essayism (brian dillon)

Dillon’s succinct and rather beautiful book weaves the personal with the enthusiast with the academic, as he discourses on the nature of the essay. His references range from Barthes to Derrida to La Rochefoucauld and Bacon, also taking in Didion and Hardwick and Cioran. The book consists of approximately twenty five essays, some themed around a particular writer, others more discursive, and others still plainly autobiographical. As much as an investigation into the possibilities, limitations and wonder of the essay form, this is also a book about how essays can save your life, which is no small beer. Much of Dillon’s reading echoes favourites of mine, or of any curious soul with intellectual leanings born in the late sixties, even if Dillon is Irish rather than British (we are not so very different). In part, as well, this is another examination from the Fitzcarraldo stable of those intellectual waters which exist at the margin of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, and therefore attract the outsider, the one who seeks an intellectual framework above and beyond that handed down by the syllabus. (The patron saint of this line of thought, a figure who has now recurred in three Fitzcarraldo books I have read this year, is Sebald, who I have failed to engage with as furiously as Dillon, Cooper and Mallo.) Dillon balances the lure of the likes of Barthes, Derrida and Cioran with Sebald, Hardwick, Brookner and Didion, but it is still intriguing to see the way in which the former bunch of deconstructionists, essayists, aphorists and creative philosophers have become a kind of scapegoat for the intellectual echelons of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the apogee of all that is wrong in a world where ethics and profit are supposed to be happy bedfellows. The outsiders, those who struggle to find a place in this world, are drawn to the sinuous prose of Barthes, or the arcane mysteries of Derrida. It is also interesting to note that, in celebrating the essay, Dillon celebrates a profoundly un-commercial form of writing (it has not always been so, because there was a time when the essay was the most profitable format out there), one which has none of the commercial clout of the novel or the screenplay. Dillon, like his stablemates Cooper and Penman, would appear to be a survivor of the war against the intellectual that is rigorously waged on British soil, and his book is a triumph of complex simplicity and the shining power of the marriage of word and idea.