Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship

Author(s): Chris Anderson

Source: College English, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Mar., 1988), pp. 300-308
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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Chris Anderson

Essay
Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class
Citizenship

In a challenging essay on Emerson as an essayist, William Gass complains about

all the "articles" his colleagues are writing, those "awful" objects full of footnotes and scholarly defenses. He wishes that more of us would turn to writing

"essays" 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 it 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 "hearsay 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.

College English, Volume 50, Number 3, March 1988

300

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Essay Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship 301

to believe," he says, in that blustering, pragmatic, late Victorian tone, "that

common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that
they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts" (1-2).
It seems to me that the essay as a form "brackets" epistemological questions
about "origins," to borrow from the language of contemporary criticism, in just
the way that Chesterton does here. The essay implicitly says, "We're not going
to get into all that. That's not the game we're playing here." The essay by convention assumes an audience of common sense and the existence of common

sense in a gesture very much like Dr. Johnson kicking a stone to disprove
Berkelian idealism. This is not to suggest that such an audience actually exists or
that these epistemological questions are not worth going into, although this is
clearly Chesterton's implication. My point is simply about the conventions of
genre, or, to put it another way, the kind of audience or reader the essay requires us to be. If we accept the rules of this game, we have claimed a space for
inquiry and conversation in which a number of a priori assumptions are allowed:
the stones we kick are here, people are born, there are origins-let's operate in
the realm of "human evidence" rather than prescinding from the everyday with
skeptical deconstructions.
If this is true for all essays, it's obvious why the essay as a form has declined
in the academic world, at least in literary scholarship, since the preoccupation of
literary criticism in the last twenty years has been precisely with the question of
origins and the possibility of making meaning, or the impossibility of it. Literary
critics, whatever their particular persuasions, cannot take as a priori the assumptions Chesterton wants us to make, or accept the world Chesterton projects for
his audience. "In even the most experimental essay writing," Epstein says, alluding to the essays of Gass, "there is something old shoe about the relationship
between the essayist and the reader." The essay has no "avant-garde tradition"
(410-11). Contemporary scholarship since structuralism has not been able to be
old shoe in any way, not in its relationship to the reader or to the text. It must
labor in an avant-garde atmosphere in which no assumptions about words can be
taken for granted. The essay allows for instant flight; the articles necessitated by
poststructuralism cannot let anything off the ground.

I think this is why the essay is flourishing outside of academe. Certainly in my

own experience as a reader, it's a relief to know that I won't be required to fill
gaps and sort out extensive terminology and question the grounds of the text's
authority and the author's authority and my own authority as a reader or a part
of my own culture. When I started Chesterton's autobiography, I relaxed. I was
glad to be on this ground, in this territory, where I could escape the rigors and
demands of epistemological skepticism, or various assaults on it. Maybe it's nostalgia the essay as a form evokes and satisfies. Suddenly I was in the parlor with
the overstuffed furniture and the oriental rugs waiting for tea to be served and
conversing in a shared, accepted language about the real concerns of my own
experience.
I wouldn't feel this relief or this comfort if I didn't take the demands and the

skepticism of contemporary theory seriously. I am vulnerable to that deconstructing skepticism, and I consider a certain amount of that kind of philosophizing essential. Deconstruction-bashing is too easy, and it's not entirely fair.

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302 College English

Not all that's being written is obscure and reductive, though much of it is. What
I'm trying to describe is simply the tonic rhetorical effect of the essay as it clears
a place for me to occupy, as it offers me shelter from the rigors of the articles I
try to write and have to read.

Chesterton's allusion to the "Higher Criticism" brings to mind Frank Kermode's exploration of biblical hermeneutics in The Genesis of Secrecy, which I
think can stand for what is so decidedly unessayistic in most contemporary literary scholarship. Kermode's project is to explore the implications of biblical hermeneutics for contemporary literary criticism, and vice versa. What he discovers is the inevitable intertextuality of the biblical record, the impossibility of
recovering origins, the presence everywhere of narratives biased or constructed
by the fictions of authors. All is midrash of some primal reality we can never get
at: "We glimpse secrecy through the meshes of a text; this is divination, but
what is divined is what is visible from our angle." Texts are always tricking us.

