The Essay Genre

Essay-writing is a flexible and subjective art. It ranges from reasoned intellectual argument to the travel essay, specializing, as Philip Lopate puts it, in misadventure, to the personal essay, which constitutes, in Samuel Johnson’s felicitous phrase, ‘a loose sally of the mind’. To essay is to test out a position, and the essayist, according to Theodor Adorno, writes in full consciousness of the fragmentary nature of his art, seeking a utopian illumination through its practice yet acutely aware that his gesture can only ever be provisional and incomplete. For Adorno, the essay's incompleteness is a mark of subversive thought, a challenge to culture's claims to naturalness and a rejection of what he calls the ‘royal road to origins’ (p. 11). Instead, the essayist always speculates on pre-existing material, and he or she is a ‘childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him’ (p. 4). The essayist thus envisaged is a reader, or even a re-reader, in a rebellious and intertextual mode – an image which, as we shall see, anticipates Goytisolo's own view of the role of the intellectual as subversive re-reader of the literary canon.

In his study of essay-writing in twentieth-century Spain, Thomas Mermall argues that the essayist seeks to dramatize ideas in a form of writing that is synthetic, urgent, and economical. Agreeing with Adorno that the essay is prey to chance and idiosyncrasy, Mermall suggests that it manifests a tension between subjective and objective modes of discourse. The writer offers both observed facts and personal intuition in support of his argument, which is characterized by the ‘interdependence of observation and introspection, intuition and logic’. The ‘genuine’ essay, Mermall states, ‘conveys an aesthetic emotion […], a certain tone, style, or personal manner’.