In such a scenario, the silent partner may be advised to adopt some caution. Beware of the questions. Not all of them are equal, some are more loaded than others, and the character of the interrogator surely warrants some scrutiny. Gerald Murnane, in the title-essay in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005), organises an essay on À la recherche du temps perdu around a challenge posed by his father: ‘What sort of man was the author of that book?’ And there is a follow-up: ‘What do I hope to gain from reading a book by such a man?’ One might also ask, ‘What does such a person hope to gain by getting you to read what he or she has written?’ These challenges prompt me to ponder the use of the question in some contemporary Australian essays.

The trust relationship between reader and writer comes under varying degrees of pressure, depending on the purport of the writing. At one end of the spectrum is the polemic designed to persuade and manipulate. At the other is the poetic essay, where significant trust is invested in the reader, and this tends to be reciprocal. To follow the train of thought in another essay from the same collection by Murnane is to be taken deeply into his confidence. ‘I sometimes have the experience of seeing my fiction as an emblem of myself or an heraldic device representing myself or even as part of myself ... But what exactly do I see?’ Here, in the shifting sense of self, there is an opening for other selves to enter, as if they have been invited to look through his eyes.

The poetic essay harps on the communal underpinnings of experience and communication. A mutual resonance between writer and reader is being explored, and the question may come as a prompt for the resonance to be checked. ‘Is being spoken to across the ages a notion we can entertain today only in bad faith?’ J.M. Coetzee wonders in Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (2002). He’s looking back on a moment of seeming revelation in his life, when at the age of fifteen he heard Bach’s music coming from a neighbouring house and felt he was being ‘spoken to’. In retrospect, perhaps the experience was not what it seemed. Perhaps it was just some delusion of cultural privilege. The introspective writer undergoes self-interrogation and suffers radical uncertainty in ways that make trust an existential issue.

Self-interrogation and self-doubt reach their epitome in Montaigne’s question, ‘What do I know?’ As the epicentre of an enquiry into the deceptions of the senses and the arbitrariness of reason, this has all the force of a cri de coeur, a heart-to-heart communication with the reader. Montaigne demonstrates that persistent questioning leads to the ultimate refusal of knowledge itself. ‘What do I know?’, his motto, becomes one of the founding gestures of the essay form. But left alone, this gesture would have meant implosion rather than foundation.

The essay is nothing without diversity. If the question accentuates the sense of voice in writing, this is partly because spoken questions carry a distinctive tone, and come in a range of tonal colours. They are conventionally badged as serious, vexed, rude, tough, silly, loaded, leading, obvious, double-edged. Of course, tone is dependent on context, but the question even in isolation is a telling barometer of tone, and tone may provide us with an intuitive guide to the personality of the essayist – allowing, of course, for artful slippages of persona. When the writer is also something of a trickster, this may be a pleasure in itself.

‘No fixed idea except to avoid fixed ideas’ is the prefatory quotation Clive James takes from Robert Musil for his collection The Meaning of Recognition: New Essays, 2001–2005 (2005). James specialises in slippages of persona, yet holds to a poetic centre of gravity. His essays play a double game. ‘Self dramatizing is what I do for a living,’ he says in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005–2008 (2009), and he does it with great virtuosity, generating a killer charm through wry self-deprecation. On his way to a solo appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he checks himself out in the mirror: ‘What have I got to offer? Well, physically, not a lot.’ Like Cyrano de Bergerac, about whom James writes with particular flair, he compensates for a deficiency in glamour by employing the poetic consciousness to seduce, but in a perverse twist on the Cyrano narrative, James fronts up in his own person, and displaces the poetry onto a succession of other figures. These are not exactly alter egos, but there is some mimetic process going on as he probes the enigmas of their literary relationship to the world.

The title essay in The Meaning of Recognition is a tribute to the Australian poet Philip Hodgins, who died of leukaemia at the age of thirty-six. James has a story to tell about being awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. ‘There I was, hogging the spotlight as usual. My main subject would be a dedicated young man who had never done any such thing. How to resolve the anomaly?’ Hodgins is the one who experiences meditative unravelling. When he wrote of a little boy who was sucked to his death in a grain silo, James asks, ‘Was he thinking of himself? How could he not be?’

Turning the lens of enquiry back on himself, James asks. ‘How is it that the lurking presence of a fugitive master of disguise is so often detected by the village idiot?’ This observation is offered by way of explanation for his withdrawal from the role of television presenter. Not that this means he has resigned altogether from the role of the artful dodger: just that he prefers to pursue it in more literary ways, to avoid the vertigo of being recognised everywhere for celebrityper se. But, as Murnane’s father might ask, should you trust such a man to write to you in the curiously intimate form of the essay? What kind of person is he really?

Another of James’s tribute pieces is a sketch of Bea Miles, a Sydney vagrant widely known for steering a course through life entirely according to her own rules. James remembers an encounter with her in which he was firmly put in his place and had to cop it sweet (as you would, if the loser role is a component of your most successful persona). But then, an alter ego moment hovers. ‘I wondered if my true vocation might not be as a vagrant, and wondered also if I had the panache to bring it off.’ Note the absence of question marks here. Is there any way of putting such questions directly that would not carry the taint of the poseur? By transposing the suggestion into reportage of things past, James insulates himself and the reader from any such embarrassment. Should you trust someone capable of such strategic nuances in communication? Isn’t it a little crafty? Craft, though, also implies skill and technique, which carry their own forms of integrity. And one thing is for sure: you can trust this writer to know what he’s doing asa writer. Clive James is not profligate with questions. He uses them circumspectly, preferably at the end of a paragraph, so that he can lead up to them with careful steerage. They often mark a subtle pivot point in the axis of enquiry, or serve to draw attention to a conundrum, an anomaly, a place where the line of thinking moves against the direction of conventional logic.

