I stumbled upon Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Irish author Brian Dillon thanks to a reference in The New York Times, although I can’t find it now, and it would be unusual for it to have been reviewed there these days. (It was published in 2017 by The New York Review of Books and by Anagrama in 2023.) In any case, although it is an enjoyable and well-written book, I find it a very partial, frankly deficient view of the essay genre. In the best-known passage of El deslinde. Prolegómenos a la teoría literaria, Alfonso Reyes defined the essay as “the centaur of genres,” alluding precisely to its hybrid nature, straddling art and science. This is what is missing in this book; the presence of the word “feeling” in the subtitle is revealing: here we have a sentimental, overly human view of the essay, where its other side, its animal side, has been erased.
The book is composed of sections with titles that refer to the origins of the tradition in Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Thus, we have “On Lists,” “On Dispersal,” “On Anxiety,” “On Consolation,” “On Style,” “On Taste,” “On Melancholy,” and “On the Fragment.” The most recurring theme, “consolation,” inevitably reminds us of that fundamental work, Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae. There, at the twilight of the ancient world, some of the issues that Montaigne in France and Bacon in England would take up a millennium later appear: the existence of evil in a world created by God, the question of human nature, wisdom as a lifeline in the face of misfortune, etc. However, these ideas are hardly discussed in Essayism; instead of the intellectual, the author exaggerates the sentimental aspect of the genre. In autobiographical passages, Dillon recounts his struggle with depression and how writing essays helped him overcome it, but it is not clear how, despite the fact that the genre does indeed emerge as an exploration of an individual—Michel de Montaigne, who was not, incidentally, a melancholic—the essay has a closer link to melancholy than, say, poetry or narrative.
The author highlights Barthes’ Camera Lucida, pointing out that what attracts him is not the “ideas about photography,” but the vulnerability in that book, “and in Barthes’s writing in general, and even in most or even all the essayists I admire.” The case of Barthes is illustrative of the relegation of the universe of ideas that characterizes Dillon’s book. While it is true that his later works, in which Barthes becomes more confessional, may seem more interesting to us today, it is also true that without his earlier work, these books—in addition to Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments—would probably not have been written, or would not have been read in the same way. The binary opposition between studium and punctum, for example, comes directly from the structuralist Barthes, who opposed the work to the text, the écrivant to the écrivain, etc. That Barthes, the author of The Degree Zero of Writing and Critical Essays, as much an essayist as the author of Camera Lucida, is sustained not only by his style, but also by his ideas—by the fundamental contribution he made to the field opened up by Saussure that we know as structuralism.
It is true that this theory is now out of fashion, and that even at its peak its appeal was somewhat literary—more so, certainly, than the post-structuralism to which Barthes’s early works are ascribed. “The attraction to theory, and in particular deconstruction, which dominated my twenties, was never anything but this: a taste or affinity for systems at their point of collapse, the pristine mechanism’s lurch towards destruction,” writes Dillon. There are many explanations for the enormous seductiveness of that critical theory which, having emerged in France in the 1960s with authors such as Barthes, Kristeva, Deleuze, Althusser, Lacan, and Derrida, quickly spread to American academia, colonizing literature departments. Dillon’s somewhat decadent reading is not questionable, as it is his personal, subjective reception, although I think that the main factor in the theory’s appeal, especially in Latin America, was the opposite: theory, particularly in the 1970s, allowed for the reestablishment, through an enriched Marxism—mixed with existentialism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis—a certain connection with praxis that had been broken decades earlier with the criminalization of Russian formalism in the Soviet Union and the contemporary split of the Surrealist group, also due to Stalinism, and all of this points not to destruction, but to the renewal of the world. Let us not forget that in the 1970s several members of Tel Quel, including the melancholic Barthes, visited Mao’s China.
