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  • Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth
  • Ned Stuckey-French (bio)
Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth By C. Douglas AtkinsUniversity of Georgia Press, 2005180 pages, cloth, $44.95; paper, $19.95

Douglas Atkins believes in the essay, so much so that he’s become an evangelist for it. He reveals at the outset of this ambitious and much needed book that the essay changed, perhaps even saved, his life. When in middle age he rediscovered the essay, he found himself not only teaching and “celebrating it,” but even “preaching it.”

Writing essays helped him slow down and be humble. He alludes to trouble with alcohol, but testifies that when he stopped drinking and began writing essays, he let go of his “willful ego.” Now, instead of banging out [End Page 157] articles at a computer, he writes essays each morning with a fountain pen, “an instrument that you [can] respect.”

There is much to learn from a true believer, and Atkins is that. I too believe in the essay and think it’s an honest form. Essayists talk straight about what they’re thinking. Their skepticism tends to keep them tentative and open-minded. They don’t usually indulge in high-handed flights of poetic fancy or make things up.

Once at the end of a dozen MLA interviews, a colleague on a search committee remarked to me how different this creative nonfiction search was from fiction and poetry committees on which he’d recently served: “Amazing! Not a nut job in the bunch.” Atkins pushes this notion even further. “I suspect,” he says, “though I can hardly prove it, that most essayists are good people.” But if some essayists are not good people, says Atkins, it’s not the fault of their form.

He begins with a chapter on the essay’s “second-class citizenship,” a term he borrows from E. B. White, who, in the oft-quoted introduction to his collected essays, pointed out that because the essay “stands a short distance down the line” essayists should not “take on airs” or aspire to the Nobel Prize. The essayist, White admitted, might be “congenitally self-centered,” but if he’s snobbish or dishonest, he’ll soon be found out. In essays, there is no disembodied third-person narrator, no hiding among the voices of others. This I is me, the same me you sit down with if you come to my house.

Of course, contemporary theory suggests that we’re always putting on a persona, even at home. Atkins quotes Derrida and Barthes (though not too much). He knows about de-centered subjects, performativity, and the death of the author, but his point is that the essay’s focus on accountability and actual events edges it away from imagination and toward memory, away from literature and toward journalism. It’s the fourth genre after all, the last one into the creative writing programs.

But, Atkins argues, second-class citizenship has its upside. It keeps the essayist from getting a big head. He’s friendly and available. He addresses the common reader in a familiar, self-deprecating voice, claiming only to be trying something out, taking a shot, essaying. While this may be just a rhetorical stance, Atkins believes that it becomes a habit and that the essay’s skepticism and tentativeness make it inherently antidogmatic. He understands that such a claim can itself be trouble, citing Adorno and Lukàcs, who, while leery of making a dogma out of antidogmatism, do sometimes idealize the essay. [End Page 158]

Atkins follows this balancing act through the essay’s long tradition, stopping along the way for close readings of everyone from Dryden to Scott Russell Sanders. Atkins’s approach is often to set the essay off against another form, or to scrutinize its own internal contradictions. The essay, he points out, was split at the root between Montaigne’s exploratory openness and Bacon’s careful, instructive aphorisms. This opposition, he continues, is not unrelated to the subtle difference between personal and familiar essays—the one exploring the self as a subject, the other using the self to explore a subject. If the essayist is a monologist...

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