Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction

by Brian Dillon

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag.

Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Dillon's style incorporates diverse features of the essay: by turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Montaigne, Woolf, Barthes, Adorno, Benjamin, Perec, Hardwick, and Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or any other number of subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Irish Literature, Memoir, Literature

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2017

About the author

BRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin 2005).

His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Bag of Bags

An essay on essays. Actually a number of essays on different aspects of the essay. Or, perhaps more accurately still, a revelation of the shape and contents of Brian Dillon’s mind through a literary bag of essays.

Ultimately isn’t that what an essay is? A fragment in formless form of literal self expression in terms of an object, an event, a feeling, a property, or idea? Put enough of these fragments together and the self who produced them begins to emerge like an image on old fashioned photo paper. Dillon demonstrates rather than defines the form.

If what Dillon suggests is true, that the essay is a sort of measurement, a proposition perhaps, of something of importance, something of unrecognised but real value, then what else could an essay convey but the most intimate thoughts of the writer. This is so even if the subject is abstract or arcane because the author has to take some stand; he/she has to evaluate and come to a conclusion.

The need for a conclusion which is not conclusive implies a certain vulnerability which doesn’t occur in fiction or in more narrow (formally disciplined?) factual reporting like scientific papers. The essay brings something to noticeability; it doesn’t prove or discredit.

The one thing an essay can’t be if it is to be a success is uninteresting, that is to say, repetitive or entirely derivative. An essay does not summarise or engage in polemics. It shares with poetry the requirement to make connections where there were previously none. It takes what may be familiar and makes it just slightly less so. It offers; it doesn’t demand.

Dillon quotes Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities about the psychology of essay-writing:

“The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete. He suggests that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted…. Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.”

I think he’s correct. The essay demands a certain cast of mind (training? personality?) which includes a kind of self doubt. It is not meant to convince the reader but to change the author, to move the writer a step closer to something vaguely called the truth. Montaigne, arguably the pinnacle of the trade, makes the point clearly:

“What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.”

Dillon says about himself that “Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two.” I understand that limitation quite well because I share it. But his ability to thread those fragments together into a coherent whole is remarkable. What emerges for me is a cultivated, witty, humble, self-aware man whom, and whose works, I want to know much more about.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dillon is a tremendous, wide-ranging critic - his Suppose a Sentence introduced me to quite a few new writers, and I came to this hoping for more of the same. What I found blew me away, as the book on essays morphed into, dare I say, an essay on depression, personal and moving, twisting and turning while never ceasing to inform. I left it lighter, and smarter.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

It starts off being mostly about essays and essay writers, but... well, OK... it ends up being mostly about essays and essay writers, too, only entering stage left with his own essays is Dillon himself. Who quickly shows himself to be a bit manic and depressive in that he likes to read about manic and depressing topics (The Anatomy of Melancholy, anyone?) by often manic and often depressed authors.

Dillon's mother suffered from depression and, after some consideration, Dillon finds equal parts horror and fascination with the affliction as seen through his own mirror darkly (he, too, will come to suffer from crushing depression). And so it goes. Writing as redemption and rescuer!

Anyway, a good dipper, as the essays are short and can be read in small spots (in line at the store, between stops on the subway, between innings at the ballgame). Assuming there are still people who read in such spots (vs. look at their binkies a.k.a. cellphones).

A good book for those who like to read about reading. And writing.

[julieta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never read Dillon, so learning about the way he works around his writing, and at the same time about his depression felt like it was a good excercise in the form he is talking about (essays), almost like giving you the example while he discusses the form itself. A lot of good references like Barthes, Woolf, Sontag, Didion, writers I have seen referenced a lot lately. Something i will definetly try is writing lists, I have never been a big list maker, but I thought it was a great idea. I also have a weakness for books on books, so this is such an an obvious choice.

[Jim Elkins]

The Difference between Essays and Journalism

This is an intentionally loosely conglomerated collection of two- to four-page essays on the idea of the essay. Self-contained pieces on individual writers and books alternate with autobiographical pieces on the author's depression and suicidal thoughts.

