"A loose sally of the mind"

I meant to post this essay on essays by Zadie Smith a couple of weeks ago, to give a sense of perspective to my students slaving over essays - particularly the first-years who may not quite see the point.

Essays are creative works: they draw your attention to, then trace the development of, interesting features of texts, ones which people may not have noticed. Meaning, we say, is created in the space between a text and its reader: the essay is your chance to transform understanding of that text.

Smith's essay is really a defence of fiction and an assessment of literary essays, but it's worth reading if you're struggling with Introduction to Poetry, Communications Studies or Shakespeare's Culture essays anyway.

A few choice quotations (the Johnson one fits blogging very well too):

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays") and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. 

 In "The Modern Essay" Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. "There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay," she writes. "The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.

In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".

I call on Woolf again as witness for the defence. "Literal truth-telling," she writes, "is out of place in an essay." Yes, that's it again. The literal truth is something you expect, or hope for, in a news article. But an essay is an act of imagination, even if it is a piece of memoir. It is, or should be, "a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking", but it still takes quite as much art as fiction.