In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.
In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022).
In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien.
Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011).
John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory.
In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), I consider this paradox that I see at the heart of the essay and that might contextualise D’Agata’s work: being a form that privileges experimentation or the stretching of the limits of form and thought, the essay, ironically, is most itself when it challenges definitional limits that we would want to impose on it. One difference in my thinking from D’Agata’s, though, is that I distinguish between the essay as a genre and the essayistic as a mode. This distinction allows us to recognise qualities we associate with the essay—such as provisionality, incompletion, self-reflection, experimentation, the movement between experience and abstraction, and the exposure of a mind in action—in other forms without forcing us to describe these forms as essays. In other words, we can talk about essayistic poems, essayistic novels, essayistic articles or essayistic films without attempting to colonise these forms and fully recuperate them as essays.
AMMD: Intriguingly, in that same book, D’Agata claims that nonfiction is the first written genre: “Writing … began as nonfiction.” Can you weigh in on this pronouncement?
MA: Nonfiction is often called the ‘fourth genre’, especially by those who write it, teach it or study it. Calling it a fourth genre is a form of protest, a way of remarking how nonfiction has perhaps not been given the attention it merits. It is also an attempt to legitimize it as a serious area of study by thinking of it as a genre with history, formal qualities and rhetorical structures. I read D’Agata’s pronouncement about writing beginning as nonfiction—which is seemingly a historical claim—precisely as an attempt to reverse the exclusion or sidelining of nonfiction from literary studies as well as from the creative writing industry in America. E. B. White famously wrote that ‘The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.’ This too is a statement with at least a dual function because the apparent self-depreciation of the essayist is also a way of giving oneself permission to write essayistically, in ways that are different from other genres.
I have to admit, though, that the term ‘nonfiction’ is not very productive for my thinking. As a term to describe certain forms of writing, it has two main weaknesses. Firstly, it is defined by what, presumably, it is not (fiction). Secondly, it has such a wide scope that it risks not having any real descriptive value.
AMMD: Phillip Lopate catalogues the dramatist Seneca the Younger, the biographer Plutarch, the court diarist Sei Shōnagon, the Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō, and the Sung dynasty scholar Ouyang Xiu as the genre’s ‘forerunners’ in The Art of the Personal Essay (Vintage Books, 1994). In The Glorious American Essay (Pantheon Books, 2020), his tracking down of the fons et origo of the American essay led him to the Puritan colonists—the clergyman Cotton Mather and theologian Jonathan Edwards. If you were to enumerate the forerunners in an anthology of The European Essay, for instance, who would these figures be?
MA: The essay in America has often been used, read or anthologised in ways that strengthen or question national identity. Take Thoreau, for example, and what an essay like ‘Walking’ tells us about constructions of national identity and the American relation to a Europe that it acknowledges but ultimately wants to move away from. Take Lopate’s recent anthologies. Or take Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays series. Something similar happens in other literary traditions, for example, in the English Essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. One can read essays published in periodicals by Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and many others in terms of constructions of Englishness. There is no equivalent tradition of a ‘European essay’ because the idea of a European identity—a kind of intermediary between national identity and global belonging—is a relatively new concept. Instead, what we find are several literary traditions with their own complex histories and forms of the essay so that any genealogy that I were to give you would be fabricating unity where there is difference, continuity where there is diversity. Simply looking at this from a language perspective, any singular genealogy for a European essay – for it to be representative—would have to bring together essayists writing in Latin, Greek, French, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, as well as Slavic, Scandinavian, Altaic and Arabic languages. This is not a comprehensive list. Maltese, for example, is a Semitic language with a strong Romance influence.
Having said all this, if I were to attempt a list of important European essayists that would not exclude British essayists, that would necessarily be incomplete and that would unforgivably omit several European literary traditions I am not familiar with, I would include: Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb, Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Mann, Woolf, Orwell, Pessoa, José Ortega y Gasset, Cioran and Robert Musil.
AMMD: Give us a glimpse, in brief and simple terms, of the history of intellectual thought and theory on the contemporary essay.