For long stretches this book reads as a list of my own interests: the idea and problem of writing about essays in an essayistic way; the lure of "essayism"; the nature of lists; questions of style, taste, melancholy, the fragment, the detail, aphorisms—those are all the titles of sections. Page after page, the authors Dillon mentions are ones I have read, taught, and written about: Gass, Adorno, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Wilde, Sontag, Deleuze, Stein, Derrida, Starobinski, Barthes, Clark, Perec, Browne, Wallace.

He wonders, as I have, what constitutes an essay, and he looks at many of the same sources. (Mine: tinyurl.com/theoriesofessays.) He has some excellent set pieces, which may be among those adapted from previously published reviews, on Maeve Brennan, Cyril Connolly, and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Despite these promising and surprising similarities, the more I read the lonelier I felt. Dillon's treatments of the authors are too quick. If an essay is anything, it's an unspooling of thought. As Montaigne knew, thought wanders. Even in Adorno's very tightly worked essay on the essay, form is deliberately elusive, and excerpts especially unrepresentative. What happens in this book belongs more to the world of journalism, where two to four pages corresponds with a feature or a five-minute read. Dillon surveys each book or author, finding interesting places to pause, raising questions, and then letting them stand as stated. It's like being introduced to interesting people at a party and then walking away while they're still talking. It's a kind of nonstop tour that works best in journalism, where evocation and enthusiasm matter and there may be no promise of slower forms of thought.

He skims over Sontag, mentioning her diaries, but in comparison to books on her (for example Lopate's) his excerpts are inconclusive. He switches rapidly from Musil to Woolf. He dispenses with Robert Burton in a page-long parenthesis of abbreviated and inconclusive praise. He does not consider the paradoxes or challenges of Adorno's essay. Occasionally the short form is just right, for example in three excellent pages conjuring Gass's On Being Blue, but usually it's glancing, as in the single page on Sebald or the few pages on Barthes's Camera Lucida. Reading these I felt lonely: there are many passages that he must have felt adequate for his purposes—conjuring a problem, picking an evocative passage—where I had the impression I was being led away before the interesting questions had even arrived. It's as if we'd read different authors.

I wonder if the real tension in this book is not between "essayism" and the author's depression—a theme he entertains in several passages—but between essays and journalism. Near the beginning he runs through several of the dozens of available definitions of essays. The only odd notes I saw are passages that conjure the idea that essays should have "a sort of polish and integrity" (p. 18), "a smooth and gleaming surface," (p. 32), or be "seamless and well-made" (p. 21). I wonder where those came from, since I haven't run across them in reading essays about essays. Could they be the moments when an ideal of journalism surfaces? Even though Dillon identifies himself as a journalist, who wants "only to make a living" from writing (p. 33), journalism isn't otherwise presented as an ideal separable from essayism—and yet for me, in this book, it is.

A letter to the author
Dear Brian Dillon,
I've always had a bad habit on Goodreads of writing in such a way that I can never show the author what I've written. I doubt you will ever see this—the internet is fabulous at burying people's voices—so let me do the inevitable, impolite thing and suggest my own book, What Photography Is, a full-length answer to Camera Lucida. It's far from perfect, but I tried to follow the consequences of some of the questions you raise in regard to Barthes's book regarding his project of theorizing, writing a memoir, and using images, all at once. I am not sure what my book is, but I think of it as an essay, and also as something different from journalism.

Postscript
For people who have been following these notes on Goodreads: I have been revising and rewriting these more or less continuously, but this is the first original post for about five years. It's not that I've stopped writing notes on books: it's that I've been reading only two books during that period, Finnegans Wake, Bottom's Dream, and Life A User's Manual. If you'd like to join the reader's group on the second or third of those, just send me a message.

