Another week has passed with readings about essays. I have to admit that I still cannot really understand why the D’Agata readings are supposed to be essays. My confusion might be related to the very broad and vague definition of the term essay. According to Adorno, the essay does not obey and rules of theory and conceptual method. It consists of the intellectual experience of the author and his personal memory, and has a high level of abstraction as well as a wide field of subjects to write about.  In contrast to Adorno’s explanation what an essay is not, Huxley distinctly states what he thinks an essay is: “[…] the essay is a literary device foe saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay.” (Huxley: 88). This is the first definition which resembles my idea of what an essay should look like. He also goes a step further and divides the essay into three poles: the personal (autobiographical), objective (factual) and universal (abstract). To distinguish these three types and therefore the purpose of writing the essay makes sense to me. It’s also rational to claim that “the most richly satisfying essay” (Huxley: 90) is a mixture of all three poles. I can work with that.

In my opinion, the essays from D’Agata’s anthology experiment with the open form of the essay, in order to express the author’s emotions connected to a certain event of his or her past. The language is very poetic and the writing seems more like a piece of art than an essay. The purpose of these writings is to express one topic or idea in many different formal concepts; starting from one point (usually the title) and elaborating on the idea to anything the author associates with that topic. Goldbarth writes about Delft and everyone and everything he relates with the city, in this case Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Vermeer (as well as fleas, sex and the plague). Griffin writes about red shoes her grandmother gave to her, which turns out to be a lie. Intertwined with the memory of her past is the discourse about gender differences, sexuality and child abuse; everything the author experienced in her childhood. Mitchell, for example, chooses numbered paragraphs to tell her story about scaffolds, but she quickly evolves her subjects to the idea of falling of a building, and later to the Mount Vesuvius discourse. Besides talking about her journey through Italy, she talks about the creative process of producing art and the power of dreaming and imagination. All these subjects doesn’t seem to relate to each other at first, but you could clearly see Mitchells chain of thoughts while reading the story. Her essay is a travel journal, consisting of her personal memories (observation of scaffold in Italy), reference to historical facts (volcano eruption) and high amount of abstract ideas, relating in the broad sense with the main idea of scaffolding.

While writing this blog post, I just realize that this is exactly what Huxley said. But you get so much information and details in these essays (fiction, truth, memory) that I am starting to wonder if it is really the best to mix all three poles, for the sake of the reader’s comprehension.