Termino de leer el siguiente enlace sobre el ensayo y los novelistas 'ingleses' contemporáneos (vivos) que abordan este género, a la vez que siento haber perdido quince minutos de mi vida. La perspectiva de Zadie Smith es la de una creadora que, posiblemente, no se encuentra imbuida con la visión académica del ensayo. No obstante, ese precontrato de lectura no lo veo como un impedimento. Aún así, no es cuestión de prejuicio: simplemente no puedo comprarle su tesis de que el ensayo venga a ser un ejercicio posterior de un narrador que padece una 'nausea por novelar'.
Es un largo artículo en inglés, pero el provecho de esta lectura es conocer la idea de qué significa el ensayo contemporáneo desde la perspectiva de una escritora británica joven.
Enlace: Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay | Books | The Guardian
In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are "conventional" and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels, and I don't doubt the sincerity of Shields or Coetzee or any writer who responds strongly to Reality Hunger as a manifesto. A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality, and does indeed make you hunger for a kind of writing that seems to speak truth directly. But I also feel, as someone who just finished a book of more or less lyrical essays, that underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest. In "The Modern Essay" Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. "There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay," she writes. "The essay must be pure -- pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" -- yes, that's it, again. There is a certain kind of writer -- quite often male but by no means exclusively so -- who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.
Es un largo artículo en inglés, pero el provecho de esta lectura es conocer la idea de qué significa el ensayo contemporáneo desde la perspectiva de una escritora británica joven.
Enlace: Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay | Books | The Guardian