 Cioran’s last years were spent in the Broca Hospital in Paris. Calinescu mentions that Zarifopol-Johnston wrote in her diary after a visit to the hospital that Simone Boué constantly attempted to remind him of the books he had written.103 In these last years, the ‘I’ underwent increasing defacement. In one of his rare moments of lucidity, according to Bradatan, ‘he whispered to himself “C’est la démission totale”’ [It is total resignation].104

Conclusions: Essay as Philosophy, Philosophy as Essay Although Cioran never theorized the essay, his entire work engaged with the relation between philosophy and the essay. Cioran’s essay involves both the transcendent and the immanent world of ideas, without claiming to formulate general truths, but rather those that resulted from his personal experiences. These features, alongside the permanent refusal of the systematicity of the philosophical treatise, can be regarded as Cioran’s original way of practicing philosophy in and through the essay. His work reflects the disguised ontology of a modern philosopher who followed the traditions of the skeptics, especially Pyrrhonism, those of Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, while also being an ardent admirer of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralistes. Cioran’s praxis of essay writing always blends in a spectacularly lyrical, lacunose formula that brings to mind not only philosophy but also literature. This chapter has endeavored to demonstrate that although the philosopher-essayist Cioran is less known in the English-speaking world, he deserves a place among other illustrious twentieth-century philosopher-essayists, philosophers and theorists such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Michel Foucault who intertwined the essay with the philosophical throughout their whole works or in some of their works, cultivating the essay as a hybrid form of brinkmanship that goes beyond any fixed genre. If I were to synthesize Cioran’s contribution to the essay in one sentence, I would say that he mainly transformed the essay into the art form of an anguished philosopher who ‘deplored any shallow schematism, any frozen philosophical formula’.105 Cioran’s Anathemas and Admirations contains a note on his rereading his first, important text, On the Heights of Despair. Rereading this essay provoked the following thoughts in him: ‘Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow.’106 Although Cioran’s rereading of his book is a reflection coming from the writer who wrote it, I would like to look at this assertion from the perspective of the reader. The reader who engages with Cioran’s philosophical essay at times may experience the sensation of being drained, or at least bearing witness to unsurmountable intellectual impasses, to shocking declarations that always return to themes such as despair, loneliness, death, insomnia, suicide. Yet, at the same time, paradoxically, Cioran’s reader is always offered a salvation, a liberation which lies precisely there where Cioran wants his reader to climb to in his attempt to ward off evil: ‘on the heights

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of despair’. Perhaps this is the best of the many other possible reasons why Cioran’s philosophical essay is certainly worth reading and thinking of in the twenty-first century as well. Once readers have finished reading one of Cioran’s volumes, they will always return to reread one sentence or paragraph that remains imprinted on their mind once they have closed the book.

Notes   1. These remarks were uttered by a member of the Assemblée Nationale four years after Cioran’s death. See Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, with a foreword by Matei Calinescu (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 6. Cioran’s Romanian works include: Pe culmile disperării [On the heights of despair, 1934], Schimbarea la faţă a României [The transfiguration of Romania, 1936], Cartea amăgirilor [The book of deceptions, 1936], Lacrimi şi sfinti [Tears and saints, 1937], Amurgul gândurilor [The twilight of thoughts, 1940], Ȋndreptar pătimaş [The passionate handbook, volume 1/2, 1991/2011] and Despre Franţa [About France, 2011]. His French works are: Précis de décomposition [A short history of decay, 1949], Syllogismes de l’amertume [All gall is divided, 1952], Le tentation d’exister [The temptation to exist, 1956], Histoire et utopie [History and utopia, 1960], La chute dans le temps [The fall into time, 1964], Le mauvais démiurge [The evil demiurge, 1969], De l’incovénient d’être né [The trouble with being born, 1973], Écartèlement [Drawn and quartered, 1979], and Exercices d’admiration (1986) and Aveux et anathèmes (1987), grouped together and translated as Anathemas and Admirations. In this chapter, all translations from Romanian, French and German are mine if not otherwise indicated.   2. Marc Lits, ‘Cioran, E. M.’, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 382–85; Marc Lits, ‘Cioran, Emil Michel: Philosopher, Essayist’, in Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 137–39; Alan R. Pratt, ‘Cioran Emil M.’, in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, ed. Tom Flynn (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 192–93; Susan Sontag, introduction to The Temptation to Exist, by E. M. Cioran, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 7–29.   3. Lits, ‘Cioran, Emil Michel’, 137.   4. Lits, ‘Cioran, E. M.’, 382.   5. Sontag, introduction to Temptation to Exist, 12.   6. G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 149.   7. Ibid., 149, italics in original.   8. Ibid., 152.  9. Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London and New York: Routledge), 7. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Ibid., 4, italics in original. 13. Donald A. Crosby, ‘Nihilism’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, Nihilism to Quantum Mechanics, ed. Edward Craig (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–5 (3, italics in original). 14. Willis G. Regier, ‘Cioran’s Insomnia’, MLN 119, no. 5 (December 2004): 994–1012 (995, 996). 15. For Cioran’s themes, see Ionel Necula, Cioran, scepticul nemântuit [Cioran, the unsaved sceptic] (Tecuci: Demiurg, 1995); Emil Stan, Cioran. Vitalitatea renunțării [Cioran: The

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vitality of renunciation] (Iaşi: Institutul European, 2005); Nicolae Turcan, Cioran sau excesul ca filosofie [Cioran or the excess as philosophy] (Cluj: Limes, 2008); and Ion Dur, Cioran: A Dionysiac with the Voluptuousness of Doubt, trans. Ian and Ann Marie Browne (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019). 16. E. M. Cioran, ‘Entretien avec Fritz J. Raddatz’, in E. M. Cioran, Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 175. 17. Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 72. 18. E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, with a foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 4, italics in original. 19. Erin Plunkett, ‘The Essay as Phenomenology’, in The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 23–36 (25). 20. For more on Nietzsche and skepticism, see Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Katrina Mitcheson, ‘Scepticism and Self-Transformation in Nietzsche – On the Uses and Disadvantages of a Comparison to Pyrrhonian Scepticism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2017): 63–83. 21. Plunkett, ‘Essay as Phenomenology’, 24. 22. See Cioran in Gabriel Liiceanu and Sorin Ilieșiu, Apocalipsa după Cioran [The apocalypse after Cioran] (Bucharest: Studioul Video Dialog al G.D.S., 1995); available also as a CD, Bucharest: Humanitas Multimedia, 2003, 32:41–35:00. This is Cioran’s last interview, which was filmed for three days in a row in June 1990 in Cioran’s attic on Rue de l’Odéon. It was also published as a book: Gabriel Liiceanu, Itinerariile unei vieţi: E. M. Cioran; Apocalipsa după Cioran [The itineraries of a life: E. M. Cioran; The apocalypse after Cioran] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011). 23. Keith Hitchins, ‘Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the West’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 15, no. 3 (2010): 9–26 (10–11). 24. Sontag, introduction to Temptation to Exist, 11. 25. Matei Calinescu, foreword to Searching for Cioran, xv–xix (xv). 26. Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 7. 27. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71 (161). 28. Ibid., 159. 29. Lits, ‘Cioran, E. M.’, 382. 30. Sontag, introduction to Temptation to Exist, 11. 31. Florin Oprescu, ‘E. M. Cioran and the Self-Image of the Modern Philosopher in the Broken Mirror’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 71 (2013): 182–88 (183). 32. Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (New York: New York Review Books, 2018), 17. 33. Cioran, Temptation to Exist, 111, translation modified. 34. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 41. 35. Ibid., 139n31. 36. Ibid., 43. 37. Hans Eichner, ‘Athenäum’, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, 73–74 (74). 38. Dillon, Essayism, 17. 39. Camelia Elias, The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 146. 40. E. M. Cioran, ‘Je suis un auteur à fragments’, in Les Cahiers de L’Herne: Emil Cioran, ed. Laurence Tâcu and Vincent Piednoir (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2009), 345–68 (345). 41. Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 207.

