Scott Black is Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2019) as well as essays on The Spectator, Hume’s essays, Henry Fielding’s novels, eighteenth-century romance, Eliza Haywood, and Heliodorus.

Warren Boutcher is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 2017), and of numerous chapters and articles on the history of Montaigne’s Essais and on topics in the European literary and intellectual history of the late Renaissance. He is currently in the early stages of editing Europe: A Literary History, 1545–1659 (Oxford University Press).

Gregory Dart is Professor of English at University College London. He has published two monographs, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and has edited the collection Restless Cities (with Matthew Beaumont; Verso, 2010), and two editions of Hazlitt’s writings. He is currently General Editor of a new six-volume edition of the Works of Charles and Mary Lamb for Oxford University Press, for which he is undertaking to edit three volumes himself, the Works of 1818, the Essays of Elia, and the Miscellaneous Prose.

Denise Gigante, Professor of English at Stanford University, is a specialist in Romantic-period literature. She is the editor of The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005), two anthologies devoted to the genre of the literary essay, and ‘The Essay: An Attempt, a Protean Form’, published in Republics of Letters (2014). She is currently editing The Cambridge History of the English Essay with Jason Childs for Cambridge University Press.

Felicity James is Associate Professor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature at the University of Leicester. She is currently editing the children’s writing of Charles and Mary Lamb for the new Oxford Collected Works, and her books include Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Palgrave, 2008), and the co-edited (with Ian Inkster) Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and (with Julian North) Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian auto/biography (Routledge, 2017). She co-chairs the Charles Lamb Society, which has held a birthday celebration for Charles Lamb each year since the 1930s; previous guests include Edmund Blunden, and new members are always welcome.

Thomas Karshan is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford University Press, 2011), the co-translator of Nabokov’s The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin, 2012), and the editor of Nabokov’s Collected Poems (Penguin, 2013). From 2018 to 2019 he was President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. He has published articles on modern British, American, and Russian literature, and essays in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Kathryn Murphy is Fellow in English Literature at Oriel College, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her academic work focuses on Renaissance poetry and philosophy, and on the literary essay. She is the author of several articles on early modern prose, poetry, and poetics, with a particular focus on style and philosophy. She is also a critic and essayist, writing about still-life painting for Apollo Magazine, and reviewing Central European literature for the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently writing two books: The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century, and Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy.

Fred Parker is a Fellow of Clare College and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2003) and, most recently, On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen (Routledge, 2018). An article on Addison’s Spectator essays, ‘Addison’s Modesty: The Essayist as Spectator’, is forthcoming in Essays on Addison, edited by Paul Davis for Oxford University Press.

Adam Phillips, is an essayist, psychoanalyst, and a visiting professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He has edited the essayists Charles Lamb and Walter Pater, writes frequently for the London Review of Books, Raritan, Salmagundi, and other journals, and is the author of numerous volumes of essays, including Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing: New and Selected Essays (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), and Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2013), all published by Penguin. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

†Ned Stuckey-French taught at Florida State University and was book review editor of Fourth Genre. He is the author of The American Essay in the American Century (University of Missouri Press, 2011), co-editor (with Carl Klaus) of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (University of Iowa Press, 2012), and co-author (with Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French) of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Longman, 8th edition). His articles and essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Walking Magazine, culturefront, Pinch, Guernica, middlebrow, and American Literature, and were listed five times among the notable essays of the year in Best American Essays.

Michael Wood is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. A longstanding essayist for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, he is the author, most recently, of The Habits of Distraction (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), On Empson (Princeton University Press, 2017), and Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest, 2015). His earlier works include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Road to Delphi (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003).

Note: Contributors from this book to look further into.

Location 257

Montaigne’s man nonetheless begins, by taking hold of an elk’s horn: a strange and apparently random place to start, but one that makes it possible for him to go on. A boldness in beginning, despite difficulty in finding a true point of origin, is a frequent characteristic of the essay form. Montaigne’s ‘Of Books’ declares ‘I want a man to begin with the conclusion […] I do not want a man to use his strength making me attentive and to shout at me fifty times “Or oyez!” in the manner of our heralds’ (365). For Theodor Adorno, in the most compelling modern statement on the essay, the form ‘starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say.’

Note: I like the "don't start with Adam and Eve" metaphor; you have permission to abandon chronological ordering. But the hook of an essay is such a delicate decision, one that I find I rarely know when I'm starting an essay. Is this to assume that my random whim at the moment of starting is locked into the essays form? I sense a real anti-editing philosophy in here, a Keurocian "first thought, best thought." [e] [p]

Location 321

And yet a collection of essays conventionally demands one: an address to the reader which performs some of the duties of Montaigne’s herald, drawing attention to the subject, defining it, justifying its interest, delimiting its scope, accounting for its origins, and explaining what holds the contributions together.

Note: good criteria for he objectives of an intro

Location 328

The essay on essays—what we might call the ‘meta-essay’—has been a feature of the form from the start. Montaigne, who originates the term by choosing the title Essais for the first edition of his miscellaneous discourses, published in 1580, is self-reflexive and self-baffled by the novelty of this new kind of book.

Note: Perspective pattern: histoical precedent of interweaving the creation of the work with the work itself [p]

Location 334

The essay is at once resistant to exhaustive definition, and yet—or thus—continually posing and reposing what Denise Gigante has called ‘the all-important question: what is the essay?’ The seventeen essays collected in this volume likewise participate in the persistent urge to write about essays, despite their characteristic resistance to characterization.

Note: Why does it resist simple definitions? Maybe because the essay is the genre most synonymous to human thought, and so a definition is not just a mapping of literature, but a mapping of the complexity of the human psyche. This is a near-Jungian project. The form of an essay is often a reflection of the mind of the creator (Montaigne and Bacon had very different minds, symbolizing romantic vs. scientific thinking), and so each camp shares definitions from their own blindspots. [e]

Location 340

Every Man His Own Looking-Glass

Note: This is a fragment from a Leigh Hunt essay; a theoretical title. I like the egalitarianism implicit in the phrase.

Location 348

The essayist, as the titles of other periodicals tell us, is guardian, spectator, and egotist; a free thinker, the master of his own wit, but also the mere purveyor of commonplaces stolen from others.

Note: This fits Aristotle's triad of rhetoric: the egotist/spectator are the appeal to personal authority (ethos); the free thinker/guardian operate within the shared rules of our intellectual memesphere (logos); the games of wit and cliche reconstructions are about the love of language, appealing to the sensibilities of readers (pathos). [e]

Location 350

concerned with the quotidian, or the trivial, and the strange, interested at once in tradition and contemporary ephemera.

Note: range

Location 354

‘The Hippopotamus Entered at Stationers’ Hall’, meanwhile, archly indicates the problems of literary form. Since to enter something at Stationers’ Hall is to register a work for the purposes of copyright, to introduce the essay there as a hippopotamus is to suggest that it is a paradoxical and monstrous creature which will blunder into and make a mess of established categories of writing and their rule-bound legislation.

Note: A better metaphor would be a "Platypus" enters Stationer's Hall, a creature no one knows if duck or mammal. This is a peak example of clever with definitions: what is an essay? A hippopotamus trying to register a copyright; a paradoxical and monstrous creature that defies categories and rules. Again, this is the romantic fixation against taxonomy!

Location 356

Despite the infinite variety of the stuff of the world, Montaigne likewise suggests in ‘Of Experience’, ‘we fasten together our comparisons by some corner’, like the curious elk’s horn on which the epileptic lights. Taking permission from Montaigne’s adhoccery, and Hunt’s happily despairing hunt, we here take hold of the elusive essay by several corners.

Note: Not all corners are equal. You can connect anything to anything. Should you trust and follow every association? The first association? Of course, as you're drafting, let the mind run free; I suppose you could just publish unedited riffs and tangents—there is time and place for that—but is there not value in then assaying each leap? Might some be worth cutting? Might some need rotation? Do a few strong leaps not create momentum that help determine that post-edit future of the other leaps? [e]

Location 364

From one perspective, it should be easier to define the essay, and supply a story of its origins, than for any other form. Unlike other major kinds of literature—the novel, the epic, the sonnet, tragedy, comedy—the moment of the essay’s inception, its Adam and Eve, is clear. When Montaigne published a thick volume of treatises on various topics in 1580, he titled it his Essais, and thereby inaugurated a tradition. Before him, the word ‘essay’ was not used in print for a kind of literary composition; after him, essays proliferated.

Note: Proto-essays existed, but Montaigne established it himself as a genre by providing (1) a volume of essays—107 over twenty years, (2) a range in topics, (3) a meta-theory on what was happening ("I myself am the subject of my work"; chimeras leaping from the mind, etc), (4) an ever-shifting point of view to demonstrate complexity; (5) intertextuality across a huge range of past works; and so one man showed his descendants the output of a whole society. Any reader could find in him the writer that they could become. Montaigne provided a model for how they could participate, whether they extended, refuted, or mimicked (see Pascal). [e]

Location 370

Since Montaigne himself nowhere refers to one of his individual discourses as an essay, it is usual in scholarship to refer to the individual works as ‘chapters’.

Note: Did Montaigne know he was going to publish his essays when he started? I saw the whole tower retreat as a retirement, his writing a means to capture and know his evolving self. The chronological arrangement of his work is a historical detail, not a compositional decision. You can rearrange the order of essays with little lost, which is not true for chronological chapters of a book (I think chapters imply a sequence and causality, where his essay portfolio is more miscellaneous). This is clarifying: I'd argue that a catalog of essays should be chaotic and non-linear, spanning a swath of topics that you'd never expect to go together; but an anarchy of the portfolio isn't a composition axiom for a single work. [e]

Location 377

It has become a trope, even a cliché, of essays on the essay to reach for word-history as a route into a characterization of the form: as Claire de Obaldia has remarked, ‘etymological evidence [is] always triumphantly brandished at some point or other’. The French ‘essai’, derived ultimately from the Latin exāgium, a weighing, could mean ‘trial’, ‘test’, ‘attempt’, ‘sounding’, ‘sample’, ‘temptation’, ‘risk’, ‘apprenticeship’, ‘exercise’, or—ironically, given its resistance to introduction—‘prelude’, ‘beginning’.

Note: Etymology is only cliche if its use yields a basic conclusion. Save etymology for shock, revelation, and torque. Montaigne doesn't use the word essay within Essais, but throughout it's stippled with "assay," a cousin of "essay" with a shared grandfather, "exagium." Assay was first coined by the alchemist Paracelsus, which inverts the looseness of "to attempt." Like an alchemist, an assay is an act of analytically weighing the properties of the ideas on the page.[e]

Location 380

The title-page of the Essais was thus a kind of modesty topos: the discourses printed on these pages, Montaigne suggested, would not be technical or controversial arguments, and should not be taken too seriously as the final, resolved opinions of the author, but instead understood as tentative and experimental discussions, the voice of an amateur or apprentice thinking aloud and liable to correction. Montaigne plays on the full range of its possible meanings, to propose essayistic writing as a tentative, risky, and experimental way of rejecting authority and exercising the free-thinking of the author: rather a style and attitude than a form, more frequently a verb than a noun.

