Essayism

Brian Dillon (2017)

“Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must prove permanent by fracture.” —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, “An Essay on Virginia” (1925)
“Let us talk about it as though it existed.” —ROLAND BARTHES, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
ON ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word lumber; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the author’s brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift or dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again requires the reader to page back in wonder—how did we get from there to here?—before the writer’s skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on death, preached in the poet’s final days on earth, before a picture of his own shrouded person; the metaphoric power of same: the womb a grave, the grave a whirlpool, Death’s hand stretched to save us; a long read; a short history of decay; a diary’s prompt towards self-improvement: “To sew on my buttons (+ button my lip)”; on a dancer arrayed like an insect or a ray of light; love, alphabetized; life, alphabetized; every second of a silent clown’s appearance on screen, dissected: “We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death”; on the cows outside the window: their movement and mass, their possible emotions; what happened next will amaze you; upon a time a dutiful thing, set and judged by teachers, proof because proof needed—of what? Compliance, competence and comprehension, proper meanness of ambition; but later, discovered in the library and under the bedclothes: sparks or scintillations, stabs at bewilderment, some effort or energy flung at the void; and style too, scurrilous entertainments, a writing that’s all surface, torsion and poise, something so artful it can hardly be told from disarray; an art among others of the sidelong glance, obliquities and digressions; an addiction to arduous learning; a study of punctuation marks, their meaning and morality; seven Dada manifestos, forty-one false starts, the writer’s technique in thirteen theses; an account of what passed through the author’s mind in the seconds before a stagecoach crash, somewhere on the road between Manchester and Glasgow, “in the second or third summer after Waterloo.” The writing of the disaster. Confessions, cool memories, a collection of sand. Curiosities. The philosophy of furniture. An account of the late eclipse. What was it like to fly high above the capital, through silver mist and hail, when flying was yet new? The answer: “Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.”
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at “therefore”) at the level of thought. Not to mention feeling. Picture if you can its profile on the page: from a solid spate of argument or narrative to isolated promontories of text, these composing in their sum the archipelago of a work, or a body of work. The page an estuary, dotted at intervals with typographical buoys or markers. And all the currents or sediments in between: sermons, dialogues, lists and surveys, small eddies of print or whole books construed as single essays. A shoal or school made of these. Listen for the possible cadences this thing might create: orotund and authoritative; ardent and fizzing; slow and exacting to the point of pain or pleasure; halting, vulnerable, tentative; brutal and peremptory; a shuffling or amalgam of all such actions or qualities. An uncharted tract or plain. And yet certain ancient routes allow us to pilot our way through to the source, then out again, adventuring.
I dream of essays and essayists: real and unreal authors, achieved and impossible examples of a genre (it’s not the word, not at all) that would—what, exactly? Perform a combination of exactitude and evasion that seems to me to define what writing ought to be. A form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. (Michael Hamburger: “But the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.”) Does that sound like what one might want from art or literature in general, not from essays only? Perhaps one category stands for everything, defines what I want from all art forms. The boundaries of this thing, this entity or inclination I admire—these I’ll have to determine later. For now it’s enough, I hope, to acknowledge that what I desire in essays—all those essays named or alluded to in the list above, almost all of which are real—is this simultaneity of the acute and the susceptible. To be at once the wound and a piercing act of precision: that makes it sound as though all I care for is style, that old-fashioned thing. It might well be true. But isn’t style exactly a contention with the void, an attitude or alignment plucked from chaos and nullity? Style as the prize, not a rule of the game. Style as sport in another sense too: botanical anomaly or innovation, avant-garde mutant. But don’t sports get assimilated in the end? Aberrations accommodated, rogues, freaks and rarities corralled and tamed? Curiosities neatly labelled, safely immured in vitrines and cabinets.
