Essayism E-Book

Brian Dillon

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention.      How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It's an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute – from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne – Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.

Leseprobe

‘Dillon’s brilliantly roaming, roving set of essays on essays is a recursive treasure, winkling out charm, sadness and strangeness; stimulating, rapturous and provocative in its own right.’

— Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

‘Brian Dillon has written a moving and vulnerable love letter to the essay as a genre – a region wherein fragmentation provides secret consolation. Depression and essayism, he brilliantly demonstrates, are twins. His own language has never been so sharp, suggestive, coiled – deliciously given over to idiosyncrasy. Interpretive treats abound: Dillon’s appreciations of Hardwick, Barthes, Sebald, and other fellow travellers are beautiful acts of critical generosity and acumen. All these wonders occur within a shattering account of literature’s power not to alleviate gloom but to justify (by illuminating) the fits and starts of consciousness.’

— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation

‘This book may hover (inter alia) around Montaigne’s famous tumble from his horse; only, in Dillon’s hands, it’s the essay itself that’s tumbling, crashing through the strata of its history, all its previous landscapes (those of Woolf, Hardwick, Blanchot, Cioran…) fragmenting and spinning in delirious recombinations.’

— Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island

‘Brian Dillon’s gymnastic brain here embodies the long shadows and descriptive delicacies of many essayist masters: it is a searing and addictive voice, ambitious to probe all corners of this condition called writing.’

— Helen Marten, winner of 2016 Turner Prize

ESSAYISM

BRIAN DILLON

For Emily LaBarge

‘Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must prove permanent by fracture.’

— William Carlos Williams, ‘An Essay on Virginia’ (1925)

‘Let us talk about it as though it existed.’

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphOn essays and essayistsOn originsOn EssayismOn listsOn dispersalOn anxietyOn consolationOn styleOn extravaganceOn tasteOn sentencesOn melancholyOn consolationOn the fragmentOn aphorismsOn the detailOn divergingOn consolationOn talking to yourselfOn coherenceOn vulnerabilityOn consolationOn attentionOn curiosityOn consolationOn starting againReadingsAcknowledgementsCurrent and forthcoming books by Fitzcarraldo EditionsAbout the AuthorCopyright

¶ On essays and essayists. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word ‘lumber’; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the author’s brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift or dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again requires the reader to page back in wonder – how did we get from there to ? – before the writer’s skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on death, preached in the poet’s final days on earth, before a picture of his own shrouded person; the metaphoric power of same: the womb a grave, the grave a whirlpool, Death’s hand stretched to save us; a long read; a short history of decay; a diary’s prompt towards self-improvement: ‘To sew on my buttons (and button my lip)’; on a dancer arrayed like an insect or a ray of light; love, alphabetized; life, alphabetized; every second of a silent clown’s appearance on screen, dissected: ‘We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death’; on the cows outside the window: their movement and mass, their possible emotions; what happened next will amaze you; upon a time a dutiful thing, set and judged by teachers, proof because proof needed – of what? Compliance, competence and comprehension, proper meanness of ambition; but later, discovered in the library and under the bedclothes: sparks or scintillations, stabs at bewilderment, some effort or energy flung at the void; and style too, scurrilous entertainments, a writing that’s all surface, torsion and poise, something so artful it can hardly be told from disarray; an art among others of the sidelong glance, obliquities and digressions; an addiction to arduous learning; a study of punctuation marks, their meaning and morality; seven Dada manifestos, forty-one false starts, the writer’s technique in thirteen theses; an account of what passed through the author’s mind in the seconds before a stagecoach crash, somewhere on the road between Manchester and Glasgow, ‘in the second or third summer after Waterloo’. The writing of the disaster. Confessions, cool memories, a collection of sand. Curiosities. The philosophy of furniture. An account of the late eclipse. What was it like to fly high above the capital, through silver mist and hail, when flying was yet new? The answer: ‘Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.’