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42. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 43. György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock, ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 16–34 (34). 44. Nicolae Florescu, ‘Precizări editoriale’ [Editorial notes], in Razne [Feats of delirium], by Emil Cioran, ed. Nicolae Florescu (Bucharest: Jurnalul literar, 1995), 38. 45. Sylvain David, Cioran: Un héroïsme à rebours (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2006), 90. 46. E. M. Cioran, Cahiers, 1957–1972 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 29. 47. I phrase my sentence following one of Ralph W. Buechler’s definitions of aphorism. Ralph W. Buechler, ‘Aphorism’, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, 54–56 (55). 48. Cioran, Cahiers, 507. 49. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (CD-ROM, version 4.0.0.2, 2009), s.v. ‘aphorism’. 50. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 8th rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), s.v. ‘ᾰ̓πό’, ‘ὁρίζ-ειν’, ‘ἀφορίζω’. 51. Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019), 16. 52. E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2019), 7, italics in original. 53. Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (London: Routledge, 2016), 68. 54. See Dillon, Essayism, 23–28. 55. R. Eric Tippin, ‘At the Limits of Fixité: The Essay and the Aphorism’, in Essay at the Limits, 169–81 (180, italics in original). 56. Ibid. 57. See Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 129. 58. E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8–9, italics in original. 59. Joel Westerdale, Nietzsche’s Aphoristic Challenge (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2013), 6. 60. Susan Sontag, ‘“Thinking Against Oneself”: Reflections on Cioran’, in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 74–95 (81, italics in original). Reprinted as introduction to Temptation to Exist, 14, without the italicized adjective. Sontag’s junction was reinforced by Clément Rosset, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnson, Sanda Stolojan, Fernando Savater, Lucia Gorgoi and Patrice Bollon. See Willis G. Regier, ‘Cioran’s Nietzsche’, French Forum 30, no. 3 (2005): 75–90 (75). To Regier’s list, I add Vincent Piednoir’s Cioran avant Cioran: Histoire d’une transfiguration (Marseille: Éditions Gaussen, 2013); Christian Moraru, who speaks of ‘Nietzschean Cioran thought’ in ‘Reading, Writing, Being: Persians, Parisians, and the Scandal of Identity’, symplokē 17, no. 1–2 (2009): 247–53 (251); and Joseph Acquisto, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 61. Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 131. 62. Hui, Theory of the Aphorism, 164. 63. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 11, Nachlass 1884–5, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV/De Gruyter, 1980), 579. 64. Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 71. 65. Gabriel Liiceanu, Itinéraires d’une vie: E. M. Cioran suivi de ‘Les continents de l’insomnie’: entretien avec E.M. Cioran (Paris: Éditions Michalon, 1995), 27–29. 66. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, 35–36. 67. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1988), 85. 68. See Cioran, Cahiers, 659.

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69. Patrice Bollon, Cioran, l’hérétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 150. I am using Acquisto’s translation from Acquisto, Fall Out of Redemption, 125. 70. Nicole B. Wallack, Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2017), 58. 71. Sontag, introduction to Temptation to Exist, 12. 72. Blanchot would perhaps be the first who comes to mind, although in his case the veiled manner of writing essays was slightly different, via passivity–passion–the neuter. See, for instance, Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989; Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lynette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–44. On the explicit connection between passivity, passion and the neuter in Blanchot, see Arleen Ionescu, ‘Pas-de-noms/ Plus de noms. Derrida and Blanchot’, Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 1, no. 1 (2011): 59–69 and Cosmin Toma, ‘D’un espace neutre’, Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 5, no. 1–2 (2015): 151–68. 73. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94, no. 5 (December 1979): 919–30 (923, italics in original). 74. Carl H. Klaus, The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 46. 75. Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), xxiii–liv (xxiii). 76. Good, Observing Self, 8. 77. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 23, italics in original. 78. Cioran, ‘A Note on the Author’, in Temptation to Exist, 223. 79. De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, 926. 80. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘prosopopeia’. 81. See Jean Lallot, ‘Prosôpon, persona: From Theater to Grammar’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski, trans. and ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11. 82. Ibid., 11. 83. Klaus, Made-Up Self, 45. 84. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 18. 85. See Cioran’s confessions to Michael Jakob in Cioran, Entretiens, 291, 287 and in Liiceanu and Ilieșiu, Apocalipsa după Cioran, CD, 38:36–39:00. See also his references to Nietzsche and Mallarmé, who also suffered from insomnia, in E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, trans. Richard Howard, with a foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 111. 86. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 19. 87. Emil Cioran, Amurgul gândurilor (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1991), 19. In this quotation, the phrase ‘in motion’ can be related to the rhythmic phrases used in the passage (even more obvious in the Romanian original than in the translation that I need to use for the Englishspeaking readers of this chapter). ‘Movement of a free mind at play’ is Cynthia Ozick’s term from a more contemporary conversation about essaying, where she defines the liberty of the essayist who is ‘free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought’. Cynthia Ozick, ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 151, 155. Cioran subscribes to thought ‘in motion’, ‘in process’, or, to allude to Roland Barthes, in ‘movement’, via the strategy of portraying himself as another.

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  88. Costica Bradatan, ‘The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair’, Los Angeles Review of Books, November 28, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ philosopher-failure-emil-ciorans-heights-despair/.   89. They included the historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–86), the playwright of theatre of the absurd Eugène Ionesco (1909–94), philosophers Mircea Vulcănescu (1904–52) and Nae Ionescu (1890–1940), their mentor, who taught them to experience life, which was the Romanian version of existentialism, named trăirism (from a trăi, to live).   90. Hitchins, ‘Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the West’, 10.   91. For the difference between the ‘Young Generation’ and the Criterion Association, which many ignored, including Hitchins, see Cristina A. Bejan, Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).   92. See, for instance, his article on how Hitler ‘instilled enthusiasm with a messianic breath in the whole field of values that democratic rationalism had made plain and trivial’. Emil Cioran, ‘Impresii din München. Hitler în conştiinţa germană’ [Impressions from Munich: Hitler in German consciousness], Vatra 7–8 (2004): 52. Originally published in Vremea 7, no. 346 (July 15, 1934). For Cioran’s fascist past, see Marta Petreu, Un trecut deocheat sau ‘Schimbarea la faţă a României’ (Cluj: Apostrof, 1999); Nicole Parfait, Cioran ou le défi de l’être [Cioran or the challenge of being] (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2001); Paul A. Shapiro, ‘Faith, Murder, Resurrection: The Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church’, in Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, ed. Kevin P. Spicer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 136–70; Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘The Metapolitics of Despair: Romania’s Mystical Generation and the Passions of Emil Cioran’, in Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators, and the Totalitarian Temptation, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2019), 209–34; and Arleen Ionescu, ‘Language as Becoming: The Cases of Self-Translation of Samuel Beckett and E. M. Cioran’, in The Time Is Now: Essays on the Philosophy of Becoming, ed. Mihaela Gligor (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2020), 63–92.   93. See Nicolas Cavaillès, ‘Chronologie’, in Cioran, Œuvres, ed. Nicolas Cavaillès, with the collaboration of Aurélien Demars (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), xxxi–lvi (xxxvii).   94. Thacker, foreword to Short History of Decay, vii–ix (viii).   95. See Cavaillès, ‘Chronologie’, xliii; Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, 8, 245n14.  96. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 99.  97. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘apotropaic’.   98. Carl H. Klaus, ‘Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay’, in Essayists on the Essay, xvi–xxvii (xxv).   99. De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, 930. 100. Bradatan, ‘Philosopher of Failure’. 101. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, 254. 102. Bradatan, ‘Philosopher of Failure’. 103. Calinescu, foreword to Searching for Cioran, xix. 104. Ibid. 105. Tismaneanu, ‘Metapolitics of Despair’, 229. 106. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, 254.