I may have imagined all of this—I might be describing a form that doesn’t (yet) exist. I have no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class, how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance and abeyance, to its present status as modest publishing revenant: the genre (please do not call it “creative non-fiction”) on which many writers’ and readers’ hopes are hung, many print and online columns filled with reflections on whether non-fiction is the new fiction, the essay the new novel, confession the new invention. Or rather, I know too well how that particular essay on essays gets written, what are its touchstones, where its arguments directed, how circular the sense that the writer is explaining a form to which he or she hopes to yoke the present text. I like circles and lines and symmetry too, more than is good for me as writer and as human, but in this case I cannot give myself to an elegant tale about the essay, neither to a pointed defence, rhetorical apology, psyched manifesto. (I find myself allergic to polemics, and so in the pages that follow some partisans of political essaying, or boisterous critical opinion, may find that their exemplars are absent. It’s not that I dislike a certain violence in the essay, but I can’t believe in a writing that is forcefully only itself—I want obliquity, essays that approach their targets, for there must be targets, slantwise, or with a hail of conflicted attitudes. This too may be political, even radical. It will often look like something else: what used to be called formalism, or dismissed as aestheticism.) I will have to write, can only write, in fits and starts, in passages that aspire to something like an argument, but others too that will seem to come from the very confusion the first class exists to cure. There are many passages in the works of the great essayists, and perhaps also the less-than-great, that will sanction a failure or refusal to cohere. Here is the poet William Carlos Williams, in the essay that yielded an epigraph for this book:
Each essay rings the changes of its range, the breadth, the penetration moving inward about the fashionable brick of all styles, unity. Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. There is no less significant matter for the attention. Every piece of writing, it matters not what it is, has unity. Inexpert or bad writing most terribly so. But ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness.
Another meaning of examen designates a swarm of bees, a flock of birds. The common etymology would be the verb exigo, to push out, to chase, then to demand. How enticing if the nuclear meaning of today’s words had to result from their meanings in a distant past! The essay might as well be the demanding weighing, the thoughtful examination, but also the verbal swarm from which one liberates development.
that being incomplete is a value in itself
What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.
And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am using only what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.
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. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtains across the world.
The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness [sic] totality and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
make a tick-tock of their tick-tick
the appearance of a list in an otherwise narrative or polemic piece of prose introduces—more or less violently—a sudden verticality into the horizontal flow of text: “An enumeration, a vertical structure, can be introduced anywhere in a sentence; the words which compose it can have any function, as long as it is the same one.”
Is there such a thing as a happy list in literature? The blithe verbal sum of possessions, achievements or experiences? Isn’t the very act of setting such things down evidence of some vexation, a clue that something is missing? The collector’s catalogue, the merchant’s tally, the seducer’s black book: they are all examples of compensating control. Compensation for what? For a scouring anxiety, or cumbrous melancholy? For sure, but there are heavy lists and lighter lists, and they both belong to the essayist, perhaps more than any other writer.
Didion soon admits that the list is evidence of abiding anxieties: “It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative.”
As a writer, as an essayist, I make lists all the time. Make, not write: because there is a difference, most of the time, between enumeration and writing proper.
(and my plans are always lists, not diagrams)
Which means, whatever William Gass says on the subject, that lists in essays always seem to me self-conscious in the extreme. They sound as if they’re explicitly about writerly ambition and its discontents, frustrations, disappointments.
Nothing seems easier, says Perec, than making (or is it writing?) a list; but it is really a complex undertaking. You are bound to forget something, and you will be tempted to give up, or let the thing tail off, and write “etc.”—“but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.”
I'm addicted not so much to production as profusion.
Lately I’ve begun to think this inclination to small forms must also be an expression of that anxiety, not only its cure. What exactly is one trying to say by this adherence to the evanescent, the dispersed and short-lived? It sometimes seems like I’m trying to fill the time, my time, with as many and various small tasks as possible, so that the time will seem to have gone slower. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen? It’s one of the things meant by a full life: a life filled with many diverse events and pursuits, many competing versions of oneself. But what of a life, a writing life let us say, that is filled with a single pursuit? A single commitment? That seems admirable to me; I have often wished that I had found such a way of being and writing. The words would eke out every day in pursuit and fulfilment of this one task. Instead here I am again, starting again.
Hardly a day goes by without my thinking of Benjamin’s famous essay about unpacking and categorizing his books. I am unpacking my library. No, I’m not.
(Maggie Nelson: “And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? . . . Are you sure—one would like to ask—that it cannot love you back?”)
The vantage it seems to me you have acquired.
The exigency of style, its imperious demand. I like rigour, but I like it to be somehow botched, impossible. The attraction to Theory, and in particular to deconstruction, which dominated my twenties, was never anything but this: a taste or affinity for systems at their point of collapse, the pristine mechanism’s lurch towards destruction. That was the thrill of Derrida’s writing, for sure: not at all the spectacle of method, which was taught us as a series of replicable steps in reading: the manifest logic of the piece discussed (poem, story, treatise) very subtly, so subtly then violently, undone by detail—the whole edifice of authorial expression or confidence turned against itself, all in disarray and yet always fretted by the ghosts of logic and form now lost. It seemed you could have both, the logic and the loss, so these writings promised. I remember trying to explain it to friends, and when I did no examples would come to mind at all. Instead an image: a perfectly forged or jointed lattice of thought, turning rickety and treacherous, like an old fairground ride, set to pitch the precious “I” headlong, when it shook itself to pieces.
