Bold acts of linearity
Still, the bricolage features of the essay, a fragmentary aesthetics of compilation, persist. Brian Dillon has recently remarked on the essayist’s predilection for lists, for the accumulation of disparate material that contains, latently, patterns of relation and extrapolation left to the reader to develop. Morgan’s comments on Plutarch register a similar relish, drawing on an image in Erasmus: Plutarch’s writing is ‘like a piece of Mosaic work, which consists of several Parts, but all extremely Beautiful’. The idea of an essay as a mosaic, an intricate tessellation of material in which the originality and beautiful consists both in the appeal of the individual segments, and the intricacy of their patterning, is still visible in modern compilatory essays, such as Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, a ‘serial essay’ which concatenates disparate information drawn from the legends and anthropology of many cultures to create an echo-chamber of human variety, or in the generically unassimilable meanders of the books of W. G. Sebald.
I like fragmentation—writing them (my logs) and reading them (the Arcades Project)—and there is a detector-like joy in readerly assembly, especially if you are an editor. An editor looks at shards, interrogates their relationships, but then, most critically, they theorize on how to better assemble the parts. We should not expect the average reader to be such a detective! This limits your audience to editors, puzzle masters, and the literary type.
An essay is, definitionally, not a silo of raw materials; it is a linear act of will, a frozen or simulated thought process driven by a question. There is beginning and end! If the parts can be randomly rearranged with no consequence on meaning, then it’s not an essay. Now of course, if you experiment in a digital medium, and you create a non-linear choose-your-own-adventure UI to navigate your notes, like a Zettlekasten, that's great—those gardens can be fascinating, but they are not essays.
I’m weary of the bricolage metaphor being used to justify amateur quiltery; the challenge of stitching is in the arrangement and seams! The A>B seam is different than the A>C seam. I will articulate A differently depending on if B or C are next.
(Note: Weave this into my Sequence pattern textbook entry.)