The essayification scale measures how easily a work of art can be replaced by an essay on the same topic.1 Let’s say it’s ten-points.
Over near the low end we have something like “The Birth-Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a story I first read twenty-some years ago. It’s a mesmerizing fever-dream about a proto-mad-scientist type who marries The Most Beautiful Woman In The World™ only for his hubris to—well, I won’t spoil it. I give this story a 2/10 on the essayification scale: you could write an essay on, say, the folly of trying to perfect nature, but it would be a wildly different experience than reading the story.
Over near the high end we have something like “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” by Salman Rushdie, which I also read in twenty-some years ago. It’s…not really a short story. I give it an 8/10 on the essayification scale.2
If I had explain the difference between the two, I would use an automobile metaphor. Reading “The Birth-Mark” feels like driving a powerful, responsive, beautifully engineered sports car, and analyzing it afterward feels like peering under the hood to see how something could work so well. Reading “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” feels more like looking under the hood for the sake of looking under the hood and shrugging “meh” when someone asks if you want to actually drive it.
Rushdie just seems embarrassed to be writing a short story. There aren’t any characters to speak of: just blank figures lacking any psychological traits. There isn’t a setting, really: just an auction house to serve the function of gathering together a bunch of pop culture flotsam. There isn’t a plot: there’s no rising action, no conflict, no denouement. You get the feeling he really, really, really wanted to write an essay about postmodernism, capitalism, and pop culture kitsch, but thought it had to be a short story for some reason (maybe he thinks artists are cooler than essayists; I don’t know), so he draped the barest amount of storytelling over the writing, sort of pinching it by the corner at arm’s length while turning his head away from the smell, and wrote what is actually an essay.
This doesn’t mean you can’t write essays about great art. There have been millions of words written about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, but it still gets a 0/10 on the essayification scale because, well, it’s a piece of music. Robert Frost once said that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” With the essayification scale, it’s the thing getting lost that matters: if you can translate a short story into an essay without losing anything then it wasn’t a short story in the first place: it was an essay in disguise.
Of course, we all know the 10/10 most essayified work of art ever:
Fountain, O Fountain, how you vex me so. Ah, I can hear the college professors cackling from behind their laptops now. “You fool! You midwit simpleton! You pathetic member of [and here they go in for the kill] the bourgeoisie! Don’t you see that by writing about Fountain you are demonstrating how remarkable, how powerful, how unspeakably brilliant it is?” And they laugh. They laugh like hyenas.
My response is… Well, my response should probably be it’s own essay.3 The problem with Fountain is that it’s 0% aesthetic experience and 100% intellectual exercise. Duchamp believed what we call “art” is contextual: a urinal which isn’t art in a bathroom becomes art in a museum. It doesn’t matter if you agree with him or not: what matters is that Fountain doesn’t do anything an essay couldn’t do.
Art doesn’t follow the sequence “medium → meaning,” it follows the sequence “medium → emotion → meaning.” Any good horror story is proof of this. Your experience of The Shining isn’t the words, it’s the dread created by the words. And you can write a beautifully insightful essay about The Shining, but the essay will be a two-step reflecting on a three-step, and the three-step will remain the thing itself.
This applies to all artistic mediums, but I’ll mostly focus on writing.
This doesn’t mean I don’t like it! Weirdly enough, I think it’s quite compelling.
Here I’ll just say that when a ten-year-old is neglected by his parents, he acts out because he’s too emotionally immature to differentiate between good attention and bad attention. I’ll just leave that bit of psychology next to Duchamp.
We already have a phrase for this, "conceptual art," no?
Stevens is vexing in your context. You could write some pretty good essays summarizing his poetry. Essayification: 8. The guy has clear ideas that interest him. His entire career is writing poems about the imagination, a main theme embellished with seemingly endless variations. And if you can't at least sketch that essay in your head while you are reading him, you aren't really reading him. At the same time, those essays without the poems are kinda hard to take seriously. Maybe a little dry and boring and theoretical? (No wonder his progeny Ashbery committed himself to writing poems that are essayification 0, it was his big reaction to Stevens. Not ideas but the poem itself...) But the language and movement of Stevens' poems has the power to make you take his ideas seriously, so essayification: 4.