on the essay
What literary genre are you? A poem, perhaps: palpable and mute. Or perchance you are a novel, and not just any novel, but a Victorian novel: generous, capacious, ambitious, desiring nothing less than to encompass a whole world in your metaphorical embrace. Or if loose, baggy monsterdom does not quite become you, the taciturn subtleties of Hemingway’s short stories may be more representative of Who You Truly Are. Whichever it is, I will bet you a million to one that your options did not include the essay. I know this from experience, vicarious and otherwise. After a few years of blog-surfing on the internet, during which I have come across all manner of online quizzes (“What Is Your Inner Eye Colour?”, “What Type of Raunchy Underwear Are You?”), I have yet to encounter a quiz that lists the ‘essay’ as one of the possible keys to the heart of one’s mystery.What this means, besides the fact that my life has been immeasurably impoverished by this omission on the part of online quizmasters, is that very few people actually consider the essay a literary genre at all. And that, if told point-blank that it is, most people would have very little idea of what an essay, in the literary sense of the word, actually looks like.
But the essay has always been notoriously difficult to pin down. Its inventor, Michel de Montaigne, made a name for himself (in more ways than one: his Essays are, in a way, an epic attempt to build a public persona that would be his monument, his one shot at immortality) by writing a series of ‘essais’ or ‘trials’: works meant to put himself and his opinions ‘on trial’; and by doing so inaugurated a tradition that has been built on by people as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, C.S.Lewis, Umberto Eco, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Fadiman, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion. Writing on a bewilderingly varied range of subject matter, from the trivial (Umberto Eco’s essay on how to travel with a salmon comes to mind), to the seriously thought-provoking (E.B White’s much anthologized ‘Once More To The Lake’, George Orwells’ classic ‘A Hanging’, and Joan Didion’s recent writing on her husband’s death), these writers bequeathed on the essay a many-splendoured legacy – but also ensured that their collective brainchild would grow up bearing the burden of never quite having a distinct sense of identity, of never quite knowing just where it stands among its more illustrious literary brothers and sisters.
Indeed, despite its illustrious list of practitioners and the undeniable significance of their contributions to the craft of writing, the essay has yet to find an secure, acknowledged place as a bona-fide literary genre. In part, this may be due to its rather embarrassing family resemblance to the newspaper op-ed column – hard enough for a serious writer to distinguish himself from the great unwashed hordes who think they can write, and the last thing he needs is to be associated, however tenuously, with those hacks who write for (the horror!) those very same masses he is trying to avoid. In recent years, the fear of contamination by association has been augmented by the emergence of the weblog, or blog – now that anyone with access to a computer is free to essay his opinions online, the boundary between what is perceived as serious writing and what is not has become more nebulous than before. With writers like Jeanette Winterson and Neil Gaiman jostling for space in the new online democracy next to people with names like Kampongchicken or Mr Brown, beginning writers may well be leery of staking their reputations on writing essays that look too much like the latest musings of yet another erudite blogger. But what causes the most confusion, I suspect, is the unfortunate co-opting of the term by educational institutions everywhere as a signifier for that bane of student life – the essay question. The memory of all those sleepless nights spent labouring over ‘an essay on the role of economic and social factors in Foucault’s discussion of madness’ is traumatic enough to put anyone off considering essays as anything approaching works of literature.
This, of course, begs the question: What is literature, anyway? Far be it from me to attempt a definitive answer. The last time I tried, against my better judgement, I ended up making a confession that would not bear repetition in polite society. But I digress. (One of the characteristics of Montaigne’s essays, by the way, is their tendency to meander.) It is possible, however, to look at what others who are far better qualified to answer that question have said. One of the more commonplace responses has it that literature involves the aesthetic use of language in a way that sets the work apart from other forms of linguistic communication. The Russian Formalists took this further when they argued that literature defamiliarises – uses language in a way that makes it strange and unfamiliar in a given context. Another definition posits that literature lends itself to interpretation – that one must somehow read between the lines to extract that pearl of great price that is the Meaning of the work. (Literature teachers the world over, despairing after reading the hundredth essay on how Moby Dick is an allegory for apartheid, will no doubt rue the day this belief crystallized into near-dogma.) And let’s not forget the family of definitions that invests literature with quasi-religious qualities, arguing, like George Eliot, that literature is the artform that is nearest to life, amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. Very often this argument morphs into the far-fetched claim that literature has a civilizing or moralizing influence on its practitioners and audience.
