Walking With Words

On assays and essays

The Bombay Literary Magazine is now reading for Issue 61 (August 2025). Wait. Let’s throw in a little more verve. The Bombay Literary Magazine is now reading for Issue 61 (August 2025)! Visit our submission page for guidelines and submit form.

We’ve always accepted fiction, poetry, graphic fiction and translations (fiction/poetry). We are now also accepting essays with a focus on writing and literature. At TBLM headquarters there was some discussion around what to call a literary category that (1) is focused on literary issues; (2) includes self-identified “creative nonfiction”; (3) is the chosen form of Narcissus; (4) is routinely certified dead, autopsied, buried, mourned over and reborn; (5) but isn’t the phoenix; (6) includes narratives drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; and (7) most emphatically rejects Bertrand Russell’s vicious criticism of Frege’s Grundgesetze, viz:

Let w be the predicate of being a predicate that cannot be predicated of itself. Can w be predicated of itself? From either answer follows its contradictory. We must therefore conclude that w is not a predicate. Likewise, there is no class (as a whole) of those classes which, as wholes, are not members of themselves. From this I conclude that under certain circumstances a definable set does not form a whole.

In short, we decided to call this protean, intractable, unclassifiable form what it has always answered to: the essay.

When faced with an abstract, ungrounded category, we can do three things. First, we can offer some examples of the category (partly so that the rules inferred from said examples can be upturned). Thus for Issue 61, Felipe Franco Munhoz will curate a collection of original nonfiction featuring Gina Athena Ulysse, Dana Walrath, Daryl Li, Jeana Scotti, Nada Alturki and Lucrecia Zappi.

Second, we can reach for the metaphor. Indeed, the production of essays on the the essay is something of a small cottage-industry. In our colophon, we reprint a classic essay by Michael Hamburger, a noted poet and critic. Hamburger assays an essay on the essay as a kind of walking with words. We hope it confuses you. Confusion seems to be a pre-requisite for embarking on an essay, just as the desire for precision is a pre-requisite for poetry and the acceptance of uncertainty, for fiction.

Incidentally, Michael Hamburger is not to be confused with the Hamburger method of composing an essay, a method taught to generations of American students to discourage them from ever taking up writing.

Finally, we can choose the third way, perhaps the best way: we can wait to see what you, dear writer, will make of this fascinating form. Happy trekking.

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Colophon: An Essay About Essays

MICHAEL HAMBURGER

EVEN that isn't quite right: an essay really ought not to be on any­ thing, to deal with anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip. So if the title says 'on' that can only mean that this essay passes over a certain field - but with no intention of surveying it. This field will not be ploughed or culti­vated. It will remain a meadow, wild. One walker is interested in wild flowers, another in the view, a third collects insects. Hunting butterflies is permitted. Everything is permitted - everything except the intentions of surveyors, farmers, speculators. And each walker is allowed to report whatever he happens to have observed about the field - even if that was no more than the birds that flew over it, the clouds that have still less to do with it, or only the transmutations of birds or clouds in his own head. But the person who drove there, sat there inside his car and then says he was there is no essayist. That's why the essay is an outmoded genre. ('Form' is what I almost wrote, but the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.)

The essay is just as outmoded as the art of letter-writing, the art of conversation, the art of walking for pleasure. Ever since Montaigne the essay has been highly individualistic, but at the same time it presupposes a society that not only tolerates individualism but enjoys it - a society leisured and cultivated enough to do without informa­ tion. The whole spirit of essay-writing is contained in the first sentence of the first great collection of English essays - Francis Bacon's of 1597: 'What is Truth; said jesting Pilate; And would not stay for an Answer.' A jesting Pilate who asks questions but doesn't wait for answers is the archetypal personification of the essay, of essay-writing and essayists. The English essay flourished for three centuries, even when the earnestness of the Victorian age had begun to question its peculiar relation to truth. Only the totalitarian systems of this century turned walking without a purpose into a crime. Since the time of G. K. Chesterton and Virginia Woolf the essay has been a dead genre. Needless to say, people continued- and still continue­ to write prose pieces which they call essays; but already George Orwell was too 'committed', too puritanical, too much aware of a crisis to take walks without a bad conscience.

The essay is not a form, but a style above all. Its individualism distinguishes it from pure, absolute or autonomous art. The point of an essay, like its justification and its style, always lies in the author's personality and always leads back to it. The essayist is as little concerned with pure, impersonal art as with his subject. Since the vast majority of so-called critical essays attaches primary im­portance to subjects, that is, to answers and judgements, the per­petuation of that genre does not prove that the essay has survived. Most critical essays are short treatises. With a genuine essay it makes no difference whether its title refers to a literary theme, whether to the origin of tragedy or the origin of roast pig.

But since the essay is not a form the spirit of essay-writing can assert itself outside the genre. Where confidence in his readership was lacking, for instance, the essayist often changed into an aphorist. Lichtenberg, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Nietzsche were laconic, partly repressed essayists. Essay-writing insinuated itself even into poetry: a pseudo-epic like Byron's Don Juan or Heine's Atta Troll, whose wit always points back to the personalities of their authors, whose plots are interrupted again and again by their narrators' peripatetic arbitrariness. Story-telling and essay-writing were inseparable in the prose pieces of Robert Walser, and it was no accident that one of them, an outstanding one, was called 'The Walk'. It was the spirit of essay-writing that drove Walser the story­ teller into self-destructive parody:

“In Thuringia, at Eisenach if you like, there lived a so-called beetleologist, who once again had a niece. When shall I have done with nieces and the like? Perhaps never. In that case, woe is me! Grievously the girl in the house next door suffered under learned surveillance... “

Some of the digressions in Musil's The Man without Qualities, too, are genuinely essayistic, because Musil was a seeker, a man without designs who asked questions that he couldn't answer. So are the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. So are many of the shorter writings of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Th. W. Adorno - however weighty their themes.

The spirit of essay-writing walks on irresistibly, even over the corpse of the essay, and is glimpsed now here, now there, in novels, stories, poems or articles, from time to time in the very parkland of philosophy, formidably walled and strictly guarded though it may seem, the parkland from which it escaped centuries ago to wander about in the wild meadow. But it is never glimpsed where that wild meadow has been banned from human consciousness even as a memory or possibility, where walls have become absolute and walk­ ing itself has become a round of compulsion and routine. It has come to terms with the overcrowded streets of large cities, but hardly with factories, barracks, offices, not at all with prison yards and extermina­tion camps. Anyone who can never get these out of his mind cannot tolerate the aimlessness and evasiveness of essay-writing, but calls it shameless, egotistic and insolent. But somewhere or other the spirit of essay-writing is walking on; and no one knows where it will turn up. Perhaps in the essay again, one day?

Reproduced from: Michael Hamburger. Art as Second Nature (1975). Carcanet New Press, Cheadle, UK.

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MICHAEL HAMBURGER (1924-2007) was a British-German poet, critic, and academic. He did the world a favour and translated some of the German works of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald into English. Naturally, he had to be punished for these good deeds, and all future reviews of his own literary work included the phrase “…Hamburger, better known as a translator,…”. Hamburger, better known as a translator, was an amateur horticulturalist.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Banner image: Walking Man I (Homme qui marche), 1960. Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901–1966). Bronze; 180.5 x 27 x 97 cm. Fondation Giacometti. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris, 2022.

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