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21 Science Essays Dirk Vanderbeke

I

n 1993, a volume of essays was published, discussing, inter alia, the importance, style, narrativity, rhetoric and impact of a single controversial scientific paper, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin’s ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’.1 Gould himself contributed an essay in which he addressed the paper’s historical context but also included sub-chapters with ‘Some Personal Thoughts and Admissions’ and ‘Random (and Therefore Nonadaptive) Jottings on Commentaries’. One of the aspects he stresses is the specific language, rhetoric and imagery chosen for the argument: Something . . . about ‘Spandrels’ is decidedly unusual, even provocative: its style – particularly its metaphors, literary and cultural allusions, and brashly personal language. . . . This does fly in the face of the most cherished and widely obeyed convention that good science is impersonal and that the intrusion of self can only denote partiality and attendant flawed reasoning.2 He later adds, ‘Scientists, for the most part, simply do not acknowledge that the form and language of an argument (as opposed to its logic and empirical content) could have anything to do with its effectiveness.’3 At the end of the essay, he returns to this point and once more emphasizes the role of style: I believe that the success of ‘Spandrels’ arises not so much from its ‘pure’ science, or even from the logic of its argument, but most of all from its rhetoric (in the honorable, not the pejorative, sense) and its humanistic imagery. The very aspect of writing that rhetoricians treasure and analyze, but that we scientists ignore and disparage, has caught our colleagues unawares and won attention for ‘Spandrels.’4 The uncommon features of ‘Spandrels’ that Gould addresses, that is the figurative and personal language, the use of rhetoric and an eloquent style, are frequently associated with the essay, and, following his argument, the juxtaposition of science and the essay in the title of my own contribution to this volume may indicate an oxymoron or, at least, an exception from very rigid rules. After all, William H. Gass made it quite clear that a certain scientific or philosophical rigor is . . . foreign to the essay; ill-suited, as when a brash young student challenges even one’s most phatic observations on the weather with demands for clarity, precision, and proof.5

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Graham Good, in his preface to Encyclopedia of the Essay, concedes that the essay plays a role at the origins of academic disciplines, but then relegates it to ‘the margins of science, as a vehicle either for unorthodox speculations or for communicating some of science’s results to a non-specialist audience’.6 While I certainly agree on the significance of the essay at the beginning of the disciplines and for the public understanding of science, on the following pages I want to demonstrate that the essay has remained an important form within the scientific debate, supplementing the research article and serving various functions that exceed the pursuit of unconventional ideas or the transfer of scientific knowledge to interested laypeople. It is, of course, utterly impossible to offer an exhaustive survey of the role and significance of the essay in science over the last 400 years in just a few pages. In consequence, I have to focus on some aspects and examples, on a few authors, and on those historical situations that I consider to be of particular interest – which leads to the obvious corollary that I have to omit all the other features, writers and times which, if seen from a different perspective, would be as relevant and momentous as the ones I have chosen. Moreover, the selection of topics and authors to some extent reflects my own knowledge of the sciences and the disciplines I have investigated in my work on ‘science and literature’. For this I apologize, and I hope that the fragments and general outlines I can offer will nevertheless serve as a pars pro toto or a useful, if still sketchy map of a territory that ought to be charted in detail.7 *** Scientific writing famously strives for strict objectivity and thus a complete detachment and neutrality of the scientist. It presents evidence-based facts that do not require rhetorical forms of persuasion like invention and eloquence, and thus it employs a language that shuns linguistic artfulness and the intrusion of personal perspectives and subjective experience. The rejection of literary style in scientific writing goes back to the origins of modern science. In Novum Organon (The New Organon), Francis Bacon launched a critique of language as the idol of the marketplace, unfit for precise knowledge because ‘words retort and turn their force back upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistic and unproductive’.8 The subsequent rejection of rhetoric, or ‘anti-rhetorical rhetoric’ (‘Rhetorik der Anti-Rhetorik’)9 – not only in the budding sciences, but also in other fields of inquiry and even in theological treatises10 – established a hierarchy of styles, with the plain words of reason at the top and the eloquent and ornamental language that evokes passions, fancies and follies at the bottom. Thomas Sprat in The History of the Royal Society suggested that ‘eloquence ought to be banished out of all civil Societies as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners’,11 and praised a close, naked, natural way of Speaking; positive Expressions, clear Senses; a native Easiness; bringing all Things as near the mathematical Plainness as they can; and preferring the Language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.12 However, while the discussion on the proper language of science and the closely related quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns were underway, scientists in the early

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modern era employed the most diverse genres to present their concepts and theories, from fantastic fiction (Johannes Kepler’s Somnium) or dialogues (Giordano Bruno or Galileo Galilei) to letters, treatises, tracts, considerations, reflections, observations, notes, discourses and, of course, essays, without clear distinctions between the various forms, each of which included aspects of essayistic writing. The term ‘essay’ itself covered an enormous range, from Bacon’s short investigations at the end of the sixteenth century into various abstract matters (including ‘fortune’, which in Novum Organon he mentions among ‘things that do not exist’13) to John Locke’s massive An Essay Concerning Human Understanding almost a hundred years later. Indeed, in this ‘Essay’ Locke strongly supported an anti-rhetorical perspective on the language of science and philosophy, and he argued that ‘all the Art of Rhetorick . . . all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat’;14 quite obviously the essay was not considered to be prone to such flaws but rather a suitable form for the serious attempt to pursue scientific and philosophical truth. It is useful, at this point, to take the larger context in consideration in which the new scientific discoveries, practices and methods developed hand in hand with the new forms of communication. The rise of Baconian philosophy coincided with the Copernican revolution, which affected not only the cosmological vision but also our understanding of very simple concepts about movement, weight, space, or up versus down. Words changed their meanings or, rather, it would take some time until, within a new theoretical framework, it could be determined what they now actually meant. The prevailing methods of knowledge production and validation could not resolve the conceptual problems, and a completely new start of inquiry was suggested on the basis of empirical methods and experiential evidence, which had, of course, also been employed to some extent before but now became the dominant practice of scientific research. This turn against the existing body of knowledge was in itself not authoritative but skeptical of the previously accepted truths. Thus, in contrast to the scholastic discussion in which the recourse to classical authorities and scripture served as powerful and even conclusive arguments, the turn towards empiricism and experimental evidence favored argumentative strategies that were in line with some of the features associated with the essay: an account of personal experience and witnessed observation, a skeptical perspective, a preliminary and tentative approach to its subject matter and, in particular, an adherence to the etymology of the term ‘essay’ as an attempt. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in the Transactions of the Royal Society the term ‘essay’ was also used for the ‘action or process of trying and testing’,15 and thus form and content fully coincided. James Paradis writes about the suitability of the essay for the new scientific approach: Its abbreviated structure reflects both a perspectivist world view, empirical in spirit and observational in method, and a skeptical despair of achieving any unified cosmological view. The kind of discursive informalism and ordinary subject matter epitomized by the French familiar essay had immense philosophical appeal for growing scientific interests in seventeenth-century England.16 In his ‘Proemial Essay’, Robert Boyle, one of the most important practical and theoretical scientists and communicators of knowledge in the second half of the seventeenth century

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and my example for this era of scientific writing, launched a critique of the exhaustive systematic books of learning that strove for complete accounts of their respective fields of knowledge. He attributed many of the Deficiencies to be met with in the Theories and Reasonings of such great Wits as Aristotle, Campanella, and some other celebrated Philosophers, chiefly to this very thing, that they have too hastily, and either upon a few Observations, or at least without a competent number of Experiments, presum’d to establish Principles, and deliver Axioms.17 The essay, albeit written in a philosophical rather than a rhetorical style, is presented as the remedy against these deficiencies, as it is based in the observation of particulars, including even seemingly trivial issues, rather than in generalizations, and thus it contributes in small incremental steps to the establishment of general principles but shuns the erection of grand comprehensive theories, which are of necessity only temporal and in need of later correction or improvement;18 Paradis thus suggests that the essay ‘[a]s experiential trial, pass, run, . . . became both literary instrument and emblem of the philosophical abandonment of a cosmological truth of final ends’.19 The preliminary perspective and skepticism are part and parcel of Boyle’s accounts, and he emphasizes that in almost every one of the following Essays I should speak so doubtingly, and use so often, Perhaps, It seems, ’Tis not improbable and such other expressions as argue a diffidence of the truth of the Opinions I incline to, and that I should be so shy of laying down Principles, and sometimes of so much as venturing at Explications.20 And while Paradis describes Boyle’s experimental essay as ‘a rigidly controlled idealization of narrative in which experience is transformed into procedural protocol, individual opinion is sequestered from physical facts, and a formal logical flow is imposed upon the text’,21 the observer has not yet been completely relegated to the detached position of an impartial witness but may also express aesthetic pleasure in the visual experience. In one of his experimental essays on the luminosity of shining (rotting) wood, for example, Boyle writes, ‘partly for greater certainty, and partly to enjoy so delightful a spectacle, we repeated the Experiment’.22 Over the next 200 years – yes, that is a long time to rush through – several fundamental developments took place which had an immense impact on scientific communication. If in the seventeenth century the outlook was often skeptical and cautious, the enormous success of the mechanistic world view allowed for an increasingly assertive attitude until, at the end of the nineteenth century, the end of physics seemed to be drawing near.23 Moreover, the Newtonian world view and the image of a strictly mechanistic clockwork universe, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been used as a confirmation of the prevailing Protestant perspective and the doctrine of predetermination,24 shifted towards a secular scientific outlook that, according to an anecdote attributed to Pierre Simon de Laplace,25 had no need for the hypothesis of divine origins or interference. In addition, the sciences underwent a process of professionalization, even though the pace varied greatly between the different disciplines. The mathematization of physics had already advanced very far in

