The essay — that stodgy, pipe-smoking, old bachelor uncle of a genre — is just not itself anymore. It’s looking younger and friskier.
Energized by award-winning and attitude-infused collections by essayists such as David Sedaris and David Rakoff, along with magazine stars such as Time’s Joel Stein and Salon’s Camille Paglia, the genre is more popular with general audiences than ever. Many of the new essayists are as much performers as they are writers, spinning their yarns on radio shows and in lecture halls. The essay even has a new nickname — the naggingly oxymoronic “creative non-fiction.”
“There’s definitely been a sea-change,” said Rakoff, author of an essay collection titled “Fraud” (Doubleday), some of the contents of which began life as monologues for “This American Life,” a public radio show. “It’s a good time to be writing essays. I’m incredibly lucky to be riding this wave now.”
Michael Steinberg, a writer and teacher who edits Fourth Genre, an essay magazine published by Michigan State University, said, “It’s the most exciting change I’ve seen in my lifetime. All of the sudden, everyone is talking about the essay.”
Of course, not everyone is thrilled about the essay’s new lampshade-on-the-head look. Some mourn the passing of its stately grace and earnest reflection in favor of wit and irony. But it may be too late: We appear, many observers say, to be in the midst of a major genre shift, when a form that was relatively static for hundreds of years suddenly lurches in a new — and, for some, potentially distressing — direction.
Even the essay’s reliance upon what Evanston-based essayist Joseph Epstein calls “the hard gravel of fact” may be slipping away, replaced by the soft marshes of what the creative non-fiction crowd calls “invention.”
“We live in a time like Shakespeare’s, when new lingos, jargons and gabbles are springing up on every side,” said W.J.T. Mitchell, an English professor at U. of C. who edits Critical Inquiry, a journal of essays. “English is bursting at the seams. Classic essays are out of the question.”
The standard
Classic essays — the kind that unfold slowly and meditatively over dozens of pages, deploying their points like gently undulating palm fronds — generally are patient ruminations on profound topics. They are serious and thoughtful explorations of works of literature or aspects of the human condition. They have been the standard ever since the essay emerged in the mid-1500s, when a garrulous Frenchman named Michel de Montaigne coined the term “essay,” which means “trials.”
In the 18th Century, luminaries of the essay form included Joseph Addison; in the 19th, William Hazlitt. The 20th Century had a wealth of classic essayists such as Epstein, Patricia Hampl, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, Thomas Lynch, Annie Dillard, Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gretel Ehrlich, Joan Didion, Henry Louis Gates and Richard Rodriguez, all still at work today.
The winds began to shift in the mid-1990s. Onward came the preening and the posturing in saucy, self-centered set pieces marked by flippancy and nonchalance. Drawn to the hectic blue glow of the TV and computer screen rather than the soft yellow light of the library lamp, many of the best-known contemporary essayists revel in the wisecrack, the bon mot — not the elegantly reasoned argument or the acute descriptive detail.
Sedaris, author of essay collections such as “Me Talk Pretty One Day” (Little, Brown), who first gained fame as a raconteur on public radio, may be the best-known practitioner of the new essay. His work, with its arch, breezy, style, reads more like a standup comedy routine than a rhetorical contemplation. The sentences are one-liners. The dialogue sounds elaborately contrived.
Indeed, veracity — formerly an unquestioned hallmark of the essay and the very definition of “non-fiction” — is no longer a significant factor, according to Steinberg.
“This has nothing to do with literal truth. Literal truth may be where it starts. But you transform the literal truth the moment you put it into language,” he said. “Writers call it `emotional truth’ or `aesthetic truth.’ Whether it’s literally true or not makes no difference to the reader.
“Essay and memoir are about identity — how did you get to be who you are? You don’t find that out by literal truth. You find out by invention. You pretty much make up what you think shaped you.”
Fact or fiction?
That notion would have horrified essayists, memoirists and biographers of old, who considered themselves “artists under oath,” in the words of Desmond MacCarthy , a contemporary of Virginia Woolf’s. The challenge was to create, within the strict confines of fact, a work with the same beauty, richness and intensity as a work of fiction. If the facts could be shifted around or altered to make a better story, why not just call it fiction?
But times have changed, as was made clear in 1999 when Edmund Morris published “Dutch,” his biography of Ronald Reagan in which the author himself appeared as a fictional character in the former president’s life. Techniques that twist facts and warp chronologies in putatively non-fiction works are not only tolerated; in some quarters, they are celebrated.
“We all embellish,” Steinberg said. “You start with what’s real and true and what happened, but instead of doing research, you let your imagination take over. It’s not about lying — it’s about trying to find out things you couldn’t find out any other way.”
While some may say that the new rules — or lack thereof — have altered the essay past recognition, others point out that the genre has always been supple and volatile, always been in flux, always been an odd and hybrid form: part memoir, part manifesto, filled with softly modulated personal reminiscence and fierce polemical argument. And it draws its oxygen from change, said Hampl, author of the essay collection “I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory” (W.W. Norton).
“It’s hard for me to think of Sedaris or any other smarty-pants voice debasing the form because, frankly, I think that without that kind of freedom of voice, the essay would quickly lose its spunk, its immediacy. It would become a desiccated form,” she said from her office in St. Paul, Minn., where she teaches at the University of Minnesota.
“It is never a problem — for me, anyway — when a genre allows for a lot of slop. Part of the way to elbow your way in is to be the latest bad boy or naughty girl on the block. It doesn’t bother me.”
Hampl actually sees a greater risk for the essay coming from the opposite direction: not from a glib, shallow lightness, but from a leaden heaviness.
Mitchell agreed. Some observers long have maintained, he said, that the essay’s real enemy was not the smart-aleck hooligan acting up in the back of the class but the grim-faced lecturer holding forth at the front of it.
“The academic article was supposed to have killed the essay because it was imitating the form of the scientific treatise, was weighted down with footnotes, long quotations, belabored points, heavy-handed arguments and a boring, impersonal style,” Mitchell said.
But do today’s essayists go too far in the other direction? Carl Klaus, who taught non-fiction writing at the University of Iowa for 35 years, conceded that some of today’s most popular essayists display “a flipness, a shallowness, a sense of being of the moment. It worries me and angers me that that kind of stuff gets so much attention.”
On the other hand, Klaus is definitely bullish on the essay. He is editing a book series devoted to literary non-fiction that will debut next spring. “I am probably more hopeful about the state of the essay today than ever before.”
Lynch, author of the essay collections “Bodies In Motion and At Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality” (2000) and “The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade” (1997), said some of today’s essayists lack “the `essay’ part itself — the test, the trial, the search, the uncertainty.”
As our increasingly prosperous nation has become more self-centered, so have our personal essays become more self-absorbed and less concerned with sweepingly ambitious cultural observations.
“The essay is a mixed genre — poetic, rhetorical, personal, argumentative,” said the U. of C.’s Mitchell. “I think of writing as an extension of thinking. You don’t know what you think until you write it down, so writing is a process of self-discovery. The best essays convey that feeling of surprise, of elation.”
Hampl concurred. “There is a bedrock of delight, I think, in the personal essayist. I don’t mean cheerfulness. I mean the delight of appetite,” she said. “There is a sense that perception and language together are enough, [that] in this vastly, menacingly complex world, it is enough to stick your neck out, have a look-see, and write your take of whatever it is.”
