Bloviated scorn definition6/24/2023 This sense of the dispersing or disporting of the self has serious and playful consequences at the level of structure. Thus Woolf, on ‘The Modern Essay’ (1925): ‘Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem.’ 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. Which is not to say that all essayists project (or better, invent) and voice this inquiring or narrating ‘I’. In an essay, everything exists to pass – maybe only exists when it has thus passed – through a scrim of authorial ego and curiosity. ‘It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts,’ Montaigne writes in ‘Of Practice’ (1580). What binds all this disparate stuff together – whether it’s been scattered over numerous more or less focused essays or flung into implausible proximity as part of a single work – is traditionally the essayist’s personality. ![]() Except to say: the discrete essay may itself be an omnium-gatherum there’s no duty to thematic unity, and because the notion that the essay is necessarily a short text is just a convenient rule easily broken, none to concision either: in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton starts composing an essay about a single affliction and ends up writing a book about everything – but everything – he can think of. The essayist’s aesthetic is that of the collector, or the ‘amateur’ in an archaic sense: such works seem destined for the writerly equivalent of the Wunderkammer – the essayist thrives on miscellanea. Charles Lamb wrote an excellent essay on the historical origins of roast pig, Virginia Woolf a reflection on taking to her bed with flu, Georges Perec on the objects on his desk and on wearing spectacles (which he didn’t). Michel de Montaigne jumpstarts the genre in the late 16th century by composing essays on the concept of experience, on cannibalism and on thumbs. The individual text may be worked up on the basis or pretext of anything at all. This teeming or seething quality of the essay obtains both inside and out. The essay, he concludes, is a risk, a judgment, but also a ‘verbal swarm’. But Starobinski goes further, etymologically speaking, for essai seems related also to the proximate Latin of examen, which means both the needle on weighing scales and, oddly, a swarm of bees or flock of birds. The writer shuttles between essaying and assaying. Again it’s ambiguous, because the leaper into the dark is not averse to making lucid appraisals, arriving at solid or sententious conclusions. So the essay’s ‘effort’ is also a kind of testing, weighing or judgment. Chesterton put it like this in 1932: ‘The essay is the only literary form which confesses, in its very name, that the rash act known as writing is really a leap in the dark.’ The French essai as the critic Jean Starobinski reminds us, emerges in the 12th century from the Latin exagium, a scale. The essay, so the dictionaries and textbooks tell us, is etymologically an attempt, a foray, a tryout. So much for giddy prelims: now for that modest faux-scholarly perspective. And let’s end this initial survey of an enigmatic field with an adventurous proposition: the centuries-old form of the essay may well be the genre of the future. They may not have been written at all, of course: the film-essay, photo-essay and audio-essay all trouble efforts at definition, even if they also lean on a literary heritage. ![]() Essays are occasional – they may be born of diaries, or gobbets of journalism – but they live to be Selected or Collected, to end between authoritative covers. ![]() Except when they don’t, when they scorn what’s considered licit in terms of structure, topic or syntax, when they propel the essayist’s ‘I’ to extremes of subjectivity, or dissolve it entire. Essays, that is to say, are well made they contain ‘good writing’. For sure, there are academic essays, but they become essays at the moment they aspire to be other than academic, when they sideline rigour for the pleasures of seduction and surprise. It’s at once an antique, redolent of libraries crammed with dusty tracts and improving pensées, and a way of writing oneself into the unknown, a style or mode that’s all swagger and risk and theatrical conjecture. The essay is the most ambiguous literary or artistic form going, or maybe gone. But let’s hold off on derivations of ‘essay’ and ‘essaying’ for a paragraph or two, and test instead a fond strategy of the genre, if that’s what it is: blank aphorism, ex cathedra pronouncement, peremptory definition of terms – happily unscrupled by scholarly evidence. Absent the consoling incipit of a well-selected epigraph – too many apt quotations to choose – it’s customary to inaugurate an essay on essays with a spot of amateur etymology. ![]() This essay on essays appeared in frieze 151.Īlways, with the essay, the problem of beginnings.
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