Essaying

Just ran across an interesting, extended article by Andrew Sullivan in a late 2008 issue of The Atlantic titled Why I Blog. His description of the nature of the blog sounds in some ways much like essayist John D'Agata's fresh definitions of the essay form.

D'Agata (who visited UW last Thursday and Friday) talks about the essay as an attempt, an experiment, or, as he particularly describes what he calls the lyric essay in his Next American Essay anthology, "a kind of logic that wants to sing." Sullivan's terms for blogs aren't exactly the same, but the sense of unfinished-ness, of uncertainty and leap-taking, is similar. Sullivan writes of the blog phenomenon, "Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy." D'Agata emphasized during Q+A after last week's reading that in attempting to address the questions it sets out exploring, a true essay is less likely to arrive at clear answers than embody a measure of "clarity" regarding the subject at hand.

Both forms -- essay and blog -- seem comfortable with imperfection and complication. And both authors (Sullivan and D'Agata) are in the position of shaping and heralding the characteristics of these modern forms of written communication. But Sullivan and D'Agata also understand that these contemporary compositional trends are not so new as they may seem. D'Agata dedicates much discussion (in his essay anthologies) to the long-lived tradition of "essaying," as he puts it. And Sullivan roots the idea of blogging in this tradition as well, pointing to Montaigne as a kind of blogger: "Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older--and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue ..."