They are "hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing; we stand alone before

them, aware of their arbitrariness and impenetrability, knowing that they may be
narratives only because of our impudent intervention, and susceptible of interpretation only by our hermetic tricks" (144-45). We catch here a kind of sadness, I think, an intimation of Kermode's own nostalgia for the conventions of
common sense the essay claims. But nothing could be further from Chesterton's
English down-to-earthness and impatience for subtleties than Kermode's resignation to intertextuality, his-it seems to me-unhappy acceptance of textual ni-

hilism. Chesterton simply steps outside the conclusions of these "skeptical

methods." Kermode is trapped inside, unable to get out.
On this level it makes a great deal of sense that Chesterton would turn to the
essay form to conduct his long defense of orthodox Christianity. The realm of
human experience the essay claims as its territory is the same realm where religious sensibility develops. If Chesterton can get us to accept the terms of the
essay as a genre, we are well on our way to accepting the terms of religious experience.
But there is something else decidedly unessayistic in Kermode's study of biblical criticism. In his view, given the complexities of reading, only privileged insiders can know the sacred truths of textuality. In a severe interpretation of
Mark 4: 11-12, Kermode concludes that the purpose of Christ's parables is to exclude, not to instruct. The passage from Mark is a difficult text:
To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand,; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven. (Revised Standard Version)

Kermode argues that speaking in parables is finally the opposite of openly proclaiming. Despite the softenings of Matthew and Luke and John, he insists that
Mark's version of Christ's disturbing statement can only mean that "stories are
always enigmatic and sometimes terrible" and that-most importantly-sacred
narratives necessarily exclude all but the elected, privileged few, "banishing interpreters from their secret places" (33). Taken as a model for literary criticism,

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Essay Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship 303

this reading of biblical hermeneutics-and it is representative of the prevailing
attitude in literary theory today-presupposes a small, exclusive fraternity of
trained interpreters necessarily given to obscure readings of the sacred texts of
culture. The common reader, the reader of common sense, need not apply.
All scholarly publication in the wake of poststructuralism-whether pro or
con, liberal or conservative, theoretical or practical-must take into account this
poststructuralist program. Scholarship today must accept, deny, or qualify the
poststructuralist claims, and that inevitably involves it in a highly technical, conceptually difficult set of terms and problems that excludes the casual reader.
Certainly historical, philological, linguistic, and other specialized studies go on
completely to the side of these controversies, but they can avoid the issues only
by becoming increasingly specialized themselves and thus inaccessible to the uninitiated. When it isn't mired in ontological speculations, contemporary schol-

arship often seems hopelessly "balkanized," to borrow a term from Wilbur

Samuel Howell (299). As Howell observed of the shift from Renaissance to modern rhetoric, in the absence of an agreed upon model for morality and ethics and

intellectual inquiry, scholarship became more and more technical, more and

more incapable of communicating across discipline lines.

This, too, sheds light on why the essay has declined in the academic world.
The essay is fundamentally democratic. It enfranchises both the reader and the
writer. The seminal text in this regard is Emerson's great essay "The American
Scholar," which argues for the liberation of American culture from the tyranny
of European scholarship and champions the capacity of the average person to
read and understand both the sacred texts of culture and of his own experience.
The "American Scholar," the "Man Thinking," is the essayist in every sense of
the term. He is a reader and thinker without pedantry. He is someone who contemplates the grand ideas of philosophy in the ordinary language of concrete experience. Such a capacity to think is not, Emerson declares, "the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man." It does not depend on "custom or authority" but "springs spontaneous from the mind's own
sense of good and fair" (90). The enabling assumption of the essay form is that
all of us can write essays and all of us can read them. They are not mysterious,
secret midrashes understandable only by the circumcised. We are all circumcised, which is not to say that the truth is fixed and immutable but only that the
ability to chart and follow that truth in all its ambiguous, complex forms is not
the privilege of the few. "I had better never see a book than to be warped by its
attraction clean out of my own orbit," Emerson says (89-90). We are not trapped
in texts as far as he is concerned. We always have recourse to our own instinct
and vision and imagination: "When we can read God directly, the hour is too
precarious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings" (91).
Emerson's vatic, prophetic enthusiasm is far different in tone from Chesterton's common sense. Yet in Emerson's notion of the prophetic capacity of each
individual there is the same assumption that we can (all of us, writers and readers alike) share certain premises and engage in the same enterprise. For both
Emerson and Chesterton the key is what Emerson calls "self-trust." "Self" is
precisely what for Kermode and all of contemporary criticism we cannot trust.