Note: epistemic uncertainty; montaigne invented a new literary epistemic atop classical ideas of moral philosophy, with from what ive read so far, no ventures into metaphysics

Location 386

The earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary finds for the word ‘essay’ as a noun is in the title of Francis Bacon’s Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion, published in 1597. This title carries none of the ambiguity of intention of Montaigne’s Essais: Bacon’s apposition makes clear that ‘essayes’ names the form of the first set of writings in the book. The same is true of Cornwallis’s Essayes of 1600, Robert Johnson’s Essaies, or rather Imperfect offers of 1601, and the title given to John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne in 1603: The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo:…

Note: It makes sense that when thought is frozen onto the page and communicated as literature, the word takes the noun form, since the reader sees a fixed product, not a process. The writer, knowing he will be read, risks thinking of essays as a noun, to meet an expectation, instead of living the verb at the source of thought. Process wise, start essaying as a verb, and then edit the essay as a noun. [e]

Location 393

It has proved easier to define the noun ‘essay’ than the form to which it gave a name. Anthologists and lexicographers are forced to cast a net as wide as possible, offering the barest minimum of characteristics. W. E. Williams’s formulation, in the introduction to his 1942 A Book of English Essays, was succinct: ‘the Essay is a piece of prose, usually on the short side, which is not devoted to narrative’.17 The OED is more expansive: ‘A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish, “an irregular undigested piece” (Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.’18 For Williams, the necessary criteria are that it is shortish, in prose, and does not tell a story; for the OED’s lexicographer, even the latter two of these stipulations are abandoned: the essay is not too long and is about something.

Note: All these short definitions miss the verb angle, speaking to noun-like attributes (prose, length, no narrative, subject, irregularity). Here's my attempt: "a personal exploration around a question that unifies literary composition patterns across genres." This speaks to both the verb and the noun; it is driven by the mode of inquiry, yet rendered from the noun-belt of literature. [e]

Location 404

Montaigne’s essay is the opposite of decisions or resolutions: various, changeable, contradictory, befuddled, staggering, drunk. This unruliness—irregularity, or ‘the Wildness of those Compositions which go by the Name of Essays’, as Addison put it in terms which became widespread in the eighteenth century—acts as a warning against attempts at generalization. Indeed, Adorno suggested that the knowledge offered by the essay is not that of definition, but experience,

Note: Again, certainty and definability are completely separate issues! Adorno names experience here. Might that not be one stable pattern of an essay? If a Wikipedia article has no experience from its author, it’s not an essay. Each experience is singular, but can we not create criteria for what makes something an experience? And what about a typology of experiences? Or a rubric on the effectiveness of a rendered experience, one we could use to measure any instance? Miscellaneity is not void of common properties. Nothing escapes the rays of generalization. [e]

Location 421

The actual title which Hunt chose for his periodical—The Indicator—suggests a similar attitude: rather than a formula, essays offer a demonstration, pointing at particular things for the reader to recognize. Abstraction is the enemy: William Hazlitt begins ‘On Reason and Imagination’ by declaring: ‘I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions…’

Note: This quote speaks to the what-not-to-do of each Essay Architecture dimension, each one a form of staleness: a creed is a stale Idea; a a stale Form, generalities and naked proposition are stale Voice. But is all abstraction stale? If we were only to demonstrate, would we not be lost in the white noise of detail? Abstraction helps us connect shown images, to see their larger nature, relationships, and meanings. Exclusive abstraction is not of this earth. No abstraction is six feet under ground... And separate from all this, to talk about writing at all, does that not require Abstraction? Can we not qualify the types of experience and demonstration to help writers understand the variety of ways to pour concrete? [e]

Location 427

Essays appear at the length of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)—belying Williams’s insistence on the shortness of essays—or the brevity and lightness of Montaigne’s one-page ‘Of Thumbs’, or the disposable single sheets of the Spectator’s daily publications. They can be fervently and committedly political, like the works collected in James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), or confined to leisure and detachment, as in Montaigne’s own works, a paradox explored by Ophelia Field’s contribution in this volume. They can be personally confessional, or pseudonymously estranged, via personae like the Tatler’s Isaac Bickerstaff or Charles Lamb’s Elia; encompass the witness accounts of journalism, as in Hazlitt or George Orwell, or fantasies and dreams, such as Lamb’s ‘Dream-Children’. Even the suggestion that an essay is a piece of prose finds a challenge in works like James VI and I’s Essayes of a Prentice, in the Diuine Art of Poesie (1584) or Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Essayes (1599), the first and third works published in Britain with the word in the title; or in Pope’s Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism.

Note: Length is not a property, and all the dualities here represent different expressions of the same patterns. Ie: a "political essay" is a particular way to use Argument, References, Response, and Catalyst, yet Montaigne can use those same patterns towards a non-political end, arguing about morals, citing Plutarch, and offering a call to action only as an irony. This is again mistaking instances for the more general patterns beneath them. An essay can be political, and a group of political essays may comprise a sub-genre, but political vs. non-political essays is a matter of subject matter, of content, and all the patterns work independent of content. Similarly, whether an essayist has real stakes of confession, or is shielded behind a pseudonym, both draw from a shared Experience pattern. Feels like there’s (1) a recurring confusion between content and form, (2) a frequent citing of dualities as proof of "indefinability," when actually, each end of the duality often operate using the same rules. [e]

Location 433

From the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth, the word ‘essay’ was at once ubiquitous—over 1,500 works were published between 1642 and 1714 with the word in the title—and often interchangeable with ‘Discourse’ or ‘Dissertation’, though ‘essay’ often implies a more tentative approach. Locke, in his dedication and epistle to his Essay, shifted back and forth between ‘essay’ and ‘treatise’. Addison and Steele, in the Tatler and Spectator, preferred ‘papers’, resisting, like Samuel Johnson after them, too close an association with wayward Montaigne: we go sixty-eight issues of the Spectator before we find the first use of the word ‘essay’, and 101 issues before we come to the first time that the term is applied to the ‘little Diurnal Essays’ of the periodical itself.22 Others prefer the modesty of ‘studies’, ‘sketches’, ‘estimates’, ‘portraits’, ‘pieces’, or even, in Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘gossips’.23 Brian Blanchfield’s recent volume organizes its twenty-four essays under the title Proxies.24 And the essay has also always lent itself to hybrid forms, from the essayistic novels and novelistic essays of Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Robert Musil, and Milan Kundera (denying the separation of narrative and essay on which definitions insist), the hybrid prose and poetry of Abraham Cowley and Claudia Rankine, to photo-essays, film-essays, and video-essays which are at once unimaginable from the perspective of Montaigne’s late sixteenth-century beginnings, and recognizably in a common tradition of experiment, tentative thought, experiential reasoning, and avoidance of definition, resolution, and closure.

Note: The word "essay," originally was a proxy for confidence. Montaigne presented his work not as absolute truths, but as a public act of sharing his process. In fact, all genres implcitly contain an degree of confidence: where manifesto, treatise, dissertation, and article are all high-confidence, the essay, proxy, sketch, and note are low-confidence. Today though, the essay has upshifted to mean relatively “formal” in a world of notes, tweets, logs, and such. [e]

Location 443

The essay has also always lent itself to hybrid forms, from the essayistic novels and novelistic essays of Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Robert Musil, and Milan Kundera (denying the separation of narrative and essay on which definitions insist), the hybrid prose and poetry of Abraham Cowley and Claudia Rankine, to photo-essays, film-essays, and video-essays which are at once unimaginable from the perspective of Montaigne’s late sixteenth-century beginnings.

Note: The essay itself is a hybrid of genres, and yet also bleeds across into other genres (ie: novels having essayistic portions). Why is this? Maybe because the essay is a proxy for thought, it's the medium that our mind works in, and thus can take on any form we can imagine. Unlike a work of fiction that is constrained by place, people, and physics, the imagination in unchained. This means the essay can take on device and dimensions from anywhere the writer's mind has been. A paragraph can shift from plane to a plane on a whim, shapeshifting in a way that wouldn't be possible if it were mired in a setting. Of course though, just as the mind can daydream or remember scenes from the past, the essay too can jump in and out of narrative. [e]

Location 454

A common tradition of experiment, tentative thought, experiential reasoning, and avoidance of definition, resolution, and closure.

Note: These words help frame the essay as a scientific process. By avoiding definitive definitions, resolutions, and closure (pre-determined thought), and by instead setting up an experiment ("I have a tentative hypothesis, but I don't know the answer"), you then reason forward based your experiences, memories, observations, readings, to come to a new conclusion. Instead of using the scientific method to understand the natural world, you use the scientific to understand yourself. For Montaigne, he was the subject of this experimentation. It may be a stretch to call him "scientific," but was he not "experimental." Why do we tend to permit the word experimental in the no-precedent romantic sense, but quiver from the analytical half of the word. Montaigne was not rigorous or explicit in the assaying of his character, but he undoubtedly ran intuitively from some loose, quasi-"experimental" principles. [e]

Location 457

As Hugh Walker wrote in his 1915 The English Essay and Essayists—still the most substantial single-author study of the history of the form in English—‘just as, in the days before enclosures, stray cattle found their way to the unfenced common, so the strays of literature have tended towards the ill-defined plot of the essay.’

