John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Wood and What We Talk About When We Talk About Essays

Reissuing a piece of magazine journalism in book form and calling it an essay adds literary cachet to it, making it seem indeed worthy of a place between book covers. I've noted this happening in the case of Joan Didion and now it's happening with John Jeremiah Sullivan and his book,"Pulphead."

I admit that I have not read Sullivan's book yet, but I suspect that although it is sub-titled "Essays," most of the magazine stories collected in it did not appear under that rubric in GQ and wherever else they were published. The pieces most often mentioned by reviewers do sound like they are indeed magazine stories -- i.e. narratives based on reportage.

An essay is, by definition, not a story, not a narrative. And if Sullivan's pieces do contain strong essayistic elements in them,and you do not wish to call them simply magazine stories, then you would have to call them chronicles. When a narrative turns essayistic, or an essay turns narrative, what you are reallly talking about is a chronicle.

Still, "essays" were what Sullivan or his publisher chose to call his pieces, and in I way I find this encouraging. It could mean that publishers have begun to realize that essays are not sales poison. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in publishing was that essays rated beneath even short stories among genres to be avoided.

Perhaps publishers have cottoned onto the fact that essays do indeed have literary cachet, so much so as to lead even an eminent literary critic like James Wood of the New Yorker to review Sullivan's magazine pieces as though they were indeed examples of the literary essay. (Of course, in getting the God-obsessed Wood's attention, it must have helped that one of Sullivan's stories was about a Christian rock concert.) Which works out to be unintentionally funny at times, because Wood seems unaware that many of the story-telling strategies that he remarks in Sullivan, including what he calls "the postmodernity" of showing us a story's workings, have long been hackneyed ploys in magazine writing (though I'm sure Sullivan is talented enough to have freshened them up a bit.)

Still, I would like to believe that Wood is correct when he writes in this review: "The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction." Of course, when he talks about the contemporary essay he is really talking about the contemporary chronicle.

Pulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

The Essay vs. the Chronicle

In the Guardian, Harry Mount — the editor of Notting Hill Editions Journal in England, which commissions a new essay every week — tries to define what an essay is: "Any shortish passage of non-fiction which makes a general argument."

I don't at all agree as to length being part of the definition. An essay does not cease to be an essay when it becomes a book (which, of course, does not constitute a literary genre,) just as a chronicle does not. Alain de Botton's "The Art of Travel" and "The Architecture of Happiness" are definitely essays despite being also books.

As to an essay having to make a general argument, I suppose that is how it differs from the chronicle, which is more concerned with depiction and narrative than argument, though it can be as thought-filled as any essay.

But what Harry Mount had to say about the autobiographical essay applies also to the chronicle: "You could write 50,000 words about yourself, and it could be an essay in every regard. It sounds banal, but all that matters is quality of writing and thought. "

He then goes on to list 10 exceptional essays. I found the list interesting because two of the essays are actually works of reportage, reminding me of how Joan Didion's pieces are now called essays when they were originally magazine features and examples of the New Journalism.

Harry Mount justified it this way: "Brilliant reportage leaps its chains and becomes an essay."

I think Harry Mount is right in suspecting that "brilliant reportage" leaps out of its genre into another -- but since a report usually has no general argument to make, and is more concerned with depiction and narrative, that other genre would not be the essay but the chronicle. The same applies to Didion's pieces: if they are to be considered more than magazine features, then call them chronicles.