Up to a Point

This chapter explores the omission of the essay from psychoanalytic literature, both as a form to which analysts refer, and as one in which they write. The absence of the word from the titles of professional publications, and the sense that the essays of psychoanalysts are a truancy from institutional forms, suggest that the essay’s scepticism and unfinishedness are in opposition to psychoanalytic expertise. The avoidance, even repression, of the form reveals what psychoanalysis denies in order to become an institution. As the example of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality shows, however, the essay’s experimentalism, provisionality, and incompletion are in fact analogous both to Freud’s account of desire and sexuality, and to the serial process of psychoanalytic treatment. The essay’s privileging of the useful and interesting over the right and perfected offers both a model for psychoanalysis, and, despite its neglect, an apt form for its insights.

The Romantic Essay and the City

This chapter explores the ambivalence of the Romantic familiar essay form towards the city by looking at the two main literary tributaries that fed into it—the current of self-consciously pro-metropolitan prose writing that had been inaugurated by Steele and Addison, and the more anti-commercial tradition of retirement poetry epitomized by William Cowper and the Lake poets. It looks at the way in which Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb in particular strove to bury their continuing misgivings about the polis as a centre of commercial rapacity and unruly popular politics in celebrations of the city as being, under certain controlled conditions, a precious haven of imaginative activity, personal reminiscence, and literary tradition. Their aim, even if it was never quite articulated as such, was to turn the Romantic periodical essay into a prose medium that was as sensitive as Wordsworth’s poetry to the ravages of recent historical change, while maintaining, in the end, a more progressive and forward-looking attitude to it.

On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition

The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.

Tristram Shandy, Essayist

The genre of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a long-standing critical crux. Indeed, the work wears its complex generic mixtures on its sleeve even as it references the great borrowers from whom Sterne learned to borrow: Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Burton. This chapter focuses on Sterne’s use of Montaigne’s Essays as a model for a generic procedure that informs Sterne’s writing in its organization (or disorganization), its self-conscious gathering of texts, its free commentary, and its interactivity with both its contexts of citation and its readers. Tristram Shandy is a watershed text in which the full range of the essay tradition is revisited, adapted, used, and abused to form a conversational, bookish, self-conscious, and digressive work that is as much essay as novel.

The Sociable Philosopher

David Hume’s philosophical essays of the 1740s offer to bring intellectual reflection into ‘the conversible world’, posing the question of whether this compromises or exemplifies the task of philosophy. Comparisons are drawn with Shaftesbury’s philosophical worldliness, facilitated by the selective nature of the ‘Club’ for whom he writes, Johnson’s more strenuous negotiations between intellectual and social being, and the edgy raillery with which Fielding addresses his public in the essay-chapters of Tom Jones. Against these contexts, the urbanity of Hume’s essay-writing is explored in relation to the implications of the Treatise; the importance of convention and civility; and qualities of ‘reserve’ or ‘modesty’ and the kind of detachment implied in Hume’s ‘delicacy of taste’. The sense of an elusive intentionality, poised against the overt hospitality to contingency and spontaneity which the essay-form equally enables, is traced in particular in the essays that make up the first Enquiry.

Time and the Essay

Published six times a week, Addison and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12) offered readers a daily essay, and some advertisements, on the two sides of a half-folio sheet costing one penny. This chapter explores the diurnal production and reception of The Spectator. In their daily sequence, each diurnal essay is an adventure in thought located in a fixed chronological relationship with the others but taking a new and unanticipated direction. Reading the diurnal Spectator offers unexpected juxtapositions of essays on different topics and in different modes and styles. Subsequent republications in quarto and octavo volumes changed the reading experience, especially through the provision of an index allowing readers to follow topics across discrete essays. Indexical reading exposes an ambivalence in the essay form between the everyday sally of thought—the attempt or endeavour—and the more philosophical thinking of the tract or treatise in miniature.

Introduction

The Introduction addresses problems in the history of the essay, and criticism and scholarship on it. Although the essay’s origin is easy to date—Montaigne’s Essais (1580) was the first book of that title—it is notoriously difficult to define, and there is remarkably little scholarship and criticism on it. This introduction asks why, offering a prehistory in Plutarch, Seneca, miscellaneous writing, and commonplacing; examining the metaphorical range of the term ‘essay’, and various other names for the form; exploring the transformation of Montaigne’s legacy in England; surveying criticism on the essay; and exploring the contradictions in its use in pedagogy. Rather than attempting a definition, the Introduction explores how the essay resists one, exposing a sequence of contradictions which anticipate the subsequent chapters: that the essay can be institutional or amateurish; methodical or anti-methodical; artistic or scientific; detached or polemical; intimate or formal; sociable or isolated; journalistic or philosophical; poetic or novelistic.

Dalí’s Montaigne

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.

Rational Distortions

This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.

‘Strips of Essayism’

Taking its cue from James Wood’s now famous critique of the fetishizing of ‘information’ in British fiction (‘always breaking in to speak over their characters and tell us what to think, mummifying them somewhat in strips of essayism’), this essay takes a close look at two Victorian novelists famous for their creative deployment of what might be called an ‘essayistic’ narrative voice: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Tracing the roots of this voice in Victorian periodical culture—in particular, the tenure of Marian Evans/George Eliot at the helm of the Westminster Review—the essay explores the ways in which two contending senses of the ‘essayistic’, one based on contingency, the other on prescriptiveness, may often occupy the same space in both periodical essays and the fictions which dramatize and draw on them.