2022, revised 2024

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

'At certain moments in my reading life there have been essays or articles that I had to keep rereading if I was to stay sane, or so it seemed. And sometimes those texts have appeared in retrospect or even at the time not quite worth the emotional, intellectual, existential weight I asked them to bear. Very few pages of the NME in 1985 really deserved to be pored over to the degree that I attended them in the days after my mother’s death. On the other hand I quite see how the collected journalism of Lester Bangs could have kept me afloat in the night, treading in panic above my black sea of despair, with his sentimental swagger. A few months into my recovery then, in 1997, I read and reread a piece by my teenage music-writer hero Ian Penman, about his heroin addiction. It was published in an otherwise awful men’s magazine, and then excerpted in the Guardian: I still have the magazine version always somewhere near to hand on my bookshelves. The writer’s experiences were nothing like my own, but some sentences and phrases in that piece have hung about at the edges of my memory for twenty years, and still to this day I will sometimes pull the December 1997 issue of Arena off the shelf to check that I have got things right. I’ve done it again just now and lighted on a random paragraph:

"Behind the romance of thick lines and thin-ice metabolic loops and leaps I can now see a certain skewed “logic”. It was as though I thought life were something that needed to be defused like a bomb or parsed like an algebraic equation before it could be lived."

Not so very distant from myself after all – and how many times (see above) over the years, and long before everybody started speaking of ‘parsing’ everything, have I stolen that last phrase in print, or let it pass through my mind as a judgement on myself or others?'

[Jamie Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I really enjoyed this book--I bought it from Shakespeare & Co. the other day, and the girl at the register asked me if I'd been there for the event. "No," I said. "But I'm an essayist, so this is exciting to me." (I love an essay about essays, naturally) She was not impressed and gave me a pretty serious eye roll. I guess it seems like everyone is trying to be an essayist lately, with new essay collections coming out by authors who have otherwise written fiction. Still, I prefer our weird little essayist clan, these strange people who go out and collect ideas and patch them all together. Brian Dillon is one of these people, and I'm glad that he wrote this book. It gives me hope.

[Summer Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an instant classic for me, and one I know I will return to often. More a formation of essay-ing than a collection, I was especially struck by the essay/section 'On Dispersal:'

"...Woolf's prose mimics the action of the storm, exploding delicately into flurries of image, sound and metaphor. As so often in her writing, you have a sense of the world becoming particulate, everything airborne and efflorescent or friable, turning to dust, powder, shingle, sand. This writing seems to release spores."

I felt compelled to read this particular essay aloud over the phone to someone, and I cried—not because of the essay's content, but because of the sentences.

[Argos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Genç sayılabilecek bir yaşta olan İrlandalı yazar Brian Dillon’un, edebiyat türü olan “deneme” ve onunla ilgili olarak denemeciler hakkında yazdığı farklı bir deneme kitabı. Depresyonundan ve bunun yazarlığına etkisinden sıklıkla bahseden yazar aralarında S. Sontag, R. Barthes, W. Carlos Williams, W. Benjamin, T. Adorno gibi tanınmış isimlerin de olduğu çok sayıda denemecinin yazdıklarını inceleyerek kendi deneme dünyasındaki üslup, metin, ayrıntı gibi kavramları irdeliyor.

Ağır bir dille yazılmış, ya da konuların ağırlığı nedeniyle bana öyle geldi. Çok zorlayıcı gelen hatta zaman zaman anlamakta zorluk çektiğimden sıkıldığım bir kitap oldu. Çevirmen S. Özpalabıyıklar’ın açıklamaları dahi yorumları anlamamda çok yardımcı olmadı. Kısaca “deneme” türünü çok seven bir okur olarak fazlaca üst düzeyde yazılmış bir metin olarak içine girebildiğimi söyleyemem.

[✩°｡⋆ryan⋆｡°✩ · Rating 5 out of 5]

”I think what I wanted from writing— from Barthes in particular but others too —was a passage out of the dismal place in which I found myself in…but also some assurance that the world could not only be recast in words but had been made of language in the first place.”


I want to be Brian Dillon when I grow up.

[Davide · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alla ricerca di robuste verità e di malinconica consolazione, attraverso lo stile della prosa.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early on in his book, Brian Dillon quotes the poet and translator Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), who said that "the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules." Essayism, which is rather short, contains twenty-six essays, all titled like this: "On essays and essayists," "On lists," and "On anxiety," including five separate essays all titled "On consolation." His essays don't have neat conclusions or even a sense of a definitive ending. Often they are fragments that lead only to new questions. A number of the essays deal with Dillon's struggle with depression, which he has written about at length, and the puzzling question of how his depression and his writing might be connected.