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the seventeenth century, and thus a rather high level of specialized knowledge and mathematical proficiency was required from its practitioners. Some disciplines, however, only gradually made the transition from a pre-scientific to a scientific approach: alchemy, for example, turned into chemistry; others, like biology or geology, slowly emerged from the religious confines and the requirement to adhere to the literal sense of scripture. Still others, like paleontology, only then came into existence and had to define their foundations and methods. All these developments were not founded merely on detached and unbiased experiments and observations but were also accompanied by extensive discussions and negotiations within the various disciplines and in a debate with their religious, political and cultural environments. These processes were strongly influenced by the personalities, religious and philosophical views, and often also professional and economic situations of the respective scientists. Many of these were amateurs who contributed not only to one but to several fields of inquiry while they actually worked as teachers, parsons or ministers, in administrative positions, in the government, or, if they were members of the aristocracy or gentry, pursued their scientific interests in their ample free time. Ian McEwan wrote about the situation of the nineteenth century that it was the culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. Darwin himself, in pre-Beagle days, dreamed of a country living where he could pursue in peace his collector’s passion, and even in the life that genius and chance got him, Downe House was more parsonage than laboratory.26 The term ‘essay’ during this considerable time span was not well defined and covered a lot of texts that would now be categorized into various genres, from research papers to letters, tracts, treatises, inquiries, recollections and even monographs as, for example, Pierre Simon de Laplace’s A Philosophical Essay Concerning Probabilities, which served as a more accessible book-length introduction to his massive Théorie analytique des probabilités (Analytic Theory of Probability).27 The very difference between the strict format of academic writing and the essay that for many scholars later became a defining aspect of the genre, for example in Theodor W. Adorno’s distinction between the essay and the scientific method,28 rather divided the two modes of the essay into the traditions of Michel de Montaigne and of Bacon which had developed ever since their inception. Tim Milnes writes that in the eighteenth century the genre remains suspended between two postures: in its Montaignean, familiar mood, it tends to be nostalgic and sentimental, attempting to roll back adult certainties to regain a sense of possibility through playful trial; in its more Baconian, systematic mood, it becomes a vehicle for increasingly abstract forms of rationality conducted through rigorously theorized experimental procedures. In the first, the essay offers experiment/experience as a tentative test that engages the trust of the reader as a means of consolidating consensus; in the second, it presents experiment/ experience as scientific method for arriving at truth.29 During the nineteenth century, the professionalization of the sciences progressed and so did the establishment of academic journals. But still, as Diane Dowdey points out,

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‘the majority of scientific information and debate was disseminated in general literary publications’,30 and the texts, in consequence, had to be accessible – and appealing – to an interested audience. Controversial topics were discussed among scientists, but also between scholars from different disciplines or informed laypeople – the impact of Darwinism is, of course, the most prominent example. By the end of the century, however, the disciplines were firmly established within academic institutions and the role of the amateur scientists had decreased. Most of the sub-disciplines that we now consider to be pseudo-sciences, but which had been seriously explored at the time, for example mesmerism or spiritism,31 had been shed, and, as already mentioned, for a brief time it seemed to be possible that science was on its way to a complete understanding of natural phenomena. Of course, this did not come to pass, and the history of the sciences now appears as a pattern in which times of consolidation and crisis alternate. Theories and scientific world views are established but also challenged, either on the basis of new and conflicting observations or because an alternative theoretical framework allows for more conclusive, productive, simpler or even more aesthetic approaches to the respective phenomena. Within these processes the essay is an important, possibly the most important text form for self-reflexive assessment of scientific developments, of orientation and reorientation, of general and individual achievements, of evaluations and revaluations, and of programmatic outlooks and the search for new venues of research. In essays, scientists locate their work and its relevance within the momentary state of the art of their own discipline but also within larger philosophical contexts and systems, they ask questions about the foundations of their disciplines, they explore the significance of specific ideas and proposals, they explain their own tenets and the rationale of their approaches and, of course, they contribute to ongoing discussions and, occasionally, also to the controversies and conflicts that are a perennial part of the scientific debate. As it is not possible to address a representative sample of essays, I want to offer only a single description of the essays of one important scientist, Henri Poincaré, by a historian of mathematics. Jeremy Gray writes: If a single theme unites these essays and explains their enduring charm, it is Poincaré’s concern with how we can be said to know things, and the consequent limitations on that knowledge. It is this that makes them more than popular survey articles, and has kept them from being too severely dated. As he ranges over logic, mathematics, physics, psychology, and metaphysics . . . there were two pillars of knowledge for Poincaré: mathematical theorems and accepted scientific experiments. His novelty lies in his exploration of the space between these pillars, which calls for analysis and elucidation. Where others, and surely his readers, rushed in with confidence, Poincaré feared to tread. His message was ambiguity.32 Of particular importance for scientific revision and the examination of foundations and assumptions are the historical times of transition and change, which may involve particular sciences, but possibly also larger scientific contexts. Such changes, which usually follow a perceived crisis, can be fairly swift, but also extend over decades and even more than a century as, for example, the development of the new scientific method in the seventeenth century or the shift from a religious to a secular framework in the following centuries. The establishment of knowledge within such processes does

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not begin with experimental practice but with tentative speculations and conjectures which then allow for experimental testing. Thomas S. Kuhn suggests that since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease.33 Subsequently, when a promising or convincing solution to the crisis has been found and experimentally tested, the new theoretical framework needs to be formulated, defended against competitors and opponents, integrated into the larger scientific context, negotiated with neighboring disciplines, and, of course, transmitted to the public together with accounts of the respective historical processes and the roles of momentous personalities. And while the experimental research paper does carry the aspect of a trial in its name, the other communicative practices are more prone to employing essayistic elements in their style, rhetoric and arguments. On the basis of this view on scientific developments and practices, I want to suggest three major areas in which the science essay is of particular relevance: times of crisis and paradigm change, personal reflections and memoirs of scientists, and work for the public understanding of science. Of course, they are interwoven and overlap, but it is still useful to look at them separately. I have to add that the essay is certainly not restricted to these three aspects, and that essays, as a form that is distinct from research papers and scientific monographs, remain in general an important element of academic communication. As an example, I want to mention Niels Bohr’s three essays published together in 1922 as The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution, in which he discusses the stages in the development of quantum theory and possible ways to apply it to the concepts and problems of atomic structure. The perspective is still explorative; indeed, Bohr points out that a full explanation in the usual sense is not yet possible, and that the considerations are still incomplete, but then he expresses his hope that ‘the exposition in these essays is sufficiently clear, nevertheless, to give the reader an impression of the peculiar charm which the study of atomic physics possesses just on this account’.34 As already indicated, times of scientific crisis will lead to intense discussions; the ‘proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research’.35 In this list we can detect two strands of intellectual pursuit, the search for a solution and the need to ‘understand’ the solution once it has been found – or seems to have been found. When Copernicus had suggested and Galileo supported the heliocentric model, many tenets of physics had to be abandoned, for example the Aristotelian dictum that movement required a constant force had to be replaced by Newtonian inertia to explain why the planets did not lose momentum and eventually spiral into the sun. Thus, simple elements of everyday knowledge had to be reconsidered and explained on the basis of newly formulated ‘laws of nature’. The problems physicists faced in the early twentieth century – and, to some extent these problems persist until today – were probably even more severe as the new theories, relativity and quantum theory, clashed with our understanding of reality and basic common logic. In his essay, ‘Physics and