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304 College English

The author is the first to disappear. We cannot rely on what Emerson would call
instinct or inspiration, what Chesterton would call "human evidence."
It's not that the essay is easy to write and requires no training. Emerson presupposes in his enthusiasm that the common man has received a liberal education and can draw on the great books of the canon. Hazlitt's famous definition of
the familiar style describes the same balance of education and instinct:
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as any one would speak
in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or
who could discourse with ease, force, and perpescuity, setting aside all pedantic
and oratorial flourishes. (242)

The naturalness of the essay can take place only as a result of the sort of education that gives us a "command" of words. But the emphasis here is on the absence of pedantry and oratory. What Emerson and Hazlitt both want to insist is
that any educated person can engage in this conversation. It is not exclusive. It
is not secretive. In its oracular lack of sequence, "The American Scholar" is difficult and demanding in its own way, but the question is not relative readability.
Emerson's project is to use a charged, heightened version of our own language
to awaken us to the transcendental possibilities of ordinary experience.
The notion of the essay's spontaneity is important for the same reason. Emer-

son's belief that genuine intellectual activity '"springs spontaneous from the
mind's own sense of good and fair" sounds a good deal like Wordsworth's definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in
tranquility. There is a tradition in essay writing of fast composition. There is the

legend, for example, of Johnson composing his Rambler essays while a

messenger waited at the door. More recently there is Lewis Thomas' confession
that he writes his essays late at night without an outline "or planning in advance," as fast as he can (The Youngest Science 243). The conversational, associative, digressive style of most modern essays reflects or simulates this spontaneity of composition. As Thomas says of Montaigne, he "simply turned his
mind loose and wrote whatever he felt like writing" (The Medusa and the Snail
121).
The romantic ideal of spontaneity, like that of sincerity, is notoriously difficult to verify. Who knows how long an essayist may labor to create the impression of thinking aloud? Or how easily and quickly a writer may produce a tight,
systematic anaylsis? Coleridge, after all, revised the manuscript for Kubla Khan
over many years, despite his claim that the vision of the pleasure dome came to
him, nearly whole, in a dream. The real issue for Emerson and others in the
essay tradition is access. Their implicit claim is that the essay is not the product
of long, arduous, abstruse research and is thus available to us, a conversation
we can join in with the credentials we already have at hand.
The essay, in other words, is not professional. "The last place one is likely to
find the essayist," Epstein says, "'is in the pages of the PMLA" (400). At least
since the New Criticism English as a profession has been trying to establish itself as a discipline of methodologies as viable as those of science. Structuralism
and poststructuralism are very much in this same spirit, assuming as they do that

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Essay Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship 305

the critic needs special training and expertise to negotiate the linguistic land

mines of the novels and poems of the canon. But "the essayist," in Gass'
phrase, "is an amateur, a Virginia Woolf who has merely done a little reading
up" (25).
We are talking here about two very different realms, realms that both need to
exist. We need more than essays to keep alive what we know about literature

and the humanities. We need, for example, historical and philological scholarship, the kind of research that only the article can effectively communicate.
These are privileged fraternities, rightly so, and they create valuable things for a
culture. But again, note the psychological, rhetorical effect of the essay, the
space the essay allows the reader to inhabit. The same amateurism and democratic character that make the essay inappropriate for contemporary scholarship
make it more and more appealing to readers weary of the hierarchies and fraternities of scholarship, however necessary they may be. It is a place of refuge for
all of us excluded by the priestly indeterminists. Here the enabling agreement is
that Matthew is right and that the purpose of the parables is to make the divine
understandable by embodying it in concrete forms. The epsay assumes that all of
us can be saved.