Dillon is a wonderful writer of sentences and his essays proceed from one sentence to the next as if he has no idea what the third sentence will contain. It's a process of discovery-or, at least, it appears to be so. Dillon borrows the word "essayism" from Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. For Dillon, the term means a piece of writing that "is tentative and hypothetical, and yet it is also a habit of thinking, writing and living that has definite boundaries...the sense of a genre suspended between the impulses to hazard or adventure and to achieved form, aesthetic integrity."

Essayism is a book to read slowly, over and over. Here's a favorite bit:

"What exactly do I mean, even, by 'style'? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. Form and texture rescued from chaos, the precision and extravagance of it, the daring, in the end the distance, such as I think I could never attain."

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 5 out of 5]

what do i love more than reading or writing? reading about one of these activities or - even better -
both simultaneously. Dillon is a new writer for me, and this book required some extra effort at first, but then it just flowed without letting me go.

[charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

too special and personal to talk about!!!!!! (all my reviews are starting to sound like this but i do have a serious issue with this book: dillon writes of how he is constantly surrounded by essays and reading very widely etc etc but everyone he mentions is white lol but not lol)

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Brian Dillon could easily have written another book about the essay – its hallmarks, history, current role in literary turf wars, etc. What a relief, then, to find his Essayism navigating away, in its opening pages, from such a project, and turning instead toward this surprising, probing, edifying, itinerant, and eventually quite moving book, which serves as both an autobiographia literaria and a vital exemplar of how deeply literature and language can matter in a life."
— Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"It is somewhat unseemly for a critic to confess that their immediate reaction to a book is one of unremitting envy. But Brian Dillon’s study of the essay is so careful and precise in its reading of a constellation of authors – Derrida and Barthes, Didion and Sontag, Browne and Burton, Woolf and Carlos Williams, Cioran and Perec – that my overall feeling was jealousy. ... A remarkable meditation on memory ... above all he claims to admire style, and he is exceptionally good at defining the styles he likes. ... His account of depression is reflected in thinking about the essay. Is it something composed of fragments and shards? Is it a coolly organised progression? Is it about confession? Is it about concealment? The book’s excellence lies in the way these paradoxes are held suspended. ... The book, ultimately, is about how literature can make a difference. It is a beautiful and elegiac volume. I can give no greater compliment than to say that having read it, I re-read it."
— Stuart Kelly, New Statesman

[sevdah]

A collection of particles, essays, attempts at approaching process, style, substance. What I enjoyed most was the eye turned towards his own history in the collection of books and works he studies. A history of a lifelong, historical depression - or dissolving - and the result of it all in thinking and writing and reading, and the essay as the perfect vessel.

Best read in one go, near your bookshelves - it's one of those volumes that make you wander, pause, reread a favourite page somewhere else, write in short bursts of memory in your diary, go back to your chair again.

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essayism by Brian Dillon is a wholly literary tour de force in the sense that its final product takes the form of an embodied whole made fully transparent to the reader, much like a glass globe; with in it reflected the transfigured face of our genially depressed author. This whole, like most, is in some respect always only the sum of its parts; in this case a curated list of the virtues of the essay form. The studied coherence that creates the effect however cannot be understood through a process of mere aggregation but by their mutually supporting reference and affect. Although mostly criticism, Dillon combines autobiography, biography, reflection, prose, poetry, and... essays, all into one. Each style and reference finds its place in essays about essays that, in being meticulously analysed, collectively take on the form of something sublime and antifragile. This is not to be mistaken for an analysis so rigorous that it will only permit itself one frame or perspective, Dillon does not remain on a topic for long, the analysis although meticulous is not one that is exhaustive; instead each moment is brought to closer bearing by its creative spin into another reference or analogy that carries forward a certain virtue of the essay at hand.

