The Age of the Essay

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| September 2004Remember the essays you had to write in high school?
Topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being,
say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the
story: what an essay really is, and how you write one.
Or at least, how I write one.ModsThe most obvious difference between real essays and
the things one has to write in school is that real
essays are not exclusively about English literature.
Certainly schools should teach students how to
write. But due to a series of historical accidents
the teaching of
writing has gotten mixed together with the study
of literature. And so all over the country students are
writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget
might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens.With the result that writing is made to seem boring and
pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens?
Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay
about color or baseball.How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back
almost a thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to
catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they
had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered
what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if
we were visited by beings from another solar system.
These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated
that for the next several centuries the main work of
European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate
what they knew.During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great
prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As
European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important;
by 1350
someone who wanted to learn about science could find better
teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1]
But schools change slower than scholarship. In the
19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone
of the curriculum.The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of
ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern
texts? The answer, of course, is that the original raison d'etre
of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that
does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.
But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that
those studying the classics were, if not wasting their
time, at least working on problems of minor importance.And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good
deal of resistance at first.
The first courses in English literature
seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly
American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst,
and University College, London
taught English literature in the 1820s.

But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until
1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese before
it had one of English.) [2]What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have
been the idea that professors should do research as well
as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and
indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported
from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at
Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught
English composition. But how do you do research on composition?
The professors who taught math could be required to do original
math, the professors who taught history could be required to
write scholarly articles about history, but what about the
professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they
do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited
by English professors. This had two drawbacks:
(a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer,
any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b)
the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's
what the professor is interested in.High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable
high school experiences were sown in 1892, when
the National Education Association
"formally recommended that literature
and composition be unified in the high school course." [4]
The 'riting component of the 3 Rs then morphed into English,
with the bizarre consequence that high school students now
had to write about English literature-- to write, without
even realizing it, imitations of whatever
English professors had been publishing in their journals a
few decades before.It's no wonder if this seems to the
student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps
removed from real work: the students are imitating English
professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are
merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what
was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.No DefenseThe other big difference between a real essay and the things
they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't
take a position and then defend it. That principle,
like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature,
turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long
forgotten origins.It's often mistakenly believed that
medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they
were more law schools. And at least in our tradition
lawyers are advocates, trained to take
either side of an argument and make as good a case for it
as they can.
Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded
early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing
persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5]
And after the lecture the most common form
of discussion was the disputation. This is at least
nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense:
most people treat the words thesis
and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was
the argument by which one defended it.Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a
legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,
as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not
just that you miss subtleties this way.
The real problem is that you can't change the question.And yet this principle is built into the very structure of
the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic
sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting
paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the
conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure
about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just
supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph,
but in different enough words that no one could tell.
Why bother?
But when you understand the origins
of this sort of "essay," you can see where the
conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the
jury.Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it
should be convincing because you got the right answers,
not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a
draft of an essay to friends, there are two things
I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem
unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by
cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by
arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.At the very least I must have explained something badly. In
that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced
to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just
incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have
to change what I was saying as well.
But the aim is never to be convincing per se.

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