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Reality’, Albert Einstein explains that in such times of crisis the scientist may have to enter the domain of philosophy: At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for a new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities.36 In their search for philosophical frameworks that could accommodate and integrate the new experimentally confirmed, but inexplicable phenomena, some of the major proponents of the new theories wrote essays on topics that had for quite some time not been addressed by physicists, for example various forms of mysticism,37 our basic understanding of objective reality,38 the role of consciousness in observation,39 or the possible topicality of ancient philosophy.40 All these texts – and many others of the same time – were attempts, essays in the very literal meaning of the word, to come to terms with the inexplicable, but frustratingly robust discoveries about the sub-atomic world or, in the case of relativity, about the laws that govern the immense forces and distances of the universe. Thomas L. Pangle wrote about Werner Heisenberg’s motivation in writing Physics and Philosophy that he was ‘gripped by a sense of the responsibility of the modern quantum physicist to convey, in language immediately intelligible to the thinking public, his most serious and far-reaching reflections on the metaphysical implications of his scientific work’.41 Within these essays, the scientists re-examined the history of their respective fields of inquiry and the premises on which their previous assumptions were founded, and they explored possible paths that might lead to alternative explanatory models, occasionally with the help of imaginative thought experiments. Arguably, we are at present still in the time between two paradigms. The crisis that started at the very end of the nineteenth century led to the formulation of two solutions, the theory of relativity and quantum theory, which are, however, famously incompatible in some points. As of now, no unified theory has been formulated, and physics is suspended within two theoretical frameworks. Moreover, within quantum theory several explanatory models have been discussed over the last decades; in an essay from 1986 John Bell wrote about ‘Six possible worlds of quantum mechanics’,42 and while new competitors like string theory have joined the field, a solution does not seem to be in sight in the near future. Steven Weinberg wrote – in an essay for a general audience – that according to present knowledge and in the face of its immense success and accuracy in its predictions, ‘the structures we describe in the Standard Model are not going to be the structures of the next fundamental theory in physics’.43 Such an experience of crises, with a momentary or extended deadlock in research and theoretical advancement, with quarrels between competing schools of thought, with the re-examination of foundations and the search for new solutions and venues, is not peculiar to physics but a process that can also be observed within the history of other disciplines. In mathematics, for example, a foundational crisis took place between the 1880s and the 1930s with the rise of counterintuitive mathematical systems like non-Euclidean geometries which no longer perceived mathematics as the language of nature but as

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an independent field of knowledge, unfettered from truth claims about physical reality. The discussion between the different parties, sometimes described as formalists versus intuitionists, was pursued in various textual forms, and Nina Engelhardt points out that the ‘speeches and prose writings of Hilbert and Brouwer [two of the most important protagonists] show that the points of conflict between modernist and counter-modernist orientations were not purely mathematical but that they addressed philosophical questions and included moral arguments’.44 I want to mention one essay by a mathematician, written after the time of the controversy and looking back in a very personal account on a scholar’s life, the tenets and beliefs, the objectives and pleasures of research, the significance and limitations of his discipline. With this example I also move to my next branch of science essays: the recollections and reminiscences that take stock of personal work, successes and failures, and accomplishments, but also examine the discipline from the perspective of the elder scholar who can revalue the earlier discussions and quarrels from a temporal distance. G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology was written in 1940, and C. P. Snow in his foreword describes it as ‘a book of haunting sadness’, ‘witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits’, of ‘crystalline clarity and candour’, ‘the testament of a creative artist’ and, ‘in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again’.45 In this essay Hardy outlines his personal creed; he concedes that ‘there is no sort of agreement about the nature of mathematical reality among either mathematicians or philosophers’, but rejects the idealist notion that mathematical reality is a mental construct and subscribes to the view that it ‘lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it’.46 He discusses the concepts of pure and applied mathematics as distinct from useful or useless mathematics, explains why he considers useful mathematics dull and trivial, and writes: ‘Imaginary’ universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed ‘real’ one; and most of the finest products of an applied mathematician’s fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have been created, for the brutal but sufficient reason that they do not fit the facts.47 Hardy’s essay comprises many of the features that in my view distinguish the science essay from the more general conception of the essay, which is ‘often characterized by its spontaneity, its unpredictability, its very lack of system’.48 In 1921, Charles E. Whitmore wrote, ‘Nowadays we should hardly look for explicit argument in anything properly to be called an essay, or, conversely, should think the appearance of such argument sufficient ground for denying the title.’49 This view obviously does not apply to Hardy’s essay. It is in no way playful, nor is it provisional or exploratory, even if it pursues a personal perspective rather than a conclusive solution. It is serious, austere and focused, strives for accuracy and precision, and it is deeply embedded in a profound knowledge of the discipline it discusses. But it is also driven by a personal voice and by a specific form of eloquence that gains its persuasiveness from the ability to address complex matters in a clear and intelligible style. Like many science essays, Hardy’s Apology is obviously addressed to several audiences simultaneously: his fellow mathematicians and scientists, but also informed and interested laypeople; and he takes pains to keep the discussion, and especially his mathematical examples, accessible to a reader who lacks specialized mathematical knowledge.

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Essayistic memoirs were and are written by a host of scientists, and I want to distinguish them from more usual autobiographical writings, as they do not focus on the life of the scientists but on their recollections of crucial moments in the development of their disciplines, on their involvement and contributions, on the debates and sometimes also quarrels between the participants, and also on the historical significance and meaning of the discoveries and the new ideas they generated. A particular element that is explored in various essays is the very moment in which a new idea, concept, theory or mathematical proof is conceived, leading to the discussion of how ideas are generated, theories found, and scientific discoveries often quite suddenly realized. Already in 1840, William Whewell pointed out ‘that, speaking with strictness, an Art of Discovery is not possible; – that we can give no Rules for the pursuit of truth which shall be universally and peremptorily applicable’,50 and in a BBC talk from 1963, Peter Medawar, quoting Whewell, argued that the traditional form of the academic research paper offers ‘a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries’.51 He then suggested that scientists should not be ashamed to admit, as many of them apparently are ashamed to admit, that hypotheses appear in their minds along uncharted by-ways of thought; that they are imaginative and inspirational in character; that they are indeed adventures of the mind.52 Essays based on the recollections of scientists are among the text forms in which concepts of creativity, of theory formation, but also of the individual experience of the specific circumstances of discovery are pursued. One of the aspects that are quite regularly discussed in this context is the beauty of scientific theories or mathematical equations and the question of how this beauty may be defined and explained. In an essay on ‘The Selection of Facts’, Poincaré wrote: The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of that beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. It is this that gives a body a skeleton, so to speak, to the shimmering visions that flatter our senses, and without this support the beauty of these fleeting dreams would be imperfect, because it would be indefinite and ever elusive. Intellectual beauty, on the contrary, is self-sufficing, and it is for it, more perhaps than for the future good of humanity, that the scientist condemns himself to long and painful labours.53 Similarly, Hardy claimed that: The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.54

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In one of his recollections, Werner Heisenberg offers a detailed account of how in 1925 he went to Heligoland to escape a severe bout of hay fever. This environment obviously helped him to clear his mind from distractions and allowed him to formulate his theoretical problem; and then he describes the moment when he finally arrived at the solution and grasped its implications: At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me.55 For Weinberg, the aesthetics of scientific solutions seems to have become a requirement for theory formation and acceptance within the community. The bias in favor of beauty, however, may also lead to the rejection of theories that lack this property, and in ‘Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist’, he writes, ‘we know that the Standard Model is not the final answer, because of its obvious imperfections – and those imperfections, I have to say, are aesthetic’.56 The opposite view has been argued more recently by Sabine Hossenfelder, who warns that the requirement for beauty may have become an impediment to theory formation and the search for new paths: ‘Beauty is a treacherous guide, and it has led physicists astray many times before’;57 she does, however, point out that the theory she favors, supersymmetry, is, indeed, beautiful.58 Not all the texts I have quoted here – and I could have chosen numerous others as well – are essays. Some started as lectures before they were published, others are monographs, but they are all essayistic in style with a strong personal voice: the recollection of experiences, the discussion of aesthetic properties and their defining features, and the exploration of a perspective and approach that may guide the way to a solution rather than presenting the solution itself. And while the level of specialized knowledge that is required from the respective intended audiences differs, they all address readers beyond the narrow confines of the professional disciplines. This brings me to my next and final branch of, and rationale for, the contemporary science essay: the public understanding of science. For both Graham Good and Diane Dowdey, this aspect has been the primary function and objective of the science essay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and indeed, with the increasing professionalization of the sciences it has become a necessity to transmit the results, concepts, theories and their significance to a public that is no longer able to access the specialized publications and to follow the developments within the disciplines. Of course, there are differences between the fields of inquiry, but in general the style of the academic research paper – involving condensed information, use of mathematics, graphs and tables, and occasionally excessive numbers of references – does not invite perusal by non-scientists. Moreover, the extreme specialization within the sciences and the sheer mass of academic publications makes it increasingly difficult to follow the important work in more than a very small fraction of research. Thus, a specialist in one field will be a layperson in almost all the others, and while solid foundations in mathematics will certainly help to pursue interdisciplinary interests, more general surveys of developments and theoretical issues are required to allow for a relatively comprehensive perspective on the state of the art in ‘the sciences’. Thus,