At the end of this book not only do you feel yourself have a newfound respect and desire to indulge in the essay form (and go and find every single deliciously obscure book in its bibliography), but you also have a newfound respect for the impact that literature can have on a life that is willing to be affected by its truths. Logically deduced or minimally well argued truths, I suppose, yes. But more the truth of the convincing attempt, a posited perspective. The essay in practice is to walk around a grandly decked table and take out a telescope to describe a small piece of cheese delicately placed on a plate, and Dillon has just brought in a platter.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy essays, essayists, a smattering of literary history crossed with craft talk and memoir, if you have ever been depressed or struggled to find your way as a writer and maybe as a professor/teacher -- read this. Then flip to the Readings section for brushing up on essayists you may have under-read. And of course, read it again, and probably again. It's that kind of book, bracingly smart and achingly intimate in turn. But I would say it wears its erudition lightly. For me, an instant classic.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't let the first pages put you off. I think they are there to discourage writing manual seekers. I cringed too. Pretentiousness does not quite cover it. But then, after around midpoint, the art gives way to interesting and moving writing. True to form, the essays (?) are about much more than essays. There are few straightforward tricks of the trade here, but many helpful ideas.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starts as a detailed, fragmentary analysis of the essay as a form and what makes it great. Ends as something......much more. Revelatory.

[Liv Noble · Rating 4 out of 5]

he is showing off and i admire it

[Edmundo Mantilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro indispensable para amar el arte del ensayo y, a la vez, una exploración de tres obsesiones: las listas, la melancolía y el estilo.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essayism is another example of a new concept I've been keenly aware of since reading Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism: autotheory. Fitzcarraldo seem to publish a fair amount of this. Dillon certainly isn't writing a systematic history or theorisation of the essay as a concept. He instead approaches it from various angles that involve copious personal reflections. I found his writing style and range of references engaging, although the fragmentary structure made his points difficult to grasp and remember. I only finished this book four days ago yet struggle to recall anything much from it. That's partly on me for reflexively speed-reading, but also suggests that the central thesis (if any) did not come through clearly. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned for expecting books of theory or literary criticism to have a central thesis. Now that I think about it, his most probable thesis is that essays are inherently fragmentary, which I do not consider groundbreaking. In any case, I did like this piece of phrasing:

The Unquiet Grave begins with a sentence from which it cannot recover: 'The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.' Connolly was addicted to inconsequence, and knew it.

I also learned a new word from Essayism: styptic, which means something that slows or stops bleeding (apparently 'coagulant' isn't a word?) It was a pleasant enough little book to read, however I did not retain any lasting lessons about essays or the writing thereof.

[Antonio Gallo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non dimenticherò mai il mio primo incontro con la forma letteraria chiamata “saggio”. Era un’antologia contenente scritti di questo tipo del settecento inglese. Mi colpirono due in particolare scritti nel 1701, uno intitolato "Meditation upon a broomstick" - "Meditazioni su un manico di scopa" e l’altro “An Essay on fan” - “Un saggio sul ventaglio”.

Il primo era del canonico irlandese Jonathan Swift, uno dei più famosi saggisti inglesi, il secondo di Joseph Addison, uno dei fondatori non solo del saggio letterario ma anche del giornalismo moderno. Oggi sarebbero due grandi firme di libri di saggistica legati ad argomenti giornalistici meritevoli di approfondimento e passati dall’editoria moderna, cartacea o digitale, come saggi di approfondimento.

Non ho mai dimenticato la perplessità che provai a quel tempo per questo tipo di scrittura. In effetti, i saggi erano satire come solo Swift, l'autore dei "Viaggi di Gulliver" e Addison, fondatore del moderno “magazine”, avrebbero saputo scrivere. Questo libro di Brian Dillon è tutto teso a dimostrare che questa forma letteraria è quanto mai viva ed attiva anche se spesso ci si continua chiedere cosa sia esattamente un saggio. Aldous Huxley lo definì “una dannata cosa dopo l’altra”. Virginia Woolf sostenne che il suo scopo era “dare piacere”, anche se il piacere di qualcuno può essere un dispiacere per qualche altro.

