by Kimmo Rosenthal

It is interesting that upon tracing the etymology of the word essay to its roots, we come across the Latin word exagium, which means a weighing. The idea of an essay as a weighing of sorts is not surprising. In her illuminating essay on the current proliferation of “personal” as opposed to “familiar” essays, which focus on subject matter other than the author, Merve Emre highlights the idea of a triad between subject matter, reader, and the writer in the familiar essay. She references Adorno as asserting that the priorities of a good essay are to “elucidate the matter at hand,” and are not about “telling stories about people;” this is obverse to what seems to be currently in vogue, the confessional, personal essay, which in the words of Virginia Woolf already a century ago, is “often uninteresting – a specimen of amazing and unclothed egoism.”

The acuity of Emre’s insights has clarified for me the essence of my own approach to essay reading and writing, in particular my gravitation towards the familiar essay in both realms. While the more personal essay can sparkle on the page, such as those of André Aciman, oftentimes I find myself uninterested due to the inattention to the expressiveness of language, which seems, to me, to have been sacrificed at the altar of feelings, contemporaneity, and accessibility.

“Form and style”: a conduit to arriving at the level of thought
Brian Dillon’s opening essay in his book Essayism, wherein I learned of “exagium,” highlights the role that form, style, and linguistic adroitness can play, engendering a “conduit to arriving at the level of thought.” He suggests an essay should possess an architectural quality replete with “the unexpected surprises of a Piranesi etching;” prose should “instruct, seduce, and mystify in equal measure,” suggesting that a mere recounting of events and personal circumstances will be found lacking. There should not be a presumption of presenting a definitive explanation, nor should the tone be dogmatic. Herein lies the appositeness of the idea of a weighing or, as exagium evolved into the old French essai, a testing or a trial. This report itself entails my own attempt at weighing the notion of an essay.

I often find myself harkening back to Cicero’s quadrivium of tenets for intellectual discourse: vigor, knowledge, discovery, and memory. The vigor of expressive language and pure style should be combined with a breadth of knowledge, encompassing erudition, literary allusions, and a measured intelligence. This will create the opportunity for discovery on the part of the reader (and writer), while drawing sustenance from the deep reservoirs of memory. In his quiz on being a good reader (and by transference a good writer), Nabokov highlighted the four essential traits of imagination, memory, a dictionary, and an aesthetic sense. Nowadays, qualities like erudition (even if worn lightly), aestheticism, the presence of literary and artistic allusions, and the reader possibly needing recourse to a dictionary seem to fly in the face of the prevailing winds. I recently read an older, established author bemoaning what she perceived as impoverished standards of discourse and the fact that mastery of craft has become undervalued.

Two essayists whom Dillon focuses on, Elizabeth Hardwick and William Gass, are writers I repeatedly turn to for inspiration and affirmation, in particular Hardwick’s The Art of the Essay, which is paradigmatic of its title, and Gass’ The Music of Prose, wherein he defends his euphonic, lustrous prose, suggesting at one point that it is an intentional affront to readers hung up on content and so-called relevance, labeling them “lead-eared moralists and message gatherers.”

The cold hardship of writing; feeling is not sufficient
Hardwick asserts that feeling is not sufficient, yet it often seems in the realm of the personal essay that the underlying assumption is quite the contrary. Heartfelt emotions and a baring of the soul for all to oftentimes obviate the need for concerted engagement with language, the exercise of style, and attention to what Hardwick calls “the cold hardship of writing.” She bemoans the air of “immature certainty” in many essays—recalling that this was written in 1999, she might feel even more strongly today. She suggests emulating Gass, whose essays are “a great meadow of style and personal manner. . .” with “individual intelligence and sparkle.” Her notion of the art of an essay of necessity demands “the mastery of expository prose, the rhythm and pacing of sentences, the sudden flash of unexpected vocabulary,” all attributes of which she is the very exemplar. The essence of an essay should not be separate from form and style, rather, as Dillon suggests above, it should inhere in these as they adduce the main thoughts.

Familiarity with those who have plowed the field before
When I read this phrase from The Art of the Essay, I was reminded of similar comments that have resonated with me, such as Theodor Adorno’s, “nothing transcends without that which it transcends.” There is also Jed Perl proclaiming “the character of a work of art has everything to do with the breadth and depth of the artist’s engagement with the fundamentals.” In order to truly exhibit originality and best exercise the freedom of the imagination, the artist must be cognizant of and conversant with those who have gone before. For me, the best artists are those who exhibit this understanding and mastery of the fundamentals, while having the imagination and creativity to effectively develop the haecceity of their own style.

Language is not the low-born, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself
Turning to William Gass’ delightful, discerning essay, he highlights the key to unlocking the door to form and style, namely utilizing the expressiveness and elasticity of language in order to translate being-in-the-world into being-in-the-word. This elasticity should make room, among other things, for alliteration, metaphors, repetitive schemes, and more. An example illustrating Gass’ mastery of metaphor is his desire that “clauses will be balanced by other clauses the way a waiter carries trays.” This is far from postulating a specific style of writing, only that serious attention be paid to the use of language, as it forms a crucial component of this cold hardship of writing. Already in 1993 when this was written, Gass bemoans the misguidedness of the notion that “grand” writing detracts from the “message” of the essay, leading to his disdain for the above-mentioned lead-eared moralists and, in a later essay, for the depressing aim of making things compliant for the reader.

When he speaks of prose “as continuous and broad and full as the ocean,” it brings to mind Proust. This is not to say that prose need emulate the Proustian sentence, a journey with divagations and detours, making us look back in wonder upon arriving at the final period at the path taken, while perhaps needing to retrace our steps for reassurance. Nor need it proceed with the stately elegance of a royal procession, such as with Henry James; it can be more modern, “splashy and catchy” in Gass’s words, such as the exuberantly idiosyncratic prose of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19, with neologisms such as “globuliferous,” or the unexpected juxtapositions of words such as “juddering grace” and “pendulous chandelier of lambent gloom.”

When I read, it is with pleasure that I come across the startling metaphor, the interesting literary or artistic allusion, the unexpected adjective or adverbial clause, the complex, long, yet perfectly modulated sentence, or indeed learn a new word, such as the recently acquired “haecceity,” (which I learned reading John Banville). Perhaps therein lies the true weight of an essay for me.

Emre bemoans the fact that “spectacular personhood” has replaced the “unintimate friendship” of the essay writer with the reader. I keep returning to the idea of the triangulation of subject matter, writer, and reader and the necessity, for me at least, to try not to make things compliant and easy for the reader, nor be in the tight grip of the stranglehold of relevance. Hardwick finishes her essay suggesting that perhaps the most important element of an essay is “the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text,” as evinced by Hardwick herself, as well as Gass, Dillon, and Emre. I am still searching for that personal signature, using familiarity with those who have inspired me and sedulous attention to language as fingerposts in finding the right path.

Bibliography
Bennett, Claire-Louise. Checkout 19. New York: Riverhead Books, 2022.

Dillon, Brian. Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction. New York Review of Books, 2018.

Emre, Merve. “The Illusion of the First Person,” in New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, No. 17, Nov. 3, 2022.

Gass, William. “The Music of Prose,” in The William Gass Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 2019.

Hardwick, Elizabeth. “The Art of the Essay,” in The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. New York Review of Books, 2022.

Perl, Jed. Authority and Freedom (A Defense of the Arts). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.