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the public that needs to be informed consists not only of non-scientists, but also of the academic community outside the discipline in question. There exists a stereotypical view of scientists as living and working in an ivory tower, unaffected by the world outside and completely detached from the problems and concerns of the rest of the population. This image is a caricature at best, and it fails to acknowledge the immense amount of time and energy many scientists, among them some of the most eminent scholars in their respective fields, devote to the transfer of highly specialized and intricate knowledge to the public. Again, the texts are not always strictly essays, and there are quite a few monographs that serve as popularizations of more academic works. I have already mentioned Pierre Simon de Laplace’s A Philosophical Essay Concerning Probabilities as an early example; in the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings was a more accessible version of his highly technical Cybernetics, and Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson followed their massive The Ants (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991) with Journey to the Ants, which ‘condenses the best of myrmecology to a more manageable length, with less technical language and with an admitted and unavoidable bias toward those topics and species on which [they] have personally worked’.59 These texts are essayistic in nature, but again, it is the style of the traditional science essay that is employed with its clarity, austerity, precision and focus on the respective facts and arguments. And then there is, of course, the immense number of science essays in journals and magazines, in semi-academic and even scientific publications, often later collected in books which can be highly successful and even reach bestseller status. I can only name a few of the numerous authors who regularly published science essays: Martin Gardner wrote a huge number of essays not only on science, but also on the debunking of pseudoscience, and he edited a volume titled Great Essays in Science;60 Stephen Jay Gould wrote a monthly essay from 1974 to 2001 for his column ‘A View of Life’ in Natural History; Oliver Sacks regularly contributed essays to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books in which he offered insights into his work and the astonishing and occasionally bizarre effects of neurological disorders; Steven Weinberg published three volumes of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.61 The style of these essays and of recent science essays in general can be very diverse, and while some maintain an austere and serious voice, others employ the quirkiness and unpredictability, the celebration of the seemingly ephemeral, and also the rhetorical finesse that are usually attributed to the essay in its various forms. Of course, science essays of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are not just concerned with the distribution of recent knowledge and updates on new discoveries and scientific programs, but also range over a wide scope of possible topics, discussing specific moments in the history of science, significant but underrated theoretical or practical achievements, momentous but occasionally also neglected or forgotten scholars, the intricacies of specific theories, the sometimes crooked way to discovery, and also the flaws, mistakes, errors and wrong roads taken in the course of scientific developments and practice. Thus, they also include a self-critique of science, and in contrast to science journalism which tends to glorify particular discoveries and heroes of science, the essays by scientists are usually more cautious, emphasize the collaborative nature of science and indicate that while scientific theories may serve as contributions to, and advancements of knowledge, they are hardly ever the final word. In

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addition, as science essays are not only addressed to non-scientists but also read by peers within the disciplines, controversies are discussed and fought not only in specialized papers but also on the pages of more popular magazines and journals. Recently, new media has added new ways of spreading the news via essays on scientists’ blogs. Even though no clear line can be drawn, it could be useful to distinguish between two variants which I would describe as the ‘science essay’ and the ‘essay about science’. The science essay is predominantly written by scientists about specific phenomena, concepts or theories. It is usually located within a specific discipline and discusses problems and solutions within the framework of the respective scientific context. The essay about science is not necessarily written by scientists; it may discuss topics within disciplines, but also practices and features of ‘the sciences’, sometimes from a critical perspective or even against the grain of scientific tenets. In the introduction to Slanted Truths, for example, the acclaimed, but also controversial biologist Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan point out that while their essays are based on scientific investigation, ‘[they] have taken the liberty of speaking out on issues widely considered taboo in scientific circles’.62 One topic of particular importance is the ethics of science, and the possible dangers of scientific discovery are frequently explored in science essays – famously, Albert Einstein ended his 1946 essay for the general reader, in which he explains his formula E=mc2, with the warning that nuclear energy ‘brings with it a great threat of evil. Averting that threat has become the most urgent problem of our time.’63 More recently, ethical problems have to be negotiated in the life sciences, and questions concerning genetic engineering in agriculture, but also in humans, are discussed in essays from all sides of the scientific and non-scientific spectrum. In addition, human-made climate change and its possible remedies have joined the already immense field of topics that are discussed in science essays and essays about science. Arguably, the feminist critique of science also belongs to the field of ethics. Feminist essays range from a criticism of male dominance and the celebration of women who managed to overcome the obstacles of male institutions and discrimination to the demand for radically different scientific practices or alternative epistemologies. Closely connected to ethics is the debate about the legitimacy and relevance of scientific work and the theories that are generated by science. In the last decades, an increasing rejection of science and even a hostility towards scientific research and perspectives can be diagnosed in some countries and social environments. The struggle against biblical literalism and creationism has, of course, been a perennial issue ever since Darwin, but religious fundamentalism has since been joined by other forces. In 1992, Gerald Holton wrote about a growing anti-science movement and ‘pseudoscientific nonsense that manages to pass itself off as an “alternative science”, and does so in the service of political ambition’.64 Furthermore, in the course of the so-called science wars of the late twentieth century, scholars from sociology or cultural and literary studies questioned the validity of scientific facts and methods, arguing that scientific theories were nothing but social constructs and ultimately indistinguishable from alternative world views or literary fiction. This increasingly hostile debate employed the essay, published in scholarly journals, but also in publications like The New York Review of Books, as one of its most important communicative tools. Moreover, science has occasionally become an exorbitantly expensive endeavor, and the importance of the results expected from immense experimental tools like supercolliders has to be

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sold not only to politicians to garner financial support but also to the public, which may doubt the value of research into the esoteric behavior of hypothetical particles. The science essay is, then, not merely a unidirectional instrument for the education of a lay audience, but one of the most important genres in the discussion of the role of the sciences in our societies, their discoveries and achievements, their impact on our lives, their benefits and dangers, their occasionally questionable methods and procedures, and their promises for the future.

Notes   1. Jack Selzer, ed., Understanding Scientific Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).   2. Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Fulfilling the Spandrels of World and Mind’, in Understanding Scientific Prose, 310–36 (321).   3. Ibid., 323.   4. Ibid., 333.   5. William H. Gass, ‘Emerson and the Essay’, in Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 9–49 (25).   6. Graham Good, preface to Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), xix–xxi (xx).   7. I want to thank James Fanning and Klaus Mecke for their suggestions and advice.  8. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (1620; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 48.  9. Richard Nate, Wissenschaft und Literatur im England der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhelm-Fink, 2001), 167, my translation. 10. Ibid., 163–70. 11. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667; London: J. Knapton, J. Walthoe, D. Midwinter, J. Tonson, A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, R. Robinson, F. Clay, B. Motte, A. Ward, D. Brown, and T. Longman, 1734), 111, italics in original. 12. Ibid., 113. 13. Bacon, New Organon, 48. 14. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690), III.x.34, 251, italics in original. 15. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘essay, n.’, accessed May 5, 2021, https://www-1oed-1com1002db2la0961.han.ulb.uni-jena.de/view/Entry/64470?rskey=DV4rzo&result=1#eid. 16. James Paradis, ‘Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience’, in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59–91 (60). 17. Robert Boyle, ‘A Proemial Essay, Wherein, with Some Considerations Touching Experimental Essays in General, Is Interwoven Such an Introduction to All Those Written by the Author, As Is Necessary to Be Perus’d for The Better Understanding of Them’, in Certain Physiological Essays And Other Tracts, Written at Distant Times, and on Several Occasions (London: Henry Herringman, 1669), 1–40 (7–8). 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Paradis, ‘Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience’, 61. 20. Boyle, ‘Proemial Essay’, 17. 21. Paradis, ‘Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience’, 76. 22. Robert Boyle, ‘New Experiments Concerning the Relation between Light and Air (in Shining Wood and Fish;) made by the Honourable ROBERT BOYLE, and by Him addressed from

