What Is an Essay?

By Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide

As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel
Johnson's "loose sally of the mind," or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig."
Since Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal,
this slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't stop us from
making our own attempt in this brief article.
Answer:
In its broadest sense, "essay" may refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction: an editorial, a feature
story, a critical study, even an excerpt from a book.
However, a literary definition of "essay" is usually a bit fussier, drawing distinctions between an "article,"
which is read primarily for the information it contains, and an "essay," in which the pleasure of reading
takes precedence over the information in the text.
Though handy, this loose division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts. So let's
consider some other ways that the essay might be defined.
Structure
Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay. Samuel
Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly
performance."
True, the writings of several well-known essayists (William Hazlitt and Ralph Emerson, for instance, after
the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations--or "ramblings."
But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his
own.
Critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists.
These principles are rarely formal patterns of organization (that is, the "modes of exposition" found in
many composition textbooks). Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought--progressions of a
mind working out an idea.
In any case, structure (or its apparent absence) doesn't seem to be taking us very far. So let's work on our
definition from yet another angle.
Types
Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types--formal and informal, impersonal
and familiar--are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele
Richman:
Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: one remained informal, personal, intimate,
relaxed, conversational, and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic, and expository.
(Foreword to The Barthes Effect, by Reda Bensmaia, 1987)
The terms used here to qualify "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand. But they're
imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal may describe either the shape or the tone of the
work--or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece,
and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully,
Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.
But as fuzzy as these terms may be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly
integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind. So let's pursue this thought.
Voice
Many of the terms used to characterize the essay--personal, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly,
conversational--represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical
voice or projected character (or persona) of the essayist.
In his study of Charles Lamb, Fred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is
to "the experience of the essayistic voice" (The World of Elia, 1975). Similarly, British author Virginia
Woolf has described this textual quality of personality or voice as "the essayist's most proper but most
dangerous and delicate tool."
And at the beginning of Walden, Henry David Thoreau reminds us that "it is . . . always the first person
that is speaking." Whether expressed directly or not, there's always an "I" in the essay--a voice shaping
the text and fashioning a role for the reader.
Fictional Qualities
The terms voice and persona are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the
essayist's self on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as E.B.
White confirms in his preface to The Essays, "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject
matter" (1977).
In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be
as chameleon as any narrator in fiction" (The Tugman's Passage, 1982). Similar considerations of voice
and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":
It seems to convey the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of
self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self--an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of
thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others.
(in Literary Nonfiction, 1979)
But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction.
Reader's Role
A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer (or a writer's persona) and a reader (the implied
audience) is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true. The difference between a short
story, say, and an autobiographical essay may lie less in the narrative structure or the nature of the
material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered.
Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred--as it occurred,
that is, to the version of the essayist on the page. The narrator of an essay, George Dillon says, "attempts
to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid" (Constructing Texts, 1981).
In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the
reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay may lie in the conflict
between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the
persona tries to arouse.
At Last, a Definition--of Sorts
With these thoughts in mind, we might tentatively define the essay as a short work of nonfiction, often
artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as
authentic a certain textual mode of experience.
Sure. But it's still a greased pig.