December 2, 2007
"What's wrong with the American essay"
Truthdig.com has published an essay by Cristina Nehring, nominally a review of the 2007 edition of “The Best American Essays” series, under the heading “what’s wrong with the American essay.” The text has made its way rapidly across the web (see this Technorati search, or this Google Blog search); I came to it via this post on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp’s blog. Describing the contemporary essay as “an apologetic imitation of the short story,” Nehring, who contributes regularly to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, says that the problem extends far beyond the middling prose and limited ambition of our essayists:
The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.
Kurp adds: “Well, yes and no. Argument, without wit or style, is tiresome.” In recent reviews of art exhibitions and books, I’ve found myself praising outsize ambition, even if it leads to errors or other shortcomings. As Nehring writes:
Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.