MA: There seems to me to have been a recent revival of interest in theorizing the essay and the essayistic. My recent work on the essay, such as, The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021) and The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), as well as a special issue of CounterText on ‘The Time of the Essay’ (forthcoming in 2023), invests heavily in thinking about the essay from philosophical and theoretical perspectives. However, what we mean by the ‘theory of the essay’ and what we tend to focus on when we theorize the essay changes according to the literary traditions and the schools of thought to which we belong.
If we were to begin with the American landscape, then I would argue that the current debates around the essay are mainly political and pedagogic in nature. Some of the most important issues in this context relate to: questioning the essay canon through critiques of the act of anthologisation or through alternative anthologies; thinking about representation in the history and present forms of the essay, especially from the perspective of race and gender; and trying to rethink the role of the essay in a rapidly changing college or university classroom.
However, there is also a rich tradition of continental essay theory that is interested in more formal and abstract aspects of the essay, such as: the relation between the essay and the literary; the essayistic as a specific way of thinking; and essayism as a phenomenological relation to the world. These kinds of approaches tend to be less concerned with who writes the essay or who is represented in the essay.
Ontotheological interest in the ethics and craft of representation tends to dominate American discourse about the form. The question of genre and how and where the essay is positioned—even institutionally—in relation to other genres, such as memoir, literary journalism and creative nonfiction, are also a common concern. European scholars tend to be more interested in the literary and philosophical qualities of the essay and the essayistic and tend to base their thinking on theorists like Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes.
Of course, the differences I have identified for the purpose of simplification are by no means absolute and, to someone familiar with essay studies, might come across as caricatural. G. Douglas Atkins, for example, straddles the two traditions consistently and impressively in his work on the essay and so do other American thinkers of the essay such as Graham Good, Carl H. Klaus and Rachel Blaud DuPlessis, to name just a few. The work of Claire de Obaldia and Réda Bensmaïa is worth reading for the way it integrates continental philosophy into a contemporary understanding of the essay. More recently active scholars working on the theory of the essay who in my opinion have extended our theories of the essay in different ways and to different degrees include Kathryn Murphy, Erin Plunkett, David Russell, Kara Wittman, and Thomas Karshan. My own writing has also been primarily an attempt to extend our thinking of the essayistic as a mode in its relation to the essay as a genre.
Going forward, I think the focus will shift on the relation between the essay and the digital. There is a growing body of work on how the essay is affected by its digital presence, but this question is bound to intensify significantly and imminently as we reflect on the effects of Artificial Intelligence on the essayistic. If we think of the essay, as we often do, as a ‘human’ form par excellence, AI essayism will have to be thought through.
AMMD: In Occasional Desire (2013), David Lazar maps out the memoirization of the essay (blending of personal content into brief idea-centered think pieces) and the essayification of the memoir (intellectualisation in in-depth autobiographical narratives). Writing workshops enforce a clear-cut mandate: memoirs are for experiences, essays are for ideas—although we have permutations these days called the ‘memoir essay’ and ‘essay-in-memoir.’ Is this indistinction derived from the New Journalism movement or are there earlier marks? And how do we locate the essay within memoiristic and auto/biographical texts?
MA: Clear-cut distinctions might be useful pedagogically, to a certain extent, but I do not think they are as useful in the creative process of writing. As Jacques Derrida writes in ‘The Law of Genre’, every text participates in one or more genres but does not belong to any. No text can be simply fully contained by the supposed limits of a genre, and this is particularly so in the case of the essay, which tends to think of itself as a-generic or as an anti-genre in the first place! Thus, to say that the essay is for ideas and memoirs are for experiences is very problematic and, possibly, untenable. For Michel de Montaigne—the first theorist of the essay if not necessarily the first essayist—and I would argue for most essayists, the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt—never absolutely successful in terms of comprehensiveness—to derive ideas or abstractions from experience and to test received thoughts against experience. It is because of the fluidity of genre or, more specifically, of the essay as a genre, that I prefer to talk about the essayistic as a mode that is strongly present in texts we identify as belonging to the genre of the essay but that is not limited to them.