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Oxford to the Publisher, and so communicated to the ROYAL SOCIETY’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 2, no. 31 (January 6, 1668): 581–600 (583). 23. Lawrence Badash, ‘The Completeness of Nineteenth-Century Science’, Isis 63, no. 1 (March 1972): 48–58. 24. Richard Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 75 and passim; Paul Wood, ‘Science in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 94–116 (104). 25. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2006), 68n. 26. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (London: Vintage, 1998), 49. 27. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (1814; New York: Wiley & Sons, 1902); Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités (Paris: Courcier, 1812). The latter work has not yet been translated into English. 28. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23 (4 and passim). 29. Tim Milnes, The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17, italics in original. 30. Diane Dowdey, ‘Science Essays’, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, 1592–94 (1593). 31. Betsy van Schlun, Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature (Berlin and Madison, WI: Galda + Wilch, 2007). 32. Jeremy Gray, Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 354. 33. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 87. 34. Niels Bohr, preface to The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution: Three Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), v–vii (vii). 35. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 91. 36. Albert Einstein, ‘Physics and Reality’, Journal of the Franklin Institute 221, no. 3 (1963): 349–82 (349). 37. See Arthur Eddington, Science and the Unseen World (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 39–49. 38. For instance, Niels Bohr, ‘The Atomic Theory and the Fundamental Principles Underlying the Description of Nature’, in Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (1934; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 102–19 (113–17). 39. The discussion is examined in Juan Miguel Marin, ‘Mysticism in Quantum Mechanics: The Forgotten Controversy’, European Journal of Physics 30, no. 4 (2009): 807–22. 40. For instance, Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 75 and Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Nature and the Greeks’ and ‘Science and Humanism’ (1954 and 1951; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 5. 41. Thomas L. Pangle, ‘On Heisenberg’s Key Statement Concerning Ontology’, The Review of Metaphysics 67, no. 4 (June 2014): 835–59 (835). 42. Reprinted in John Stewart Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181–95. 43. Steven Weinberg, ‘Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist’, in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 93–106 (97). 44. Nina Engelhardt, Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 9.

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45. C. P. Snow, foreword to A Mathematician’s Apology, by G. H. Hardy (1940; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–58 (50–51). 46. Hardy, Mathematician’s Apology, 123, italics in original. 47. Ibid., 135. 48. Good, preface to Encyclopedia of the Essay, xix. 49. Charles E. Whitmore, ‘The Field of the Essay’, PMLA 36, no. 4 (December 1921): 551–64 (552). 50. William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences: Founded Upon Their History, vol. 2 (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 483, italics in original. 51. Peter B. Medawar, ‘Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?’, The Saturday Review of Literature, August 1, 1964, 42–43 (43). 52. Ibid., 43. 53. Henri Poincaré, ‘The Selection of Facts’, in Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914), 15–24 (22). 54. Hardy, Mathematician’s Apology, 85, italics in original. 55. Werner Heisenberg, ‘Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein (1925–1926)’, in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, trans. Arthur J. Pomerans (London and New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 58–69 (61). 56. Weinberg, ‘Night Thoughts’, 97. 57. Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 28. 58. Ibid., 145. 59. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950; New York: Avon, 1967); Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990); Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), ix. 60. Martin Gardner, Great Essays in Science (New York: Washington Square Press, 1957). 61. Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); Lake Views: This World and the Universe (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); and Third Thoughts (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 62. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution (New York: Copernicus, 1997), xix. 63. Albert Einstein, ‘E=mc²: The Most Urgent Problem of Our Time’, Science Illustrated, April 1946, 16–17 (17). 64. Gerald Holton, ‘How to Think About the “Anti-Science” Phenomenon’, Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 1 (January 1992): 103–28 (104).

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22 Columnism and Essayism Ivan Callus

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redictably, the regulation noises about definition. Only one of this chapter’s title words is in the Oxford English Dictionary. For this volume’s readership, ‘essayism’ will already be a term suggesting deep tradition and rich associations, so that the definition provided – ‘the practice of writing essays’, ‘the quality that constitutes an “essay”’1 – might seem scant and self-recursive. The line the OED quotes from the Saturday Review of September 24, 1887, ‘[t]hat mysterious literary essence known as essayism which pervades all literature’, prefigures a later critical disposition for the hallowing of a quality that remains indeterminate. This provokes, below, some impatience with pieties around what essayism must be and the essay’s elusiveness to definition. However: the start must go to ‘columnism’. It looks the more curious term. Still, how awkward could it be? Or is there scope for further elusiveness there, a subsidiary mystification? Let us try the following for size (trying itself for length, incidentally, being something that every column must do in every single one of its iterations, editors needing to be kept equable). Hence and self-evidently, what ‘columnism’ names will have something to do with the conveyed character of the column, which can be taken to be a regular feature in a newspaper or periodical (keeping reference limited for the moment to the affordances of print seems wise) about a topical issue (though not invariably) that is typically (but not necessarily) written by the same person each time. Doubtless the term will also refer to the poetics of that space as well as attitudes (authors’ and readerships’) around it. That seems safe and intuitive enough (and strategizing what can be made to seem intuitive, working alongside or countering it, is key to the dynamics of the column). But is the column a space or a genre, a stance or a serial exercise in persuasion? Is it all of these and more? Already, in the parentheses-heavy syntax above, hesitancies arise. More fun than this nervous way with definition is the explanation of ‘columnism’ provided – appropriately – in a newspaper column by a columnist. Because I was not neologizing, you see. For on July 12, 2019 Matthew Parris – columnist, broadcaster, political commentator, editor and anthologist, memoirist and travel writer, Conservative MP for West Derbyshire between 1979 and 1986 (as Wikipedia, that fine go-to for essayists and columnists alike, chronicles) – wrote the following in the Times (UK): ‘There is communism; there is capitalism, Conservatism, Catholicism – and there is columnism. It’s a cast of mind. Its practitioners are a type.’2 Clearly the tone here, before it gets complexly ironic, is not so much disingenuous as teasing. Pointedly so, especially because the mindset and character of your typical columnist is presented as changeable. Conviction, Parris suggests, can be an affected aspect of the columnist’s forma mentis. Steadfastness is precisely what the columnist may expediently lack:

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Columnism is striking poses which (as any method actor will tell you) will only convince others if you yourself can temporarily inhabit the belief. You are counsel for the prosecution or defence of an idea, or dream, or fear, hatred, party or politician. You take a brief, elbow doubt and ambiguity aside, and go – joyously or ferociously but always (in the moment) with passion and conviction – full pelt. What columnism is not is making absolutely sure first that you’re right. To be frank, you sometimes rather doubt it.3 The context is a critique of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, himself formerly a columnist for more than one newspaper or magazine. Parris’s suggestion is that he can offer an insight into Johnson because they are two of a kind. He writes, ‘I understand [Johnson] not through acquaintance as a colleague but in the way any dustman or dress designer knows another dustman or dress designer. We know each other through shared engagement in the same pursuit.’4 Parris does not mention the matter in his piece, but in that pursuit, when still Mayor of London during the run-up to the Brexit referendum held on June 23, 2016 – the British electorate’s vote on whether to stay within or withdraw from the European Union – Johnson, in his role also ‘as a 275,000-a-year columnist for the Telegraph’, (in)famously drafted contrary articles, ‘two for Brexit and one backing Remain’.5 In the event, Johnson came out in favor of Brexit, announcing his support of the Leave campaign and sending corresponding copy to print on February 21, 2016, eventually committing the country (one referendum and two elections later) to withdrawal. The columnist, the column, columnism can then, at least according to this characterization, be capricious, even mercenary. ‘It is hugging a set of principles fiercely to your breast while (should these principles not work out) keeping a wandering eye out for some spare ones down the back of the sofa’,6 writes Parris of columnism in this piece that deserves and bears attention, if nothing else for the quasi-Swiftian sophistication with which it articulates a contrary poetics of the column’s contrariety, not to mention the crucial prompts it offers for this chapter’s comparative exercise. For the scene is set for binarism. Columnism’s and essayism’s ways with how to address events will be quite different, it can be presumed. The impression will be that the essayist, the essay, essayism expect and have expected of themselves an underlying sincerity, a revealing earnestness: at any rate, little of the pragmatic disingenuousness that can be resorted to by columnists unabashed if they come across as twitchy and turnable, sensitive to what it might be convenient to opine. To be sure, essayists’ perspectives can themselves develop and change. One of the absorbing moves in many essays, in fact, is the rehearsal of the shifts between resolved certainty and lingering doubt. William Hazlitt’s ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ (1826) is a good example. ‘As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them’, he declares, before concluding, in evenhanded misanthropy and self-reproach, ‘[H]ave I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.’7 This, one comes to understand of the ways of both the column and the essay, is a performance (‘I hope our art is more than performance but it is at least a performance art’, Parris notes of columnists and their work).8 All writing is one, to some extent, but the columnist and the essayist acquire the fuller repertoire and choreography of the disarming (or, as in this case, reviling) devices of rhetoric. (This is not the space for it, but a comparative explication de texte exercise of those devices in action