Ci sono innumerevoli tipi di saggi. La stessa idea di scrittura può assumere nomi diversi come memorie, ricordi, pensieri. La forma può essere tanto personale, quanto impersonale. Nel primo caso, alla sua base, ci deve essere l’idea di verità personalizzata presentata al lettore come verità condivisa ed oggettiva. A dire il vero Dillon dice chiaramente di non sapere cosa scrivere e come scrivere del “saggio”, visto e considerato che questa forma di scrittura, nel corso dei secoli, e nella storia della comunicazione scritta, trasferita da quella orale, ha assunto varie e diverse forme.

Scrivere un saggio sui saggi, presenta una chiara difficoltà, anche in considerazione del fatto che nello stesso titolo del libro, Dillon dichiara di voler occuparsi non tanto del “saggio”, quanto del “saggismo”. Dal latino “exagium” - sop-pesare - e “examen” - controllare, considerare, sciamare -. Il saggio, lui scrive, ha facce diverse. Oscilla tra leggerezza e pesantezza. Tra i saggisti “leggeri” vanno annoverati Oscar Wilde, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec. Dillon, piuttosto che privilegiare un genere, pensa che sia meglio scegliere un comportamento “obliquo”, una scrittura cioè che proceda per obiettivi.

Ed infatti, nel suo libro, egli categorizza questa forma di scrittura, personalizzando le idee di chi scrive per adattarle a quello che cerca o vuole il lettore. Egli cosi dedica sezioni diversificate per interessi: l’ansia, la dispersione, la consolazione, il gusto, la malinconia, il frammento, la coerenza, l’io, l’attenzione, la curiosità. Questo mi fa ricordare che in francese la parola “essai” significa "tentativo, prova". Ogni scritto, allora è tale, un cercare di capire, prima se stessi e quindi gli altri.

La scrittura ideale del saggio non deve essere mai lineare, ma informe, incerta, misteriosa, nel senso che chi legge non sa mai dove si vuole arrivare. Va bene una abbondanza di citazioni, il tono sia scettico, ma mai troppo cinico o negativo. Bisogna sapere interessarsi di tutto, e sapere farlo credere a chi legge. Il motto dovrebbe essere quello di Montaigne: "Cosa so?" Questo atteggiamento porta il saggista ideale ad essere un sostenitore del pensiero libero.

Egli non si inganna e non intende ingannare chi legge. Scrive in un modo sempre piacevole e sembra che si diverta sempre di quello che dice, delle sue leggerezze, delle sue osservazioni intelligenti e delle sue stupidità. I saggi di Montaigne non vanno letti con metodo, perchè lui scrive senza metodo. Logico che sia stato così. Scriveva per capire se stesso. E’ quanto mi sforzo di fare anche io. Non so se ci riesco e se mai ci riuscirò. La lettura del libro Brian Dillon non mi ha convinto molto.

[☄ · Rating 5 out of 5]

bumping this up to 5 stars bc it's been a week and i haven't stopped thinking about it once.... formative text!

[Emily Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every now and then I’m drawn back to the opening line of Emily Skilling’s ‘Bay’— “I feel a nessness”. That’s how I want to describe all my favourite pieces of writing—I feel a nessness while reading them. Because there’s no particular feeling or style or topic that joins them together in my heart, it’s just a certain ineffable quality that sinks in and touches something, though I’m not sure exactly what.

Which is really just to say: I loved this book! And I am so grateful to my dear friend Alexandra for lending it to me (and also: there is a nessness about the temporality of a loaned book. I have been taking pictures of my favourite passages instead of underlining, which feels like a sort of agreement between me and this copy, a promise that l will keep some part of it, some fragments, with me).

- - -

“What exactly do I mean, even, by "style"? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. […] "I like your style" means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I'm a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.”

“I started with a list —well, here is one more, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: […] Parataxis says: this happened, and then that happened, followed by this other. And so on, on, on.”

“As if I were packing my suitcase like Didion, I list all the things I want to put in an essay. I treat the essay as a container, because I want to smother the anxiety that comes with writing, because if I have a plan (and my plans are always lists, not diagrams) then I will not have to face the blank page or screen without a word or thought in my head. I can simply follow the entries in the list in their turn-A to Z, one to infinity. Except: the list, if it's doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making.”

“(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one's reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)”

“But how else to write? How else to be? And always the question, bound up with being, of who to read, what books and especially what essays might change things—change me.”

