The Essence of the Essay
1 – 3:00
Sat April 11
Thank you for being here!
I’ve been delighted to give lectures at this library on poetry, James Baldwin, and Jane Austen. I’m grateful to Jay and the staff for the invitations.
A few months ago, when Jay suggested I give a series of talks, lots of people were reading, and were very moved by, the essay you have in front of you – A Battle with My Blood by Tatiana Schlossberg – and I happened as a result to be thinking about the essay as a literary form, and why it can be so powerful. It seemed only natural for me to take advantage of the attention being riveted on this particular essay to focus on that genre. Why did Schlossberg choose the essay form? What is the essay, a genre whose name means an attempt, a stab at, something? What types of essays are there? How can we account for the intense effect of the very best essays?
Before I run away with praise of the essay, a word about its neglect and dislike. For many of us, the only place we actually spent time reading, analyzing, and writing essays was in the dreaded required English Comp class in high school or college. Few schools call it that anymore, so unpopular has the course become; but under whatever name, it tends to be the same deadly mix of rather formulaic polemic about the usual suspects – the death penalty, abortion rights, assisted dying. Even worse, buying or plagiarizing your college admissions essay seems something of a national sport. So the whole subject of the essay – there is a vast BUY YOUR ESSAY HERE industry – has a tendency to arouse emotions of boredom and cynicism.
And yet that same formulaic thing – that five paragraph thing where you first state your argument, then move it along with evidence and personal narration and the use of transitional phrases; and conclude by restating your argument in your final paragraph – ain’t at all bad as a way to begin learning to write and appreciate the essay. Note, for instance, that this is precisely what Schlossberg, in a much more complex way, does. Her final paragraph indeed reiterates her first, giving her essay not merely structural shapeliness, but also, in its circularity, a sense of her entrapment in therapeutic repetition rather than actual improvement. One could go even further with that circularity as a figure for her inability emotionally to get anywhere past a stubbornly recurrent sense of incredulity about what she beautifully calls “the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself.”