I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that the catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgement of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along, bony fate attending in the shadows for years (half at least of a young life), waiting its moment to strike, if that’s the word—more perhaps to interfere, to tamper, to subtract enough that all came crashing down. I fell in love with these moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there were anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The refusal of “aestheticization” is a refusal to accept the worst, but dressed up as its opposite. The greatest art is nothing but delicately broached negation. I went looking for writers who would tell me that, time and again.
And closing in on his book’s proper philosophical import, he marvels at the poverty of language when it comes to describing sex: “We have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses. . . .We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming.”
“Seldom was blue for blue’s sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies.”
“I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing.”
Because what is left for us to say or to write if in the end the most intense bodily adventures will escape our sentences? You could read Gass’s endless list-making as a sort of depressive rosary, or an addiction long detached from its instigating trauma.
"the extreme gravity of her remembered world"
He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious, weeping women at his bedside. His last months, his final agonies, his utterly woeful end were a sordid and spectacular drama of broken hearts, angry wives, irritable doctors, frantic bystanders, rumors and misunderstandings, neglect and murderous permissiveness. The people near him visited indignities upon themselves, upon him, upon others. There seems to have been a certain amount of competition at the bedside, assertions of obscure priority. The horrors were more and more vague, confused by the ghastly, suffering needs of this broken host and by his final impersonality.
Hardwick admired the prose of poets: “I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose . . . the quickness, the deftness, confidence, and even the relief from spelling everything out, plank by plank.”
But isn't there something peculiar about the placing of that first comma?
Somewhere among my father’s books were crammed forgotten examples of an aestheticism of which I think my father did not approve—though he was obviously attracted in some way.
"the book-bed-bath defence system"
"Others merely live, I vegetate."
Connolly’s perfectly wrought, disconsolate phrases revert to what one suspects they had been in life, before reaching the pages of his notebooks: jokes, that is, one-liners and gags.
Connolly’s wife Jean, by then estranged, told him: “I think you are one of the few people whom self-pity or unhappiness develops rather than shuts in.”
Schlegel again: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.”
the aphorism not as a weapon but as a suit of armour
The aphorism would like us to believe in its tightly furled autonomy, but we can still discern its secret anatomy.
Thus La Rochefoucauld, in his Maxims, as related by Barthes: “The clemency of princes is often only a policy to gain the affection of the people. . . .The sage’s constancy is only the art of keeping his agitation shut up within his heart.”
Wit is the art of bringing unlikely things or ideas together, in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together.
Oscar Wilde’s is the epitome of the paradoxical style; each of his bon-mots, whether embedded in a play or story, or discretely proffered as part of a list, is designed to expose this or that cliché from the store of Victorian piety and hypocrisy. A single example should suffice to remind us: “In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.”
Is it possible generally to love the particular, universally to admire the individual instance? To say: I’m not interested in specificity, only in specifics? I cannot stand that clumsy academic veneration of the sovereign particular that pronounces itself on the side of the object or of materiality, at the sheer expense of objects and materials. If you’re this much invested in things, I want to say to the object-oriented ontologist and the new materialist, how come your writing is such a pallid repetition of theoretical tendencies from half a century ago, and in no way the rigorous adventure with the discrete or peculiar that you imagine it to be? How can you be so committed to inhuman thisness or thatness, yet so oblivious, so exasperatingly removed, when it comes to this or that actual example? A philosophy of the object without objects, a materiality without materials—what good are these to anyone except the intellectually immature and overreaching, of whom assuredly I have been one?
I took the book home and could make little sense of it. But something stayed with me—the purest pretension, maybe—and I borrowed it again a year later. This time, somehow, I knew how to read it.
"I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK"
"The emotional life is a complex sewer system. Have to shit everyday or it gets blocked up."
More pertinent to the intellectual and writing life she is trying to picture are those moments when she instructs herself to be less charming, less accommodating: “Don’t smile so much, sit up straight . . . and above all Don’t Say It, all those sentences that come ready-to-say on the tickertape at the back of my tongue.”
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.
“Project: convert my photographer’s eye (mute) into a poet’s eye.”
“I know I’m alone, that I’m the only reader of what I write here—but the knowledge isn’t painful, on the contrary I feel stronger for it, stronger each time I write something down.”
