Essayism by Brian Dillon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Bag of Bags

An essay on essays. Actually a number of essays on different aspects of the essay. Or, perhaps more accurately still, a revelation of the shape and contents of Brian Dillon’s mind through a literary bag of essays.

Ultimately isn’t that what an essay is? A fragment in formless form of literal self expression in terms of an object, an event, a feeling, a property, or idea? Put enough of these fragments together and the self who produced them begins to emerge like an image on old fashioned photo paper. Dillon demonstrates rather than defines the form.

If what Dillon suggests is true, that the essay is a sort of measurement, a proposition perhaps, of something of importance, something of unrecognised but real value, then what else could an essay convey but the most intimate thoughts of the writer. This is so even if the subject is abstract or arcane because the author has to take some stand; he/she has to evaluate and come to a conclusion.

The need for a conclusion which is not conclusive implies a certain vulnerability which doesn’t occur in fiction or in more narrow (formally disciplined?) factual reporting like scientific papers. The essay brings something to noticeability; it doesn’t prove or discredit.

The one thing an essay can’t be if it is to be a success is uninteresting, that is to say, repetitive or entirely derivative. An essay does not summarise or engage in polemics. It shares with poetry the requirement to make connections where there were previously none. It takes what may be familiar and makes it just slightly less so. It offers; it doesn’t demand.

Dillon quotes Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities about the psychology of essay-writing:

“The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete. He suggests that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted…. Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.”

I think he’s correct. The essay demands a certain cast of mind (training? personality?) which includes a kind of self doubt. It is not meant to convince the reader but to change the author, to move the writer a step closer to something vaguely called the truth. Montaigne, arguably the pinnacle of the trade, makes the point clearly:

“What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.”

Dillon says about himself that “Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two.” I understand that limitation quite well because I share it. But his ability to thread those fragments together into a coherent whole is remarkable. What emerges for me is a cultivated, witty, humble, self-aware man whom, and whose works, I want to know much more about.

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