The Essay

Meaning & Method

What is an essay?

• 1580 Michel de Montaigne publishes his collection of writings called Les Essais thus inventing (and popularizing) the genre.
• Moving into the 18^th century, British wits Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele began writing essays of ‘manners’ in the highly popular and somewhat scandalous periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator.
• In the 19^th century, philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote some of the first essays on nature and the environment, while Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, used personal letters as a kind of intimate essay form to discuss what it means to be an artist.
• At the beginning of the 20^th century, women began making the essay their own. Virginia Woolf’s episodic pieces have a dreamlike quality whereas Mary McCarthy’s are sharply observant and self-scrutinizing.

What is an essay?

• FOR OUR PURPOSES: Starting with Aristotle’s belief that writers are most convincing when they forge a strong ethos, or credibility, built on the twin appeals of reason and emotion (logos and pathos).
• The essay: every essay is a true story, well-told, written by the person who lived, witnessed, or thought deeply about an experience.
• What essayists say comes directly from their own experience or thoughts, or what Aristotle calls the “artistic proofs” – evidence that arises out of the writers themselves.
• In turn, essayists further support their claims with “inartistic proofs,” or those that come from reading and research.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• In 1580, Michel de Montaigne publishes a three-volume collection of writings that scholars agree are the first “essays”. He titled them “Attempts”
• Although other writers before Montaigne turned to themselves as their primary subject matter, no one before him had thought the stuff of a person’s everyday life worth of close literary attention.
• Montaigne wrote in the vernacular French rather than formal Latin; thus, his voice is immediate and intimate.
• These unusual attributes for the time have come to define the principles of the modern essay: a true story, told in accessible language, by someone who has direct experience with the subject matter.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• We also owe Montaigne a debt for defining the essay’s central purpose: he believed that the individual represents the universal, and he continually sought to link his own life to wider human experience.
• As Montaigne once wrote, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
• This revelation underscores the idea that essayists must write not just for themselves but also for their readers.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• After Montaigne, the popularity of this newfangled genre jumped the channel, with Francis Bacon writing his own collection in English – also called “Attempts” or “Essays” – in 1597.
• The English essay came fully into its own about a century later, with the rise of a middle-class reading public.
• At the beginning of the 18^th century, Addison and Steele turned outward for their source-material with the launch of their literary and society journals with a satiric bent – journals called The Tatler and The Spectator. They created narrative personas such as Mr. Spectator who “spectated” on human flaws and foibles then “tattled” about them.
• Addison and Steele aimed to delight and surprise their readers. They saw themselves as arbiters of their culture, defining what was – and what was not – acceptable behavior.

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Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• In his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate divides essays into two categories: formal and informal.
• Formal essays tend to be the formulaic “Five paragraph essay” with which we are all (probably) familiar.
• Informal essays are always personal. Informal essays have become cliched, “complaint-ridden” and tedious.
• We might also think of essays as ‘containers for human memory.’
• Bill Roorbach suggests that the essay is “a true story, a work of narrative built directly from the memory of its writer, with an added element of creative research.”
• Patricia Hampl adds, “We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it.”

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• These ideas should resonate with essayists. What matters most is how we writers witness the world around us and remember what we saw, heard, and felt by putting those memories into words.
• As a “container for human experience,” essays have no fixed parameters apart from including a first-person narrator who is intent on telling the truth.
• An essayist’s form and style is entirely dependent on your purpose and your audience.
• Essayists draw on the facts of history and science, the musings of philosophy and theology, and the melodies and harmonies of music; then, by applying the techniques of poets, fiction writers, and dramatists, they pursue imaginative encounters with the real.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• Even if we haven’t exactly pinpointed an all-encompassing definition of an essay, we can recognize specific elements that seem essential for essays to encompass and convey. (Five points)
• First, an essay must have ethos, a Greek term meaning ‘moral character.’ For Aristotle, in his 4^th century treatise Rhetoric, ethos is the first of three artistic proofs, or modes of persuasion, which also include pathos (emotional appeals) and logos (proof of a truth through rational arguments).
• Second, whatever about an individual is presented within an essay must represent a larger, more universal truth. Once ethos is established and a reader trusts the writer, then an essay will speak beyond the petty concerns or obsessions of the essayist. Successful essays engage the wider world and those who inhabit it – namely, the readers.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• Third, an essay must the vital question, “So what?” Jotting down notes about a fickle lover or how much your sister irritates you is an instance of personal storytelling that fails to consider the wider world. An essayist must ask: What is the purpose – the point – of my essay? What is my central claim, argument, or conception? You are writing for the reader who is intelligent, curious, and hungry for meaning. You are speaking to other humans; not just to yourself.
• Fourth, although all essays express a structure of some kind, there is no formula to follow. An essay is a mental walkabout. When reading an essay, we meander inside someone else’s head, looking out through her or his eyes.

Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin

• Fifth, essays tell the truth. Writers need to convince the audience that they are credible, have wisdom, and are reliable.
• This brings us back to the first point, which is that an essay writer’s ethos is the clout of character that makes her or his claims both credible and powerful. It’s important to understand that ethos comes from writers themselves.
• And because ethos is a proof that comes directly from the writer, Aristotle calls it an artistic proof. By this, he means that the integrity of the writing stems directly from the author rather than from data, interviews, statistics, or other ‘nonartistic’ proofs.
• Another way of stating it: an essay’s ethos is the credibility that comes out of the writer’s self-knowledge and self-presentation. An essayist must allow the reader to re-experience something both vital and true about the human condition.
• Abstract ideas and themes must be grounded in concrete facts, yet these facts must then be synthesized with intelligence, emotion, and reflection that speak both to the hearts and heads of readers.