The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance (review)

This collection of essays about essays opens, promisingly, with an epigraph from Hazlitt: 'What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, What crooked reasons, what lame conclusions!' The editors' preface labels the essay 'a generic glory-hole', and a second introductory piece, an erudite survey by Peter France, compares British and French traditions. France cites Hume's appealing view of the essayist as 'the ambassador from the world of learning to the sociable world'. On different levels, the collection reminds the reader that such postings are rare (and the climate often poor, the language unfamiliar); that nonetheless some essayists have moved successfully into the public arena — notably in the colonial or postcolonial sphere, discussed by Aedín Ní Loingsigh and David Murphy, where a certain essayistic interplay between the personal and the political gains a new weight; and that another version of essayistic practice has been defined by the relative modesty, or apparent modesty, of its aims. Montaigne is a near-constant reference point; and though occasionally the links back to the Essais seem a little tenuous, more often they work suggestively, as in Michael Sheringham's spin on 'an approach to knowledge that refuses to bracket out concrete, embodied experience' — or, less explicitly, in the quotation from Foucault with which Robert Crawshaw closes his analysis of L'Ordre du discours: 'Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j'écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu'auparavant'. As you would expect, the volume is heterogeneous, and there is alluring material ranging from Augé to Segalen to the photo-essay. For readers not tackling the whole book there is an index of names, and overall it gives a sense of the liveliness and diversity of modern essay-writing in French; it helps nudge certain essays towards the status of 'primary' texts and draws attention to major secondary works on the form. 'Form' may not be the right word, of course: among the contributors who are bracingly pragmatic on this point, Anne Freadman, in a fine discussion of Colette, proposes that journalism count as essay-writing 'when it can be sold a second time'. More often, though, contributors take their lead from Adorno's dazzling reflections on the 'methodically unmethodical', and one of the pleasures of reading the collection lies in tracking different authors' characterizations of the essay, which include Forsdick's 'the perambulation of an idea' (a nod to Paul Klee), Michon's 'demi-fictions', and the notion, from Claude Coste's intriguing account of Pascal Quignard on music, that the essay 'laisse . . . la voix à la voix'. Quignard himself declares: 'Que celui qui me lit ait constamment à l'esprit que la vérité ne m'éclaire pas', and that struck me as another alluring candidate for use as an epigraph, or perhaps an essay title.