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S E P T E M B E R 1 9 9 8
by Cynthia Ozick
N essay is a thing of the
imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and
if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine
essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the
movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in
kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made of
language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.
From Atlantic Unbound:
An Atlantic Unbound interview with the author.
A small historical experiment. Who are the classic essayists who come at once to mind? Montaigne, obviously. Among the nineteenth-century English masters, the long row of Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Stevenson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Martineau, Arnold. Of the Americans, Emerson. Nowadays, admittedly, these are read only by specialists and literature majors, and by the latter only under compulsion. However accurate this observation, it is irrelevant to the experiment, which has to do with beginnings and their disclosures. Here, then, are some introductory passages:
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.What might such a little anthology of beginnings reveal? First, that language differs from one era to the next: archaism intrudes, if only in punctuation and cadence. Second, that splendid minds may contradict each other (outdoors, Hazlitt never feels alone; Emerson urges others to go outdoors in order to feel alone). Third, that the theme of an essay can be anything under the sun, however trivial (the smell of sweat) or crushing (the thought that we must die). Fourth, that the essay is a consistently recognizable and venerable -- or call it ancient -- form. In English, Addison and Steele in the eighteenth century, Bacon and Browne in the seventeenth, Lyly in the sixteenth, Bede in the eighth. And what of the biblical Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), who may be the oldest essayist reflecting on one of the oldest subjects -- world-weariness?--William Hazlitt, "On Going a Journey"
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"
. . . I have often been asked, how I first came to be a regular opium-eater; and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case.--Thomas De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.--Charles Lamb, "The Two Races of Men"
I saw two hareems in the East; and it would be wrong to pass them over in an account of my travels; though the subject is as little agreeable as any I can have to treat. I cannot now think of the two mornings thus employed without a heaviness of heart greater than I have ever brought away from Deaf and Dumb Schools, Lunatic Asylums, or even Prisons.--Harriet Martineau, "The Hareem"
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.... But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.-- Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry"
The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together.--Robert Louis Stevenson, "Aes Triplex"
It is recorded of some people, as of Alexander the Great, that their sweat, in consequence of some rare and extraordinary constitution, emitted a sweet odour, the cause of which Plutarch and others investigated. But the nature of most bodies is the opposite, and at their best they are free from smell. Even the purest breath has nothing more excellent than to be without offensive odour, like that of very healthy children.-- Michel de Montaigne, "Of Smells"
O the essay is ancient and various; but this is a commonplace. Something else,
more striking yet, catches our attention -- the essay's power. By "power" I mean
precisely the capacity to do what force always does: coerce assent. Never mind
that the shape and inclination of any essay is against coercion or suasion, or
that the essay neither proposes nor purposes to get us to think like its
author -- at least not overtly. If an essay has a "motive," it is linked more to
happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a
doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. Thomas Paine's "Common
Sense" and Emile Zola's "J'Accuse ... !" are heroic landmark writings;
but to call them essays, though they may resemble the form, is to
misunderstand. The essay is not meant for the barricades; it is a stroll
through someone's mazy mind. This is not to say that no essayist has ever been
intent on making a moral argument, however obliquely -- George Orwell is a case
in point. At the end of the day the essay turns out to be a force for
agreement. It co-opts agreement; it courts agreement; it seduces agreement. For
the brief hour we give to it, we are sure to fall into surrender and
conviction. And this will occur even if we are intrinsically roused to
resistance.
To illustrate: I may not be persuaded by Emersonianism as an ideology, but Emerson -- his voice, his language, his music -- persuades me. When we look for words of praise, not for nothing do we speak of "commanding" or "compelling" prose. If I am a skeptical rationalist or an advanced biochemist, I may regard (or discard) the idea of the soul as no better than a puff of warm vapor. But here is Emerson on the soul: "When it breathes through [man's] intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love." And then -- well, I am in thrall; I am possessed; I believe.
The novel has its own claims on surrender. It suspends our participation in the society we ordinarily live in, so that for the time we are reading, we forget it utterly. But the essay does not allow us to forget our usual sensations and opinions. It does something even more potent: it makes us deny them. The authority of a masterly essayist -- the authority of sublime language and intimate observation -- is absolute. When I am with Hazlitt, I know no greater companion than nature. When I am with Emerson, I know no greater solitude than nature.
And what is oddest about the essay's power to lure us into its lair is how it goes about this work. We feel it when a political journalist comes after us with a point of view -- we feel it the way the cat is wary of the dog. A polemic is a herald, complete with feathered hat and trumpet. A tract can be a trap. Certain magazine articles have the scent of so much per word. What is indisputable is that all of these are more or less in the position of a lepidopterist with his net: they mean to catch and skewer. They are focused on prey -- us. The genuine essay, in contrast, never thinks of us; the genuine essay may be the most self-centered (the politer word would be subjective) arena for human thought ever devised.
Or else, though still not having us in mind (unless as an embodiment of common folly), it is not self-centered at all. When I was a child, I discovered in the public library a book that enchanted me then, and the idea of which has enchanted me for life. I have no recollection of either the title or the writer -- and anyhow, very young readers rarely take note of authors; stories are simply and magically there. The characters include, as I remember them, three or four children and a delightful relation who is a storyteller, and the scheme is this: each child calls out a story element, most often an object, and the storyteller gathers up whatever is supplied (blue boots, a river, a fairy, a pencil box) and makes out of these random, unlikely, and disparate offerings a tale both logical and surprising. An essay, it seems to me, may be similarly constructed -- if so deliberate a term applies. The essayist, let us say, unexpectedly stumbles over a pair of old blue boots in a corner of the garage, and this reminds her of when she last wore them -- twenty years ago, on a trip to Paris, where on the bank of the Seine she stopped to watch an old fellow sketching, with a box of colored pencils at his side. The pencil wiggling over his sheet is a grayish pink, which reflects the threads of sunset pulling westward in the sky, like the reins of a fairy cart ... and so on. The mind meanders, slipping from one impression to another, from reality to memory to dreamscape and back again.