Now, elsewhere Dillon confesses: “Nowadays I would much rather read the plainest—they are hardly ever plain, not really—description of a thing than its most erudite or ‘radical’ theorization, in which the thing vanishes.” And here, in this antinomy, we run the risk of losing the very essence of the essay genre, that which distinguishes it from other types of “non-fiction” writing, such as the chronicle. Because the description of a thing is not, in any way, an essay. The mere chroniclers of the Indies, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo, have nothing to do with Montaigne, while Las Casas, in Apologética historia sumaria (1552), who in addition to describing presents theological arguments, can be seen as an essayist. Let us recall the beginning of Platero y yo: the description of a particular donkey is poetic or narrative prose; for it to become an essay, it would have to move on to something more general, not necessarily theoretical but intellectual; this is what, in the Spanish tradition, Ortega and Azorín, great describers of landscapes—of Castile, of Andalusia—did masterfully, without ever remaining in description or mere sensitivity, because what interests them is to probe, to investigate—in this case, the essence of Spain, its decline, the splendor and misery of that great country that produced Velázquez and the mystics but turned its back on philosophy and science. Without reflection, there is no essay; the genre languishes, afflicted by what Susan Sontag called “stylization” in On Style, an empty affectation that borders on kitsch.
The idea that theory or erudition “kills” the thing is, on the other hand, a commonplace of romanticism, a version of literary anti-intellectualism. The other passage on theory in Dillon’s book is also very problematic. Referring to A Thousand Plateaus, which he read as a graduate student, the author notes: “By that stage I was convinced that criticism (and perhaps writing in general) should consist of a sensitive but dauntless search for the most productive or provocative metaphors in the material at hand. And I still think that this is what writing is, still feel that an account of the world that fails to draw from it all its figurative potential is therefore incomplete.“ To this idea I would oppose Sontag’s own ”Against Interpretation.” It is one thing not to read theory in its most literal sense; it is another to search everywhere—not only in texts but in the world itself—for a set of metaphors or figurations. It is precisely against this vestige of bourgeois ideology, which we might call medievalist, that Sontag, a disciple of Barthes, proclaims the futility of interpretation. In both authors, criticism is not the search for metaphors to interpret, but just the opposite: the use of metaphors to express an idea that often denies the necessity or possibility of interpretation. “I think it could be said,” Barthes notes in “Literature and Significance,” “that literature is Orpheus ascending from the Underworld. (The real would be Eurydice).” And in The Pleasure of the Text: “Just as Moses is only allowed to glimpse the Promised Land without ever setting foot on it, literature allows us to glimpse ‘the Promised Land of the real.’”
Sontag’s place in the book we are discussing also reveals, incidentally, the limits of this, we might say, subjectivist understanding of essay writing: Dillon focuses primarily on her diaries, published posthumously. Now, if these were not Susan Sontag’s diaries, and she had not written the essays compiled in Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and Under the Sign of Saturn, would we be interested in them? We are drawn to them precisely because they are the diaries of the author of those and other extraordinary essays that do not depend on the first person but rather, to a large extent, on ideas: for example, without the seminal thesis that photography does not facilitate but rather hinders our knowledge of the world, On Photography would not exist; here the descriptions are subordinate to the general critique of photography that articulates Sontag’s entire essay.
There is no essential link, as Dillon seems to assume, between essay writing and diary writing, nor between essay writing and the fragmentary (pace Adorno), essay writing and the aphoristic, or essay writing and lists. Some essayists have written diaries, others have not, as have poets and novelists. Borges is not fragmentary, nor is Octavio Paz, nor is Ortega y Gasset; nor are T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Aldous Huxley, and others in the Anglo-American tradition. Aphorisms can be seen as very short essays, but aphoristic writing cannot in any way be seen as a quality of essay writing. As for lists, there is, I believe, another fundamental misunderstanding here. Dillon highlights Sir Thomas Brown as an extreme example of the essay’s tendency toward curiosity: “that is, towards a rapt discovery of the world around the essayist, but also a way of treating that discovery: as a collection. There is already something of this urge in the essayist’s love of lists, in the essay’s paratactic habit of simply setting things alongside each other and inviting the reader to make connections.”
