The work of continental philosophers like Derrida has not explained away such problems. But it has demonstrated why such problems are not some marginal impediment to a more mathematically solid model of language but are rather inescapable and fundamental to what language is and how it functions, i.e., that a word is never out of a specific context limiting its meaning, even when it is isolated by a line of white paper above and below it, or when it is beside its definition on the dictionary page, or when it is cited as a general instance of meaning in a philosophy paper (i.e., that the absolute and unlimited Word-with-its-meaning — the transcendental Logos — is an illusion).
“Shadows,” then, represents what I hope some readers will find an interesting piece of transitional thinking between the two traditions. And it prefigures much of the later work. If “Shadow and Ash” is the most important essay here, then “Shadows” is its lengthy, chrestomathic preface.
The excuse for such a collection is not to provide “a good read” but — indeed — to provide several, some sequential, others simultaneous. For reading is a many-layered process — like writing. The different forms, such as the long essay vis-à-vis the short, all have their separate excellences and pleasures. I hope this collection presents a rich field in which to look for — if not to find — them.
Extensions
An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany
by Ken James
There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation, whose analysis must be very finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction.
I
The term “extended essay,” in its very articulation, seems to presuppose a norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed. Certainly the long pieces in the remarkable collection to follow do not fit the form of the essay we have been led (by whom? by what? for what purpose?) to expect; nor does the experience of reading them feel like the experience of reading a traditional essay. To better understand what these pieces are up to, then, we might want to consider the form against which they position themselves.
What constitutes a “traditional” essay, and what is the experience of reading one like? Obviously to make generalizations about a form with such a wide range of possible topics (i.e., just about anything) and possible writerly approaches is to construct something of a fiction; nevertheless, generalizations about normative trends — generalizations about what we have come to expect from an essay — are possible. Lydia Fakundiny characterizes the essay in passing as a “short, independent, self-contained prose discourse.”[1] Fair enough. But as has been noted by Fakundiny and many other scholars of the history of the essay, there are other, more specific traits which have characterized the essay since the traditionally posited birth of its modern form in the sixteenth-century writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, “I myself am the subject of my book.”[2] Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting “the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos” of life.[3] From Bacon, we get a writerly stance that tends towards didacticism, in the specifically aphoristic mode. Bacon’s Essays, which appeared 17 years after the publication of the first edition of Montaigne’s collection, are written in a terse, pithy, authoritarian style: they do not so much analyze topics as list epigrams. Here is a well-known example of typical Baconian prose:
Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them… Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention… Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.[4]
In Bacon we find the seeds of what the essay was to become a little over a century later in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele — a specifically urban mode of writing, offering an authoritarian moral compass for those who would live in the city. (At the same time, a critical tradition was developing from the essay’s classical roots, giving rise to the “impersonal” form which constitutes most academic writing today.)
What often seems to characterize the works of the most popular contemporary essayists is a combination of the didactic tone of Bacon with the self-presentational obsessions of Montaigne — a conflation of the authorial and the authoritarian. Consider the following passage from The Writing Life, in which Annie Dillard compares the experience of essay-writing to a kind of path-finding:
You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.
The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.[5]
Note how Dillard’s use of the second-person pronoun causes the sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its epigrammatic style are typical-unto-defining traits of the contemporary essay. Certainly they are traits which, knowingly or unknowingly, we expect of it.
But as Roland Barthes — one of the great essayists of the twentieth century and possibly the first great theorist of the form — has persuasively argued, spectacle (even the spectacle of self-portraiture) and aphorism are two major rhetorical modes of conservative discourse — the discourse of the status quo. According to Barthes, spectacle discourages critical consideration of “motives” and “consequences”[6] as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a “univocal” moral order (M 25). Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order, such an “unalterable hierarchy of the world” (M 154). Aphorisms serve the purposes of the status quo precisely because their seemingly “pithy” declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context. The root-meaning of the word gives it away: apo-horizein — to delimit, to mark off boundaries, to circumscribe a horizon. Edward Hoagland has commented on the complicity of the essay with the preservation of the status quo:
2
Michel de Montaigne,
3
Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” from
6
Roland Barthes,