ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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Micah McCrary
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This piece originally appeared in The Essay Review, 2013.
Essaying about essays is a gut-wrenching, tergiversating process. A stroll or jaunt in some park or through some field of thought, bringing one back to an idea or nugget of understanding a bit more glossed over than when one began. It’s a process upon processes—certainly defining of what essaying-as-activity is. Essays are then a byproduct rather than an objective, and those who essay, and especially those who essay upon essays, are wont to find strange surprises in spheres of text, image, and thought.
To essay is to succumb to happy accidents. It’s to find meaning in rich personal, thematic, or topical exploration. It’s to meditate. It’s to extrapolate. It’s to examine carefully with a surgeon’s precision the significance of large and small things, and through this examination ask questions (Rilke’s beloved pastime) one could not, and would not ask, were they not essaying. To essay is all these things, no more than writing poetry as exhibition and writing fiction as adventure. Essay scholars will no doubt follow the lead of its nominal father, Michel de Montaigne, who defined essaying through the French verb “essayer,” for “to try” or “to attempt,” and embark on these endeavors with curiosity about essayistic decorum. These scholars will no doubt both create and question ambiguous definition set against certainty—that is, while we know and have known what the essay is not, we often discourse on what the essay is. What’s appropriate when composing essays? Do we stick with the Montaignan form of organic writing on a particular subject (even if the self is a subject) and allow our thoughts to visibly grow on the page as this subject gets explored? Do we emulate the styles of contemporary essayists like Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, or Lia Purpura? Do we take an academic stance, telling our reader this is what I’m going to show you and add creative, edgy spins? Do we treat the essay as a blend of poetry and prose? Do we treat the essay as technical evaluation and inspection? The answer, as it stands today, is all of these. We treat the essay as both art and craft, and we never for a second allow ourselves to forget that its versatility is not one found in any other writing form we’ve created. We’ve engineered the essay to be its own species. Best American Essays series editor Robert Atwan categorizes essays as “provocative, sexy, a way of being in the world that could be both satisfyingly aesthetic and socially active” (Atwan 12) surely for clarity of explanation to those unfamiliar with the distinction of essay types. In U.S. K–12 we’re taught first to write the five-paragraph essay beginning with an introductory paragraph, a body of text exploring our topic, and a concluding paragraph restating our most important points. Later, we’re shown how to stretch five paragraphs to five pages, adding citations from writers who’ve written something similar or related to our own essays and incorporating their words with ours. And then, if we’ve gone the so-called creative writing route, we begin to meditate on form and content and how they instruct each other--Does this essay need to be written in block paragraphs? Can I use a footnote as the text and not as the supplement? Should an essay on lightning be written in quick, jolting sentences?—and begin to play around with essaying-as-process in an organic, developmental fashion. L’essay est l’enfant—and it requires patience and time to watch it grow into a fully-formed, mature body. Essays instruct. Through Virginia Woolf we know better how to enjoy solitude in a room of our own, through Walter Benjamin the noticeable differences between speech and thought, and through Roland Barthes that the reading of a text can be both sensual and sensuous (“the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others,” 58). Even William Hazlitt noted that “the proper study of mankind is man,” (n. pag.) and through this study and essaying we’ve both instructed and been instructed on how to do many things. It’s not without proper examination that we can accurately note our triumphs and follies. We claim with alacrity that essays are sometimes poetry, and that even fiction writing craft is part and parcel of essaying. The essay is a dress with pockets: A seamless blend of style and function that forces us to be discursive about what does and doesn’t qualify as essay, our opinions based mostly on the thoughts of scholar-practitioners before us and partially on those of our contemporaries. It’s 2012, and proponents of the “next” American essay like Anne Carson and Carole Maso will aid in supplementing the definition of essay (as a body of writing) as new forms continue to be invented and explored. David Shields compiled Reality Hunger wishing for it to be a companion to Internet research, and I for one wait for someone to jump on Shields’s train of thought with the hypertextual essay (the click-through essay, if you will) as we move further into a digital world that values several kinds of innovation. It’s no longer required that one be Montaignian to be an essayist, and the essays of 2013 and 2014 may very well be written with the touchscreen in mind. What happens to our level of stimulation when those of us who enjoyed “choose your own adventure” novels as children are now given the option of a choose your own footnote essay? Intrigue. While articles, essays’ cousins, are rooted in the Latin artus (joint) and require timely topics, essais (attempts) adhere to their semantic roots, remaining exploratory from the very beginnings of Montaigne asking, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?)