I would dispute this thesis: the essayist’s perspective on the world, I would dare to say, is contrary to that of the collector. The essay does not work by coordination or juxtaposition, but by connection; Sontag does not describe the works of Artaud, Genet, and Beckett so that readers can deduce a thesis about modern literature; she makes it explicit, she states it, she explains it. In Mythologies, Barthes does not describe the commonplaces of the petty bourgeoisie, but observes them with detachment, like an anthropologist observing the myths of a primitive society, in order to teach us his thesis about this social class which, pretending to be eternal, denies history and naturalizes consumption. Just as Sontag is not interested in photos for their own sake, but in terms of her general critique of photography, Barthes is not interested in articles on bourgeois culture for the sake of collecting them, as one might put them in an album, but for analyzing them, as one might place them on a dissecting table, under a magnifying glass that is more scientific than artistic. Francis Bacon, one of the two founders of the tradition, was, not by chance, a scientist.
All this is relegated to a book so dominated by subjectivity that it becomes, not so much about essay writing, but rather about those essayists who most interest the author (Cyril Connolly, Maeve Brennan, W.G. Sebald, William H. Gass), and in particular, about himself. “I was quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument” (p. 122), Dillon confesses, and this personal inability of his is projected onto the entire genre, which is thus largely alienated from the world of knowledge and limited, on the one hand, to the sentimental realm of consolation and melancholy, and, on the other, to short, imperfect forms. “Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two.” A book that combines a series of recurring observations on essay writing with an attempt at literary autobiography, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction is a good example of the type of contemporary literature that César Aira calls the “autobiographical circle,” one in which “adrift, left to its own devices, interest turned toward the author.”
Everything that escapes Dillon about essayism is offered to us by Aira himself, not in “Evasión”—where the above quotes come from—but in that other masterful essay, “El ensayo y su tema” (“The Essay and Its Subject”). The Argentine writer begins by pointing out the obvious: in the essay, unlike the novel, the subject is there from the beginning, always explicit. Recalling the 1970s—“the years of nonfiction”—Aira observes how in the essays of that decade one thing referred to another, which was often the Revolution, but which, depending on the times and interests of the author, could be any other subject. The basic format of the essay would then be “A and B,” the relationship between two different things; this is, again, the opposite of collecting, where there is no relationship but juxtaposition. And because it always starts from there, from the exploration of the subject, the essay is presented first as content, “in the essay it is the form, the artistic, that is revealed at the end, contradicting the intentions, almost like a surprise.”
Here, once again, we have the antithesis of essayism as seen by Dillon, where there is an emphasis on form, particularly short forms, as we have pointed out before. Aira has nothing to say about the length of the essay. The decisive factor lies elsewhere: “The short story writer must know his craft, the poet must be original, the novelist must alchemize experience… the essayist must be intelligent.” Direct subjectivity, Aira points out, “is only justified as intelligence.” This point is fundamental: it is not because of their vulnerability, but above all because of their intelligence that we read Barthes, Benjamin, or Sontag. We read them because they are more intelligent than we are, and this conventional difference between the author and the readers, despite Montaigne’s false modesty, constitutes the essay genre. The etymology of the word “intelligence” is well known: intelegere, to read between the lines, means to understand, to discern. Whether melancholic or choleric, phlegmatic or sanguine, the good essayist is, rather than someone who expresses their particular mood, someone who perceives, whether in the world of books or in the book of the world, the connections that escape others. And what he perceives, he does not insinuate: he explains it, exposes it, declares it, affirms it.
Aira sharply highlights this element of enunciation, which the modern narrator seeks at all costs to nullify, and which has persisted in the essay because it is inherent to the genre. “The immediacy of the author with his subject imposes the protocols of enunciation. In fiction, the character serves to nullify or neutralize enunciation, making everything enunciated. By freeing itself from these anchors in the comedy of discourse, the novel adopts all innovations and avant-gardism with the garish snobbery of a parvenu, while the essay, a dandy genre, prefers that aristocratic aftertaste alien to fashion.” Herein lies the crux of the matter: the essay is an eminently conservative genre, or, to be more precise, traditional. Precisely because it lives on the margins of literature—with one foot there and the other in the world of science, that is, of knowledge, ideas, and themes—it has remained safe from that irrepressible impulse for renewal that led to artifacts such as Apollinaire’s calligrams, games such as exquisite corpse, and techniques such as the automatic writing of the Surrealists.
