The Essay and Old Roads

December 4, 2007

The formal ideals cultivated here at Old Roads have yet to be explained. I have identified "interpretation" as the broad goal of this site, but I think we can take that a step further and state that the essay is the natural form through which interpretation is embodied.

I can get at what I mean by "essay" if I draw a few points from Clifford Geertz's essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture".

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. [5]

The idea of explication is memorably tied to the example of winks and twitches. An observer could watch a rapid exchange of winks and twitches within a group and describe exactly what was seen. This literalistic reportage would constitute "thin" description. Those winks and twitches, if we think about it, could be quite complex: communication, parody, fake-winks, social commentary. Lots of time could be spent getting at the meaning of all those winks and twitches. An analysis that attempted to explain what was really going on in those exchanges we could call "thick". So there is the first goal: to look for the meaning of details.. not simply to describe, but to place the details within the web of cultural values. That is to say: we are interpreting.

Geertz goes on to call the essay the natural vehicle for this mode of interpretation:

...the essay, whether of thirty pages or three hundred, has seemed the natural genre in which to present cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them, and why, if one looks for systematic treatises in the field, one is so soon disappointed, the more so if one finds any. [25]

He is clearly working from a rather broad definition of the essay. In common parlance the essay is the non-fiction mirror of the short story.. both being a less than book length piece of writing. For Geertz the essay could well be a book.. and it is not so much length that counts as the nature of the writing: does it set out to interpret cultural specifics? It would seem that acts of interpretation are, by nature, essays.

That is the logic by which I have taken to grouping much of my work under the label of essay: blogging and academic presentations are two examples. I now label my efforts at video documentary "essays" as well.. feeling uncomfortable with the rather thin approach to culture that is exemplified in most documentaries. A website, insofar as it attempts to interpret a work or place, could also be conceived of as an essay. None of this means that the word "essay" is losing its meaning, it is simply being tied to a kind of content rather than a page count.

One problem with interpretation is the limitless footholds for such interpretations that exist within any given culture. At the end of "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" Geertz acknowledges this problem. He has provided a brilliant interpretation of the way the cockfight embodies specific cultural values, but then he backtracks and admits that one could pick up some other cultural text and through close analysis come to a similar insight: "As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else."

Geertz gets around this possible endless succession of interpretations by noting the goal of it all:

The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said. [30]

That way of describing the goal gives a distinctly Old Roads cast to this labor. All these interpretations are not being added to each other with the hope of arriving at the universal human, but rather with the hope of creating a record of human choices and points of view.

That record implies the preservation of texts. Perhaps, though, we should distinguish between thin and thick preservation. A translation of a classic text or the re-creation of a vanished cityscape would be a form of preservation, but by themselves such works are thin. They do nothing to recreate the human experience of these works in a specific time. How did people read? How did they identify with the contents of a story? What kind of details in the cityscape caught their attention? By attempting to answer questions such as these we arrive at something like thick preservation.

Possibly someone will ask: aren't you talking about commentary? I am uncomfortable with the baggage connected to the traditions of commentary. Historically speaking, commentary has not been about interpretation as defined above, but about the re-inscription of cultural values through linguistic expertise. Commentary may itself be a candidate for interpretive work.. but it is not a lineage to which an interpreter of the past should wish to be connected. It is time we speak more confidently of the essay.