So, here I am writing an essay. An essaie. A trying out of thoughts and ideas. I’m nervous. Is that obvious? Perhaps the blunt Hemingwayesque short sentences are a giveaway. It’s not my usual genre. An escape into fiction is easier. There, I can hide behind another voice, another life, a different kind of truth. There, it’s a truth that sidles up, unannounced, or leaves chasm-like gaps for the reader to leap over – or plunge into – and it comes from somewhere only half-understood or consciously planned.

Essays should be planned, shouldn’t they? That’s what you’re told at school. You make a list of points, you think through your arguments, you construct a logical sequence and decide where to place your strongest points, your knock-out quotation, your rhetorical flourishes. You follow your plan through. The problem is planning’s not my thing. I like to just get started and see where that takes me. I write to think, and think as I write. Open-endedness, an uncertain path, the lack of a map, the thrill of the unknown, the change of route along the way all seem to get me there in one way or another (eventually) and the journey has usually been an adventure. Writers differ hugely on this, I know, but for me the thoroughly planned writing route is a dull, wearisome plod.  My freshest thoughts appear on the trail, unexpectedly, as if from nowhere. The fog lifts, I reach the brow of a hill and a surprising new vista opens up.

And here’s another thing. If an essay is a trying out of ideas, what about feelings? Can feelings be ‘tried out’ too? An essay on feelings seems perfectly fine, but what about an essay of feelings, where feelings are the substance, where they do the heavy-lifting, rather than simply providing the content? Can my pulse race in an essay? Can I pause to look at that stunning pink and gold sunset, or, on a hike, feel the squelch on the soles of my boots, sucking me into the mud, or choke back the tears in a darkened room, as a father films his daughter on a camcorder at an airport, playing hide-and-seek with him for the last time?

These questions aren’t rhetorical ones – I’d like answers. And the route to these answers is in reading other people’s essays – not school essays but the kinds of essays that are published in book form.  If I ask, ‘can an essay do x or y or z?’ then going to essayists should help me find out. So here are a few observations about essays I’ve read in the past and more recently.

First, for me, some of the best essays are by brilliant thinkers, people who know a lot about something and think in exciting ways about that subject. Take Susan Sontag, for instance, writing about changes made by photographic images on our world and perceptions of that world in the collection On Photography in 1971.  It takes just five sentences in the first essay for her to come up with a stunningly insightful take:

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar, and even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Was this the first appearance of the idea of ‘reading’ visual images that have their own special ‘grammar’ – the metaphor of the written word being adopted for the visual in a highly illuminating way? Is it where the idea of ‘visual literacy’ originated. I’m not sure, but it’s a startling opening to a highly influential book. And the ‘ethics’ of seeing too. That’s an extraordinary phrase. It’s original thought encoded in surprising conjunctions of words that make one think afresh.

But not every great essayist is pithily constructing abstract new philosophies or highly intellectual ways of framing, or re-framing, the world. George Orwell is one of my favourite essayists and he generally follows one of two approaches. The essays are either a bit like a plainly stated, and carefully argued and exemplified, manifesto, or, in another style, more like a powerful story with a message – ‘Politics and the English Language’ is an example of the former, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the latter. I like both. Both have a strong thesis, usually a political argument to be proved, and the engine of the essay never stutters or splutters but powers ahead full throttle.  This extract from ‘Shooting an Elephant shows Orwell being quite explicit about how the story he’s going to tell will throw light for the reader, as it the episode did for him, on some significant political idea, such as poverty, inequality, socialism or, in this case, imperialism:

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out.

More recently, new genres of essay-writing seem to have sprung up, alongside the more conventional forms and perhaps these show how the essay can be something looser, more complex, with feelings and experiences allowable, and other things too. Annie Dillard’s collection The Abundance was gifted to me by Secret Santa, a collection of essays. That’s what the reviewer on the back cover calls it, and that’s how it’s billed. And yet it defies easy categorisation as such. There’s no thesis in the essays, no explicit argument, no explanatory voice, no concluding thoughts. Sections are not connected with each other, thoughts and feelings jostle with each other, sometimes randomly. There are stunning descriptions of landscape and wildlife and disturbing moments of alienation and confusion. Are they memoir? Writing from life? Are they, perhaps, even poetry? What exactly makes them essays? In the introduction to the collection Geoff Dyer talks of a recognised genre called ‘genre-resistant non-fiction’ and seemingly Dillard has been doing this since the 1970s, resisting convention and ‘essaying’ a different way of writing. Her focus is often, though not always, on the natural world, and herself in it, on trying to understand who we are and what our experiences in nature, and nature’s experiences of itself, might mean. So, in one essay she writes about an encounter with a weasel, about what it thinks and what she thinks and what that can tell her about both it and her.

‘Please do not tell me about ‘approach-avoidance conflicts.’ I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes – but the weasel and I for a sweet and shocking time, both plugged into another tape altogether. Can I help it if it was a blank?

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.

Dillard’s essays are metaphysical and philosophical and often quite strange, a bit off-the-wall. They leave you with powerful thoughts but few conclusions. If the essay has to have a conclusion, Dillard defiantly refuses to give you one.

To conclude, (or should I say thus, therefore, so, to sum up, or what you will) essays, these days, can be pretty much anything that is short, written in a writer’s own voice (I’ve come to this conclusion late on in my conclusion, for which apologies) and rooted in non-fiction. It can be poetic, it can tell a story, it can be brilliant philosophising (or not). It can follow strict rules or none. Perhaps it does have to have that element of ‘essaie’ of trying out something – trying out a thought, a position, a viewpoint, a way of understanding experiences. And the provisional, questing, enquiring nature of the name might help the reader to see it as something to enjoy for this very reason – that it allows us access to someone else’s mind, and their efforts to think things through, in a valiant literary attempt at something…whatever that may be.

Barbara Bleiman

April 2023