In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 254.
In the beginning, there was only abyss. Then god. Or snake. Or, perhaps, it really was explosion that first ignited echoing heartbeat. For millennia—across times, places, and peoples—gods have built and raised the world, planets have governed human movements. Truth, fact, essay—their own amorphous beasts. Only in the last few centuries has the essay become entangled with academia and seventeenth-century rationalism. Only recently has essay come to enact, legitimise, and convey “truth” as tacitly defined by colonial claims to authority over ordering thought and meaning.
From The Pyramid Texts to the Book of Going Forth by Day (The Egyptian Book of the Dead), from Mesopotamian stelae concerning ghosts and their exorcism to Mesoamerican burial objects, nonfiction has always radically departed from today’s sterile concept of the essay. Bodies morph; medicine and magic, terrestrial and spiritual coalesce. Nonfiction condenses to stone tablet, bends to tomb wall, holds within it the power to guide a soul from this life to the next. Far from originating with Pliny or Montaigne, as most curricula assert, the essay can be traced back to ancient origins—none of them white or European. And just as the essay is neither white nor European in origin, it frequently isn’t cisheteronormative, or able-bodied. In ancient nonfiction, bodies transform—human, ghost, god, beast—they step between, exist as myth, as primordial and elemental, as genesis.
How to define the essay? What constitutes “truth” or “fact”—sociocultural, historic, or embodied—and the literary forms of their expression? “It is He Who maketh the stars for you,” says the Qur’an, “that ye may guide yourselves with their help, through the dark spaces of land and sea.” Throughout history, humanity has looked to the stars to navigate the darkness, not only pragmatically, but also as a means of situating ourselves spiritually, conceptually, within a cosmos. We have looked up, interpreted. And in humanity’s long gesture of looking, of seeking meaning, the constellations have themselves changed in nature. Ancient Greek and Islamic astronomers once believed the stars immortal, finite in number and set upon a great hollow globe (the orb of fixed stars) that carried the constellations around Earth. Now, stars are considered variable in number, receding, ever more remote with the universe’s expansion, and subject to the mortal concern of dying.
Similarly, works of nonfiction are constellations—glowing, radiant—upon which we trace the vitality of ever-shifting beasts. We use essays to traverse darkness, that of body, self, and world. Or, perhaps, more frequently, as being human demands: to reconcile to darkness unyielding.
Rather than a static genre or set of forms, the essay is an evolving, socio-historically situated practice. Definition relates more to perception than anything intrinsic to the object. The Essay a body—expanding ever outward. Its contours briefly luminous—constellation, shimmering orbit. Constellation and orbit as genre, as form.
How might the contemporary essay not only acknowledge but also be inflected by its historic counterparts, especially those that have traditionally been excised from histories of the Essay? How can the page take up the “grammar” of the tomb chamber, the slab of stone tablet? How might essay dialogue with god, ghost, or ancestor? When one complicates definitions of “fact” or “fiction,” “real” or “imagined;” questions what constitutes “truth,” how will the essay emerge: What kind of literary object will it be? What forms will it take? Essentially: How must the essay be intellectually and formally upended if it is to progress in rich and meaningful ways?
Lars Horn’s first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and teaches nonfiction at Columbia University.
image credit: Olena Bohovyk