Aira mentions the novel, but I would highlight poetry as the genre most clearly marked by this desire for originality that culminates in the avant-garde and its paradoxes. There is concrete poetry, but there is no concrete essay. There is experimental poetry, but there is no experimental essay. There is ultraist poetry, but there is no ultraist essay. There is stridentist poetry, but there is no stridentist essay. There is surrealist poetry, but there is no surrealist essay. In fact, when the avant-garde needed the essay to launch their iconoclastic ideas, they could not draw on a more ancient, more eighteenth-century, more rhetorical format than the manifesto. The essay is thus an eminently stable genre, with fewer continuity solutions, more resistant to revolutions and fashions than the strictly literary genres. The hybrid nature of the essay, that freedom and flexibility that are always pointed out, rest on this fundamental resistance, and it is precisely to highlight this aspect that Aira returns to the contrast between snobbery and dandyism.
There are, of course, changes in style over time, and the essayistic prose of the modernists is not the same as that of the avant-garde, the Origenistas, or the essayists of the 1950s generation, to use Cuban literature as an example. But if we contrast these differences with those found in their respective poetic writings, we notice a huge gap: from Poveda to Guillén, from Guillén to Eliseo Diego, and from Diego to Padilla, the distances are enormous; on the other hand, there is much less difference between an essay by Ortiz, one by Mañach, one by Vitier, and one by Fernández Retamar. (The originality of Lezama’s essays is idiosyncratic, not historical; although he has contextual references, his style itself is not secular but personal; it is not the Zeitgeist, it is Lezama.) Beyond themes, ideologies, politics, temperaments, and styles, there is a fundamental continuity among essayists. This is why, when faced with a blank page, any contemporary essayist is closer to an essayist of the past, say a Vitier, a Mañach, or even a Saco, than a poet would be to an Eliseo Diego, an Agustín Acosta, a Casal, or a José María Heredia.
The essay, in a certain sense, has no history, if we understand history as the succession of revolutions that have characterized poetry in the last two centuries. If the history of this genre is an effort to increasingly dispense with rhetoric, even though each new anti-rhetoric ends up, as we know, becoming another rhetoric, the essay exists outside this vicious circle, precisely because it is, from the outset and necessarily, a rhetorical, formal genre that has not fundamentally abandoned that classic space of aut prodesse aut delectare. If poetry, which after the Renaissance and the Baroque definitively left behind the practice of imitating models—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the greatest poet of her time in Spanish, is a self-declared imitator of Góngora—to embark on a frenetic race in pursuit of originality, the essay has remained largely on the sidelines of that race. Which is to say, on the margins of modernity: the essay is always outdated, always old, and precisely because of this it does not run the risk—that avant-garde risk par excellence—of aging.
It is as if it still remained in that pre-modern space, rhetorical but at the same time modern, enlightened, which perfectly epitomizes Sor Juana’s Primero sueño. Lezama contrasts, incidentally, in La expresión americana, the “way of approaching the dreamlike” in that great baroque poem with that of “contemporary surrealism or German romanticism of the first half of the 19th century,” since in the former it is not a question of “seeking another reality, another magical causality, but with visible Cartesian reminiscence, the dream appears as a form of domination by superconsciousness.” Well, this superconsciousness, this Cartesianism, is inherent in the essay, a fundamentally anti-Romantic genre. At the antipodes of the modern cult of youth, which emerged precisely during Romanticism and reached its apotheosis in the avant-garde, one might say that all essayists wear glasses; like those dapper gentlemen of “the world of yesterday” described by Stefan Zweig, the essayist always wants to be older, that is, wiser, than he really is.
