Because the Essays are a forum for testing the writer’s judgment, they must necessarily remain open-ended. Montaigne built the process of self-correction into his writing practice. He published several different editions of the Essays. After the publication of the first two books, in 1580, a second, expanded edition, including a third book, appeared in 1588. However what is remarkable is that the second edition does not “revise” the first edition by replacing awkward phrases with better ones, tightening arguments, or correcting misquotations—the normal processes that define “revision.” Instead, Montaigne took the first version of his book, reread it, and simply added more text to what he had already written. New ideas, quotations, and sometimes entire paragraphs are inserted into the middle of existing sentences, to reflect the state of the essayist’s mind at the moment of rereading. This curious and virtually unique writing practice was continued throughout Montaigne’s life, and a third major edition was published after his death in 1592.
Modern scholarship has made it possible for us to study the different “layers” of the text. Most editors insert marks (usually a, b, and c) showing where new text was added. In this way we can read the book, not only from left to right, to appreciate the linear rambling of Montaigne’s ideas, but also, as it were, archeologically, or “vertically,” to watch how he reread a given essay and decided to add a new quotation or introduce a new idea that opens a digression. So, for example, in “Of Idleness” he expands the very brief first version of the essay. He adds, for the second edition, a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, where the ideas spinning in the agitated mind of Aeneas are compared to bits of light bouncing off of water in a bronze bowl. This addition both expands scope of the essay, bringing in yet another classical authority, and comments ironically on the writing process, wherein revision scatters ideas about to generate new ideas. As Montaigne continues to write and rewrite the Essays, the book grows in all directions, like an amoeba. It becomes coextensive with the life of the author, ending only when his body gives out. As he says in the essay “Of Practice,” “What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. … My portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place. One part of what I am was produced by a cough, another by a pallor or a palpitation of the heart—in any case dubiously. It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.” This linkage of body and text—so startlingly modern—underscores the constantly evolving, metamorphic impulse behind the Essays.
The shifting, mutable nature of Montaigne’s writing—one part produced by a cough, another by pallor—has wide-ranging moral and even political implications. Because the text is constantly changing, every insight that Montaigne puts forth is open to revision and questioning—either as his wandering argument unfolds or as he returns to reread and revise his text. As he notes in the very first essay, “Man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.” Therefore, the establishment of a solid “position” from which to reflect—that gesture that will be so important for the establishment of the Cartesian cogito forty years later—is but a temporary tactic. It follows that any claims to absolute standards of judgment or truth are necessarily immediately open to revision. Montaigne’s suspicion of his own opinions at any given moment extends to his comments on culture and society. For example, in what may be his most famous meditation on human customs, the essay “Of Cannibals,” we find a discussion of the culture of the Tupi in Brazil (known to him principally through his reading of Léry, though he also claims to have met a sailor who had lived there). In his account of the Tupi, Montaigne accepts their customs on their own terms, as evidence of a virtue that his own culture could scarcely comprehend. He points out that, while eating one’s enemies might seem savage, it is no less savage than some of the recent spectacles of cruelty that have been seen in France, where mobs of religious zealots have torn apart the live bodies of their “heretical” neighbors. He goes on to admire the courageous cannibals, comparing them to ancient Romans. He contrasts their bravery with the cowardice of the Europeans, and concludes, ironically, “Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours.” Coming out of his absorption in classical culture, Montaigne presents an image of cultural difference that is strikingly modern. His account of Brazil in “Of Cannibals” helped to found the field of study that we know as anthropology.
However, it is not only in the context of cultural understanding that Montaigne’s interest in the contingent, temporary nature of judgment may be seen. Precisely because he recognizes the limits of his knowledge, he demonstrates remarkable tolerance for things beyond his reach. Modesty, flexibility, and an ability to imagine the experience of others counterbalance Montaigne’s acute awareness of the limits of what he knows. The Essays feature a number of moments at which, through startling leaps of the imagination, Montaigne sketches out strikingly progressive ethical or moral positions barely glimpsed by his contemporaries. Thus, in the essay “Of Cruelty,” he condemns torture and acknowledges the obligation humans have to care for nature. In “Of Cripples,” he speaks out against the burning of witches. In “Of a Monstrous Child,” he interprets the body of a child born with a birth defect as a sign, not of “deformity” or “evil” (as would have been customary in his day) but as evidence of the wondrous variety of nature. “What we call monsters are not so to God,” he concludes. “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom.” And in the great “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” he imagines that his cat may be playing with him as much as he is playing with his cat. Montaigne’s sensitivity to the mutability of experience and the limits of knowledge makes him skeptical of pomp and grandeur—among scholars as well as kings.
