Germaine Brée (1978) has written: "The French essay made such a brilliant stage entrance with Montaigne that it seems at one stroke to have reached a level of perfection designed to discourage successors." She adds: "It was in England rather than in France that the essay won a rightful place among accepted literary genres." As a title in the singular for a longish, tentative, and modest inquiry into a large subject, the essai took hold in France; but as a short form, for two centuries it assumed other names and guises, as though to distance itself from Montaigne. It became the invisible or nonexistent genre, unrecognized by critics and historians of letters. It was categorized - and often dismissed - as an English literary type. Rare were the French essayists such as Marivaux or Montégut willing to emulate their English counterparts. In one of his letters Flaubert hints at something deep in the French psyche that both admired the "superb parts" of English writing and distrusted its "defective composition" and "lack of plan." Sainte-Beuve, introducing his famous article, "What Is a Classic?" ( Causeries du lundi , 1850), indulges for once in a more informal manner of writing, "of the sort that our neighbors, the English, modestly call an 'essay' and have developed into a genre." Brunetière makes no mention of the essay in his L'Évolution des genres, except, in the volume on criticism, to dismiss the English critics as "mere essayists." A German anthologist of French moralist writings, G. R. Hocke, affirmed in 1938: "There is no French essay." Fraser documents further evidence of this strange situation, citing French dictionaries and encyclopedias.Gradually in our own century, however, thanks to the efforts of Chadbourne, Brée, Fraser, and others, awareness has increased that l'essai is much more than a vague amorphous term for "nonfiction" or "the prose of ideas" and that it deserves attention for its specific nature as a distinct literary genre, however elusive its nature may be. Among long-established, prestigious genres such as fiction, poetry, and drama, its very marginality and its freedom from the constraints of literary conventions have given it the advantage of being a uniquely flexible and adaptable instrument; so adaptable, in fact, that it is "protéiforme" (Brée), able like the Greek god Proteus to change its form at will; capable of assimilating features of the poem, the short story, or the dialogue; capable even, in the hands of a Blanchot, a Barthes, or a Butor, of subverting itself, dissolving into fragments and becoming the "anti-essay."The paradox is that the long absence in France of critical awareness of the essay as genre has coexisted with an extraordinarily rich production of essays and "essay-elatives," almost without hiatus, from Michel de Montaigne to Michel Butor and beyond. Amidst the changing guises, certain more or less constant features of the essayist's art recur: the invitation to the reader to enter into the author's confidence and share in his or her dialogue with the self; the freedom of form sometimes called "artful disorder"; the effect of "thought-inprocess" as distinct from the finished product of thought leading to conclusion and closure; reflections that are less premeditated than stimulated by chance, rooted in circumstance, using any subject as pretext. These features, which obviously derive from Montaigne, are hardly exclusive to the French essay. What may be its specific cachet is at least fourfold: a restrained, indirect manner of self-portraiture; a strong link with the moraliste literary tradition (not all moralistes are essayists but most essayists are moralistes); a greater willingness (certainly than the English essayists), especially since postmodernism, to use the essay as a tool for theoretical, often highly abstract speculations on the profoundest philosophical questions. As for the fourth feature, it has been beautifully summed up by Sontag apropos of Barthes' essays. The French essay, she writes, provides merely one great "variation on the project of self-examination - the noblest project of French literature," a project "inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self [with] the self as the locus of all possibilities." RICHARD M. CHADBOURNE

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Further Reading