Note: Love this simile. The essay was something like an "in-between" medium. In between writing books and plays, if an author had thoughts that didn't fit into a traditional form, they would jot down it to preserve, keep, and return to it. Many writers were accidental, emergent essayists. In pursuit of their larger literary ideals, they accidentally accumulated a book of orphans, and if essays are the medium that thought takes on the page, then it would be a book of essays. [e]

Location 460

Warren Boutcher, in his contribution to this volume, argues against taking the essay as a genre at all, placing it instead in a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing. The essay has been called ‘less a genre than quite deliberately an antigenre, designed to flaunt the prescriptiveness in literary matters which had been inherited from a rationalistic rhetorical tradition’; one critic calls it a ‘Proteus’, saying that ‘there is no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so systematically to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape’; another, that it is ‘a genre legitimated by its existence outside any genre’, which ‘retains its character only when it constantly intersects with other genres’; a fourth suggests that it is ‘a moment of writing before the genre,…

Note: This leads into essay as mode, and ignores genre altogether. Yes the massive matrix of possibilities and shapes does make it much harder to identify its recurring patterns, and it’s made harder because since not every writers knows or cares about the underlying patterns, its effort to dissect which rules any given writer is playing by [e]

Location 463

For Rachel Blau du Plessis, ‘given that the essay is all margin, marginalia, and interstitial writing, it rearranges, compounds, enfolds, and erodes the notion of center in textually fruitful ways.’28 ‘Essay’ becomes one of those words, like ‘nonsense’, ‘miscellaneous’, or ‘etc.’, which Susan Stewart describes as making ‘a category that is both negative…

Note: Gaps and centerlessness are celebration of disorder; fragmentation is typically most enjoyed when you buy into the ideology of fragmentation; and yes, our society is of course radically fragmenting, but that’s not a license to mirror that in our work. Similarly, as cities have alienated its inhabitants, the sin of modern architecture, according to Alexander against Eisenman, is to make grotesque buildings that aim to strike cerebral resonance in the small art-appreciating demographic. As a counterpoint, I love Pessoa, but he is a fragmented identity with pieces that are whole and well-scoped. Jung acknowledges fragments, but makes the case towards unification. I am all for wild juxtaposition in a single essay, but so long as it comes with a skewer of cohesion. The best essayist will use their reaches of association to summon off material arrangements, but their precision of logic to rotate and trim each brick in a particular way, to create, instead of soup, a journey of both logic and dream logic. [e]

Location 471

This unlegislated gathering of strays and fugitives, giving a name of form to formlessness, has irked some writers. Samuel Johnson blamed Montaigne for having ‘reconciled mankind’ to ‘licentiousness’ ‘by the vivacity of his essays’: ‘he therefore who wants skill to form a plan or diligence to pursue it, needs only entitle his performance an essay, to acquire the right of heaping together the collections of half his life, without order, coherence, or propriety.’ In this book we have tried to strike a balance between the licence offered by the title of ‘essay’, and the worry expressed by Johnson that the word might act as an excuse for not engaging in the proper work of definition. Our book is entitled On Essays, not On Essayism, and we do not see the essay merely as a ‘heap’ of ill-assorted writings; or a gesture of amused despair at the inadequacy of categories; or a liberty run to licentiousness.

Note: I’m glad that they called out this tension. Montaigne was able to execute a meandering serious of miscellaneous works—through great voice, skepticism, references—yet other writers who adopt the name and form, "essay," but create far less interesting digressions, might give the genre a bad impression. We need not classify an essay by disorder alone, or at all. I'd actually say a great essay is "cohesive," and masterful cohesion is not limiting your scope of exploration to a narrow safe band, but to venture widely, will having the most random assemblages cohere under a single thesis, a filter to guide an ambling thought process.

Despite them saying, it is not "a gesture of amused despair at the inadequacy of categories," that is certainly my impression after reading the introduction three times. The harder question that I think would solve their tension: how can we define categories that are flexible enough to allow for the massive variation in the medium, and what traits are common amongst them all? It's definitely not a formal similarity. It's not something on the page you see. This is what makes it hard. There is no procedure, and no template, yet there are organic orders for organic beasts, malleable principles that honor the radical mutations of form and expression. [e]

Location 476

‘What a prodigy it is’, Montaigne exclaims, "that the drop of seed from which we [humans] are produced bears in itself the impressions not only of the bodily form but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers! Where does that drop of fluid lodge this infinite number of forms? And how do they convey these resemblances with so heedless and irregular a course that the great-grandson will correspond to his great-grandfather, the nephew to the uncle?" It is not difficult to transpose from human genus to literary genre: what Montaigne says here is true of the history of the essay, in which family resemblances skip generations, realize potential in unexpected ways, mutate, recur, lie dormant for decades, then spring to life again. Virginia Woolf, a great historian as well as practitioner of the essay, likewise turned to the metaphor of family resemblance in her ‘The Modern Essay’ of 1922. ‘The form’, she concedes, ‘admits variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God or Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside.’ It is nonetheless, as her phrasing suggests, a form; and though ‘the family is widely spread’, some of whose ‘representatives have risen in the world and wear their coronets’ while ‘others pick up a precarious living in the gutter’, it is still a family.

Note: I like this point, that historical lineage and impact is not necessarily a full representation of the extents of the form; as profound as Montaigne is, he is certainly and self-admiringly lacking compositional skill in certain areas, and so it would be wrong to over-emulate or define the genre solely from its originator. Over time there are resemblances and mutations, but the larger question is, what stays stable in the species across time? Similar to how human nature is said to be "unchanged" across millennia—given our biology changes across tens or hundreds of thousands of years—so to do the stable qualities of an essay persist across the centuries. Surely, there are expressions not yet realized, and they would not be alien, but unrealized expressions of the same genetic code. [e]

Location 485

This volume, after two more general essays by Karshan and Boutcher, is organized chronologically, from Montaigne to the present. Most contributions focus on one of the typical characteristics of this family, as it finds expression in particular members, but with an eye to the whole tradition, its edges and its blurring with others. Each contribution, like Adorno’s traveller in a foreign country, points out the essay or the essayistic in different contexts; each essay, in the spirit of Hunt’s indicator, acts as a pointer, towards some of the senses of what the essay can be or has been.

Note: Solid structure! To understand the generalities through specific archetypes and avatars. I am structuring my summer syllabus in a similar way. Like how the Greek mythology needed humanoid Gods to concretize their values, composition concepts need personification. [e]

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Bacon pointed to Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, which, he claimed, were ‘but Essays,—That is dispersed Meditations, though conveyed in the form of Epistles’. Montaigne wrote an essay ‘In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch’, and Joseph Addison similarly nominated Seneca, alongside Montaigne, as his essayistic ‘Patterns’. In doing so, they separated themselves from a strain of ornate and orderly oration associated with Cicero, and laid claim to a tradition of miscellaneous, curious, moral writing. Seneca’s Epistulae morales, or ‘moral letters’, were a sequence of 124 short Latin texts dating to the first century ad each written on a theme—‘On the Terrors of Death’, ‘On Philosophy and Friendship’, ‘On the Reasons for Withdrawing from the World’, ‘On Meeting Death Cheerfully’, ‘On Grief for Lost Friends’, ‘On Drunkenness’, ‘On Gathering Ideas’, ‘On Discursiveness in Reading’, ‘On the Fickleness of Fortune’, ‘On Style as a Mirror of Character’. They tend to begin with an anecdote, a memory, a concrete observation, before broadening to generalized and moral statements in a Stoic vein. Plutarch’s Moralia, written in Greek slightly later in the same century, is a collection of seventy-nine texts on similarly miscellaneous topics, taking in a wider range of subjects than Seneca’s Epistulae: alongside moral questions of virtue, education, and prudence appear antiquarian discussions, anthropology, natural speculations, and collections of anecdotes and sayings, including ‘On Profiting from One’s Enemies’, ‘On Superstition’, ‘On Isis and Osiris’, ‘On The E at Delphi’, ‘On Curiosity’, ‘Whether Land or Sea Animals are Cleverer’, and ‘On the Eating of Flesh’.

The inclusion of the word ‘moral’ in the titles of so many seventeenth-century volumes of essays demonstrates how closely the form was understood as pursuing the same path as the wisdom literature of Seneca and Plutarch, with its witty alternation of general precept and personal speculation: ‘their teaching’, Montaigne says, ‘is the cream of philosophy, and presented in simple and pertinent fashion’. Their mosaic of different topics was also enabling: ‘the knowledge I seek is there treated in detached pieces that do not demand the obligation of long labor, of which I am incapable. I need no great enterprise to get at them, and I leave them whenever I like. For they have no continuity from one to the other’. The detachment of their separate considerations, their shortness, and their freedom of form to begin and leave off at will, remarked by everyone from Montaigne to Adorno as key features of the essay, are what appeal. The examples of Seneca and Plutarch served more generally to develop a new style of vernacularized philosophy in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries which privileged matter and particularity over formal or oratorical eloquence, and cultivated a high regard for erudition conducted with a gentlemanly informality, also characteristic of Charles Lamb or Leigh Hunt.

The recognized model of Seneca and Plutarch amplifies the point made by Warren Boutcher in his contribution to this volume, that essays participate in a much longer tradition of various and miscellaneous writing that has always had an evident appeal for writers and readers. Recent anthologists have taken this beyond the scope of the direct genealogies of the European and American essay. Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay includes, in its ‘Forerunners’ section, passages from Sei Shōnagon’s tenth-century Pillow Book, from the fourteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk Kenko, and from the eleventh-century Chinese writer Ou-Yang Hsiu. John d’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay begins at the moment when the use of writing by the Sumerian civilization is first recorded for a purpose other than accounting and administration, in ‘The List of Ziusudra’—anticipating the essay’s tendency to the mosaic and listing form—and includes texts from Akkadian, from Heraclitus, from Azwinaki Tshipala, who lived in southern Africa c.315 ad, and from Chinese and Japanese traditions, including, again, Sei Shōnagon.

Note: The fact that so many 17th-century essayists had "morals" in their title proves that their is an origin back past Montaigne, to Seneca and Plutarch (the 1st century). Even back then, the tradition of the A|B Sequence, starting with a concrete story and closing on a lesson, was established. I'm sure this is a staple of orality too (to tell stories and then unpack their meaning). Tie this into the lore of the Microcosm pattern, and to the value of oscillating between exemplification and abstraction.

Given these proto-essayists are about informality moral writing on various topics, I wonder why Marcus Aeurilius does not fit in? He kept a private journal, so there was no imagined reader, but was that not how Montaigne started? Is the only difference a minor historical circumstance?

Re: mosaics—they offer separation of ideas, shortness, freedom. Instead of converging on a single idea, they let the looseness of the mind exist; to commit to the practice of auditing your own morals in prose; to write at a speed of your own adjusting mind. Montaigne specifically spoke about avoiding "long labors," and that his writings are "the cream of philosophy," just the top layer, most casually written and understood, speaking to the fact that it's a democratic and accessible practice, not something done by specialists. [e] [p]

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Writing in a five-volume translation of Plutarch’s Morals published in 1684, the translator Matthew Morgan suggested that Plutarch’s ‘way was that of Common-Place Book’. The practice of commonplacing assembled quotations, exempla, and aphorisms under thematic headings, and acted as the storehouse of latent ideas from which a schoolboy or writer could draw material to be assembled into more sustained argument, oratory, or literary composition. It digested reading into fodder for writing, and made writing a process of assembly of pre-existing material, rather than the creation of new matter. Montaigne himself acknowledges the potential to view his essays as a kind of anthology of the words of others, a florilegium: ‘someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them’ (984). Bacon’s earliest essays barely supplied that thread: his editor Michael Kiernan comments that ‘[s]ome would view the ten earliest essays […] as little more than pages from Bacon’s commonplace books’, raw matter in which sentences were divided by pilcrows, emphasizing that these ‘essays’ were not pieces of continuous discourse, but the result of a partial process of digestion and compilation, made available to other readers. As Scott Black has argued, early essays are ‘primarily “records of reading” rather than of writing’.

