On Essays: Montaigne to the Present by Thomas Karshan Kathryn Murphy

Abstract

BOOKS IN REVIEW On Essays: Montaigne to the Present Ed. Thomas Karshan & Kathryn Murphy Oxford. Oxford University Press. 2020. 380 pages. IN HER INTRODUCTION to The Best American Essays 1992, Susan Sontag writes: “The culture administered by universities has always regarded the essay with suspicion.” Twenty-eight years later, does the appearance of On Essays: Montaigne to the Present —produced by one of the world’s premier university publishers and written by academics—indicate a change of heart? Scholars are certainly showing signs of a dawning awareness that this is an area worth exploring. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy are correct that the twenty-first century is witnessing “a revival of interest in the essay form.” In similar vein, Felicity James—who contributes an excellent chapter on Charles Lamb—talks about the essay today being “rediscovered and reinvented.” And, in another essayfocused volume published in 2020—Imagined Spaces, edited by Gail Low and Kirsty Gunn—no less an authority than Phillip Lopate adds his voice to this idea of a contemporary essay-renaissance. Though the essay has long been “neglected at a theoretical level,” Lopate reckons this “is beginning to change.” In evidence he cites recent conferences and books that have started to construct “a poetics and ideology of the essay.” But although there are signs that the attitude Sontag noted in 1992 is changing, it would be premature to see the essay being comfortably ensconced in the standard syllabus of literary concerns, its pariah status exchanged for the same kind of mantle of genrerespectability that scholarship has draped so thickly over novels and poetry. Theodor Adorno—whose theoretical work on the essay remains an important touchstone—recognized heresy as “the law of the innermost form” of this type of writing. The essay is an independent, even outlaw genre that likes to go its own way. Orthodoxy and conformity are anathema to it. As such, it is resistant to the kind of categories scholars bring to bear. Karshan and Murphy talk about “the various ways in which the essay bristles ON ESSAYS 114 WLT SPRING 2021 against academic writing.” Specifically, they identify its “resistance to introductions , to generalization and abstraction, to accounts of its origins, its freedom from discipline, rules, and criteria.” In other words, the essay swims against the current in which books like this are written. Essayists should not be surprised, therefore, if they experience a certain bristling as they read—but there is also much to engage their interest. Attempting to summarize the book’s seventeen chapters is beyond the reach of a brief review. Instead, as a way of indicating something of the spread of topics, let me pick out a few points that struck me. Fred Parker’s chapter on David Hume offers a refreshing perspective on this key Scottish thinker by arguing that it was “as an essayist , not a philosopher, that Hume made his name.” Scott Black makes a convincing case for seeing Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as more an essay than a novel, flagging up “digression, irregularity, wildness” and “discursive wandering about” as some of its most striking essaylike features. Tom Wright’s examination of the “voiced essay” in Carlyle and Emerson—both of whom spoke to live audiences as well as producing written texts—provides persuasive evidence that the essay “has never been solely introspective or intimate.” Michael Wood—in a chapter that nicely complements those on Hume and Sterne—looks at “Essayism in the British novel after Borges.” His comments on Julian Barnes are particularly good. Writing on “The Psychoanalyst and the Essay,” Adam Phillips shows how, for those professionally engaged in this area, calling their books essay collections “is like a declaration of independence.” Looking at the essay’s “genial scepticism” and “hospitable curiosity,” Phillips makes the intriguing suggestion that “the essay can be, to put it psychoanalytically, the genre in which we are free of tyrannical parents.” Christy Wampole contributes a photo essay on Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for an edition of Montaigne’s essays published by Doubleday in 1947. In a fascinating aside she speculates that if Montaigne had had a camera, he “would have left behind a different kind of cultural artefact.” Other chapters range...