The best essayists use the form to display thought processes and to exploit the protean qualities of human thought. Perhaps it is more important that we should be able to trust them as writers than as people, though it is when they start putting questions to us that the distinction becomes blurred. Where are these questions coming from? Inga Clendinnen, another skilled boundary rider in the realms of introspection and public dialogue, asks myriad questions. She writes with an explicit consciousness of public reception, but also of the private act of reading. ‘Why do we think that reading is good for humans?’ she asks, in the opening line of an essay in her collection Agamemnon’s Kiss: Selected Essays (2006), and ‘what’s the use of it?’ As someone brought up in an environment where speech acts were of the strictly functional do-the-dishes variety, she is bothered by these challenges, but also haunted by an early childhood image of the potentially sinister relationship between books and actions. Hidden behind the ventilator grill in the wall, she was told, lived a spy: an elf who kept a log of good and bad deeds – inscribed, respectively, in his gold book or his black one. Her response to this intelligence was an early commitment to psychological resistance. ‘So what? What was it to me?’

Clendinnen is concerned about the need to foster a psychology of resistance between children and books, and reacts against the sunny aura surrounding the Children’s Book Awards list. ‘How will they cope with the rigours of solitary grown-up reading after all these lucid, friendly books, eager to please as puppies? Where is the murk?’ She comes round to a validation of the book on the grounds of the freedoms it provides for readers who, if they are rigorous enough to exercise them, will always resist control and manipulation.

Along with the mistrust of happy and friendly models of reading, Clendinnen has an aversion to polemical writing: ‘when did you last change your mind because you were yelled at?’ She has kept herself at one remove from the ‘history wars’ but does not steer clear of controversy. Her Quarterly Essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (2006), draws out a string of questions, starting from the scenario of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. What values does the song celebrate? How far was ‘Banjo’ Paterson being historical? Is the iconic scene important to us not because it is a fragment of history, but because it is not? Because it’s an ‘invented moment’? From here, she moves towards an attack on historical fiction, specifically targeting Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) for filling the inevitable chasms of unknowing with imaginative construction. ‘By contrast,’ Clendinnen says, ‘the real past is surrounded by prickle bushes of what I have to call epistemological difficulties ... “Do you really know what you think you know?”’

This is a leading question, rather than a move towards Montaigne’s radical uncertainty. Clendinnen’s essay is contentious, and has contributed to a heated debate about the matter of how historians and fiction writers deal with past events, and there is an extent to which the habit of questioning contributes to this. All questions lead. One question leads to another. If you scan the question marks across the pages of an essay, typically you will see that soon after the first one appears, there will be several more – a little crop of them, sprouting sometimes in the same paragraph. The process of following a question trail can itself foster division. There’s a genre of rhetorical questioning that purports to mimic the opposition by putting words in their mouths, or through the rudeness of direct caricature.

Such questioning occurs in concentrated volleys through the assaults and counter-assaults of the ‘history wars’. Keith Windschuttle, who is capable of writing with restrained concentration, lets rip in the April 2006 issue of Quadrant, in response to a scattering of quotations from his critics:

How to explain such contortions: short term memory loss? incapacity to recognize self-contradiction? wilful dishonesty to deflect criticism? a postmodernist ploy that allows words to mean whatever their users choose? all of the above?

Positioned in the jury box, a reader may or may not choose to consider representations from the other side of the court. The chances are that anyone who has found their way into the pages of Quadrant is either already subscribed to the case for the prosecution, or is acting for the defence, seeking ammunition to turn the case. Henry Reynolds, writing for Meanjin at around the same time, takes the appeal to a wider court – a seminar in Vancouver with representatives from Canada and New Zealand – prompts them to ask the questions, and claims that the verdict is in. ‘Whatever has been happening in Australia? What’s going on down there?’ Such questions are self-answering. It’s all in the tone.

Rhetorical inquisition is a time-honoured literary practice, and the turbulence it produces is part of an invigorating shake-up that is often needed, but sometimes it gets into a feedback loop that does nothing but escalate the tensions. From a writer’s point of view, the question is the jemmy in the toolbox. Use it craftily, with a nuanced sense of where you want to make an opening, and it may let in some daylight. If you get reckless with it, you make cracks and splinters, the chips spray around you, and often you block off access to the very space you are trying to enter.

The way a writer manages questions relates to other kinds of control in the essay form: tone control, logical integration, structural clarity. Occasionally, a writer takes on an issue that is fraught, critical, beset with tangled difficulties and conflicting investments, and does the job of providing a centre of gravity for public understanding. Noel Pearson’s Quarterly Essay, Radical Hope (2009) is deeply contentious, but also presents as a fine contemporary example of gravitas. It opens with a set of questions drawn from another writer, Jonathan Lear, who in turn took it from Kant. ‘For what may we hope? Kant put this question in the first person singular along with 2 others: What can I know? And what ought I to do?’ (Behind Kant hovers the ghost of Montaigne.) These are questions of existential responsibility and though they work as solvents on any kind of certainty or assurance, they seem to arise from a place of mental stability. This is what Pearson captures and proceeds to express on his own terms, for his own domains of concern:

It is time to ask: are we Aborigines a serious people? … Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge? … The truth is that I am prone to bouts of doubt and sadness around these questions. But I have hope.

In this convergence of public and private questioning, of existential and political planes of awareness, something is turning. The essay provides a space for this, a turning circle in which the terms of understanding may be reconfigured.

This article originated as a paper delivered at Essaying: The Calibre Prizes, a symposium held at the National Library of Australia in April 2010.