—for what do we know? How are we both knower and known? How do we broaden this to connect with readers and show we’re not merely diarists? Part of what separates Montaigne and his essays from today’s commercial memoirists, we should note, is that he doesn’t pontificate. “The worthiest essays are ventures into the unknown,” as Scott Russell Sanders writes, “from which we return bearing fresh insights and delights” (Sanders xviii). Montaigne incessantly, relentlessly ventures into the unknown, avoiding lectures on the page but as if of utmost authority. The essay, Montaignian or not, doesn’t generally move into textual lecturing, doesn’t become self-righteous, and doesn’t budge from its original humble professorship or lose its ability to examine the quotidian with a careful eye. The essay is and should continue to be macroscopic, microscopic, and telescopic at once, possessing broad understanding within finite space and able to examine either a nail or a war—willing to defend itself against any scrutiny. The essay should maintain its power with virility and ardor. In “Soul and Form” (1910) Geörgy Lukács writes that the essay “is a judgement, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging” (Lukács 34). We can, if we wish, judge the efficacy of a file (Fabio Morabito’s “File and Sandpaper”) or the ethics of photographing war victims (Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Torture of Others”) but the point isn’t the judging itself—the point is how we reach for these judgments through a process of wandering thought on the page. In which other media do authors visibly jump from one thought to the next as a question begs another? It’s this question-begging that gives the essay its uniqueness. In a discipline where composition and inquiry can instruct each other, even enhance each other, the essay stands out as an adaptable form that other writing methods haven’t yet achieved. Close second: Milan Kundera’s interweaving of fictional story with historical explication--The Unbearable Lightness of Being, alongside novels Immortality, Ignorance, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, etc. are all what one may call transgeneric work. Is Kundera, then, at heart an essayist essaying through story? Are The Curtain, Testaments Betrayed and his recent Encounter his joies de vivre and his novel-writing merely pastime? Is he, like Anne Carson or Maggie Nelson or Virginia Woolf, expressing the interests of the next (un)American essayist, willing to dabble everywhere in search of an individual truth? The essay has never needed to fit in anywhere. And “bad essays are no less conformist than bad dissertations” (Adorno 154) writes Theodor Adorno, who knew that a “bad essay,” like a too-complaisant child, would fail to explore. “The bad essay chats about people instead of opening up the matter at hand” (154) Adorno says, and he’s right. Though there’s no consternation at the thought of essays as narrative (as many essays are narrative) the worst ones don’t reach in and pull something out for us to embrace with our curiosity. For the essay to remain in good standing, narrative or not, it must use its power of autonomy (in form, function, genre, etc.) to inspire thought. More importantly: To inspire interest. Many times we wonder, when scribing nonfiction, why the work should be regarded by anyone other than the author themself. We ask our composition students to discern why their stories or their topics are important. We prod memoirists for the motivations behind their writing. We look so critically, deeply, skeptically at the importance of the nonfiction genre that it has become almost taboo to be labeled purely as “an essayist.” Memoirs sell better than essay collections because we hoard what we believe should be authentic in a world with much inauthenticity thrown in our direction—celebrities who are celebrities because they’re fools, nationalist politicians, talk show performances—yet we scrutinize the stories we hear and immediately regard them as untrue until verified. As stated, again, by Scott Russell Sanders, [w]e are a question-asking animal. That is our burden and our glory. It’s a burden because, unlike creatures governed entirely by instinct, we puzzle over how to behave, we wonder about where we’ve come from and where we’re going and what, if anything, the journey means. The inveterate questioning is also our glory because it leads to our finest achievements—to all the ways we ponder and praise this life, this universe, into which we’ve been so mysteriously born. (Sanders xviii) It’s this mysterious birth that’s constantly, with vigor, sought by essayists across time and around the globe.
“The essay,” Adorno writes, “presses for the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience” (160). This reciprocity, entreated by both the essay’s reader and writer, isn’t something asked for by other genres. It’s never so implored that both reader and writer explore new thoughts as it is in the essay, and for this reason essayists can and should find topics about which our interests may be piqued. Patrick Madden’s Quotidiana, for example, not only explores issues outside the self but literally focuses on the quotidian, and does it so fascinatingly that both reader and writer have a sense of engagement with the text that’s unique to the essay form itself. The writer is engaged in expansion, and the reader is engaged in the author’s process of discovery. To add with Phillip Lopate: “The essayist attempts to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter” (Lopate xxxviii). This is why the essay has been, for me, the “realest” form of writing: Because of how it equates itself with memory and cognition. The essay is about coming to terms with oneself and one’s audience honestly, and to see this unfold reveals the essay’s palpable magic—as a reader, it’s great to see an author’s mind unfold on the page. But it’s also great to be that author. And that’s why I enjoy writing essays. So often do essays become digressions. More than seemingly, essayists enter a spiral of thought always unexpected by the reader and hopefully unexpected by the writer themself. Essays are sometimes digressive, as even Montaigne stated in his “Of the inconstancy of our actions”: If I speak variously of myself, it is because I consider myself variously; all the contraries are there to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. “Distinguo” is the most universal member of my logic. (Montaigne n.p.) This gyration and discord, this digressive spiral, is a sure result of the personal essayist’s attempts at self-understanding. It’s as Lukács has said: “Ever since there has been life and men have sought to understand and order life, there has been this duality in their lived experience” (Lukács 20). In other words: When painting themselves honestly, one is sure to emulate Picasso.
