Abstract

In a challenging essay on Emerson as an essayist, William Gass complains about all the his colleagues are writing, those awful objects full of footnotes and scholarly defenses. He wishes that more of us would turn to writing again-informal, experimental, open-ended, personal pieces, like Emerson's (25). No one would dispute, I think, that the article in Gass' sense dominates the scholarly journals. To get something published anymore we need to pretend that everything is clear, that our arguments are unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections (Gass 25), and that means submitting articles rather than essays. Why is that? Why has the essay as a form declined in the academic world, even as has gained in popularity outside the academic world? As Joseph Epstein has recently said in his own essay about the essay, it is a sweet time to be an essayist; the essay is taking up the slack for the novel (411). Why is that true outside of academe when the opposite is the case inside? Chesterton gives us one perspective on these questions in the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, a book, like all of Chesterton's books, which is nothing more than a long, associative set of essays. Chesterton is a quintessential essayist, quick to write and generalize, informal yet detached, always playing over the field of his own immediate experience and reading. In these opening paragraphs of the autobiography, he quickly claims the ground that I think all essays claim when he admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of his own birth and the circumstances of his early childhood and so must accept on faith the evidence of his existence: Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of Higher Criticism. It is possible, by employing the skeptical methods of contemporary philosophy and criticism, to argue that he was never born at all. He cannot prove that he was. But I prefer Chris Anderson is assistant professor of English and Composition Coordinator at Oregon State University. His book, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, was published last year by Southern Illinois University Press, and he has edited and contributed to another book for Southern Illinois, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, to be published this fall.