An
Essay on the Essay
Mikhail Epstein
The essay is part confession, part discursive argument, and part narrative — it is like a diary, a scholarly article, and a story all in one. It is a genre legitimated by its existence outside any genre. If it treats the reader as confidant to sincere outpourings of the heart, it becomes a confession or a diary. If it fascinates the reader with logical arguments and dialectical controversies, or if it thematizes the process of generation of meaning, then it becomes scholarly discourse or a learned treatise. If it lapses into a narrative mode and organizes events into a plot, it inadvertantly turns into a novella, a short story or a tale.
The essay retains its character only when it constantly intersects with other genres. It is driven by a spirit of adventure and motivated by the desire to attempt everything without yielding to anything. As soon as the essayist tries to take a breath, to come to a stop, the nomadic and transmigratory essence of the essay crumbles to dust. If sincerity threatens to cross a limit, the essayist intervenes with abstractions. If abstract reflection threatens to grow into a metaphysical system, the essayist unexpectedly throws in a peripheral detail or anecdote in order to undermine its systematicity. The essay is held together by the mutual friction of incongruous parts that obstruct one other. At the heart of the essay is an uneven and discontinuous intonation that can be identified as the hallmark of the genre. Its typical voice is that of the sad exile or the brazen vagabond, combining a lack of self-confidence with an extremely casual demeanor. Not knowing from moment to moment what he will do next, the essayist can do most anything. He is in a permanent state of need or lack, but he releases, in a single line or page, enough riches to fill potentially an entire novel or treatise.
A good essayist is not a completely sincere man, nor a very consistent thinker, nor an extraordinary and imaginative story-teller. The writer who cannot successfully construct his sujet or argument, and who consequently loses out as a novelist or author of a treatise, gains as an essay writer. This is because in the essay only the digressions matter. The essay is thus an art of compromises, of surrenders. In the essay, the weaker side wins. The founder of the genre, Michel Montaigne, declares his creative and intellectual weakness on almost every page of his Essais (1571). In the essay On Books he complains to the reader about his inability to create something striking, polished, and generally useful due to his lack of philosophical and artistic talent. "If someone exposes my ignorance, he will not insult me because I do not take the responsibility for what I am saying even before my own conscience, let alone before others. Any form of self-complaisance is alien to me... Even if I am able to learn a few things occasionally, I am definitely incapable of committing it firmly to memory. (...) I borrow from others what I cannot express well myself, either because my language is poor or my mind is weak." [i]
The essay is the product of a convergence of poor unsystematic philosophy, bad and fragmentary literature, and an inferior and insincere diary. However, it is just this sort of hybrid and bad pedigree that has given the essay its flexibility and its beauty. Like a plebeian who is not burdened by traditions of nobility, the essay easily adapts to the eternal flow of everyday life, the vagaries of thought, and the personal idiosyncrasies of the writer. The essay, as a conglomeration of various deficiencies and incompletions, unexpectedly reveals the sphere of a totality normally hidden from the more defined genres (such as the poem, the tragedy, the novel, etc.); determined by their own ideal of perfection, these genres exclude everything that cannot be encompassed by their aesthetic ideal.
We can now clearly see that the essay did not originate in a void. Rather, it came to fill the space of that form of unified knowledge and representation that once belonged to myth. Because its roots run so deep into antiquity, the essay's second birth in the sixteenth century, in Montaigne, appears to be without origins and without tradition. In fact, the essay is directed towards that unity of life, thought, and image, which in its early syncretic form was at the origin of myth. Only at a later stage did this original unity of myth divide into three major and ever proliferating branches: the sphere of facts and historical events, the sphere of the image or representation, and the sphere of concepts and generalizations. These three spheres correspond to three broad categories of genre — the documentary-descriptive, the artistic-imaginary, and the theoretical-speculative.
Essay writing, like a weak and somewhat sickly growth, found a place for itself in the gap created by the branching out of myth into those three major directions. From there, this thin branch grew vigorously to become the main off-shoot of the great tree of myth. The essay thus became the central trunk of that totality of life, image, and thought, which split into the various branches of knowledge that have become further specialized over time.
In our own times, which have seen a renaissance in mythological thinking, the experience of spiritual totality finds expression more and more frequently in the essay. With Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is philosophy that becomes essayistic; with Thomas Mann and Robert Musil it is literature; with Vasily Rozanov and Gabriel Marcel it is the diary. Henceforth it is no longer only peripheral cultural phenomena that acquire qualities of the essay but mainstream ones as well. The pressure of mythological totality can be felt from all directions. In the essay, however, this totality is not experienced as a given, as accomplished, but as a possibility and an intent, in its spontaneity, immediacy, and incompletion.
