It’s linguistically logical that the essayist would be central to the essay. Smith, Benson, and Murdoch (and obviously Montaigne) agree on this point. More specifically, they emphasize the superior role of the essayist in shaping the essay’s subject matter. Smith writes (referring to the essayist), “the world is to the meditative man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm” (Essayists on the Essay, 26); Benson writes “the work of the essayist is to make some-thing rich and strange of those seemingly monotonous spaces” (Essayists on the Essay, 42); and Murdoch notes the personality of the essayist, who must “behave himself like a gentleman; good manners are more essential to him than to any other kind of writer” (Essayists on the Essay, 67). In these conceptions of the essayist’s style, Smith, Benson, and Murdoch have demoted the subject of the essay to the object of the essayist’s mind. Agency is for the essayist to wield. The subject is to be examined and handled by the essayist as a fish would be in an outdoor marketplace. Murdoch is a slight exception because he does not mention any agency, however, he betrays the subject’s demotion by neglecting to mention it.

There appears to be a different sort of agency at work within David Foster Wallace’s “Ticket to the Fair”.

“Ticket to the Fair” reads like an exhaustive catalog of sensory experiences: visual observations, olfactory disturbances, and entertaining dialogue are laid out for the reader like museum plaques. It is not enough for Wallace to say that he is visiting the fair’s cow barn, he must say “you can hear the cows all the way from the horse complex. The cow stalls are all doorless and open to view. I don’t guess a cow presents much of an escape risk. They are white spotted dun or black. They have no lips and their tongues are wide” (The Next American Essay, 351), etc. etc. etc. Notice that when the essayist (the I) presents himself it is in response to the environmental stimulus he has already described (the stalls are doorless probably because they aren’t likely to escape). Wallace does not appear to examine or handle his subject, but his subject appears to handle him. Even Wallace’s summative conclusion culminates from the preceding external stimuli: “The land is big here [in the Midwest]—board-game flat, horizons in every direction […] thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd. To see something besides land and grass and corn and cable TV and your wife’s face” (The Next American Essay, 381). The very over-stimulation that we experience while reading the essay and that Wallace experienced while attending the Illinois State Fair molds the essayist’s conclusion. The essayist, Wallace, has been delegated to a passenger on the subject’s ride. His agency is reduced to a decision to write about his subject—from there, the subject straps him in and takes control.

“Ticket to the Fair” forces a re-examination of the essayist’s role in the essay. The lofty position of the essayist described by Smith, Benson, and Murdoch is not crucial to the success of an essay (I say this because I thought Wallace’s essay was, although overwhelming, highly entertaining).

Is the essayist necessary at all? Wallace’s voice does not entirely disappear although it does seem to be less important. Some of the proto-essays we read in class seem even more distant from their essayist. The essayist in “Miscellany” (lists  that evoke a certain feeling or reality denoted by the headings) is evident only in that Shang-Yin Li (the essayist) must have written these lists down. However, the word I or the explicit connection between I and the lists is absent from “Miscellany”.

I’ve already gone on too long, but as I wind down, I’ve started to think about whether an author can ever be eliminated from his or her writing (maybe if his or her name’s anonymous). The least I could say, is that the positioning of the essayist in an essay is, like so many aspects of the essay’s construction, available for experimentation.

Now, I’ve got to go. Visions of a freshly frosted chocolate cake have infiltrated my mind and I’m sure it won’t leave me be until I’ve had a slice (or maybe five).