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across exemplifying columns and essays would be useful to conduct.) The perception will hold that the essayist’s views are profoundly considered (if accessibly rendered) and neither tradeable nor lightly held. When reading the essays of Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Elizabeth Hardwick, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit or Brian Dillon, the sense is of carefully negotiated thought and disposition having been committed to the august page. With the column, conversely, the just-in-time retailing of topical opinion in more or less mainstream settings is fundamental. The ready hooks, eased pitches and transient immediacies make for a different effect. So does, it has to be said, the sway of commissioned or positioned outlooks sometimes. After all, getting the gig and the space may have happened because one is onside, or because they are the tokenistic other. Steady on. This is plainly wrong. The getting-the-gig considerations are much the same for columnists as they are in any calling. There is an overwhelming number of columnists whose names can be reeled off in evidence of solid views solidly held (and who it is easy to imagine being quite cross, if not apoplectic, to have the integrity of the expression of their positions and ideas impugned). In fact, if anything, a columnist’s persona is a function of the reliable and go-to constancy of their forthrightly held world view. (Parris’s piece was mordantly effective in its ironizing partly because columnists are often in reality quite set and unyielding, making the contrast with Johnson’s stance sharper.) To think otherwise is to expose a deeper prejudice, or at least attitude, at work here. The bias goes like this. If we must compare (and in this chapter we do), then the essay is thought to be of a higher order: more venerable because of its older tradition, because of that presumed greater authenticity, its theatre of self-doubt, its detachedness from large and small politicking, its non-dependence on topicality, its capacity for more timeless reflection (to put it grandly), and (yet again) its intractability to definition. (Is any genre declared to be elusive with as much repeat reverence and solemnity as the essay?) Not to mention the fact that so many figures within literature’s canons have contributed to the essay’s, whereas fewer have been columnists (though Carl Sandburg, George Orwell, Langston Hughes, Flann O’Brien and George Mackay Brown are among those who can be mentioned in the latter ranks).9 Yet one curious thought is irrepressible. Is not each column itself an essay? In fact, is the column, indeed columnism, not regular(ized) essayism? It needs no very difficult exercise in critique for those questions to arise when these two forms/genres/modes/ spaces (the alternative designations seem neither excessive nor inappropriate) are considered together. Their co-implicated literary histories then become discernible, for the column and the essay were, at least for a time, arguably one and the same thing. *** Full disclosure. One of the most valuable set of observations on the column is Christopher Silvester’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Columnists, a book which I shall be quoting liberally and acknowledging happily (it is a delightful, informative collection) while nevertheless sensing the incongruity in this context of the punctiliousness of scholarly conventions. Here I would not have a single endnote if I could. The column, even less than the essay, does not typically have them. Certainly a column that came with end references would

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be a strange thing, though the exception would be worth remarking (this being the very juncture where an endnote documenting one would come in if this chapter were intently and comprehensively scrupulous about that other pitch or mode). For here is another trick of columnism. Like the essay and again even more so, it is (or rather pretends to be) research-lite. Many good columns are cannily deliberating about what they will look up and cite, and when a quotation occurs it does so with clinching appositeness. The same occurs with the statistic thrown in at a pivotal point in the argument. Not too many of those, as this is not about accumulation of evidence but, rather, the one or two forensic stabs at clinical fact. If I may: go off right now and read a good column for yourself and you will see. I do not need to be doing that homework for you when I am laying out and getting into what to make of the way things are: about the way things are in columns, in this case, with the argument taking on as much of the manner of the column as scholarly publishing allows. The way things are and what to make of it: that, in fact, is what the columnist’s stock in trade is as they go about writing essay after essay (by any other name) about it. They know that their game is not to have read everything conceivably relevant and show you that they have done so, as the diligent scholar or researcher must, but to resonate with readers whose views they thereby confirm, vicariously expressing for them what might otherwise remain less cogently or punchily thought, or, conversely, challenging and (re)shaping those views (if the reader is open enough). Columnists know, therefore, the importance of a smoothly persuasive stream of argument, of not overdoing the documenting credibility when keeping a beadier eye on easeful flow. And in regard to that flow, when I read Phillip Lopate quoting Clarence Hugh Holman and William Harmon on the essay having ‘an urbane, conversational manner’,10 the irrepressible exclamation must be, ‘But that goes for the column, too! If anything, even more so.’ Most columns, especially ‘the-episode-from-my-life’ or ‘here’swhat-happened-to-me-this-week’ kind, recall aspects of the personal essay, in fact.11 And if critical tradition is disregarding of the column then that is only representative of a broader trend, one that ultimately will have the column down as being sub-literary. The essay, in comparison, has the cachet. And the more one reads about the column and the essay, the more this emerges as a bit of a theme. The mysterious literary essence which pervades all literature and that is consonant with essayism does not appear to settle, in any very recognized way, around the column. That the two genres (if that is what they are) should be cousins makes things curiouser still. Those regulation noises about definition anticipated at the start hit upon a strange dissonance here that will not go away. Quite simply, characterizations of the essay are often comfortably stretchable to the column. Admittedly some will not quite apply, but surely it is more telling that many (like Lopate’s) do. And so, what of essayism, which must now be defined in foreknowledge of (or resignation to) its indefinability? But before the definition, a confession – in further disclosure – to what will already have been suspected: namely, to a touch of assumed partisanship in favor of the column rather than the essay, if a stance must be taken at all. (And what would a column – or indeed a columnista, one might even say – be, without some attitudinizing?) Already, essayism arrives as the weightier of the two, so that someone must speak up for the column even if, like Johnson in another context (that is to say Boris, not Samuel: need one specify?), I could have gone the other way. Contrary to Parris’s outlier of a term, ‘essayism’ comes with impressive canonical freight. Accepting the referencing-lite ethic, I shall recall only two users of the word.

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Robert Musil, that great high modernist, describes Essayismus as ‘the inner hovering life’ lying ‘between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry’.12 We see at once that this is more high-toned than anything suggested by columnism, though something unfortunate ought perhaps to be read into the fact that the definition occurs in a novel, The Man Without Qualities, about a protagonist who hovers rather too ineffectually: an unfinished novel, at that. (The conclusions and conclusiveness motif must itself be attended to, and it will feature again below.) On, then, to Brian Dillon, doyen of the essay and author of Essayism. Dillon writes that essayism is ‘not the practice merely of the form, but an attitude to the form – to its spirit of adventure and its unfinished nature – and towards much else’.13 He notes too that ‘[e]ssayism is tentative and hypothetical, and yet it is also a habit of thinking, writing and living that has definite boundaries’, such that it carries ‘the sense of a genre suspended between its impulses to hazard or adventure and to achieved form, aesthetic integrity’.14 (And, he also notes, ‘sententiousness is one of the aspects of essayism’.15) ‘Aesthetic integrity’ is a heavy phrase. But who can doubt that the best columnists have what is, at the least, an achieved cohesiveness of form in what they serially turn out? Do they not have, this being both their point and pull, a signature shape but also signature voice and style and tone and key and pitch? (It does not do to be sparing of, or about, the range of its rhetoric’s identifiability.) And is not all of that very finished? For many of the best columns are object lessons in slick delivery, in more than one sense. Similarly, the column, quite like the essay, has its way with ‘adventure’. (What would an unventuring column be?) Spikier, because that is the way they often are, most columns proceed with carefully considered judgment over where ‘definite boundaries’ might lie (not least in an age of culture wars). When that goes wrong, the column has less latitude than the essay and therefore more ‘hazard’ (Dillon’s word), partly because it is more public and, not improbably (it has to be said), more read (that it is easier to think of general outcries that have been occasioned by columns than by essays is surely significant). They are more fastidious endeavors, essays (‘tentative’, Dillon called them, as we saw), even when they go about their adventuring. Meanwhile, it is not that columns – which are themselves not lacking in sententiousness (again, to use Dillon’s word), not when it is approved/improved/reproved opinion that they are often tendentiously (not tentatively) after – are careless in comparison. But they must be, if not prosy or prosaic, then light on the mysterious literary essence or, indeed, the ‘poetic’ (to recall, now, Musil’s attribution). For in the end, provocation in columnistic prose is what in this day and age is more shared: certainly on various social media. Still, and again, it does not do to countenance the column>//