In Defense of Facts

A new history of the essay gets the genre all wrong, and in the process endorses a misleading idea of knowledge.

- William Deresiewicz

JOHN D’AGATA HAS ACCOMPLISHED an impressive feat. In three thick volumes, over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies— of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim (D’Agata is the director of the Nonfction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the most prestigious name in creative writing)—because effrontery, as every body knows, will get you very far in American culture, and persistence in perverse opinion, further still.

D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in un certainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion.