ais018 In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic. In Defense of Facts Anew istory of the essay gets the genre all wrong, and in the process endorses a misleading idea of knowledge, WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE | OHN D’AGATA HAS ACCOMPLISHED an impressive feat. In three thick volumes, over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim (D’Agata is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the most prestigious name in creative writing) —because effrontery, as everybody knows, will get you very far in American culture, and persistence in perverse opinion, further still. D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it htps:hwew theatlantic.comtmagazinelarchvei2017/01ir-defense-ol-facts/S08748/ aneais018 In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic. this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as itis, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of crit ‘al esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion. Every piece of this is false in one way or another. There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument (and does so, unlike academic writing and other forms, for a general rather than a specialized audience). That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more. There are “public essays” and “personal essays” and essays that are both or neither; the form is broad and various and limitlessly flexible. Yet what distinguishes an op-ed, for instance, from a news report is that the former seeks to persuade, not simply inform. And what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion. Near the end of the title essay in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, to take the most celebrated recent example, we read the following: “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us... It’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” The movement that culminates in that passage—from instance to precept, from observation to idea—is the hallmark of the essay. J scara’s prostem, conceptually and psychologically, appears to begin with the term nonfiction. Nonfiction is the source of the narcissistic injury that seems to drive him. “Nonfiction,” he suggests, is like saying “not art,” and if D’Agata, who has himself published several volumes of what he refers to as essays, desires a single thing above all, it is to be known as a maker of art. But the syllogism is false. Nonfiction may not be avery useful term, and it certainly is an ill-defined (and, with its double negation, a very odd) one, but no one believes that the thing it names cannot be art. htps:hwew theatlantic.comtmagazinelarchvei2017/01ir-defense-ol-facts/S08748/ aneais018 In Datonse of Facts - The Allantc Atleast, no one has believed it for a long time. D’Agata tells us that the term has been in use since about 1950. In fact, it was coined in 1867 by the staff of the Boston Public Library and entered widespread circulation after the turn of the 20th century. The concept’s birth and growth, in other words, did coincide with the rise of the novel to literary preeminence, and nonfiction did long carry an odor of disesteem. But that began to change at least as long ago as the 1960s, with the New Journalism and the “nonfiction novel.” By decade’s end, the phrase creative nonfiction had entered the lexicon—a term that’s since become ubiquitous and that explicitly negates D’Agata’s claim about the anti-artistic implication of its second word. As for the essay—a form whose exponents in English had included, from the 1860s to the 1960s, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin—its prestige was never less than high, and the emergence of creative nonfiction as a rallying point (and of the memoir as a publishing phenomenon) was soon followed by that of the personal essay, in particular, as an increasingly prominent and celebrated genre. The annual Best American Essays debuted in 1986, the first addition to the Best American franchise since the series was launched (with The Best American Short Stories) in 1915. Phillip Lopate’s anthology The Art of the Personal Essay was published in 1994. Joseph Epstein’s anthology The Norton Book of Personal Essays was published in 1997. Joyce Carol Oates’s anthology The Best American Essays of the Century was published in 2000. Also in 2000, the National Magazine Awards established a category exclusively for essays. D’Agata, whose first anthology did not appear until 2003, has hardly saved the genre from oblivion. If anything, he was rather late to the party. htps:hwew theatlantic.comtmagazinelarchvei2017/01ir-defense-ol-facts/S08748/ ane