In the same way Montaigne, when contemplating the unpleasantness of sweat, ends with the pure breath of children. Stevenson, starting out with mortality, speaks first of ambush, then of war, and finally of a displaced pin. No one is freer than the essayist -- free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought, to begin with the finish and finish with the middle, or to eschew beginning and end and keep only a middle. The marvel is that out of this apparent causelessness, out of this scattering of idiosyncratic seeing and telling, a coherent world is made. It is coherent because, after all, an essayist must be an artist, and every artist, whatever the means, arrives at a sound and singular imaginative frame -- call it, on a minor scale, a cosmogony.
NTO this frame, this work of art, we tumble like tar babies, and are held
fast. What holds us there? The authority of a voice, yes; the
pleasure -- sometimes the anxiety -- of a new idea, an untried angle, a snatch of
reminiscence, bliss displayed or shock conveyed. An essay can be the product of
intellect or memory, lightheartedness or gloom, well-being or disgruntlement.
But always we sense a certain quietude, on occasion a kind of detachment. Rage
and revenge, I think, belong to fiction. The essay is cooler than that. Because
it so often engages in acts of memory, and despite its gladder or more antic
incarnations, the essay is by and large a serene or melancholic form. It mimics
that low electric hum, which sometimes rises to resemble actual speech, that
all human beings carry inside their heads -- a vibration, garrulous if somewhat
indistinct, that never leaves us while we are awake. It is the hum of perpetual
noticing: the configuration of someone's eyelid or tooth, the veins on a hand,
a wisp of string caught on a twig; some words your fourth-grade teacher said,
so long ago, about the rain; the look of an awning, a sidewalk, a bit of cheese
left on a plate. All day long this inescapable hum drums on, recalling one
thing and another, and pointing out this and this and this. Legend has it that
Titus, Emperor of Rome, went mad because of the buzzing of a gnat that made her
home in his ear; and presumably the gnat, flying out into the great world and
then returning to her nest, whispered what she had seen and felt and learned
there. But an essayist is more resourceful than an Emperor, and can be relieved
of this interior noise, if only for the time required to record its murmurings.
To seize the hum and set it down for others to hear is the essayist's genius.
It is a genius bound to leisure, and even to luxury, if luxury is measured in hours. The essay's limits can be found in its own reflective nature. Poems have been wrested from the inferno of catastrophe or war, and battlefield letters, too; these are the spontaneous bursts and burnings that danger excites. But the meditative temperateness of an essay requires a desk and a chair, a musing and a mooning, a connection to a civilized surround; even when the subject itself is a wilderness of lions and tigers, mulling is the way of it. An essay is a fireside thing, not a conflagration or a safari.
This may be why, when we ask who the essayists are, we discover that though novelists may now and then write essays, true essayists rarely write novels. Essayists are a species of metaphysician: they are inquisitive, and analytic, about the least grain of being. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. It is probably an illusion that men are essayists more often than women, especially since women's essays have in the past frequently assumed the form of unpublished correspondence. (Here I should, I suppose, add a note about maleness and femaleness as a literary issue -- what is popularly termed "gender," as if men and women were French or German tables and sofas. I should add such a note -- it is the fashion, or, rather, the current expectation or obligation -- but nothing useful can be said about any of it.) Essays are written by men. Essays are written by women. That is the long and the short of it. John Updike, in a genially confident discourse on maleness ("The Disposable Rocket"), takes the view -- though he admits to admixture -- that the "male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer." Except, let it be observed, when men write essays, since it is only inner space -- interesting, active, significant -- that can conceive and nourish the contemplative essay. The "ideal female body," Updike adds, "curves around centers of repose," and no phrase could better describe the shape of the ideal essay -- yet women are no fitter as essayists than men. In promoting the felt salience of sex, Updike nevertheless drives home an essayist's point. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies: the novelist can inhabit not only a sex not his own but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads and beasts. The essay is, as we say, personal.
And here is an irony. Though I have been intent on distinguishing the marrow of the essay from the marrow of fiction, I confess that I have been trying all along, in a subliminal way, to speak of the essay as if it -- or she -- were a character in a novel or a play: moody, fickle, given to changing her clothes, or the subject, on a whim; sometimes obstinate, with a mind of her own, or hazy and light; never predictable. I mean for her to be dressed -- and addressed -- as we would Becky Sharp, or Ophelia, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Mrs. Ramsay, or Mrs. Wilcox, or even Hester Prynne. Put it that it is pointless to say (as I have done repeatedly, disliking it every time) "the essay," or "an essay." The essay -- an essay -- is not an abstraction; she may have recognizable contours, but she is highly colored and individuated; she is not a type. She is too fluid, too elusive, to be a category. She may be bold, she may be diffident, she may rely on beauty or cleverness, on eros or exotica. Whatever her story, she is the protagonist, the secret self's personification. When we knock on her door, she opens to us; she is a presence in the doorway; she leads us from room to room. Then why should we not call her "she"? She may be privately indifferent to us, but she is anything but unwelcoming. Above all, she is not a hidden principle or a thesis or a construct: she is there, a living voice. She takes us in.
Cynthia Ozick is a novelist and an essayist whose books include Fame & Folly (1996) and The Puttermesser Papers (1997). Her essay in this issue will appear as the introduction to Best American Essays 1998, to be published by Houghton Mifflin this fall.
Illustration by Brad Holland
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 1998; SHE: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body; Volume 282, No. 3; pages 114 - 118.
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