The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

Abstract

As it currently stands, the genre we have come to call creative or literary (the adjective is still up for debate within the guild) nonfiction suffers from a theory deficit. The deficit has to do, at least in part, with the fact that its formation as a “genre” is so much more recent than poetry or fiction. Theorists in poetry can track citations as ancient as Aristotle. Theorists in fiction can debate Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis ad infinitum. The most notable argument among nonfictionists lately arose over John D’Agata’s flimsy definition of a “fact” and his corollary decisions over what could be counted in his trilogy of essay anthologies, even when many of those essays were never written or read as “essays.” But another part of the deficit has to do with the fact that whatever theoretical debates do currently exist in nonfiction have most often arisen among practitioners of the genre—essayists, memoirists, et al.—rather than among scholarly readers and critics. That is not necessarily a problem, only an acknowledgment that the genre so defined has not had enough time to develop enough graduate programs in English departments to proliferate cohorts of professional critics. It will be awhile yet before we will get the first edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Nonfiction and Its Poetics.This is not to say that the essay itself has not had its own history of criticism. A sense of the theoretical about the essay goes at least as far back as Montaigne, if only because nearly every essay that we could locate within the tradition of the sixteenth-century French noble holed up in his tower contains its own theoretical sense of what it is trying to be or do. Just as nearly every poem could be read as its own ars poetica, nearly every essay could be read as its own ars essaistica, an essay that in some way (self-)reflects on the “art of essaying.”Both of these realities make a critical anthology like The Essay at the Limits so necessary. Its editor, Mario Aquilina, never quite says it as such, but the anthology seems to bear a self-awareness that it is helping to form a more professional criticism of literary nonfiction in general and the essay in particular. Its origins arose from a conference on the essay convened by Aquilina at the University of Malta in April 2019, The Essay: Present Histories, Present Futures. Aquilina organizes the fifteen essays (plus his introduction) neatly into three sections of five essays each: “The Essay and the World,” “The Essay and the Self,” and “The Essay, Form and the Essayistic.” The section titles are more or less self-explanatory, but they allow the essays that they contain to explore a wide range of texts, artwork, and media, beyond the strictly literary confines of the essay itself. Thus, the anthology includes a wide range of reflection not only the essay as a literary form, but on musical compositions, digital media, film, poetry, and the like, instances of which could in some way be defined as “essayistic” in tone, style, or mode.As editor, Aquilina provides an extended introduction that I found enormously helpful, and I will be making his introduction required reading in any advanced undergraduate or graduate nonfiction workshops or seminars I teach for the foreseeable future. He also provides useful short (two to three pages) introductions to each section, which situate their themes and provide some cohesion to the contributions, which are otherwise provocatively far reaching. For that reason, I am deeply grateful that the collection includes a good index.Even though the individual contributions delight in pulling the reader in various directions (itself an essayistic impulse?), the anthology simultaneously seems to build momentum toward its last section and the distinction it makes between the “essay” and the “essayistic.” This distinction animates the collection as a whole, as Aqualina makes clear in his preface: “The contributors . . . make a case, primarily through the introductory chapter but also throughout the volume, for thinking of the essay as a form at the limits, constituted by a productive tension between the essay and the essayistic, that is, the essay as a genre and the essayistic as a mode that may or may not coincide with the genre” (xiv). I find this tension tremendously productive. Not only does it echo the dual etymology of the French essai as both noun and verb (which is retained in its English history and usage), but it also signals how the essayistic “spirit” reaches beyond genre, much in the same way that we can read a text that we call a “poem,” while at the same time read another passage of prose and recognize its “poetic” style.If I might digress, this also points to an imprecision I found at various places within the collection. The essays in The Essay at the Limits often refer to the essay as both/either a “genre” and a “form.” Notice how the quotation abovementioned uses those terms interchangeably within the same sentence. It strikes me that our theoretical reflections would gain more precision if we referred to nonfiction generally as the “genre” and the essay, in particular, as one of the “forms” within that genre, much like theorists might distinguish the lyric as a form within the genre of poetry or the short story as a form within fiction. It is a minor quibble, but one I believe worth mentioning, especially since such precision in terminology would further enliven the tension between form and mode that this anthology so helpfully locates within the essay(istic) “at the limits.”It also strikes me that positioning the essay “at the limits” is particularly apt at this point in time. The essay, as text, often persists in the liminal spaces, the thresholds, of language and consciousness. But the essayistic, as a history, might also seem to persist at a liminal space in time and in our reception of it. In the American literary marketplace, we are still in the midst of what many have called a “memoir boom,” and more than a few practitioners of the essay are finding new expanses in the craft of the essay, all of which are making nonfiction an exciting space for both writers and readers. But the essay in particular is a form suited for the limits of thresholds, margins, and boundaries. Essayistic modes of thinking and language are, in this way, rhizomatic rather than rooted. They do not need a center. An essay can be gathered around a seemingly endless array of objects or inquiries, braided together by a logic that is linear, circular, or otherwise. This is at least part of what makes the essay as form as generative as it is. And I do not think any of this reflecting upon the essay(istic) would have occurred to me without this particular anthology foregrounding it in the way that it does. Yet, at the same time, the essay weds this experimental expansiveness with a particularly keen attentiveness to truth. In reflecting upon the work of Rebecca Solnit, Aquilina demonstrates how that makes the essay(istic) more urgent for today: “At this particular moment in history characterized by fake news, post-truth politics and social media alienation, the essay, she insists, is a form of gathering and meaning-making that is ‘passionately engaged, informed, and committed to ideals including accuracy and precision and fact and memory’” (12).All of which suggests that, just as there are more essays waiting to be written, there is more theoretical work to be done. I did notice that the contributors to The Essay at the Limits are decidedly Eurocentric, with a particular concentration of scholars trained in Great Britain. But I would not characterize this fact as a weakness. Rather, it is an invitation. We need similar collections of reflection from other continents of thought that negotiate other limits and liminalities of the essay(istic). Given that Montaigne followed his European Renaissance contemporaries in their ad fontes return to ancient Greek and Roman sources, I have personally wondered, as just one example, if the Hebraic sources of the form (cf. the wisdom traditions of the Hebrew Bible) remain uncharted theoretical territory. Likewise, in a North American context, what is it about the essay(istic) that has allowed for some of the most profound expressions of Black experience at its limits? (James Baldwin and Claudia Rankine come immediately to mind.) If anyone is interested in organizing a conference that might include these themes, count me in.