Almost all the mythologems of the twentieth century have their origins in the essayistic mode: Camus's Sisyphus, Marcuse's Orpheus, Miguel de Unamuno's Don Quixote, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and "magic mountain," Kafka's "castle" and "trial," Saint-Exupéry's "flight" and "citadel." This kind of essayistic writing is in part reflexive, in part representational, in part confessional and didactic. It attempts to deduce thought from being and to lead it back to Being. All the major trends of literature, philosophy and even the scientific disciplines of the twentieth century have acted as tributaries to this mainstream of essayism. Among its exemplars are Carl Jung, Theodor Adorno, Albert Schweitzer, Konrad Lorenz, André Breton, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Yasunari Kawabata, Kobo Abe, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. In Russia too, outstanding poetry and fiction writers, philosophers and literary scholars expressed themselves as essayists: Lev Shestov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandel'shtam, Victor Shklovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Bitov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Georgy Gachev, and Sergei Averintsev.
Essayism is a considerably broader and more powerful trend than any single artistic or philosophical movement; broader than Surrealism or Expressionism, Phenomenology or Existentialism. It is of this interdisciplinary scope precisely because essaysim is not a trend of one of the branches of culture or a method of one of disciplines but a distinctive feature of contemporary culture in its entirety. Essayism tends toward a neomythological wholeness, a merging of image and concept inside culture itself, but also a merging of culture with Being itself and with the sphere of raw facts and daily occurrences that are usually considered beyond the limits of culture.
Essayism is thus, like its earlier counterpart, mythology, an all-encompassing mode of creative consciousness. Essayism functions as a metadiscourse in relation to all the artistic, philosophical, and documentary modes of representation that feed into it and that originated in mythological consciousness.
However, there is also a profound difference between mythology, which was born before cultural differentiation, and essayism, which arose out of these differentiations themselves. Although essayism unites the disparate—fact, image, and concept, or the sensible, the imaginary, and the rational—it does so without destroying their autonomy. This is how essayism differs from the syncretic mythology of earlier epochs as well as from the totalitarian mythologies of the twentieth century. The latter tend to unite by force what was naturally not subject to differentiation in antiquity. Thus totalitarian mythology requires the ideal to be treated as factual; possibility or even impossibility to be treated as real; an abtract idea to be treated as material force, the prime-mover of the masses; and one individual to be treated as a model for all other individuals. Essayism, too, unites fragmented portions of culture. But in so doing, essayism leaves enough space between them for play, irony, reflection, alienation, and defamiliarization. These are definitely antagonistic to the dogmatic rigidity of all mythologies based on authority.
Essayism is a mythology based on authorship. The self-consciousness of a single individual tests the limits of its freedom and plays with all possible conceptual connections in the unity of the world. In an essay, individual freedom is not negated in the name of a myth, with its tendency for depersonalization, but flourishes in the right to individual myth. This authorial, mythopoetic freedom, which includes freedom from the impersonal logic of myth itself, constitues the foundation of the genre. The essay thus constantly vascillates between myth and non-myth, between unity and difference. Consequently, the particular coincides with the univeral, image with concept, being with meaning. However, these correspondences are not complete, edges protrude, creating uneven surfaces, disruptions, and discrepancies. This is the only way in which the contemporary perception of the world can come to realization: aiming for totality, it at the same time does not claim to overcome difference in its constituent parts.
The literal meaning of "essay" is an "attempt," an "experiment." This is its indispensable quality. The essay is experimental mythology, the truth of a gradual and unfinalizable approximation to myth, not the lie of a totalizing coincidence with it. Essayism is thus an attempt at preventing the fragmentation of culture on the one hand, and the introduction of a coercive unity on the other. Essayism is directed against the plurality of fragmented particulars as well as against the centripetal tendencies of a dictatorial totality. Essayism is an attempt at stemming the tide of narrow disciplinary particularization at work in contemporary culture. But it is also a bulwark against the petrification of culture into cult and ritual, which becomes all the more fanatical the greater grows the discrepancy between the extremes of fantasy and reality (which makes all the more difficult to force them into the immutable dogmatic unity of faith).
Essayism is an attempt at unification without violence, an attempt at projecting compatibility without compulsory communality. It is an attempt at leaving intact, in the heart of a new, non-totalitarian totality, the experience of insecurity and the sphere of possibility, the sacred Montaignesque "I cannot" and "I do not know how," which is all that remains of the sacred in the face of the pseudo-sacralizations of mass mythology. "I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity . . . and so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things" [ii] Two conditions must be met: audacity of vision and awesome respect for things themselves. Or, to put it differently, boldness of propositions and meekness of conclusions. Only by fulfilling these two conditions, inherent in the essay, can something of true worth be created in our age: namely, a universe of unfinalizable totality.
The present essay has transcended the confines of its topic—"the essay"—and entered the wider sphere of "essayism," which carries a new hope for contemporary culture. But it is only by transcending its topic that the essay remains true to its genre.
1982
Transl. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover