Few discussions of the essay fail to begin etymological: essai, 'assay', 'trial', 'attempt'. The project of the essay is interrogative, investigative, exploratory, provisional; the essayist's duty is to seek a personal confrontation with Montaigne's question, so characteristic in its quizzical severity: que sais-je? Or so we are told. In practice, though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit - the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration - are far outnumbered by those for whom the essay is a forum for pyrotechnics and exhibitionism, for politics and for performance. The history of the essay - from Hazlitt on his first acquaintance with poets to Orwell on the sex life of the common toad - is the history of writers taking a break from other forms in order, not to ask themselves que sais-je? but simply to strut their stuff.

LRB 21 October 1993 | PDF Download