22 - Columnism and Essayism

Summary

Predictably, the regulation noises about definition.

Only one of this chapter’s title words is in the Oxford English Dictionary. For this volume’s readership, ‘essayism’ will already be a term suggesting deep tradition and rich associations, so that the definition provided – ‘the practice of writing essays’, ‘the quality that constitutes an “essay”’– might seem scant and self-recursive. The line the OED quotes from the Saturday Review of September 24, 1887, ‘[t]hat mysterious literary essence known as essayism which pervades all literature’, prefigures a later critical disposition for the hallowing of a quality that remains indeterminate. This provokes, below, some impatience with pieties around what essayism must be and the essay’s elusiveness to definition. However: the start must go to ‘columnism’. It looks the more curious term. Still, how awkward could it be? Or is there scope for further elusiveness there, a subsidiary mystification?

Let us try the following for size (trying itself for length, incidentally, being something that every column must do in every single one of its iterations, editors needing to be kept equable). Hence and self-evidently, what ‘columnism’ names will have something to do with the conveyed character of the column, which can be taken to be a regular feature in a newspaper or periodical (keeping reference limited for the moment to the affordances of print seems wise) about a topical issue (though not invariably) that is typically (but not necessarily) written by the same person each time. Doubtless the term will also refer to the poetics of that space as well as attitudes (authors’ and readerships’) around it. That seems safe and intuitive enough (and strategizing what can be made to seem intuitive, working alongside or countering it, is key to the dynamics of the column).

But is the column a space or a genre, a stance or a serial exercise in persuasion? Is it all of these and more? Already, in the parentheses-heavy syntax above, hesitancies arise. More fun than this nervous way with definition is the explanation of ‘columnism’ provided – appropriately – in a newspaper column by a columnist. Because I was not neologizing, you see.