Barnard College

I’ve often wondered what an essay is—how it differs from fiction, for example, or prose-poetry, or even from reporting. In 2010, many writers and most publishers will tell you that it is the marketing of “essays” and “fiction” that determines the difference between those genres, rather than anything intrinsic to their content or form. In the event, there seems to be a blasé disdain among imaginative writers, and even among some scholarly ones, for the drawing of distinctions—not only between essay and fiction but also between “truth” and “fact.” (There is no such confusion among print publishers of trade books, of course: they know that memoirs sell, fiction might, and essays don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.)

Does anyone else find these confusions and/or erasures of distinctions alarming in a world where world leaders insist that the Holocaust never happened?

Certainly, no one seemed to evince more than a token concern on the panel “The Essay,” on Saturday afternoon, in the small, comfortable, subterranean auditorium of Scandinavia House. The moderator was Susan Harris, editorial director of Words Without Borders; and the participants were the Catalonian novelist and newspaper columnist Quim Manzó; the German novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Peter Schneider; and the French-speaking novelist and screenwriter Jean-Philippe Toussaint. These gentlemen were all charming speakers, and, as Ms Harris gave each a chance to read an excerpt of his work, they all proved themselves to be crackerjack writers. But only Mr. Schneider—who has toiled in the inky fields of journalism—ventured an offhand clue to what he thinks makes an essay. “I have written a lot of novels and a lot of essays,” he said. “The essay was invented some 400 years ago, by Montaigne. Writing is an adventure. I’m more interested in the question than the answer, in discovering a new topic. . .The great form now is the favorite form of the Internet: the blog. It’s marked by a lack of research, an absence of facts, and sheer egotism.”

As a blogger for PEN, I thought about this for a moment. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to research anything, and that I could dispense with facts altogether in favor of bringing my egotism to the fore! Wow. I could say anything at all about Mr. Schneider? I could misspell his name and tell you that he’s married to Angelina Jolie? Why didn’t I think of that before? In fact (so to speak), I could tell you that Mr. Manzó—who actually read a short story, called “The Fork,” which Ms Harris had thought was an essay because the author had published it in his newspaper column, as if it were, uh, true—read a polemic about upcoming elections in Spain, called “The Spoon.” That’s it: I’ll tell you that version. As for M. Toussaint, I’m sure that you don’t much care that he recently published a monograph (which might be called an essay or a short story, according to marketing purposes) about the “World Cup head-butt heard round the world”—an event that took place while he was actually watching the soccer match in the stadium where the head-butt occurred but that he didn’t witness, because, instead of looking at two rogue warriors over at the side, he was focusing on the game. Nah, you don’t want to know about that. You want to know that M. Toussaint and Lenny Bruce have never been seen together in the same room at the same time. Or—wait for it!—that Mr. Manzó got to his feet and challenged M. Toussaint to a head-butt right then and there, while Mr. Schneider and Ms Harris jumped up on the table and played a game of air-badminton. I think I’ve got it. By Jove, I’ve got it! Fidelity to experience is so limiting! What a liberating epiphany: I don’t have to tell you the names of the translators, also on the panel, for Mr. Manzó and M. Toussaint, because it doesn’t matter whether they were accurate. For all we know, their respective speakers might have been reciting the line-ups of the past ten Kentucky Derbys.

So, here’s a little puzzler. If you guess right whether it’s fact or fiction, I promise that, in the next life, Lenny Bruce will record your voicemail message for your home answering machine:

There were a number of questions and comments from the audience for this panel. The first was posed by a young lady, who asked: “Do you feel that when you’re writing in the essay form you have a responsibility to be truthful?” To which M. Toussaint shot back, “What is truth?” The last in line to speak was a lady of a certain age, who stepped up to the mic and said: “I learned in school that if you want to ask a question, write fiction; and if you want to answer a question, write an essay.” No fan of memoirs, which she distinguished from essay writing, she added: “If the literary essay were to flourish again, it might cure all this endless memoir writing.”

Your faithful blogger, fascinated by the lady’s dignity and patience as well as by her observation, sought her out afterwards to see who she was. “My name is Irene Schmied,” she said. “But I’ve also published a lot of stuff under ‘Irene Katzenstein,’ my maiden name. And under ‘Irene Alport.’ I’d prefer to write about existential problems, about life in general. But, often, what I’ve been asked to write and discuss was my childhood. I grew up in England, but I came there from Germany, as one of the people in the Kindertransport, during World War II.”

And so, ladies and gentlemen, truth or fiction? Easy: as some famous guy in baseball used to say—I’m too tired to research who it was—you can take your nimble fingers right to Google and look it up.