Note: The commonplace books runs through Plutarch, Montaigne, and Bacon, and it's fascinating to think of the essay as a "record of reading." This practice feels accessible, attainable and transformed to an Internet reader who has new ease of assembly. Instead of manually organizing into headers, you could imagine an AI-powered embedding process, where you write a prompt, and then it auto-assembles relevant notes from that new heading.

A commonplace book could be the potential core of a 21st century English Composition class in high school. Instead of being forced to write about old literature you don't care about—on average, for only 7 minutes per class—there could be a dedicated space where you're taught to capture and transform. This prevents the onus and fear of creating something from nothing. Beginner writes need a starting point, and you might as well let them choose, ie: from across their classes, movies, friends, media—write it down! Store it. Then, come to class and write from it. [e]

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The model suggests that we might read the fragmentary aphorisms of Bacon’s early essays rather as a site of potential, than of haphazard unfinishedness.

Note: Total cope. You can say this about any assemblage of things. This is the sin of modern art. A toilet bowl in the MoMA inspires a potential of interpretations. [e]

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Montaigne: "...how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little ingenuity will produce numberless essays. […] They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who get my drift."

Montaigne describes the purpose of his ‘stories’—the classical exempla, the personal and historical anecdotes scattered throughout his work—as a storehouse. Each example contains the possibility for ‘numberless essays’ to which it might give rise. The essay we are reading is a proxy which stands in for innumerable essays that others may have written, that the reader may yet write. They are the ‘seeds’ from which other essays might grow.

Note: Yes, all material gets transfigures based on frame and context—a story has many bends and arcs, but to bring into a conga with other ideas, you can only include a small portion of it—, but this doesn’t mean we need to strip all frame and create a mosaic of equal context so the reader can pluck and use stories themselves. What percent of readers do this? I do. But is this the end audience of an essay? If anyone, I fully support the reader-to-writer pipeline; it's a unique affordance of the genre, not found in novels or poems.

But, crucially, a reader can just as easily pluck an anecdote from a linear context and give it a totally different life. We don't need to present work in a fragmentary way in order for readers to find and pick out fragments. Anything can be extracted from anything, when that occasion arises.

A lot of the logic here is conspiracy theory logic: combining excerpts and post-modern theories to support an unfounded claim. In a quite meta way, it’s like I’m watching the ineffectiveness of the mosaic theory at work. Things are plucked for association, and the resulting conclusion is an imagined synergy inspired by the unconscious desire of the book's thesis, rather than the true and linear relationship between the material if it were understood in full. [e]

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The association of the essay with commonplacing links it to the schoolroom, and to an inculcation of habits of thought and cultural norms: qualities which seemingly run counter to the wildness and licentiousness also attributed to the essay. This paradox leads to a dilemma at the heart of the history of the essay, and scholarship and criticism on it, which casts a considerable irony over a volume of essays on essays written largely by people employed by universities. One of the oddities of the essay is that it begins as a literary genre of tentativeness and resistance to institutionalized knowledge, but is now most commonly written as the standard mode of instruction and assessment and usual genre of school and undergraduate writing, especially in the humanities. Montaigne’s long essay ‘Of Pedantry’ indicts the desiccated paralysis of ‘scholars’ and contrasts them with his own writing: they ‘distinguish and mark off their ideas more specifically and in detail. I, who cannot see beyond what I have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a general way, and tentatively. As in this: I speak my meaning in disjointed parts’. The essay resists scholarship and orderly composition: ‘I put forward formless and unresolved notions’. He claims to emulate the actual course of thinking, moving wildly from one subject to another in order ‘to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind’. His stipulations run directly against what are nowadays the criteria used to assess essays in pedagogical contexts: definition of terms and method, orderly structure and clear argument, lack of digression, impersonality of tone, avoidance of conjecture, provision of evidence, summative conclusions, completeness and coherence.

Note: There is middle-ground between incoherent drivel and mechanical form. If Montaigne were more scholarly, he could have invented a curriculum to teach his process and prevent the medium from ossifying into stale formula—but imagine that would have been uninteresting to him (I am not sure if the thought of scholars debating his intentions centuries later would amuse or terrify him—probably both).

If the critics here were prolific essay writers, they might be less eager to take Montaigne's humility and self-effacing spirit for a definition of the genre. Across Montaigne there is plenty of terms, arguments, focus, formality, abstraction, evidence, and conclusion! It is never presented in a predictable form, but rather, there are granular patterns that weave in and out, along with their opposites.

We can reconcile the seemingly unreconciliable: we can strive to eradicate the lawyerly "thesis defense" from schooling, yet still consider a thesis, and we can seek to capture a wandering mind on the page, but that is not a license for disjointedness, and our ideas can avoid templated forms, but patterns can teach us re-combinable modules, and we can explore ideas without coming to a resolved conclusions, but that's not an excuse to to ignore composition, editing, and the end-reader. [e]

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Brian Blanchfield justified calling his essays ‘proxies’ because the word ‘expresses a kind of concession to imprecision, a failure’, expressing the essay’s willingness to pledge itself less to truth and accuracy than to ad hoc and temporary expression, as in Montaigne’s insistence that he makes ‘essays’, not ‘decisions’.

Note: You can be uncertain in conclusion while still having a systematic form. [e]

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Montaigne himself placed the word ‘essai’ in pedagogical contexts, yet did so precisely to stress the provisionality of his writing: I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance and permitting neither doubt nor dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; what I reason out according to me, not what I believe according to God; as children set forth their essays to be instructed, not to instruct[.]

Note: Again, this is mislabeling Montaigne’s epistemic humility with an anarchy of form. Of course he has an organic looseness (which is desirable!) but there are definitely recognizable moves across his work. It is not Joycean. [e]

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The ‘school-theme’ Florio refers to was a proposed subject on which a student had to write a composition, following standard rules of definition and example. Montaigne recalled, in ‘Of the Education of Children’, tutors ‘giv[ing him] a theme in the school fashion’: receiving a text on a given subject to recast in elegant Latin. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the essay had also become a pedagogical genre, an ‘exercise in the grammar school’, as the title of Ralph Johnson’s The Scholars Guide had it:

"An Essay is a short discourse about any virtue, vice, or other common-place. Such be Learning, Ignorance, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, Drunkenness, Usury, Love, Joy, Fear, Hope, Sorrow, Anger, Covetousness, Contentation, Labour, Idleness, Riches, Poverty, Pride, Humility, Virginity."

Johnson supplies rules for ‘making’ an essay, which, far from the changeable and drunken form inaugurated by Montaigne, work like a recipe for the exhaustive treatment of a topos, beginning by ‘express[ing] the nature of it in two or three short Definitions, or Descriptions’, establishing its sorts or kinds, its ‘causes, adjuncts, and effects’, while emphasizing that this should be done ‘briefly, without tautology or superfluous good words, in good and choice language’. It is not clear how long the essay’s previous history in the schoolroom was, especially since Johnson sends his reader to modern exemplars, referring to the ‘larger and complete Essays’ of Bacon and Owen Felltham. What is clear is that already by 1665, the fissure in senses of ‘essay’ had set in.

Note: Good distinction: the real problems of school essays are coercion via procedure and templates. The core clarification (perhaps worth opening an argument with), is that you can have a system that is non-coercive, non-procedural, and non-templated—an organic system; ie: a system to teach the Montaginean way. You don’t just derive that from drunkenness and lawlessness. Look more into this 1655 book by Ralph Johnson. [e]

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According to Ian Michael, the essay ultimately gained supremacy in large part due to its use in the rubrics of competitive public examinations, which were adopted widely from the 1850s, in an attempt to provide a meritocratic way of judging candidates for employment in the expanding professions and civil service, especially the Indian civil service. The emphasis on virtue and vice lingered on in the essay tradition, with candidates for exam papers being asked, for example, to ‘assess the characters’ of figures from Shakespeare. The purpose of such examinations was to offer candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their own character and merit, independent of any particular area of specialized knowledge or practical aim. The notion that the essay exposed the writer’s idiosyncrasy was harnessed to the meritocratic pretensions of a new educational and professional structure, which rewarded students for meeting certain well-recognized if often implicit structural and conceptual models. Peter Womack expresses these mixed messages—write freely, but conform to expectation; be yourself, but adopt the disinterested persona of the essayist—as the product of the ideological fantasy ‘that expressing one’s individuality and affirming one’s membership of the elite [should] become effectively identical’.

Note: The medium took two inherently personal things (the process of writing essays, and the examination of your own virtues) and instrumentalized it. Naturally, Goodhart's Law happens, and you get a sense of performed virtue, the type you see in college essays. Real essays have a "disinterested" attitude—disinterested as in, unconcerned with how it's received, yet very concerned with the ideas and structure of the piece perhaps. There can be no idiosyncracy if there are extreme stakes and life consequences. [e]

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The essay’s role in the school and university systems thus became, in parallel, at once the codified mode of addressing a topic (along with strictures on structure, with models of four-point and five-point essays recommended by handbooks), and a prompt to a kind of playful composition which, despite or because of its pretence to lightness and spontaneity, did the work of forming an intellectual and social elite. Cyril Connolly wrote in Enemies of Promise that as late as 1938, ‘countless small boys’, suffering under the bad influence of Addison, ‘are at this moment busy setting down their views on Travel, the Great Man, Courage, Gardening, Capital Punishment to wind up with a quotation from Bacon'. John Gross, too, remembers with horror being asked in the classroom of the mid 1940s ‘to write a light-hearted essay all about nothing’ in the tradition of Lamb. One significant institutional survival of the personal essay about character is the American college admission essay, in which applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: ‘failure’, an expert on the admissions essay tells us, ‘is essayistic gold’.59 However distantly, these essays, too, derive ultimately from the Montaignian sense of essai as trial and attempt, a vehicle for writing the experiments of life.

Note: In these examples, an organic form is instrumentalized: you imitate a free-flowing mind to join a rank, pass a class, or get into college. Can you teach an essay in a school without instrumentalization? My 12th grade English teacher made us keep a journal, but did not read, only graded to the extent we filled it, which I suppose is a good example of unpressured autonomous. [e]

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Given the various ways in which the essay bristles against academic writing—its resistance to introductions, to definitions, to generalization and abstraction, to accounts of origins, its freedom from discipline, rules, and criteria—it is no wonder that the field of critical work on the essay is sparse. The essay has been relatively neglected in scholarly and critical accounts, since the characteristics associated with the essayistic—lack of authority, digression, marginality, and so on—are precisely those from which the professional study of literature had to distinguish itself, in order to make a claim to the systematic and methodical qualities that would win it respectability as a university discipline. Remarkably, there is only one substantial history of the essay in English, Hugh Walker’s The English Essay and Essayists (1915), though there are also several excellent studies of the essay in particular periods, while editors of anthologies have done important work in framing their topics. Though English is the language in which the form of the essay has been most consistently productive, the most compelling theoretical statements have been Central European, from Robert Musil, György Lukács, and Theodor Adorno, an irony reflecting the English and essayistic bias towards practice and empiricism, and away from theory and abstraction.