Based on these three definitions alone, it is easy to see why the essay has failed to attain a status similar to its more popular cousins like the novel or the short-story. Though well-written essays invariably do use language in a skilful, even innovative way, the reader’s attention is usually drawn to the content of the work, rather than its form. Sometimes, writers deliberately eschew the display of linguistic pyrotechnics, opting instead for a more conversational tone, such as in George Orwell’s ‘Shooting An Elephant’ (starting with the disingenuously casual, “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.”). As for providing room for interpretation, the essay fails most miserably because of its disconcerting tendency to say exactly what it means. Which leaves the last definition, the one most likely to fit (essays, especially personal essays, being about as close to life as art is likely to get), and also the one most out of sync with current tastes in fashionable literary circles.
If the essay’s status as literature is disputed, what place does it have in literary journals and magazines? I would venture to say that a lot of writers take to writing, or at least publishing, essays, only after they have tried out, and perhaps cemented their reputations in, other genres. The essay fills in the spaces left by poetry and fictional prose. But to relegate it to a mere space-filler would be, I think, a mistake. These other genres satisfy our need for alternative psychological spaces in which our imaginations may roam free, unfettered by the claims of the real world, important though these may be. But the real world is there nonetheless, insistent and, well, real. And the essay transmutes this real world into something akin to art, providing writers with an avenue through which they can reflect on the world around them without the distorting lens of fiction, and without the obliqueness and formal constraints of poetry. The essay gives us, in other words, a bridge between the everyday and the sublime.
The best essays, the ones that make me want to grab a plane ticket, fly immediately to wherever in the world their writers are currently residing, (or, in the case of writers who are no longer living, hop into a time-machine and travel back in time) and buttonhole them into coffee and a long conversation, are the ones that, like all good art, help me see the world in a new way. There is no subject matter that is inherently more suited to the form – for me, a pet dog is as valid a topic for essayistic exploration as Shakespeare’s tragic vision. What makes a good essay is the ability to find the sublime, the unusual, and the quirky, in the ordinary and mundane. For instance, one of the most engaging essays I have read lately, ‘Bumping Into Mr Ravioli’ by Adam Gopnik, describes in loving detail the writer’s struggles to pin down the elusive Mr Ravioli, his three-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend, and reflects on how Mr Ravioli’s persistent absence is a symptom of the busy-ness of life in New York City. I’ve also enjoyed Auden’s essays on life and literature in The Dyer’s Hand for their depth of perception cast in such easy-reading language, and for all his occasional obtuseness and snobbish elitism, T.S. Eliot is still one of the masters of the literary essay. More recently, I have started to appreciate scientific essays targetted at the layman, and I am grateful to writers like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Oliver Sacks for expanding my mental universe and making the foray beyond my comfort zone just that bit less uncomfortable.
What I have come to realise, however, is that more than any other genre, the essay seems to appeal most to those who are, not to put too fine a point upon it, not quite in their prime. (What that says about me is fodder for another discussion.) As Anne Fadiman writes in her introduction to her edition of The Best American Essays 2003 (a genuinely worthwhile collection, despite its rather unfortunate ‘America’s Top 40’ nomenclature):
“Philip Lopate has called the personal essay the voice of middle age. After compiling this volume, during the course of which I read essays of every conceivable stripe, I’d extend that statement by saying that any essay – personal, critical, expository – is more likely to be written by someone with a few grey hairs than by a twenty-five-year-old. (He’s too busy finishing his first novel.) Activity and reflection tend to be sequential rather than simultaneous.”
The concomitant to this is that the essay is also more likely to be read by someone with a few grey hairs, or at least who is old enough to appreciate its more leisurely pace, its meanderings, its rootedness in the real (all essays, whether they be essays on art and culture, science, history, contemporary life, or even the writer’s personal life, are tied to something real, and do not pretend to be anything else). I myself came to the essay comparatively recently – when I got to the point where the illusions of fiction actually tired me out, and I started to yearn (what a hopelessly Romantic word for an impulse so inherently unromantic) for writing that would ground me to the mundane and the everyday, for writing that tells the truth without telling it slant.
Far be it from me to affect a world-weariness that my age does not warrant. Few things annoy me so much as unearned cynicism. (And nothing stirs my admiration as much as a grounded idealism where the right to cynicism has been earned.) But I do think that the essay is an acquired taste – and it is a taste that I hope will be cultivated and nurtured even here in Singapore, a young society always in a hurry to get somewhere else, to become something else: a society that may seem, at first, antipathetic to everything that the essay represents.
So, what literary genre are you? An essay, perhaps: grounded, thoughtful, truthful (as far as it is possible to be truthful when it is so difficult to even know the truth about ourselves) – someone with the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your contradictions.
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posted by eothen @ 10:31 PM
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