He thus remains on the margins of that radically new phenomenon that in the nineteenth century came to be called “literature,” whose emergence Foucault described in a very long paragraph in The Order of Things, so good that it is worth quoting at length: “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when language was sinking into its object-like thickness and allowing itself to be traversed from one end to the other by knowledge, it reconstituted itself in an independent form, difficult to access, withdrawn into the enigma of its birth and referred entirely to the pure act of writing. Literature is the challenge to philology (of which it is, however, the twin figure): it refers the language of grammar back to the naked power of speech and there finds the wild and imperious being of words. From the Romantic rebellion against a discourse immobilized in its ceremony to Mallarmé’s discovery of the word in its impotent power, we can clearly see what the function of literature was in the 19th century in relation to the modern mode of language. Against the backdrop of this essential game, the rest is effect: literature increasingly distinguishes itself from the discourse of ideas and encloses itself in a radical intransitivity; it separates itself from all the values that could have made it circulate in the classical era (taste, pleasure, the natural, the true) and gives birth in its own space to everything that can ensure its playful denial (the scandalous, the ugly, the impossible); it breaks with all definitions of “genres” as forms adjusted to an order of representations and becomes the pure and simple manifestation of a language that has no other law than to affirm—against other discourses—its rugged existence; now it has nothing else to do but to recurve itself in a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than to say its own form: it addresses itself as a writing subjectivity where it attempts to gather, in the movement that gives it birth, the essence of all literature; and thus all its threads converge toward the finest extreme—particular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal—toward the simple act of writing. At the moment when language, as scattered words, becomes an object of knowledge, it reappears in a strictly opposite form: silent, cautious deposition of words on the whiteness of a page where they can have neither sound nor interlocutor, where there is nothing else to say but themselves, nothing else to do but sparkle in the glow of their being.”
Well, the essay is not invited to this party—which ranges from Rimbaud’s lyrical effusions to Beckett’s desolate scenes, full of silence or taciturnity. Too sober, it remains safe from madness, from the fire in which modern literature burns. What Foucault calls “the wild and imperious nature of words,” which only poetry could reveal, and perhaps the modern novel in the manner of Joyce, can never embody. The same “terror” that Jean Paulhan and Barthes discovered in literary modernity; the essay, a civilized, conventional genre, can at best celebrate it, never be it. A poem is not made with ideas, but with words, Mallarmé is said to have said, and that does not apply to the essay, which is always, necessarily, transitive, that is, communicative, discursive, however baroque or abstruse it may be. And precisely because of this, because it always says something, it cannot derive completely from écriture. Unconcerned with that “pleasure of the text” for which Barthes, attempting to define that strange brilliance Foucault spoke of, borrowed a Lacanian term—jouissance—the essay remains in the more conventional realm of plaisir, which also has, incidentally, an erotic analogy: Ortega said that when contemplating the naked body of an idea, one experiences a voluptuousness similar to love.
Thus, the essay, with its reactionary dandyism and relative disdain for fashions, is, after all, closer to escapist literature than to what Aira calls “the autobiographical circle,” works “made of pure time, because the self, when it realizes its essence of being alone in the world and can only speak to itself, is pure time.” If these works of escapism, which the Argentine writer celebrates in contrast to the solipsistic tendencies of modern literature, recount adventures in space, we also find them in the essay, only they do not take place in physical space but in abstract space, which is equally vast: the wide and alien world of ideas. In a good essay, where ideas and words are perfectly conjugated, married like the left and right hands, what we have, even if it appears didactic, is ultimately another form of escapism. That is why the essays of Barthes and Sontag continue to entertain us, despite having lost their relevance: although we do not live in the world that produced them, and given the contemporary rise of the extreme right, unthinkable in the years following the defeat of fascism, it would seem that the imperative now is rather to preserve those modest but valuable freedoms that they, with all the radicalism of their time, dismissed as “bourgeois.” Their essays continue to give us a pleasure that is, fundamentally, that of ideas, as Ortega said. Although Barthes and Sontag speak to us passionately about a literature whose fire seems to have been extinguished, and although we view with a certain skepticism those concepts that were once adopted almost as articles of faith, we continue to find in these essays, always guaranteed, the same thing that Montaigne found in his favorite books: “the pleasure that honest entertainment provides [us].”