Note: This almost confirms the point of essay scholarship is to claim a literary niche by showing a neglected medium is legitimate. These works of criticism write upwards as for an appeal to entry into the institutionalized circles of literature, not down to the masses via education, who are disregarded as too systematic. Most literary criticism is elitist, but the essay is unique in that it’s simultaneously elitist and egalitarian. There is a canon, yet anyone can participate, even if they have no regard or awareness of that canon. Many bloggers write essays under a different name. [e]

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Such meta-essays often avoid systematic definitions, preferring to offer their insights indirectly, by performing the features they claim as typical, as in Brian Dillon’s recent Essayism.

Note: Reminds me of Bloom’s anxiety of influence: join the canon by synthesizing it in a single work.

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The introductions by practising essayists contributed annually since 1986 to Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays anthologies form, taken together, one of the most substantial recent bodies of thought on the essay. Recently, Adam Gopnik has offered an unofficial history of the essay tradition through pieces in the New Yorker on Montaigne, Johnson, De Quincey, Wilde, Chesterton, and Beerbohm, while Woolf’s essays on essayists, including Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, and Lamb, constitute a thorough and insightful, if unofficial, history of the essay.

Note: I plan to study these systematically, and wonder if it’s been done before.

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Recently, Adam Gopnik has offered an unofficial history of the essay tradition through pieces in the New Yorker on Montaigne, Johnson, De Quincey, Wilde, Chesterton, and Beerbohm, while Woolf’s essays on essayists, including Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, and Lamb, constitute a thorough and insightful, if unofficial, history of the essay.

Note: Gather these, along with Tolentino and Freddie deBoer recent histories

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For most of the second half [of the 20th century], it was a neglected genre: its association with dilettantism and ephemerality, and its resistance to theory and abstraction, making it a less serious or worthy object of research and scholarly attention than the more obviously amenable genres of lyric, novel, or drama. However the twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in the essay form, and forms of non-fiction prose more generally, at the same time as practice and publication of essays and memoirs has also significantly increased. Non-fiction prose, or creative non-fiction, is now a staple of creative writing and MFA programmes; bookshops host whole sections under titles like ‘Literary Essays’; and the publication both of new volumes of essays, and of studies of the essay, participates in the renewed attention to the form. Courses on the essay are increasingly available to undergraduates and graduates; and, in addition to this volume, several new studies have recently been published, or are emerging.6

Note: This is the shared narrative between both the MFA scene (starting with E.B. White's "second-class citizen" claim, and picked up by Best American Essays. Both claim the revolution a success. Is it? Is one shelf of "Literary Essays" a win? Was this the goal, or do we not think well-written essays could have mass appeal? This narrative ignores the Internet, where the real essay boom is happening.

Worth noting the pattern of "the deep history, the dark age, the revival," which runs similar to the psychedelic medicine movement. I wonder if this is a true countercultural pattern, or a rhetorical flourish. [e]

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This is not a Handbook of the essay, an apparently comprehensive and general introductory guide to the workings of a form as to the operation of a machine or contraption; nor is it a Companion, suggesting that the essay is a single and singular personage, to an encounter with whom this book might act as chaperone; nor an Encyclopaedia, implying that we have delimited and anatomized our subject into its component parts; nor a History, suggesting that the essay has a continuous and causally connected past which could be summarized. Instead, we have called the volume On Essays, availing ourselves of the essay’s own titular habit, which implies at once its tendency to be about something, to have in view something which is its subject; while at the same time incorporating an awareness of the writer’s intentionality, the taking up of an angle, rather than a claim to definitiveness or completion. We have tried to do justice to the paradoxical, miscellaneous, and amorphous qualities of the form, and the possibilities and potentials they permit, without losing sight of family resemblances, and the various characteristic qualities which, despite their hopscotching across generations, are nonetheless recognizably traits of the essay.

Note: Does seem to be a work about mapping identifiable traits. Also worth noting: "Handbook" "Companion" "Encyclopedia" and "History" are all worth targets. Process, Patterns, Precedent, Perspective.

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It is precisely this indirect mode of approaching the history of the essay which Thomas Karshan discovers in Chapter 1 of this book, ‘What is an Essay?’, which shows how Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street-Haunting’ acts as a consummation and recapitulation of the paradoxical, miscellaneous history of the essay as she saw it, looking back to Montaigne and Bacon, and incorporating the eighteenth-century periodical essayists, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Hunt, Thoreau, Emerson, Stevenson, Butler, and Belloc. Woolf’s weaving of these references covertly into the incidents and accidents of a dusky walk through London in search of a pencil performs the contingent, chancy inheritance of traits across the essay form. Her essay is thus exemplary of something which emerges over and again in the writers discussed in the chapters of On Essays: the way in which the history of the essay is always being obliquely reimagined and rewritten when essayists rework tropes from their predecessors. This process continues today: so, for instance, ‘Street-Haunting’ has been a constant reference and inspiration for Rebecca Solnit, who calls Woolf a ‘Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown’, and traces her ancestry as an essayist of self-loss back through Woolf to Thoreau.

Note: This ties into Bloom's idea of nodding to the canon; on how original works can be conscious, experimental, and original remixes of historical tropes. [e]

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More essays were published in English than in any other European language (including French), in part because of the congruence of the essay’s informal, anti-systematic, and anti-metaphysical biases with the emergence of English experimentalism and empiricism (a justification for the incongruous title of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). Kathryn Murphy’s contribution to this volume investigates this early English history, and the synonymity of essay, experience, and experiment in the seventeenth century.

Note: Now I wonder if anti-systematic refers to form or something else.

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Montaigne’s preoccupation with his own idiosyncratic experience turns, in Bacon, to an interest in experience as a cognitive virtue, divested of personality; and thence, across the English seventeenth century, to an association of the essay with the beginnings of experimental science, in Robert Boyle. This trajectory gives some grounding for the essay’s paradoxical relationship to science in later periods. On the one hand, for the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, the essay is ‘science, minus the explicit proof’, or for Max Bense, a German philosopher of science, ‘the essay is an experimental method […] in the same sense that one speaks of experimental physics’. On the other, for Pater, Woolf, Lukács, and Adorno, the essay is precisely the form that resists science and system. Murphy’s chapter shows the common origin of each of these positions in a preoccupation with experience rather than reason or authority as the ground of knowledge.

Note: The unifying thread between these camps is "Experience" as the substance of an essay. The essay is quasi-scientific, not necessarily in a systematic way, and not with proof, but it is "experimental." It is applied empiricism for the masses: you have an Experience, that triggers some unproven though or idea, a hypothesis, which you barrel forward through associations to make sense of. What the essay is not is a structured and definitive dissertation of a rigid, sternly-held idea. [e]

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The periodical essay also marks the shift of the essay’s primary locale from the closed gentlemanly spaces of the private study, garden, or experimental closet, as in Montaigne, Bacon, and their seventeenth-century followers, into the coffee-house and city. As Ellis shows, the material history of the periodical essay—both the signs of usage and reading on the single-sheet ‘Daily-Papers’, and the more substantial gathering of them into bound and collected volumes—demonstrates that the proper place of the Tatler and Spectator was at once the coffee-shop and the library, and shows their participation simultaneously in the ephemerality of the daily life of commercial London in the early 1700s, and in learned culture and the formation of taste.

Note: The periodical essay feels like the second era of the essay; the first shift from elite circles to public coffeehouses, influencing mass opinion. [e]

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The essay thus enriches the conversation of ordinary society with the ideas and discoveries of learning. But it also provides a conduit through which the learned world is supplied with an embodied, situated content of character, situation, and personae. The eighteenth-century vogue for the philosophical dialogue, or the essay in dialogue, something practised by Hume and advocated by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, shows the period’s sense that ideas require a person to whom they are attributed, in order to be evaluated or given credit.

Note: Importance of tangibility and specific examples. Good source for microcosm. [p]. There is also an idea here about individualism, where we want not just the idea, but the person behind the idea. On the rise of authorship.

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This connection between the eighteenth-century essay and persona, dialogue, and associative digression allies it with the emergence in the same period of the novel. Eighteenth-century novels, like essays, are miscellaneous, and incorporate various discourses into a single intelligible whole, making connections between specialised thought and the ordinary, social world. Henry Fielding opens each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones with an essay; Parker shows that, no less than Hume or Samuel Johnson, Fielding’s fiction dramatizes the tension between intellect and society, opinions and life.

Note: Expand on how essays align with the golden age of the novel. And what was the relative popularity to it in comparison? [e]

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Gigante shows how the eighteenth-century combination of public consumption (of coffee and news) with the sociable discussion of ideas and formation of taste in the coffee-shop shifts to a world of isolated reverie and dream in the smoking houses of early nineteenth-century London. Hunt, nostalgic for the world of Addison and Steele, shapes the essay in resistance to the pressing activity of modern clock-watching, desiring a ‘humane openness of intercourse’ in which thought and life flow together in easy conversation. In keeping with the Romantic return to Montaigne as the presiding spirit of the essay, Hunt follows the smoker into Gliddon’s cigar divan, where he finds the Montaignian ‘arrière-boutique’ or back-room of the mind literalized in an exotic, orientalized space which seems to belong to a world entirely differing from the sociable, commercial one going on around it. What he sees there is something closer to the cloistered den of De Quincey’s Opium-Eater. A volume of Kant’s metaphysics replaces Addison’s communally-read Spectator, and wild hallucinations replace the sociable associations of thought.

Note: The essay in era of consumerism

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Lamb, as in Montaigne and Seneca, the essay is closely akin to the letter, and the related informality of style suits an era which articulated the ideal, in Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that poetry should be written in ‘the real language of men’.

Note: Original of write like you talk [e]

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On both sides of the Atlantic, the essay continued the effort to voice itself directly and to build a public sphere, not through a virtual coffee-house, or a retreat into a confidential privacy, but by drawing together audiences in lecture halls. Formerly spectator, conversationalist, and correspondent, the essayist now becomes political orator or religious preacher. Yet, as Wright shows, in Carlyle and Emerson the essayist is a listener as well as a speaker, inviting into his essays the imagined voices of their publics, offering ‘a space of synthesis amidst the cacophony of society, in which multiple voices speak variously and sometimes in conflict but within a common space’. Emerson likened his essays to a ‘panharmonicon’, a huge mechanical organ invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the capacity to imitate the sounds of other instruments and thus a whole orchestra. The essayist comes to play a role in imagining the democratic nation into being.

Note: Simulated debate, patterns Response and Perspective [p]. Also speaks to the larger function of an essayist to synthesize the different currents of their time [e].

