assumptions we cannot make about the narrators in fiction. Only a sophomore is permitted to ask if Huckleberry Finn ever had any children; but even literary sophisticates wonder in print about Thoreau’s love life, Montaigne’s domestic arrangements, De Quincey’s opium habit, Virginia Woolf’s depression. (194)
I point to this quote to demonstrate that there is a problem with the premise driving common conceptions of the relation between essay and essayist that I’ll trace out here. The problem is that in order for Sanders’s argument to work, first one must buy the premise that the essay is the expression of the writer’s self. Only then would one be permitted to ask questions about the essayist, like those listed by Sanders. As to where that premise might come from, I will speculate a bit below, but for now, it’s worth noting that said premise would not even be possible without the first convention of the genre: freedom. As essay scholar Michael Hall says in “The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery,” the personal essay is free from “the constraints of established authority and traditional rhetorical forms” (78), e.g., the constraints of a whole literary tradition that the writer must speak to and within. As such, it can be and do other things. It can be, for example, the embodiment of the essayist.
Of course, the interesting irony here is that there are, in fact, conventions of the essay—qualities that make an essay recognizable as such. The most important of those conventions is also the one that is most inherently contradictory: the essay’s freedom from the conventions of a literary tradition. The essay is not supposed to be about conventions, about the great essayists, the great literary movements, and the great sociopolitical concerns that came before (or that emerged during) the essayist’s foray into essaying. Rather, the essay is a form without tradition. To explain, in another ironic move (ironic because it argues for the essay’s freedom from tradition by historizing it), Michael Hall argues that the essay came about in response to the huge shifts in thinking that emerged just prior to and during the Renaissance—shifts that emphasized and celebrated the exploration of unconstrained possibilities.
Freedom is important to the work of the essay because it makes possible something other than participation in the confining conventions of a literary tradition. Instead, according to Sanders, “an essay is […] about the way a mind moves, the links and leaps and jigs of thought” (192). He goes on to explain that in this movement, the mind (which he equates to a dog hunting in “the underbrush of thought”) “scatters a bunch of rabbits that go bounding off in all directions.” The essayist must then chase a few of these metaphorical rabbits and avoid “plodding along in a straight line” (192). This requirement of chasing the jigging and jagging lines of thought is bound up in what Sanders argues, after Emerson, is the essayist’s job: to “fasten words again to visible things” (Emerson 88 and Sanders 191), including, it seems, the essay to the essayist, or more specifically, the essay to the essayist’s mind. 4
Essayists working from this premise take their cue from a conception of a mind-essence relation that is more than 2000 years old (or at least, they take it from a particular reading of that conception). In Georg Lukács’s influential chapter on the essay in Soul and Form, he points out that in a free form (the essay), “an intellect … believes itself to be sovereign” (2). Without constraints, without the parameters imposed by a more rigid genre, the mind does as it will. In that freedom, it is likely to work according to its own tendencies, its own habits, according to its own logic. And if it is working according to its own tendencies, habits, and logic, then it is free to see the writer’s essential, unmediated self (what Lukács refers to as the “soul”).
To explain this, Lukács invokes Plato’s argument that “only the soul’s guide, the mind, can behold it” (5).5 To clarify this relation between the mind and soul a bit further, I point to the supposition here that not only are the mind and soul separate, but that the mind’s purpose is to know and to guide the soul. What’s interesting in this articulation of purpose is that while one could easily reason that in this statement, Plato is actually arguing that “the rational mind” should rein in the impulses of the more passionate (and impulsive) parts of the self, essayists use the claim to argue that where the mind is freed from any obligation to the boundaries of convention, the soul is better or more truthfully revealed. To explain this through Sanders’s metaphor, if the essayist’s mind is like a hunting dog chasing thoughts, then the key to the essay is in granting that mind plenty of freedom to chase whatever thoughts it likes wherever it likes. What will emerge in the course of this run over open land, so to speak, is a soul that is finally free to emerge as it truly is—without the constraints of social mores, without the expectations imposed on us according to our gender, ethnicity, class, etc., and without, it seems, even the confines of rationality (a socially-sanctioned way of thinking).
Walking
Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, to find that the next major convention of the essay concerns the chase itself—i.e., how one chases what thoughts one wants to chase and, consequently, reveals the unmediated, unconstrained self. That how is understood as being like a journey into nature, which traditionally involves a long, meandering, contemplative walk in the woods.6 In short, the walk in nature serves as a metaphor for essaying, and there’s a long tradition of essayists using this metaphor in their essays to reveal both the nature of the essay and the nature of the essayist’s self. Essayists typically describe the self-realizing/self-remembering process that they underwent in their latest visit to the woods (or to the mountains or to some other remote expanse of nature); in turn, via the description of the distillation of the natural self, the essay comes to embody that self.7
For example, in the anthologized essay, “An Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry explicitly invokes the metaphor of walking and simultaneously enacts that movement on the page. He writes of walking through the woods and shedding “all the superfluities” of his life. For Berry, this shedding or “stripping,” as he calls it, is made possible only in “the absence of human society.” He states, “The necessities of foot travel in this steep country have stripped away all superfluities. I simply could not enter into this place and assume its quiet with all the belongings of a family man, property holder, etc. For the time, I am reduced to my irreducible self” (677). By walking through the woods without the cumbers of all his worldly obligations and through the subsequent effects of that walking (i.e., the quieting and the reducing of the obligations of the worldly self), Berry discovers his natural self, what he calls his “irreducible self.”
This discovery happens not only in the process of walking-in-the-woods but in the process of walking-on-the-page, and Berry points to this play. Note the tense he uses as he states, “Slowly my mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of” (678). He writes as though he is walking in the woods at this moment. And, he notes that by walking in nature (and now in the essay), he no longer simply observes the quiet of the woods; he becomes a part of it. I would suggest, then, that for Berry, discovering the irreducible self involves a return to what he is a part of naturally—nature—while moving away from what is not “natural”—society. This movement, he does not simply describe but enacts in the essay, not only because of the verb tense he uses, but because the essay lingers in and wanders through the issue [of discovering his natural/irreducible self]. The return to the natural self via the movement of the essay seems most important to the work of the essay because through this return, the natural self—the self that is buried/diluted when integrated with society—emerges.
In another famous example of discovering the natural self through the freeing experience of walking in nature, William Hazlitt is able to shed the superfluities or “impediments,” as he calls them, of life in his essay, “On Going a Journey.” Hazlitt states, “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others” (181). Again, Hazlitt is freed in journeying, not only in the described real-world journey, but in the journey enacted in the essay, because the essay provides him with the singularly unimpeded and
