Borges and the Essay

Literature courts its own demise

I’m currently reading a collection of Jorge Luis Borges’s nonfiction, which includes his essay on novels and magic, among many other supremely interesting pieces—there is writing on World War II, literature, the illusion of the self, and the concept of infinity, to name a few.

Borges was apparently a prolific essayist. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine) from the introduction to the collection, which was written by Eliot Weinberger (himself a notable essayist):

The English-language reader may well be misled by the practice of many of the major modern Anglo-American writers and assume that Borges’ essays are merely addenda to the fiction or poetry, and now of interest mainly to fans or scholars. In Latin America, however, it is frequently said that the best Borges is the essayist: the place where nearly all the ideas that propel the short stories, and many more, are elaborated in lively, different, and more detailed ways. (…)

In English, unlike many other languages, the essay has played a minor role in twentieth-century literature. In contrast to the other writing forms, there is almost no criticism on the essay, no articulated recognition of the way an essay may be written, and other than comments on its content, no consensus or dissent on how it should be read. At the present moment, it is largely represented by certain of its subgenres—memoir, travel writing, personal journalism, book review, academic criticism—and the kind of free-ranging essay that Borges wrote is almost entirely absent from periodicals, outside of small literary journals.

Abroad, essays in an unlimited variety of styles appear daily in the cultural supplements of newspapers or in large-circulation intellectual magazines. They tend to be written by poets or novelists, and it is often the case that the writers are known or respected as poets or novelists, but actually read as essayists. This is the milieu in which Borges wrote: much of the work here first appeared in newspapers. In that world, it was expected that essays be as fascinating as stories, and it is revealing that, perhaps in order for his fiction to be read, he started out by disguising his stories as essays.

Borges wrote in an environment in which essays were popular—they showed up in magazines and newspapers, not just small literary journals.

It’s not exactly surprising that essays were more popular in Borges’s world than ours; what is surprising is the suggestion that essays were even more popular than stories. (What a curious thought that Borges would have been motivated to “disguise” his stories as essays in order for them to be read.)

This reminds me of David Foster Wallace: multiple times, I’ve observed people recommend his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again over his fiction. This has always been odd to me, because even though I love his essays, I love his fiction even more. But it gets at the point that people actually like reading essays. Or at least people like reading the right kind of essay: “free-ranging” is the way Weinberger describes it. DFW’s essay are certainly free-ranging, and he is probably the only essayist whose name is familiar to many people in the contemporary English-speaking world.

Most of DFW’s essays were written because a magazine paid him to write about some specific topic—cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign. He was paid to be a journalist, not an essayist. This is very different from the context in which Borges was writing; DFW stands out because he defied his context, the conventions of journalism, so much. What makes “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” so great is the way it is constantly dodging the journalistic pretense—it’s about a hundred pages, and there’s no point to it.

The reason the free-ranging essay is mostly missing from the last few decades of the English-speaking world is the domination of journalism as the pretense for nonfiction writing, a pretense which hampered “free-ranging” writing and writing that attempted to figure things out, which only continued to spiral into narrower corridors of intellectual and artistic scope as the internet and social media came to be the determinants of reading.

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Paul Graham has a fantastic essay on essays. He notes the origin of the word “essay”:

Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

I find this delectable. It’s relatable and weirdly motivating, and it also shines an explanatory light on historical essays—it makes sense to think of them as a person just trying to figure something out. I think this is part of what makes good essays so fun to read: it’s not instruction or even information, it’s thinking together.

He compares an essay to a river. A river winds and meanders in a pattern that appears random, but the path that it finds is the most efficient path to the sea.

The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.

This is how you write free-ranging essays as fascinating as stories:

Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don’t find it. I’d much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.

Graham ends on an optimistic note:

It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can’t say precisely because they’re insiders.

The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.

Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that’s certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.

This was written in 2004 (if you couldn’t tell by the way he says “The Web.”).

I’m not sure that the golden age of the essay was ever realized. Graham didn’t foresee social media and the way it would change our attention and our desires (Facebook was created the same year). It’s possible that the golden age of the essay is still on the horizon, though: I think people want to read essays now more than ever. There’s a reason Substack has been successful at all, despite actively moving against the trend towards narrower, shorter-form, more algorithmic content; we’ve gone down the attention-hole, and we haven’t liked it down there. People are climbing back out, and the people still in the hole will soon die there. The world is desperate and ripe for thoughtful, sincere, free-ranging writing.

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Substack has been described as a return to the golden era of blogs. I’m not sure about this—it’s either too optimistic (is Substack really that great?) or not optimistic enough (did online writing really peak already?)—but anyway maybe it will finally allow the golden era of the essay, or at least establish the essay as a form central to English-speaking culture.

It’s worth considering the differences between Substack and old-fashioned blogs. For starters, we have respected literary minds like George Saunders and Salman Rushdie on here. Such writers did not have blogs in the 2000s (as an illustrative example, Paul Graham is known as a programmer more than a writer—these were the type of people that had blogs, not Rushdie).

But also, Substack is designed as a “newsletter”—a periodical—making it more like a traditional magazine than a blog. Posts on Substack show up to you (on a regular basis) instead of you showing up to them (at your own whim).

Probably more importantly, Substack is a centralized platform for this type of writing. It’s a network of writers and publications. Such a thing has never existed before. This fact encourages “criticism on the essay,” “articulated recognition of the way an essay may be written”—the things Weinberger noted English-speaking culture is lacking, which are required for the development of a form. Substack allows for comparative reading, writer back and forth, meta-discussion, commentary, and, crucially: experimentation.

From a New Yorker article on Eliot Weinberger:

Weinberger also helps us to see that the essay, as a form, can do almost anything, if we’re willing to try. “The essay is the only literary form that didn’t have an avant-garde in the twentieth century.”

What would you call the content of publications like Numb at the Lodge and Secretorum if not avant-garde essays?—We have arrived. Because besides avant-garde, Substack’s independent and nichey structure leads to much more free-ranging essays. It has recreated the environment in which Borges wrote his essays—an environment free of pressures besides the curiosity of the reader; an environment which has demand for essays, or which at least isolates the demand for them and connects it to writers.

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Writers like Borges were often “known or respected as a poet or novelist, but actually read as an essayist,” according to Weinberger, which doesn’t sound like such a bad fate for a writer, and Substack makes this practically and economically feasible once again in the (post-)internet age.

It may just be a fact of reality that readership for poetry and novels isn’t that significant, and composing in these forms isn’t enough to have a career as a writer or even have a readership. So what happens is the only way you can be a poet or a novelist is if you’re also a teacher at a university, and that creates this horrible echo chamber of pretension, which leads to poetry and novels that are disgusting to people outside the academic circle, which further sequesters the writers, and so on and on…

This was eerily presaged by Borges in “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader”, published 1931: “There are no readers left, only potential literary critics,” he says. And: “(…) literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.”