The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue--a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship. (xxiii)
The formal (sometimes called impersonal) essay is characterized by "seriousness of purpose, dignity, logical organization, length...The technique of the formal essay is now practically identical with hat of all factual or theoretical prose writing in which literary effect is secondary to serious purpose." The informal essay, in contrast, is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme, freshness of form, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic." (xxiii-xxiv) The personal essay is a subset of the informal essay...
The personal essay...tends to put the writer's "I" or idiosyncratic angle more at center stage. (xxiv)
To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed. (xlii)
The Personal Essay as a Mode of Thinking and Being (section heading)
Luck and play are what are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss. it says what is at issue and stopes where it feels itself complete--not where nothing is left to say..." (Adorno, qtd. on xliii)
Robert Louis Stevenson on the "idler" "He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood."
The unashamed subjectivity of the person essay... (xliii)
The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them" (Alexander Smith, qt. on p. xliv)
Naturally, essayists who honor the flow of their thoughts may often contradict themselves. But what would be a flaw in the systems-building philosopher may be an essential step for the essayist... The essay's capacity for processing doubt is part of what makes it so stimulating and tonic. (xliv)
The essay is the enactment of a process by which the soul realizes itself even as it is passing from day to day and from moment to moment. (O.B. Hardison, Jr., xliv)
The self-consciousness and self-reflection that essay writing demands cannot help but have an influence on the personal essayist's life. Montaigne confesses at one point that "in modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me." Thus the writing of personal essays not only monitors the self but helps it gel. The essay is an enactment of the creation of the self. (xliv)
In the final analysis, the personal essay represents a mode of being. It points a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world. Skeptical yet gyroscopically poised, undeceived but finally tolerant of flaws and inconsistencies, this mode of being suits the modern existential situation, which Montaigne first diagnosed. His recognition that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one had to make oneself up from moment to moment. (xliv)
key terms: intimacy, candor, irony, experimental, self-reflective, "tolerance for the fragmentary and irresolution," amble, ironic modesty, self-contradiction
"the genre's virtues: curiosity; openness; appetite for pleasure; willingness to reflect, to give oneself up to "random provocations," nature, beauty. All this adds up to the capacity for perception. (xxxiv)
Mark: "Those who speed-read for general argument may be frustrated by the personal essay, which is neither a legal brief nor an editorial." (l)
Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their ignorance. Just as often as they tell us what they know, they ask at the beginning of an exploration of a problem what it is they don't know--and why. They follow the clue of their ignorance through the maze. (xxvii)
...a strong suit for the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand...into a grand meditational adventure. (xxviii)
...the personal essayist tries to make his many partial selves dance to the same beat--to unite, through force of voice and style, these discordant, fragmentary personae so that the reader can accept them as issuing from one coherent self. (xxix)
...the personal essayist is not necessarily out to win the audience's unqualified love but to present the complex portrait of a human being. (xxix)
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