Back to the Future

In a recent New Yorker profile of Derek Parfit, the controversial British moral philosopher wonders why we are "so biased toward the future." It's a human predisposition I've often wondered about myself, especially now that I'm confronted with questions about the future of the essay. When it comes to contemplating essays, I'd much prefer to reevaluate the essay's past than speculate about its future.

To be sure, back in 1985 when I was preparing to launch the Best American Essays series, the essay—as my publisher feared—apparently had no future. It was dead. Or rather, it was dead again, having already been buried in the 1930s, as readers during the Depression era increasingly favored the more urgent and timely prose featured in a number of rising new American magazines. So the literary essay, it appears, was first killed by the Old Journalism and then some forty years later by what was called the New Journalism.

The truth is that throughout the twentieth century, the essay endured a generally hostile marketplace. Even E. B. White in 1939 had a hard time selling personal, reflective essays to his own magazine, The New Yorker, and eventually turned to Harper's to find a receptive audience for the writing he felt most compelled to do. In the late 1980s, Paul Fussell said (I paraphrase from memory): if you want to watch an editor squirm, walk into his office with a collection of essays on disparate subjects. His remark is even more applicable today; in fact, with a collection of essays on disparate subjects, you will most likely have difficulty getting in the door. And, unlike Fussell, most essayists do not have a National Book Award to bolster their proposal.

But that's only one way to look at the essay's future: its marketability as a literary product. I'd like to take the opportunity here to examine a different future—the essay's aesthetic prospects. How will the genre change? Will we see any innovations in form that will make the essays we admire today seem wholly conventional and old-fashioned? And will these be genuine literary innovations in composition and prose style, or merely deviations from customary forms calculated to grab attention and appear artistically cutting-edge?

To my way of thinking, innovation doesn't necessarily consist of breaking prose down into a number of fragments and then placing numbers in front of them. Why are the numbers in sequence, I wonder—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. and not 17, 3, 35, 89? Does it make any difference? Is this simply linear progression in another form? Nor does innovation necessarily consist of juxtaposing images or thoughts that appear to have nothing in common—as the early seventeenth century poets did so marvelously. Or in multiplying footnotes until they dominate the body of the text. It seemed "innovative" when David Foster Wallace purposefully did this years ago, but it now seems to have become another nonfiction workshop formula.

Nor does innovation consist in making the message imitate the medium—as though readers will be knocked out of their socks by essays that resemble Twitter posts. Or in blurring boundaries or erasing borders. Not that this isn't worth doing at times, but has anything become more clichéd in contemporary literature than blurred boundaries? Nor does an essayist do anything special by believing the discontinuous is superior to the continuous, the nonlinear to the linear, the transgressive to the orthodox, the margins to the center, the fragment to the whole, the asymmetrical to the symmetrical, and so on down the whole dialectical grid of current literary fashions. Writers, artists, and composers have consistently expressed these preferences since at least the turn of the last century. We have well over a century of literary experimentation behind us—much more if we count Michel de Montaigne's great experiment in self-examination, Laurence Sterne's brilliant Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), Charles Baudelaire's "Little Poems in Prose," or Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855).

The seeds of the future are often buried in the past; this is as true for...