One of the further ironies here is that the form of the essay, far more than the

form of the article, acknowledges uncertainy and ambiguity. Most of the

poststructuralist theorists I have read use the form of the article to make their
claims about indeterminacy, and that has involved them in the contradiction of
arguing for gaps and uncertainties in hard and fast ways. They are dogmatic
about indeterminacy, insistent. The systematic form of the article lends itself
well to their scholastic demonstrations of the inadequacy of language. But the
essay is by definition an attempt. It is, in Emerson's phrase, a reflection of the
"Man thinking"; that is, man in the act of contemplation. Or as Gass would put
it, the essay embodies "activity-the process, the working, the wondering" (25).
It doesn't pretend that everything is clear and worked out. It "turns round and
round upon its topic, exposing this aspect and then that; proposing possibilities,
reciting opinions, disposing of prejudice and even of the simple truth itself as too
undeveloped, not yet of an interesting age" (25).
Roland Barthes is a notable exception to the contemporary reliance on the article, since in nearly all of his work he performs his argument, digressing, proposing and abandoning theses, dramatizing the processes of thought, refusing to
reduce the text to a manufacturable thesis. Indeed, from Barthes' perspective I
am wrong to tie the poststructuralist program to the "article" per se. The preeminent practitioners of poststructuralist theory-as distinct now from their

more stolid disciples-write a subtler, much more elusive, much less conven-

tional kind of prose, prose in which the premises shift and turn and invert them-

selves over the course of the analysis and in which the transitions are much
more daring and tenuous. But in these cases, contemporary scholarship is even
more unessayistic, perhaps because it is much more ambitious than the essay
ever can be. The project in these cases is to write philosophy on the grandest
scale or to produce a kind of literature itself, at least a literary theory equal in

stature to the literature it is about.

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306 College English

Perhaps it all comes down to some contemporary version of Matthew Arnold's notion that poetry will take over the role of religion. Contemporary criticism has located questions of ontology and meaning in language, so that all phi-

losophy becomes literary criticism, or vice versa. If literature has taken the
place of religion, criticism has taken the place of theology (albeit a negative theology). That's a great burden for the interpreter of literature, whether he or she

chooses to write an obscure, technical article or a more flamboyant, experimental, avant-garde prose. The burdens are greater for readers of this prose as
well, who must give it the same attentive reading and rereading she or he in the
past reserved for philosophy or literature.
The essayist doesn't choose to shoulder the burdens of philosophy or literature. "A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay," Epstein says. It
must be "straightforward, flexible, and conversational." The essayist must always keep in mind that "the last word cannot be his." Most of all, "however
much art there may be in his writing, the essayist cannot hide behind the claim
to be an artist" (400, 404). Essayists make leaps, generalize with a certain risky
disregard for system, but they don't make great claims for these leaps. They admit that they are simply leaps. As Edward Hoagland puts it in still another essay
on the essay, "though more wayward or informal than an article or treatise, the
essay contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn't be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used" (223). No matter how concrete
and subtle and brilliantly dramatized, the essay doesn't require from the reader
the same act of interpretation that a poem or novel requires, or the same kind of

concentration that a philosophical treatise demands. The essay is more "literary" than the article in that it is concrete, reveals the personality of the writer,
and doesn't "prove" a thesis. Yet it has a thesis. It has a point, and one that all
of us can get. That's why the essay inevitably has a problematic status in American letters, since in American literature opaqueness is the source of literary and
philosophical prestige. That's why the essay doesn't appear very often anymore
in the journals. The journals have much larger philosophical ambitions.