“Its a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure or acutest expression. […] But, but, but: what if the cliché has been there all the time, what if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? What then?”




[Keight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at "therefore") at the level of thought. Not to mention feeling. Picture if you can its profile on the page: from a solid spate of argument or narrative to isolated promontories of text, these composing in their sum the archipelago of a work, or a body of work. The page an estuary, dotted at intervals with typographical buoys or markers. And all the currents or sediments in between: sermons, dialogues, lists and surveys, small eddies of print or whole books construed as single essays. A shoal or school made of these. Listen for possible cadences this thing might create: orotund and authoritative; ardent and fizzing; slow and exacting to the point of pain or pleasure; halting, vulnerable, tentative; brutal and peremptory; a shuffling or amalgam of all such actions or qualities. An uncharted tract or plain. And yet certain ancient routes allow us to pilot our way through to the source, then out again, adventuring.

A love letter to the essay and its writers, Brian Dillon doesn't analyze the form or detail its history, but rather waxes lyrical. The book is, of course, essentially a collection of essays itself, and while it may ostensibly focus on different techniques — as "On Lists" examines Joan Didion's use of that format in The White Album — it's not trying to be instructive either. Over the course of Essayism, Dillon provides increasingly personal context for why he loves this particular type of writing, in the recurring "On Consolation" entries in particular.

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[Jessica Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great meandering essayistic rigourous, but non-academic, personal yet critical look at the essay form. I really enjoyed the first part of this, it was beautiful. I always enjoy reading about other people's reading, or having them open other artists up for me. I want to read Elizabeth Hardwick now, and Susan Sontag. He affirms my working on Woolf and my belief in the essay form. I share with him an affinity for style and he makes me feel less superficial for it. The last sections I found drier, less worked on, sometimes tedious because I couldn't always follow his discussions on Thomas Browne or Cioran with any earnest interest. And I will admit I was rather jarred by the very personal, by Dillon's open language regarding his own depression. I'm not sure if that's just me, trained to retreat from that kind of frankness or that perhaps I found Dillon's seeming relief at being diagnosed somehow arrogant, a foolish thing to relish -- just as glorifying the likes of Foster Wallace and wallowing in it through literature. I'm shocked he was actually reading Barthes at seventeen too. But then perhaps I'm being unfair, fearing he has a confidence that a female essayist wouldn't: Maggie Nelson was confessional in The Argonauts, flagrant in her references to academics and critics and I didn't find her so arrogant, I lapped her up. And this too, regardless, a compelling collection for any sucker for the essay, the meandering eye/I.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never felt that I would be moved by a book of Essays on Essays, yet in some parts of this book, I was.
From the first page with its wonderful lists of essay topics that have been explored in the past by some of the writers that are discussed in more detail later on, I was drawn in to what is a rather wonderful book. All written in a delightfully entertaining style that wears its bright, curious intelligence lightly.

Throughout, beneath the surface of much of the writing is a sense of consolatory exploration - as if through the reading of essays, whether on literature, or identity, pop music, photography, or culture in general, some comfort and relief from a nagging sense of longing, loss, emptiness and actual depression may be gained.

Above all, whether Dillon is addressing lists, or style, sentences or aphorisms and more, his writing is generous, sharing ideas and ways of thinking; with page after page giving out lines and thoughts that set you scribbling down notes, folding down pages and making references for later, on other books and writers to discover, explore, or re-read.

[Leland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading books about writing can be a perilous activity. Writing about writing so often reduces the essential qualities of form and style to grammatical minutiae, or worse, elevates them to some mystical and impenetrable rite. We are fed promises and formulas, rules and best practices, and rarely perspective or inspiration. Into this paucity of good recent writing about writing comes Brian Dillon's book Essayism. This book manages to convey a great wealth of information about the essay as a form, it's rich history and endless variety without stooping to abstruse or doctrinaire prescriptions. It is at times richly personal offering occasional glimpses into the life of the writer, and is filled with thoughtful reflection on the masters of the form, new and old.

This book has earned a place of honor on my bookshelf, and is one I will return to time and again in the future.