This mixing of modes within genres is not simply a consequence of New Journalism—though New Journalism actively and intentionally celebrates it by bringing the literary, the novelistic and the essayistic into the journalistic. It is something that we can see in the essay way earlier. Seneca’s epistles to Lucilius are not framed as ‘essays’ by Seneca, but Bacon and Montaigne thought of them as essays, and they indeed exhibit the provisionality of thought derived from experience that we often associate with the essay. Or consider the essays of Charles Lamb or William Hazlitt or, more recently, of George Orwell. How do you separate memory and lived experience from ideas in their work? I like to think of the differences among the essay, memoir, and the autobiographical as differences in degrees of emphasis rather than in any way absolute. An essay can easily be autobiographical and based on memory. It does not have to be. Memoir, on the other hand, while focusing on recollection and the construction or reconstruction of the self through an engagement with the past, also often gestures towards attempts at ideas and a form of dialogism that we associate with the essayistic.
Take, for instance, the wonderful Firebird: A Memoir (1999) by Mark Doty in which extensive intimate autobiographical details coexist with passages like:
‘What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us. […] Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that’s why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn’t yours. Proximity is the best consolation; place the griefs beside one another and watch them diminish. We seem to need to hear, Yes, I’ve known something like that, too.’
AMMD: In The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), you disputed the essay’s longstanding notoriety “as primarily expressive of individual thought and personality.” In a world where borderline navel-gazing solipsism or, to borrow from your words, “as narcissistic a genre” are celebrated, how can this be unlearned?
MA: I use the phrase you quoted from my work to refer to how the essay is often presented—especially in certain traditions that think of it as primarily expressive—rather than to how I see the essay as a genre. I do not think that the essay has to be narcissistic. Indeed, it often is not. The essay is dialogic and open to the other even as it might seem or want to turn on itself. And this has always been the case in the form. Montaigne’s marked sense of individuality arises also from the way he confronts his thoughts and experiences with what has been written or said by others, primarily classical writers but also more contemporary sources. Hazlitt’s introspective and peculiar excursions into the pleasure of hating bring out what I call a dynamic of affinities and contestations with Shakespeare – whom he quotes and misquotes assiduously in his work – as well as his contemporaries. Claudia Rankine’s Just Us is precisely an essayistic book about the possibility or impossibility of dialogue with the other.
Even when the essay does not thematically address public issues, or it does not present the essayist directly engaging with other voices, it is still dependent on a language that the essayist can use but not necessarily own. As Barthes shows brilliantly in works like A Lover’s Discourse, even when dealing with very intimate and personal feelings like love, we are always already immersed in a language that has its own symbolic structures and images that shape, to a large extent, the way we can think of or indeed experience love. I think that this openness to the other is important to acknowledge because it makes us see the political (or social) potential of the essay. The essay can be a vehicle for public debate. Even when it is oriented towards the essayist’s experience of the world (and even here there is a self-reflexiveness that is not simply narcissistic), it always assumes the potential presence of at least one other in the form of a reader.
AMMD: Asian ‘counterparts’ to the essay such as the Chinese sanwen, the Tibetan tsom, and the Japanese zuihitsu all point to their heterogeneous natures—from travelogues to biographies, from prose poetry to monarchial edicts, from journalistic reportage to lists, ranging from the mundane to the mythic, from what is likely to what has been lived. Native American and First Nations essayists position the exploration on the fringes of truths over the ‘colonial demand’ for the factual. These traditions make us interrogate what the essay is or what nonfiction is—or even what is literary. What does this tell us of the essay, as in its globalised sense, in the field formation of world literature?
MA: In issue 9.3 of CounterText: A Journal of the Post-Literary, I collaborated with Ogutu J. Muraya, a performance artist from Kenya, in an interview about the essayistic elements in his work. After weeks of giving and taking, I asked a question that led to a momentary but significant interruption of the flow of questions and answers as I invited him to reflect on the post-literary qualities of his work. I asked him about the fluidity of his work and the way it takes language and combines it with visual, performative and aural artistic modes in ways that extend our traditional understanding of the literary. His response was that in framing his work within discussions of the ‘literary’ or ‘post-literary’, we would be colonising it with a discourse that is intrinsic to and inextricable from a Western literary tradition to which he does not feel he fully belongs. Instead, he told me, he preferred to think of his own artistic practice as a form of orature that arises from his own cultural upbringing. What this shows is that the generic labels we seek to use in evaluating works from around the world are never innocent. They come with a heavy cultural and ideological baggage so that acts of description and classification are also, to a certain extent, (involuntary) acts of colonisation. If we were to explore the word ‘nonfiction’, for example, we would find that there are very few places outside North America where the term is used productively and prolifically to talk about written works.