"The essayist," E. B. White cheerfully acknowledges, "unlike the novelist,

the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-

class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other
earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the
essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence" (vii). White isn't bitter about his
status. He is a "happy practitioner" of the form without aspirations for anything
greater. His gain from this resignation is space to work in. The pressure is not as
great; thus the free and happy existence White evokes. The fact that some essay
writing becomes literature anyway is a bonus, a gift.
Similarly Epstein implies that the essayist is someone who wants to write but
isn't up to the forms of the novel or the poem. But he or she needs some form to
write in. The happy essayist, the successful essayist, is one who simply accepts
his or her limitations and is thus able to produce writing that, while less exalted
than the original object, nonetheless is interesting and important in its own way.

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Essay Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship 307

The essay form thus suspends the critical, theoretical, and literary anxiety of influence, and for the reader as much as for the writer. Coming to the essay we

know that we will not be subject to the metafictive and fabulist demands of
much contemporary fiction and poetry or to the difficult, mind-jarring analyses
of these demands in a commentary. We have the right, given the conventions, to

ask, as Epstein puts it, "What's the point, bub?" and then expect from the
essayist an answer (411).
I don't mean to suggest that I read only essays-that we shouldn't have novels and poems, shouldn't have difficult, metafictive, ontologically probing novels
and poems, that we shouldn't have difficult criticism of these works. I mean
here only to describe the attraction of the world we enter when we accept the
terms of the essay as a form. I mean only to account for the success of the essay
in some circles and its inappropriateness in others.
Certainly I am generalizing, too, from my own experience, in part my experience as a writer. Virginia Woolf said of the essay that it is "the medium which
makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas
to the world" (150). As someone of ordinary intelligence, I find that statement
heartening. As someone struggling to gain professional accreditation, someone
with a desire to write, someone trying to understand the important-and excit-

ing-questions generated by contemporary criticism, someone who has published some scholarly articles and had others rejected, I find the essay an in-

creasingly compelling model. The acceptance of second-class citizenship in

exchange for freedom of movement is beginning to strike me as a pretty good

bargain. I want the deconstructionists and postdeconstructionists to keep struggling with the ontological nightmare. I take as an article of faith that as in all
scholarly endeavors some important measure of all that work is telling us something we really need to know. I suppose that all I want is a space in which I can
function as well. Live and let live, I say.
Besides, if poststructuralist theory is right that all experience, literary or
otherwise, is a matter of conventions offered and accepted or rejected, the game
that the essay wants us to play is just as valid as any other. It doesn't necessarily claim that the ontological questions aren't there. It simply says, for now
they don't apply. For now join with me in assuming certain things and we can
get a good deal of work done. Accept these conventions and we can accomplish
at least the pleasure of discourse on important ideas. More than that, if contemporary criticism and philosophy are right that language generates rather than discovers ideas, then the language of the essay generates a world as well. It's very
close to the world we think we live in, the world of Chesterton's human evidence. It's certainly a world worth inhabiting, however provisionally.
Works Cited

Chesterton, G. K. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. New York: Sheed,

1936.

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308 College English

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." The Complete Works. Ed.
Edward Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton,
1903. 81-115. 12 vols. 1903-04.

Epstein, Joseph. "Piece Work: Writing the Essay." Plausible Prejudices. New
York: Norton, 1985. 379-411.

Gass, William H. "Emerson and the Essay." Habitations of the Word. New
York: Simon, 1985. 9-49.

Hazlitt, William. "On Familiar Style." The Complete Works. Ed. P. P. Howe.
Vol. 8. London: Dent, 1932. 242-48. 24 vols. 1930-34.

Hoagland, Edward. "What I Think, What I Am." The Tugman's Passage. New
York: Random, 1982. 24-27.

Howell, Wilbur Samuel. "Renaissance Rhetoric and Modern Rhetoric: A Study

in Change." The Province of Rhetoric. Ed. Joseph Schwartz and John
Rycenga. New York: Ronald, 1965. 292-308.
Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1979.
Thomas, Lewis. The Medusa and the Snail. New York: Viking, 1974.

-- . The Youngest Science. New York: Bantam, 1983.

White, E. B. The Essays ofE. B. White. New York: Harper, 1977.

Woolf, Virginia. "Addison." The Common Reader. First and Second Series.
New York: Harcourt, 1948. 137-51.

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