What do other essayists think about the essay? Where does their challenge and questioning begin? A few examples: An essay, for me, must go past the facts, an essay must travel and move. Even the facts of the essayist’s own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone. The facts of personal history provide anchor, but the essayist then swings in a wide arc on his anchor line, testing and pulling hard. (Alan Lightman, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2000, xviii) Just a few more:
Essay writing is not about facts, although the essay may contain facts. Essay writing is about transcribing the often convoluted process of thought, leaving your own brand of breadcrumbs in the forest so that those who want to can find their way to your door. (Lauren Slater, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2006, xvii) Finally:
It is not only that the essay could be about anything. It usually was. The good health of essay writing depends on writers continuing to address eccentric subjects. In contrast to poetry and fiction, the nature of the essay is diversity—diversity of level, subject, tone, diction. Essays on being old and falling in love and the nature of poetry are still being written. And there are also essays on Rita Hayworth’s zipper and Mickey Mouse’s ears. (Susan Sontag, Introduction to The Best American Essays 1992, xv–xvi) We see that in the roughly four hundred years essays (under this taxonomy) have been written, change has occurred and diverse foci have been suggested to keep essays’ vitality fresh—to be sure that as methods and processes change, the fact that we’re essaying does not. Essayists on the essay seem to agree on a few values the essay must possess no matter the essay type: the essay must remain versatile, the essay must act as a conversation, and the essay must be inventive:
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance. (Cynthia Ozick, “Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” n.p.) The essay, a superb thing of the imagination, can then “puncture the stiffness of formal discourse with language that is casual, everyday, demotic, direct” (Lopate xxv)—remaining spontaneously separate from the formality surrounding fiction’s and poetry’s histories.
The essay has been, in effect, less formal, as essayists over time have written many variegations and called them “essay” while being questioned by those wishing to study the form. Woolf liked to call her work “fiction,” writing from a specific, concentrated persona in whatever it was she authored. M.F.K. Fisher preferred not to be defined as a “food writer” simply because she was, rather, an essayist with a topical penchant for the gastronomical and the intricacies about it which could be written in poetic and affectionately attentive ways. But it’s merely that the essay “can neither make do with general concepts—even language that does not fetishize the concept cannot do without concepts—nor does it treat them arbitrarily” (Adorno 160) and the public doesn’t always seem to understand that the essay requires no general concept or widely spoken language that doesn’t fetishize these concepts. The general concept is devoid of personality, and therefore lacks humanity, and the essayist must write what the essayist can personally write—and they must write it with as much fervor as humanly possible to make the experience of essaying convergent with the experience of reading. That is, for the author and reader both to attempt reaching the essay’s occasion. As the essay has been established as a conversation, its poetics must lure the reader in for discourse on the matter at hand. The truth is that essays are far too independent not to be questioned, and as the validity and verisimilitude of essay writing is placed in the interrogation room, the essay will continue drawing even more attention to itself. Whether in lyric or libretto (see: Anne Carson) or dissection or macroscopy, the essay’s spirit alone won’t be understood empathetically by all. And because essays are so often written under the guise of an attempt, further curiosity will ensue about how essays ever manage to find their form—how can a cracked egg become a flapping bird when it began as a disjointed, broken possibility? It’s this possibility the essay embodies that will have the reader befuddled time and again, until they’ve seen for themselves some kind of evolution in essay writing that acts as a shift on a precipice. Happy Accidents, really, are all essays are. Avoiding the polemic, the sociopolitical, helps the personal essay maintain its essence and keep it whole not only in form but also in function. By this it’s meant that the essay exists as a unique body, an individual and autonomous imagination. It’s with deep adoration of the essay’s struggle that essayists will persevere in their efforts to keep the essay confessional, exploratory, inspective, topical. And essaying as a collaborative effort between authors who teach and learn from one another how we’re able to essay will never be an exercise in “the blind leading the blind”—scholar-practitioners of the form are always eager, always willing to embark on this continuous path of scholarship. The essay itself, and its malleable and relentless form, will be our seasoned, veteran guide. |
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Contributing Editor Robin Micah McCrary is a Creole public health humanist. Author (as Micah McCrary) of Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing (Bloomsbury) and Island in the City (University of Nebraska) his work also appears in College English, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Essay Daily, among other publications. A contributing editor at Assay, Dr. McCrary lives on Haudenosaunee homelands where he teaches in the Writing Studies and Health Humanities programs at Syracuse University. He also serves as a mentor-teacher and low-residency faculty in Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
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