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In ‘Retiring or Engaging’, Field points out that the retirement and detached spectatorship of Montaigne and Addison are themselves political positions, and that indeed many essayists have valued retirement as the condition of political effectiveness, allowing scope for the liberal conscience, dissent, and self-questioning. Detachment also allows, as in Montaigne’s own ‘Of Cannibals’, a stance of critical anthropology towards one’s own society. Field traces from ‘Of Cannibals’ the strain of the essay which critiques imperialism and slavery, passing through Hazlitt’s ‘On Reason and Imagination’, via Orwell, to James Baldwin and Lewis Nkosi. Hazlitt’s argument—that an essay’s political value can be found not in its argument, but in its evocative appeal to experience and imagination, thus encouraging readers to, in this case, imagine what it is like to be trapped in the hull of a slave ship—is also visible in the writings of Thoreau, Woolf, Baldwin, Nkosi, and Sontag, whose Regarding the Pain of Others combines in its title the essayist’s ‘aboutness’ (writing on the pain of others) with the problem of voyeurism and the necessity of taking suffering into account. Such essayists, Field shows, combine the ‘advice to princes’ tradition of the Baconian essay with the strategic indirection of Montaigne.

Note: Concealed catalyst; mimesis. [p]

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Questions about the status of the essay as art or otherwise dominated three great Central European interventions in the theory of the essay in the early and mid twentieth century: György Lukács’s ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ (1910), Robert Musil’s reflections on ‘essayism’ in his novel The Man without Qualities (1930–43), and Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), a direct response to Lukács. Lukács dismisses the idea that any well-written non-fiction is an ‘essay’, and accords it instead a unique role in the literary array as giving form to the faintest and most evanescent moments of life; an intermediate form between poetry and philosophy, a kind of ‘intellectual poem’ which gestures towards the absolute truth of philosophy, science, and system without reaching it. Always a precursor, the essay emphasizes process over verdict or destination. Musil reiterated some of Lukács’s judgements, finding the essay’s domain ‘between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine’, in which ‘terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable’. Musil’s hero Ulrich adopts an ‘essayism’ based on Lukács’s account of the essay: a way of living which involves a resistance to system, taking experience hypothetically and assessing and weighing it from various angles, yet inconclusively.

Note: Essay as tentative personal philosophy for another to consider. It less about arriving at the absolute truth, but about experiencing a person's process/quest to arrive there. Helpful towards a definition. [e]

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In Chapter 16, ‘Up to a Point’, Adam Phillips observes, conversely, how psychoanalysis has resisted expressing itself under the title of ‘essay’, for fear of being accused of purveying fiction, falling short of the status of a science and a profession—a worry about institutions and professionalism which, as we noted above, also besets academic writing on the essay. Yet the irony is that essayists such as Montaigne, Lamb, and Pater (the latter two of whom Phillips has edited) pioneered the charting of the unconscious and its un-methodical free associations. Here, the dominant theme of ‘association’ in the first half of the volume finds a further echo. Phillips instead argues for a kinship between the two terms of his title: ‘An essay, like a psychoanalysis, is an experiment without a proof.’ If some of the most interesting contemporary essays are being written by those who are sympathetic to psychoanalysis but sceptical of its claims to being a science and a profession—Phillips himself, Darian Leader, Jacqueline Rose, Janet Malcolm—that may be not only because they believe that psychoanalysis, like the essay, is an art rather than a science, but nonetheless not fictional; nor even only because it is the essence and tradition of the essay that it allows the wandering pen to match the zig-zags of the irrational mind; but also because the unconscious is recalcitrant to the authority of science and professionalism.

Note: Interesting to consider a Jungian approach to the essay, mental mapping via prose. Is the Red Book essayistic? Feels a bit too cryptic, but maybe? What about a form of essay where all experience is hallucinated day dreams?

Either way, essays often barrel forward through an associative logic, and through reading that essay, you have insight into the workings of your mind. Through editing and revising, you change your mind. Through publishing, you offer a model for others to consider that transformation themselves. [e]

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As Christy Wampole says in Chapter 17, ‘Dalí’s Montaigne’ (the last in the book), the essay has always been a form which shows the mind working not in rational discursive argument but via the rich but inchoate images one meets in dreams and objects. As the essay fulfils this quality in itself, it can leave the written word behind, taking advantage of new media and realizing itself in images or in text-image hybrids—whether the mixed photo-essays of Sebald and Rankine discussed by Wood and Stuckey-French, or the various essays in the media of drawing, photography, film, and video that have become a significant part of contemporary essayism.

Note: Or, prose itself can render sight

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All of these works, in different ways, bear traces of the influence of Surrealism, a movement with perhaps surprising affinities to the essay. Yet, in Agee and Walker Evans, Marker, and Bresland, such surrealism is closely allied to the everyday, the factual, and the artefactual. In these hybrid forms, technologically unimaginable from Montaigne’s perspective, we still find the unfolding patterns of family resemblance which mark the essay: association, experiment, experience.

Note: I like this framework a lot: experiment, experience, associate. The experiment is rhetorical scientific process of asking a question; experience is living the question; and associations are the thoughts that emerge in pursuit of an answer. [e]

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Although two new and influential journals of the essay had been founded in the previous decade—Cabinet Magazine in 2000, and n+1 in 2004—and were joined in 2011 by Notting Hill Editions, a London publisher dedicated to essayistic writing, it was still notoriously difficult to sell books of essays. The past decade has, however, seen a substantial growth of interest in the essay among writers, readers, scholars, and publishers, making On Essays more timely than we expected; the title of Christy Wampole’s 2013 New York Times column, ‘The Essayification of Everything’, gives a sense of the sudden cultural centrality of a genre historically located on the margins.

Note: Look into the early 2000s essay publishing scene. My question and skepticism: was there actually a renaissance? Are living in its fruits? Did it crest and crash? How would we know if some social movement has been attained? We definitely have a coordinated effort of many scholars, writers, and intellectuals claiming "the essay is here!" and also, and equal number claiming "and, now it's over!" But it has maybe never arrived, and never left. The status of this movement has only been bound in rhetoric. What could we measure to show the essay has actually made a revival? [e]

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Several exceptionally significant books of essays, or essayistic books, have recently been published, including Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (all 2014), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts(2015), Mark Greif’s Against Everything, and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies (both 2016). The success, achievement, and vitality of work by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Olivia Laing, Hilton Als, Adam Phillips, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eula Biss, Emilie Pine, and Jia Tolentino, suggests the resurgence of the form.

Note: Contemporary essayists

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Though detecting causes of such trends is hazardous, one condition may be the shift in media and its circulation from print to online, serving to soften the boundary between journalism and personal reflection, making opinion both easily accessible and speedily shared, and allowing distinctions between professional, expert, institutional, and private commentators to erode.

Note: Acknowledges the Internet

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Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1991), 3–23, here 4.

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Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (1995), 2.

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In the preliminary material for a special issue entitled The Essay: An Attempt, A Protean Form, ed. Denise Gigante, Republics of Letters 4 (2014), available at http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/fora/essay-attempt-protean-form.

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See, for instance, Ullrich Langer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (2005), 3. We have not followed this strictly in this volume, however, since many of our contributors discuss Montaigne in his role as model for subsequent essayists.

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See Richard Scholar, Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (2010), 67–8.

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the liberating effect of Montaigne’s Essais on vernacular philosophy and individual thinking, see Warren Boutcher, The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe (2017).

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Hugh Walker, The English Essay and Essayists (1915), 2.

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Wolfgang Holdheim, The Hermeneutic Mode: Essays on Time in Literature and Literary Theory (1984),

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Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1978; 1979), 5.

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John D’Agata (ed.), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009).

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Black, Of Essays and Reading, 24.

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Ralph Johnson, The Scholars Guide from the Accidence to the University, or, Short, Plain, and Easie Rules for performing all manner of Exercise in the Grammar School (1665), 13–14.

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See Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (1987), 309–11, and Peter Womack, ‘What are Essays For?’, in English in Education 27.2 (1993), 42–8. 55 The argument in this paragraph is drawn from Womack’s in ‘What are Essays For?’.

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For the four-part structure—‘introduction, points for, points against, conclusion’—prevailing in British handbooks and the five-part American structure (‘introduction, three arguments, conclusion’) see Peter Mack, ‘Rhetoric and the Essay’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23.2 (1993), 41–9, here 41, 48, and n.13. [p] Argument

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See Gross’s ‘Introduction’ in The Oxford Book of Essays (1991), xxi–xxii.

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See also Tracy Chevalier (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Essay (1997). The most comparable volume to ours is Alexander J. Butrym (ed.), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (1989).

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e.g. Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (2006); Elbert N. S. Thompson, The Seventeenth-Century English Essay (1927); George S. Marr, Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (1923); Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (1987); David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2017). Though not focused solely on essayists, Michael Hurley and Marcus Waithe (eds), Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2018), contains several relevant studies. For briefer accounts, see Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘Not Being, but Passing: Defining the Early English Essay’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 10.2 (1977), 17–27; Robert DeMaria, Jr, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (2005), 527–48.

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See Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (1998); Denise Gigante (ed.), The Great Age of the English Essay (2008), on the eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists; Gertrude Himmelfarb (ed.), The Spirit of the Age (2009) on the Victorian essayists.

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See also de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit; Kuisma Korhonen, Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (2006); Blau duPlessis, ‘f-Words’; Erin Plunkett, A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience, and Style (2018).

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For Gopnik on Montaigne, see The New Yorker, 16 January 2017;

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Rebecca Solnit, ‘Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable’, The New Yorker, 24 April 2014 (adapted from an essay in Men Explain Things to Me (2014), 85–108).

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What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it. Montaigne1

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What is an essay? The essay would rather not answer such an impertinent question—or would answer it only with a shrug offered in retreat. The very word essay was from the beginning just such a shrug: an expression of modesty; a defensive mask; a licence, like that of a joke, for saying things without being held accountable for them.3 Essays have always understood themselves evasively, preferring to define themselves by what they are not. They are not quite knowledge, and they are not quite art.4 Emerging in opposition to the methods that characterize scientific procedure, they resist being defined theoretically; but deriving from that mass of ‘miscellaneous’ writing born in the spaces left vacant by the recognized forms of discourse at a given time, they cannot be placed generically. Essays are, as Montaigne said, monstrously formless, and, as Samuel Johnson added, dangerously licentious.5 Claiming the licence to take in anything and everything, essays adopt a potentially unlimited range of forms, and essayists have frequently preferred not to straitjacket themselves in the uniform of a definition. The essay ruins categories and definitions, embracing a wild diversity of possible forms, which is why Leigh Hunt, in his witty list of possible titles for the essay, once called it a ‘Hippopotamus entered at Stationers’ Hall’.6 Doubt about its own identity drives the essay; as G. K. Chesterton wrote, ‘an essay, by its very name as well as its very nature, really is a try-on and really is an experiment’, and for that reason, ‘a man does not really write an essay. He does really essay to write an essay’, and does so in order ‘to find out what it was supposed to be’. The essay, he says, is ‘the joke’ of literature—the relaxation of its rules, the dissolution of its boundaries.7 Yet if essayists must risk being told that what they are writing in is not a form at all, to be accounted as nothing when placed amid the recognized methodical discourses and literary genres, that contempt at least offers a sanctuary of neglect, even invisibility, in which many essayists have gladly taken refuge. The essay’s apparent nothingness affords it a jester’s licence for free speech, its seeming formlessness a shape-shifter’s gift for impersonation.