It is unclear whether we are to understand Montaigne’s appealing modesty of judgment as the emanation of a particular personality, expressing itself in print, or whether it is the form of the essay itself that imposes and shapes the essayist’s sensibility. Either way, the Essays offer a signal instance of a personality deeply imbricated in the twists and turns of language and literary creation. “I have no more made my book than it has made me,” says Montaigne in “Of Presumption.” And as the Essays unfold, the process of self-revision becomes more complicated. The earliest chapters often seem little more than exercises, in which Montaigne takes a classical theme (sadness, virtue), or a famous quotation from a classical author and embroiders upon it. However, by the time we reach the third book of the Essays, the individual chapters have become quite long. Montaigne moves beyond an early interest in the Stoic tradition (recently revived by a number of his contemporaries, most notably the great Dutch humanist Justus Lipsius) to a much more flexible ethics based on self-acceptance and suspicion of intellectual authority.
At the same time, as the political situation in France worsens, political and ethical themes emerge as central concerns. Thus, the third book begins with an essay titled “Of the Useful and the Honorable,” in which Montaigne contemplates the question of whether one should betray one’s own ethics in order to serve one’s king or state. These issues, pertinent to anyone who works in an institutional setting, were quite close to Montaigne. He was a traditional Catholic, faithful to king and Church in a time of political strife. Yet he was also a politique, a moderate intellectual who believed that France’s troubles could only be solved in political, rather than religious terms. His sensitivity to the fragility of human judgment makes him suspicious of any kind of zealotry, and of any authority that would pretend to come from beyond this world through divine commands or mystical transports. Such messages, he realizes, can lead humans to commit terrible violence upon their fellows. His focus instead is on the social and ethical value of conversation, of negotiation, and flexibility. In his moderate insistence on political compromise as a s
olution to the religious wars, he helps to define the ethical language of modern political culture, as a world of sectarian empires begins to give way to a community of states.
Montaigne’s claim that one part of his book is produced by “a cough” and another by his pale complexion underscores the importance of the body in both the arguments and the composition of the Essays. Like Rabelais and Shakespeare, Montaigne lives close to the world of the body. Death, sex, violence, and illness come up again and again in his work. Montaigne suffered terribly from kidney stones, and, in the third book, he uses his own discomfort to develop reflections on change and aging. Because the body is subject to decay, and because corporeal experience shapes the act of judgment, the practice of philosophy is understood as a process, not as a set of absolute claims. Montaigne’s establishment of the link between bodily change, writing, and judgment runs counter to the tradition of abstract philosophical maxims and aphorisms that would come to characterize much of later French literature from La Rochefoucauld to Cioran. Moreover, his understanding of the mutable body as a source of ever-changing insight reminds us of why Descartes would be so insistent on separating philosophical reflection from bodily experience.
The counterweight to Montaigne’s interest in the decline of the body is his great attention to the role of the face, or “countenance.” His humanist training made him familiar with the classical tradition of immortalizing great men in sculpture and portraiture. Courtly writers such as Baltasar Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier (1528), had noted the importance of presenting an appealing face to the world. Erasmus, by contrast, had privileged humble figures such as Socrates and Christ, men whose unglamorous bodies concealed inner beauty—like texts to be deciphered. Montaigne stresses the openness and honesty of his own face, which, as he recounts in “Of Physiognomy,” has saved him from more than one difficult situation in the civil conflicts of his day. He stresses that his open manner inspires trust in others and has helped him in his work as mayor and mediator. This comfort with himself is one of Montaigne’s most appealing features. It goes hand in hand with his acceptance of his foibles (imperfect education, bad memory, brusqueness, impatience). “I do nothing without gaiety,” he says in “Of Books.” He presents himself engaged in the social world around him as well as the intellectual world of his favorite authors. He values peasants as teachers of virtue as much as he does philosophers. In his essay on education, he emphasizes the importance of conversation and of associating with people from all walks of life as the key to a well-rounded and virtuous personality. Thus, it is no accident that the very last pages of the final essay—the beautiful meditation “Of Experience”—underscore the importance of humility and social engagement. Montaigne laments the mystical transports of Socrates—the one feature of the great philosopher that he cannot stand—and he notes that grandeur is of little value: “On the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.” He ends the book by quoting Horace’s poem to Apollo, begging the god of health and poetry to grant him long life. Let us dedicate our old age, says Montaigne, to the god of wisdom, “but gay and sociable wisdom.” The French word gaye, which John Florio’s English Renaissance translation usually rendered as “blithe” or “cheerful,” implies a kind of lightness of spirit, expressed through a pleasant countenance. In his definition of wisdom as “gay and sociable” Montaigne firmly places philosophy in the social world. Gaiety and conversation, the ability to draw lessons from all walks of life—these are the hallmarks of the sage. Wisdom is gleaned from a philosophy of social engagement—not from the abstractions of mathematical reasoning or logical paradoxes. Montaigne roots the cultivation of virtue and judgment in his own attention to the world around him, in his body, in the course of his common life.