AMMD: A personal essay you penned, titled ‘On Three Houses,’ is part of the third volume of Scintillas: New Maltese Writing (eds. Jen Calleja & Kat Storace), which came out late October from Praspar Press. As a scholar of the essay, how disparate was this shift, process-wise, from the critical into the creative? And did the critic in you become ammunition for your creativity or was it some sort of stumbling block?
MA: In terms of writing, I am not a believer in a strict distinction between the creative and the critical. Whenever I write a chapter for a book, a paper for a journal, or a talk for a conference, I agonize over each word and every sentence. I want the language to sound good and to affect readers or the audience in specific ways. In this respect, I think that critical writing is also creative. On the other hand, anyone writing ‘creatively’ is also one’s own first critic and adopts a critical stance towards their own work, often revising over and over again until they arrive at a version of a text or work they can let go of for publication or for wider circulation. Having said that, there are other aspects of ‘On Three Houses’ that I had to think deeply about before committing it to print. First of all, it is a very personal essay with significant and intimate personal insights. I write about my family and about myself in ways that scholarly writing rarely allows. How much do I reveal about myself and people in my life? Secondly, because of the text being framed as an ‘essay’ by the editors of the volume (I am unsure whether to call it an essay or an essayistic memoir), there are expectations of ‘nonfictionality’ that a piece that is essentially about ghosts will inevitably challenge.
AMMD: Your scholarship focuses on essayists Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb as well as theorists such as Lukács, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Barthes—to name just a few of them. Are there Maltese, South European, Middle Eastern, and North African scholars, writers, and thinkers (aside from Derrida) whose works shaped your philosophy, writings (both critical and creative), and ethos? And in what ways have they been influential to you?
MA: This is such a difficult question to answer because there are so many people, writers and theorists who have shaped who I am today, and the question requires me to unravel intertwined threads. We are a collage of influences that evolves through time. The way I think and write today, for example, is different from the way I used to think and write ten years ago, when I was completing The Event of Style in Literature (2014). I now tend to favour a different style of writing, more essayistic, more immediately accessible and closer to the rhythms of spoken language than the more theoretically inflected abstractions that a Derridian might favour.
However, there are indeed writers and theorists whose work stuck with me and whose influence on me is strong. Apart from the ones you mention, I would add playwrights like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe; novelists like Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens; and short-story writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. In terms of the essay, I have also read widely from the American tradition—E. B. White, James Baldwin, Claudia Rankine, Rebecca Solnit, and others—but being Maltese and living on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean that was a British colony until 1964 means that I have stronger affinities with British writers. One not mentioned in your question is Brian Dillon. Works like In the Dark Room and Essayism are worth reading for anyone interested in the essay, memoir or the interface between them. Since I read for a degree in English literature, my influences mainly come from Anglophone writing, though there are also Maltese writers whose work affected me, moved me, changed me when I read it. Some of them are Oliver Friggieri, Francis Ebejer, Rużar Briffa and Immanuel Mifsud. One other writer is the contemporary poet, Maria Grech Ganado, whose lectures were one of the main reasons why I decided to study literature in the first place. Indeed, as a student I was blessed with many lecturers whose own reading of literature affected me as much as the literary texts I studied. My thinking about who I am or what we are as human beings, and the way I write about these and other questions, are indelibly marked by these people, the way they think and the way they write.
Mario Aquilina, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Malta’s Department of English where he teaches style, literary theory, rhetoric, electronic literature, and the essay. He has authored The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), edited The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and two special issues of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary on electronic literature (2016) and the essay (2023). He holds BA in English and MA in English degrees from the University of Malta and PhD in English Studies from the University of Durham in the United Kingdom. Apart from chapters in several books, such
as, Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The
Bloomsbury Handbook Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018), he has contributed to journals such as Word and Text, Oxford Literary Review, Polysèmes, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of Renaissance Studies.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, from Finland to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, their works can be found at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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