Longer Views: Extended Essays

Extensions: An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany

Extensions An Introduction to the Longer Viewsof Samuel R. Delany BY KEN J A M E S There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation , whose analysis must be very finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction. —Jacques Derrida The term "extended essay," in its very articulation, seems to presuppose a norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed . Certainly the long pieces in the remarkable collection to follow do not fit the form of the essay we have been led (by whom?by what? for what purpose?) to expect; nor does the experience of reading them feel like the experience of reading a traditional essay. To better understand what these pieces are up to, then, we might want to consider the form against which they position themselves. What constitutes a "traditional" essay, and what is the experience of reading one like? Obviously to make generalizations about a form with such a wide range of possible topics (i.e., just about anything) and possible writerly approaches is to construct something of a fiction; nevertheless, generalizations about normative trends—generalizations about what we have come to expect from an essay—are possible. Lydia Fakundiny characterizes the essay in passing as a "short, independent, self-contained prose discourse."1 Fair enough. But as has been noted by Fakundinyand many other scholars of the history of the essay, there are other, more specific traits which have characterized the essaysince the traditionally posited birth of its modern form in the sixteenthcentury writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From I xiv Ken James Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal ofanalytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, "I myself am the subject of my book."2 Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting "the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos" of life.3 From Bacon,we get a writerly stance that tends towards didacticism, in the specifically aphoristic mode. Bacon's Essays, which appeared 17 years after the publication of the first edition of Montaigne's collection, are written in a terse, pithy,authoritarian style: they do not so much analyze topics as list epigrams. Here isawell-known example of typical Baconian prose: Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them . .. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and somefew to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention . . . Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writingan exact man.4 In Bacon we find the seeds of what the essaywas to become a little over a century later in the hands ofJoseph Addison and Richard Steele— a specifically urban mode of writing, offering an authoritarian moral compass for those who would live in the city. (Atthe same time, a critical tradition was developing from the essay's classical roots, giving rise to the "impersonal" form which constitutes most academic writing today.) What often seems to characterize the works of the most popular contemporary essayistsis a combination of the didactic tone of Bacon with the self-presentational obsessions of Montaigne—a conflation of the authorial and the authoritarian. Consider the following passage from The Writing Life, in which Annie Dillard compares the experience of essay-writing to a kind ofpath-finding: You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports , dispatch bulletins. The writinghas changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility,you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. Introduction xv Note how Dillard's use of the second-person pronoun causes the sentences in this passage to waver between description and...