By linking philosophy to the world of the everyday—“without miracle and without eccentricity”—Montaigne lays to rest the Renaissance culture of classical ideals, ideal forms, and monumental lives. Like Cervantes in his celebration of the idealistic but deeply mortal Don Quixote, Montaigne turns the somewhat rigid culture of Renaissance humanism against itself, extracting from its heart a self that is noble and virtuous precisely because it cannot live up to accepted ideals of nobility and virtue. Notwithstanding Montaigne’s aristocratic bearing, there is something democratic about this social and gay model of philosophy, since it locates wisdom within the reach of each of us.
Given Montaigne’s skeptical engagement in the everyday world, his deep moral focus, his grounding in the study of history, and his creativity as a stylist of French, we should not be surprised that his most devoted readers have themselves been figures on the edge of the disciplines of philosophy and anthropology, straddlers between the world of literary fiction and the study of the self. The two great dogmatic personalities of seventeenth-century France, Blaise Pascal and René Descartes (the first seeking to blend Christianity and philosophical reflection, the second seeking to ground philosophy in rational thought) both suffered anguished relationships toward the easygoing Montaigne, with his cheerful acceptance of ambiguity and change. Yet Francis Bacon drew deeply on the Essays in his own philosophical reflections, and William Shakespeare quoted Montaigne on several occasions, most famously in the description of the utopian island world of The Tempest. Even more influenced were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions and Rêveries are deeply indebted to Montaigne, and the novelist Gustave Flaubert, who called him “the nursemaid” of French prose. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s blending of practical advice and skeptical reflection makes him Montaigne’s greatest American heir. And it is certainly true that the explorations of morality and power that we associate with the names of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault can scarcely be imagined without the example of Montaigne. All of these eccentric readers and writers remind us that the Essays are both a touchstone for the intersection of philosophy and literature and a lasting guide for the perplexed. Endlessly fertile and suggestive, the Essays continue to demonstrate that, despite the disclaimer of their author in his letter to the reader, “This book is for you, after all.”
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Shakespeare read John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays, which is available online at http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/montaigne. Also important is Charles Cotten’s 1686 version (http://www.gutenberg.org). The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman’s Library, 2003), which I have used above, is a readable modern version that contains Montaigne’s posthumously discovered Travel Journal. The recent Penguin version by Michael Screech, Michel de Montaigne: Essays (London: Penguin, 1993) is also very accessible. James B. Atkinson and David Sices, Selected Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics, 2012) is superb for the main essays.
For Montaigne’s historical context, J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1979) is an excellent guide. A literary critical account of the crisis of community that shapes the period may be found in Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Two biographies in English deal with Montaigne’s life from different perspectives. Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984) is a deeply historical account. Sara Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (New York: Other Press, 2010) focuses more on Montaigne’s philosophical quest.
Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne (1949), trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) remains a solid introduction to his humanist culture. Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) is a general account of the Essays by a major European literary critic. David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) explores Montaigne’s engagement with classical moral philosophy and contemporary politics.
The Cambridge Companion
to Montaigne, ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) is an excellent collection of scholarly articles covering many aspects of Montaigne’s work. On Montaigne’s relationship to the rise of printed books, see George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A study of Montaigne that approaches him from within an Anglo-American philosophical tradition is Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) considers what modern philosophy would have been had it taken shape from Montaigne, instead of Descartes. Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne’s Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) offers an account of Montaigne in the context of postmodern theory. Terence Cave, How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta, 2007) approaches him through the lens of cognition. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” remains a stimulating engagement with his thought, as does Virginia Woolf’s brief essay from 1925 in The Common Reader: First Series.
Molière, Theater, and Modernity
CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER
The classical tragedians of seventeenth-century France are routinely said to have invented the modern stage. A key element was the three “unities” extrapolated from Aristotle’s Poetics, demanding that a play’s action unfold within a single natural day; be confined to a single, readily identifiable place; and exhibit the logical consistency required to convey an air of internal natural necessity and coherence. However, more even than the unities themselves, the crucial breakthrough lay in the methodized vraisemblance, or dramatic verisimilitude, for which they supplied the framework.
As the unity of action demonstrates, the rules French playwrights followed were derived from the principle of immanence underlying the Aristotelian theory of dramatic “imitation,” or mimesis. The term “immanence” originates in metaphysics, where, in opposition to the transcendence associated with Platonic Ideas or a divine Creator set apart from his Creation, it describes the world as experienced from within its own natural limits, to the exclusion of anything outside, above, or beyond it. Applied to literature, it brings out the fundamental contrast between narrative and theatrical forms of representation. Unlike the epics, myths, histories, or biblical stories in which tragedy sought the plots it set onstage, drama avoids mediating narration in favor of seemingly self-engendered human action. What is seen or heard in theater is no mere verbal account of the events involved (Aristotle’s diegesis) but rather the theoretically indiscernible counterpart of events themselves. Nothing, then, could be shown to happen except as the spontaneous reflex of the passions, perceptions, and interests that determine how characters respond to the actions in which they are embroiled. The result was the perfected “natural illusion” of which classical dramatists were justly proud: the overwhelming sense of visceral reality required to provoke the powerful emotions of pity and fear, hope and doubt, exultation and despair spectators were meant to feel.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 21