Note: Infuriating

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For what appears as free speech is a modern invention made possible by the essay; this apparently ‘natural way of speaking’ conceals the machinations of a genre; and ‘the peculiar form of the essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other’ (I, 25).

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Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cripples’, for instance, which testifies to the form’s very deformity, or Hazlitt’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’, which presents the essayist as a juggler with themes.

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But is also a haunting, in which Woolf opens herself to being possessed by the spirits of the great essayists and reshaped by the metaphors of the genre, embodied in the various characters she encounters and the rooms she passes through.

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Likewise, William Cornwallis describes himself, as an essayist, as ‘newly bound Prentice to the inquisition of knowledge’.11 Montaigne’s essays were early on understood as presenting themselves as apprentice works: in 1584, one of his first readers, La Croix du Maine, wrote that ‘this title is […] is modest indeed, since if you take the word “Essais” as “trials” or “apprenticeship”, that is most humble and self-denigrating’.

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the essayist is an apprentice to the wisdom of the past—though not, as Montaigne insists, merely parroting it, or parading it, and not producing what Montaigne called ‘[t]hese concoctions of commonplaces, by means of which so many men husband their study’, but integrating it into his being, and so giving it new life.14 He rejoiced to take some passage he admired: ‘I give it some particular application with my own hand, so that it may be less purely someone else’s.’15 As the various chapters of the present book show, essayists since Montaigne have, by apprenticing themselves to their predecessors, brought recurrent and unexpected life to the traditions of the essay.

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She may have been inspired by the gift that her brother Thoby astutely made her, on 25 January 1903, her twenty-first birthday, of editions of Montaigne and Bacon; in her letter thanking him, she wrote that she had ‘hunted’ Cotton’s translation of Montaigne for three years, preferring it to the Florio; that ‘I always read Montaigne in bed’; that ‘the Bacon is one of my choicest works’; and that ‘I shall carry it in my fur coat many a mile and many a mile.’17 Woolf was the last major essayist to have been a conscious and diligent apprentice in the full tradition which passes from Montaigne and Bacon via Addison and Steele, and on through Hazlitt, Lamb, Hunt, and De Quincey, up to Stevenson, Belloc, and Chesterton. She was as persistent and acute a historian and theorist of the essay as has ever been, offering two direct theoretical statements: ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, and ‘The Modern Essay’, her review-essay of the five volumes of Modern English Essays 1870–1920 edited by Ernest Rhys for Everyman. Woolf published hundreds of essays which, collected, fill six volumes. She wrote essays on Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Beerbohm, and many other less remembered essayists, and read diligently for all these pieces.

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In Woolf’s next novel, Orlando (1928), the title character shape-shifts as they pass down the centuries of English literary history. ‘Street-Haunting’ does something similar for the essay: it is a summing up of the whole genre, in which Woolf weaves together images and scenes from Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, Lamb, Emerson, Belloc, and Chesterton, entering into what she calls ‘sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished’ (IV, 487).

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perfect the genre, as she said Addison’s essays do, which ‘exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves’ (IV, 113). Yet it is part of its perfection that ‘Street-Haunting’ includes much that is grotesque, divided, and imperfect, attaining to the quality of Lamb’s essays as Woolf described them in A Room of One’s Own: ‘superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry’.18 That crack of genius in ‘Street-Haunting’ stars with imperfection many of the metaphors in which the essay has been accustomed to see itself reflected, rendering their oddities visible.

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Like Montaigne, the more she haunts herself and tries to know herself, the more her deformity amazes her and the less she understands herself. As such, ‘Street-Haunting’ is engaged in something like the project of To the Lighthouse, in which, Woolf later wrote, ‘I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients.’20 It holds a particular interest in drawing out the importance of the essay as that form in which the unconscious was charted prior to the invention of psychoanalysis. Not that Woolf was seeking in ‘Street-Haunting’ to illustrate Freudian theory, though Woolf’s brother Adrian had trained as an analyst, and though Woolf was publishing psychoanalytic works at the Hogarth Press: in January 1927, around the time she embarked on writing ‘Street-Haunting’, the press published Freud’s The Ego and the Id, and Ferenczi’s Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis. Only in the late 1930s would Woolf read Freud with respectful interest; in 1927 she was hostile. Rather, we can regard her, like other modernists, as a competitor to Freud, finding ways of exploring the unconscious through experiment with existing literary forms, and discovering in the essay’s digressiveness a vehicle for exploring the association of ideas and their conflicts.

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Woolf’s lifelong reverence for Montaigne led her to make three pilgrimages to his tower, in 1931, 1937, and 1938.23 The small study there is described in Leigh Hunt’s ‘Autumnal Commencement of Fires—Mantel-Pieces—Apartments for Study’ as ‘sixteen paces in diameter’. Descanting on his ‘feeling’ ‘in favour of smallness’, Hunt recommends for the essayist ‘a small study, where we are almost in contact with our books’, with curiosities upon the mantelpiece, such as an ‘old-looking saucer’ which, though of little worth, ‘overflows […] with the milk and honey of a thousand pleasant associations’.24 Celebrations of the little room of the essayist are themselves a sub-genre of the essay, and it is in just such a room that we find Woolf at the beginning of ‘Street-Haunting’, ‘surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments’,

Note: So the recurring topics that tend to emerge when a mind writes about itself

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Montaigne’s tower study offers to essayists through the centuries an authority and image for that retirement from which the essayist can observe the world with sceptical, independent eyes. The essayist moves among the quotations that bear the wisdom of the past, but is not enslaved to them, any more than to the commonplaces of the present; rather, the essayist is, quintessentially, a free-thinker, writing on the authority of their own experience. Woolf called the essay ‘primarily an expression of personal opinion’ (I, 25). ‘“I” must always think things for himself, and feel things for himself’ (IV, 223). It is a theme on which Hazlitt wrote a whole essay, ‘On Living to One’s Self’: that is, to be ‘living in the world, as in it, not of it’, ‘to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things’.25 Montaigne’s little inner room stands for the arrière boutique of the mind, a ‘back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude’, where one can step back from the authority of the powerful.

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Woolf writes, ‘Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’ A Room of One’s Own reprises the eternal battle of the essay, from Montaigne onwards, against the secluded learning of the universities, their methodical research and linear arguments, their nuggets of fact and ‘indisputable proofs’, summed up in ‘the student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge’, and who ‘has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into his answer as a sheep runs into its pen’, and in ‘the professors, the patriarchs’, writing on ‘The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex’.31 To be sure, the essay had itself long been thought of as a form of patriarchal privilege—as Woolf’s father had put it, ‘literature written by gentlemen for ladies—that is, for persons disposed to sit at gentlemen’s feet’.32 Yet in A Room of One’s Own—a work that with its self-interrupting openness and looping digressions is as Montaignian as any in English barring Tristram Shandy—Woolf discovers in the essay a form capable of offering resistance

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Woolf quotes from a typical passage in her essay on Montaigne: ‘I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world.’

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In ‘A Piece of Chalk’ (1905), G. K. Chesterton finally realises that the writing implement he has been looking for—a piece of chalk—is everywhere beneath his feet on the hills of the South Downs, and—implicitly—that the virtue of experience is also everywhere beneath our feet, requiring only the essayist to take it up and make it visible.36

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It is a paradox that for all their defiant independence from authority, essays are built out of quotations. For all Montaigne’s repeated expressions of contempt for the scholarly parade of learning for its own sake, his pages are a maze of citations, and essayists have often been accused of doing little more than rearranging their commonplace books. Ben Jonson was among the first to level this charge: ‘such are all the essayists, even their master, Montaigne. These in all they write, confess still what books they have read last—and therein their own folly—so much, that they bring it to the stake raw and undigested.’42 To call someone an essayist is to describe them as much as a reader as a writer; Scott Black has shown how in seventeenth-century England ‘“essay” was the name for a tool of reading that enabled a certain competency and skill—a kind of commonplace book where the work of selection and collection that is key to humanist reading is practiced and undertaken’, and Graham Good has argued that the essay from its inception is ‘commentary which has broken free from its “text”’.43

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The essayist is an assayer, or a valuer; to essay is, according to Samuel Johnson in the third of his definitions for the verb to assay, ‘to try the value and purity of metals’. The essayist is frequently concerned with commerce, and its digestion and transformation of raw material into the commodities and toys of civilization.

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And not only does the essayist value; to essay is also to weigh or weigh up, an image Montaigne made his own by the set of scales he chose as his emblem. By venturing down to the docks, Woolf is able to discern behind commodities that weighing and valuing and tasting which naturally concentrates the essayist’s interest, watching how ‘not only is each package of this vast and varied merchandise picked up and set down accurately, but each is weighed and opened, sampled and recorded’ (V, 278). Yet along with this, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf presents the essayist as one who can value the world according to other scales than those officially sanctioned.

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The essay frequently presents experience as a chewing-over, a taste which is lost if it is swallowed down; the essay is the first taste of things, before they have been digested, and the essay is frequently referred to, as by Johnson in his Dictionary, as ‘an irregular, undigested piece’. Yet by a paradox typical of the essay, this metaphor is reversible: the task of the essay is also to digest ideas. Of superficial scholars, who regurgitate quotations undigested, Montaigne says that ‘it is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it’ and that ‘the learning that could not reach their mind remains on their tongue’.48 In ‘The Modern Essay’, Woolf says that all information and learning should first have been ‘assimilated’, something Mark Pattison failed to do when, in his essay on Montaigne, he drew on Alphonse Grün’s biography, but ‘served M. Grün up raw’, so that he ‘remains a crude berry among the cooked meats, upon which our teeth must grate for ever’ (IV, 217).

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The essay confers a civilized authority upon the apparent subjectivity of taste of the ‘conversable world’ over which Hume said ladies preside, and to which the essayist is ambassador from the world of learning.52 For Leslie Stephen, it defined the limitations of the Spectator that it could not offer any hard meat not easily digested by the ladies.53 (Montaigne himself had aspired to get his essays past the salon into the ladies’ private drawing rooms.54) In ‘The Decay of Essay Writing’, Woolf said that ‘the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays’ (I, 26), though at the end of her life she would regret her Times Literary Supplement essays, pointing the blame for their ‘suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach to my tea-table training’.55

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The butterfly eye of the spectator cannot discover the ‘obscure angles and relationships’ that belie proportion and harmony. ‘After a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety’ (IV, 482). And it is at this point that Woolf suddenly turns from taste to disgust, beauty to grotesquerie, dream to nightmare, and proportion to deformity, entering a world that belongs less to Addison, Lamb, and Beerbohm, and more to Montaigne, Hazlitt, and De Quincey.