I was capable only of interesting myself in subjects I was already interested in; as often with students of oddly variable achievement, a practiced scorn concealed, but badly, my selective fWhen I could be bothered, I was a pretty good student, and mostly because, or so I thought, I had devised a scheme for composing my undergraduate essays. I thought that every essay should have what I called (privately) its particular “guiding metaphor.” The study and interpretation of a given work of literature was a matter, I imagined, of discovering the metaphor by which it could be described or (so as to distinguish myself, if only a little, from the available critical literature) redescribed. Once I had found this metaphor—sometimes it was obvious, but I preferred it when not—then the essay would in some real sense write itself, the figure unfolding and fulfilling its promise.ailure of nerve.
I was more inclined to an ancillary tendency these critics shared: a habit of claiming that some force, usually a little unlikely, was at work in the text or other cultural object under discussion. Derrida and the concept of pharmakon (poison and cure) in Plato, Deleuze and the dendritic (tree-shaped) logic that he says governs western thought—when you got down to it, the most committed adherents of these writers’ work refused to accept that these were metaphors at all: they were somehow “immanent” in thought itself, or in things themselves. I don’t think this is transparent nonsense—concepts have their being, after all—but I do, and did then, think that these are essentially metaphors, like most of what passes for metaphysics: or so my highly selective reading of Nietzsche had taught me to say.
My friends rounded on me straight away for my naivety and the crudeness of my comprehension: the rhizome was emphatically not a metaphor. But it seemed to me that it was far more interesting as a metaphor, to be deployed with a certain lightness, pushed playfully as far as it will go and then given up, than as a metaphysical entity to be pursued over the six hundred pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
“It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.”
From the surgery I walked, light-headed, to the library, where I sat and read the only book I knew on the subject at hand: Darkness Visible, a short account by the novelist William Styron of his own depression. I remember almost nothing about the book except a powerful sense of recognition during a passage where Styron describes the dizzying detachment that comes with depression, the feeling that one has been immured or glassed in Sylvia Plath’s famous “bell jar,” which I had lately realized was scarcely a metaphor at all, such was the stifling abstraction from behind which I viewed the world.
"a great Book is a great mischief"
As may be obvious, there was a bit of bravado mixed with my efforts to understand my depression. I was proud in a way of my diagnosis—I imagined, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it conferred or confirmed some depth or profundity that I had always felt I lacked. An absurd idea of course, but one that led to the suspicion, for the first time, that I might be able to write, properly write, that I could say “I” and this would not be an entirely shameful or exposing starting point. Because if “I” had comprehensively fallen apart anyway, then the version of myself that spoke—but in what context? I had no idea yet—would be nothing but a ghost, a sort of special effect.
In the middle of a fruitless argument with a girlfriend about our fragile relationship and the direction of my chaotic life, I waved around a copy of Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair and declared: this, this is all that matters. A second adolescence? An adolescence squared, I’d say now. Here, after all, is Cioran in that book:
How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
The fog in my head—another of the depressive’s clichés: the bell jar feels filled with this stuff, and it has seeped into the brain—began to propose itself as a way of thinking, where before it had felt precisely like not-thinking, and so it seemed as though it might also be a way of writing. I had always thought that my problem with writing—exhibit A: the unfinished thesis—was my lack of lucidity and energy, a failure or focus. Was it possible I could write out of the fog itself, out of confusion, disarray, debility? From inside the disaster itself ?
Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems we do not write that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others. Maybe we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once. . . . Maybe the actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing, at least when set out in sentences. (Too passive? Too privileged? Too rudimentary? Too “male”?) Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do for us—the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable—will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time. Whatever the reason for the omission, I think it should be repaired.
The likely outcome if you imprison a mole, a toad and a viper together, under glass? (As it happens, the mole prevails.)
(Lisa Robertson: “The melancholics concern themselves with the structure of doubt, rather than the structure of belief, because doubt is inventive. Doubt complicates. Even repudiation is a doubling. In this sense, doubt is erotic, as is melancholic space. Doubt, eros, melancholy: affective ornaments.”)
(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one’s reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)
Behind the romance of thick lines and thin-ice metabolic loops and leaps I can now see a certain skewed “logic.” It was as though I thought life were something that needed to be defused like a bomb or parsed like an algebraic equation before it could be lived.
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
To essay is to try but not to attempt. It is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is always sure, it remains from first to last fixed. Nothing affects it. It may stop, but if it stops that is surely the end and so it remains perfect, just as with an infant which fails to continue.

Page last revised on: 2024-05-06