Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

Irony or Sneakiness: On the Essay's Second-Class Citizenship

irony or sneakiness on the essay’s second-class citizenship The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence. E. B.White, foreword, Essays The essayist dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes lead him to believe that he has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than explanations of the poems of others, or at best of his own ideas. But he ironically adapts himself to this smallness—the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in the face of life—and even emphasizes it with ironic modesty. Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” - This page intentionally left blank The essay is, of course, the form literary commentary has traditionally taken, at least until the MLA, German scholarship, and socalled professionalism expunged belles lettres in favor of the book-length monograph and the “definite article,” which are impersonal , closed, purely logical, and authoritarian. What we call “criticism” counts for little in the world outside academia: it sells more anemically than even poetry and is often to be found, if at all, in the farthest, darkest reaches of bookshops. If criticism offers no cachet to the essay, where to look for its significance? And the essay is significant, having survived midcentury proclamations of its demise (delivered, sometimes, with strained irony), and having managed a recent comeback so widespread and vigorous that even textbooks now grant it canonical and genre status alongside poetry, fiction, and drama. Nothing short of a renaissance of the essay has been underway for at least two decades. Possessed, therefore, of remarkable resiliency, the essay has endured drought and doubt, exclusion from the pantheon of genres, and a lack of academic recognition. It has now blossomed, cultivated by writers and eagerly sought by admiring readers interested in “the real.” Perhaps one reason for the essay’s impoverishing “second-class” citizenship, as E. B.White labeled it in 1977, lies in its characteristic modesty; refusing to “take on airs,” the essay often appears so unassuming as to be self-effacing, which is certainly part of its charm as well as of its power. Its brevity—the essay can often be read in one sitting—militates against epic pretensions or visions of 11 grandeur, before which the maker of essays is, besides, uncomfortable and wary. Accordingly, the essay has never flaunted itself the way the novel sometimes does; rather, it declares its importance through its difference from the romance, history, and biography. The essay has, typically, manifested contentment with itself, although just as typically it manifests discontentment with the world surrounding it. From the be ginning, indeed, modesty has characterized the essay. Lukács refers to “the wonderfully elegant and apt title of ‘Essays’” Montaigne gave his mere trials or attempts as “simple modesty” and “an arrogant courtesy.”1 Arrogance is hard to find, but otherwise the Hungarian theorist is surely right. Modesty there is everywhere in Montaigne, along with elegance, nowhere more so than when he tries, simply, to defend his undertaking, an apologia pro sua essais that turns “Of Practice” from a personal account of a neardeath experience into a seminal revelation of the essayist’s art: “What I write here,” offers the wily old Gascon, “is not my teaching , but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” Both becoming and beguiling, “the father of the essay” continues, edging his defense a major step forward with the same humility: 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. We have heard of only two or three ancients who opened up this road [presumably not including Seneca and 12 irony or...