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But Woolf is really engaging in another kind of rambling, the sort we find in Samuel Butler’s ‘Ramblings in Cheapside’, singled out for praise in her review of Modern Essays. Butler’s ‘ramblings’ are his chains of associations. He passes, as Woolf says, across ideas as various as ‘that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots’; and ‘that no one really cares about Aeschylus’. Butler’s essay stands as a reproach to what she, quoting Butler, calls ‘a fatal “faithfulness to a fixed idea”’ (IV, 210).

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Butler wisely implies here what Freud would later say: that we die of the defences we make as shells for ourselves, if they prevent us from making connections. It is one of the virtues of essays, by their liberating ramblings, to evade fixed ideas, pierce our defences, and unchain the connections which hold us locked tight.59 This Woolf pledges herself to doing in ‘Street-Haunting’, when she closes the door on the ‘oddity’ of her social self, and on ‘the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves’ (IV, 481).

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In her essay on Montaigne, Woolf quotes this from ‘Of Exercitation’, in Cotton’s translation: We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this road [said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; ’tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions. (IV, 71)

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Woolf is entirely Montaignian when she speaks of ‘the true self’ as ‘neither this nor that, neither here not there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves’ (IV, 486).

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For Woolf, the ramble into darkness is a dream; in 1922, in ‘Modern Essays’ Woolf had said that the essay aims to ‘lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last’ (IV, 216).

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In the next essay she wrote after ‘Street-Haunting’ in the spring of 1927, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, Woolf would ask for a form capable of expressing the mind of an age ‘full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions’, ‘an attitude which is full of contrast and collision’, in which beauty and disgust sit cheek by jowl, and ‘emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up at the threshold’ (IV, 429–30, 433)—as they are in ‘Street-Haunting’, at the threshold of the shoe-shop.

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What Woolf took from De Quincey was a model for the underlying nightmare-logic of ‘Street-Haunting’—for the sudden unmediated transmutations of peace into violence, of the Mayfair lady, with her set of pearls like the fantasy from an advertisement, turning into the dwarf women surrounded by her giantesses, trying on shoes, and then in turn metamorphosed into two blind bearded men supporting themselves on the head of a young boy. If this rapid concatenation of image reminds one of dreams as Freud described them, that is not so surprising. What we see in De Quincey is what happens when Montaignian digression is allowed off its leash, approaching that intoxicated or rhapsodic ecstasy, governed only by ‘Fortune’, in recognition of which Montaigne likened his writing to poetry, ‘an art, as Plato says, light, flighty, daemonic’.62 ‘Free association artistically controlled’ was Aldous Huxley’s phrase for ‘the paradoxical secret of Montaigne’s best essays’.63 The association of ideas, on which Freudian theory depends, has been seen as a hallmark of the essay form since the Spectator popularized the theory set out by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).64 As late as 1923, we still find Hilaire Belloc teasingly expressing Locke’s theory, in an essay where he muses on why he finds himself wanting to read Virgil’s Bucolics in the Bourse at Paris at two o’clock on a summer afternoon: ‘as to why this should be so, I cannot tell. Locke would explain it perhaps by his “Association of Ideas”: but Locke is dead and gone.’

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A violent conflict within the self is a constant risk in the act of assaying oneself.

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The essay on friendship, or in praise of a friendship, is a distinct sub-genre, initiated by Montaigne and Bacon’s essays ‘Of Friendship’. Yet the essayist must be a candid friend, not a flatterer, a distinction Bacon takes over from Plutarch, insisting that ‘the Counsel, that a Friend giveth’ is necessary because the counsel ‘that a Man giveth himself’ is bound to fall into either of two opposing traps: it may be flattery, or it may be that ‘Calling of a Man’s self, to a Strict Account’, which is ‘a Medicine, sometimes, too Piercing and Corrosive’.67 But that medicine is just what Montaigne dispenses in his Essays, whose opening scenes of military assaying turn inward into a series of assaults and essays against oneself, severe martial tests of one’s own virtue

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The essayist may write for, or against, and is not infrequently, as Hazlitt argues in his classic essay on the subject, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ (1826), a good hater, a counter-enlightenment figure for whom ‘Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men.’70 His friend Lamb had five years earlier, in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, equally repudiated an indifferent egalitarianism, and confessed himself ‘a bundle of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies’,

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The paradox of the essayist as a figure divided between friendship and hatred, peace and violence, enlightenment and bigotry, is expressed in Leigh Hunt’s list of possible titles for essay volumes: ‘the Crocodile, or Pleasing Companion;—

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Hazlitt had incarnated that blood in his famous essay ‘The Fight’, where he plays the pugilist and embodies his essayism in the figure of the boxer, even as in the antipathetic essay, ‘The Indian Jugglers’, he had embodied the opposing lightness of the essayist juggling with ideas. For Woolf, these potentially violent paradoxes were Hazlitt’s essence; he was, she said, ‘a two-minded man’, and there was something ‘divided and discordant even in his finest essays, as if two minds were at work who never succeeded save for a few moments in making a match of it’ (V, 495, 498).

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Montaigne before her had called essays ‘grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of diverse members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental’.73 The deformity of the essay was apt for the expression of ‘one’s self’ as ‘the greatest monster and miracle in the world’ (IV, 78), as Woolf put it in her essay on Montaigne, and of all the other terrors that collected in her imagination under the name of monster—‘this monster, the body’ (IV, 318), and the ‘monster’ that a literary woman will fear herself to seem.74

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The essay may be a dwarfish, mis-shapen form, flanked by the larger genres, but as Woolf had written in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, ‘you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other’ (I, 24), just as in A Room of One’s Own she said that Austen devised ‘a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use’.76

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The essay on deformity is a well-established sub-genre.78 Perhaps in response to Montaigne, Bacon wrote ‘Of Deformity’ in 1612, and four years later Cornwallis responded to it with his essay on ‘King Richard the Third’, inverting Bacon’s view that outer deformity expresses inner crookedness, while in 1754 William Hay, himself a hunchback, would publish Deformity: An Essay, claiming Montaigne as his ally against Bacon’s aspersions on the deformed.79 Hay was able to draw on the authority also of Addison, who in the seventeenth number of the Spectator had introduced the ‘Ugly Club’, reflecting that ‘it is, methinks, an honest and laudable Fortitude to dare to be Ugly’, and that ‘it is happy for a Man, that has any of these Oddnesses about him, if he can be as merry upon himself, as others are apt to be upon that Occasion.’80 Woolf’s dwarf-woman expresses that Oddness, lurching up from beneath the easy comfort of the Addisonian essay: ‘at any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities’ (IV, 482).

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By doing so, Woolf can express that paradox, the universal oddity of the individual, which is the quintessential subject of essays, whose ‘proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities’ (I, 26).82

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Vladimir Nabokov would combine the two metaphors in his Hazlittian 1925 essay Igra (‘Play’, or ‘Sport’), in which he opened an account of a boxing fight with an image of god as a ‘marvellous juggler’ and a vision of all of life as sport.84 Hazlitt had already pitched the idea of the essayist as a juggler with themes in 1819 in ‘On the Periodical Essayists’, if only to disclaim it by praising Montaigne for eschewing ‘juggling tricks’ on the one hand and ‘solemn mouthing’ on the other.

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The view of Montaigne as a jester goes back to Bacon’s ‘Of Truth’, in which he insinuates that Montaigne is a ‘jesting Pilate’. Montaigne himself refers to his hero Socrates as a jester and says that man is ‘the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce.’86 Indeed, Sainte-Beuve suggested that the best Latin translation for Montaigne’s essai was lusus—jest, sport, or game.87

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Adam Gopnik has noted that ‘the essay differs from the lyric poem (which does the same kind of thing) by being in prose, but also by being funny and by being clear’.88 When Addison makes his fundamental distinction between ‘the Freedom of an Essay’ and ‘the Regularity of a Set Discourse’, it is in the context of one of his several essays on laughter, a subject for which he clearly considers essaying the appropriate mode of writing.89 Working in this tradition, Woolf wrote her first familiar essay in 1905 ‘On the Value of Laughter’, there defining true humour as a blend between tragedy and comedy, and describing the humorist by the same image of a perilously balanced acrobat that she would apply thirteen years later to the essayist: the humorist ‘not infrequently topples over ignominiously on the other side, and either plunges headlong into buffoonery or else descends to the hard ground of serious commonplace, where, to do him justice, he is entirely at his ease’ (I, 58).90 In doing so she recapitulated Hazlitt’s praise of Montaigne for avoiding the equal pitfalls of juggling tricks and solemn mouthing.

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Containing everything in nothing, it is, as Woolf nicely said of Addison’s essays, ‘the shapely silver drop, that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions of human life’ (IV, 115). The word ‘essay’, it has been said, can mean everything, and so risks meaning nothing; but it is also the task of essayists to contain everything in nearly nothing. Encyclopedists, they transgress the fences shutting off one academic or professional specialism from another, drawing together into a single intelligible whole all that falls under the authority of their own odd experience; miniaturists, they focus their thoughts through the smallest or most trivial of objects: Thackeray writes about chasing his hat; Chesterton about the contents of his pockets; Addison the cat-calls of London; Beerbohm some question a forgotten clergyman once tremulously put to Johnson.

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the essay may seem not merely a monster, or a joke, but a near nullity—as close an approach to nothing as is possible in writing. Hilaire Belloc, who wrote an essay called, ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’, published volumes of essays On Everything, On Something, On Anything, and On Nothing, before publishing one entitled simply On. Essays on nothing and on doing nothing are a staple of the genre, from Cornwallis through Fielding and on into Lynd, Belloc, and Priestley; for nothing is whatever is not recognized by the professionals and professors of the day; a praise of nothing inverts established truth and opens up for literature all those elements of existence usually overlooked.

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Montaigne said, ‘any topic is equally fertile for me. A fly will serve my purpose.’93 Or even a pencil; or even the death of a moth, the subject of the fragment, unpublished in Woolf’s own lifetime, under whose title Leonard Woolf first republished ‘Street-Haunting’. Woolf’s editors think it likely that Woolf wrote ‘The Death of the Moth’ a few months after ‘Street-Haunting’, in September 1927 (VI, 444). In it Woolf, like so many other essayists before and after her, surveys life itself in a form as near as possible to nothingness, fleeting and evanescent, and does her best to prop it up, just long enough to be witnessed, by stretching out the point of her pencil (VI, 443). In the moth, she sees herself—just as she does at the end of ‘Street-Haunting’, where she reflects on ‘the self which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns’ (IV, 491).

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