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Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and the Structure of Montaigne's Essais

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Barry Lydgate
Barry Lydgate*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
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Abstract

In seeking to distill into a public image a consciousness that changes over time, Montaigne faced moral and rhetorical dilemmas that confront all autobiographers. Unlike most literary self-portraitists, however, he gives evidence of having consciously tailored his project to the powers and limitations of his medium, the printed word. Montaigne's solution to the problem of imagining and addressing the reader reflects his perception of a new audience for printed books in the sixteenth century. Acknowledging that his public self-image has clarified and defined his private one, he reconciles the conflicting demands of a self in process and a book in print by making successive additions that temper the lapidary finality of the text. The deepest truth of Montaigne's claim to have written a book “consubstantial with its author” lies in the dynamic equilibration of past and current consciousness manifested both in the labile self and on the printed page.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 2 , March 1981 , pp. 210 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 290.

Note 2 See Eric A. Havelock, “Mimesis,” Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), Ch. ii.

Note 3 References to the text of the Essais are drawn from the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), hereafter cited parenthetically within the text. Capital Roman numerals indicate book numbers, lowercase Roman numerals the chapters, and Arabic numbers the pages; the letters “a,” “b,” and “c” refer, respectively, to the texts of 1580 and 1588 and the Bordeaux Copy. Translations are taken from The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957).

Note 4 Floyd Gray, “Montaigne's Friends,” French Studies, 15 (1961), 203.

Note 5 See, e.g., Machiavelli's letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 Dec. 1513 (The Letters of Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Allan Gilbert [New York: Capricorn Books, 1961], p. 142). Literary personifying in the Renais-sance, which reflects the Christian doctrine of immanence as well as Greek concepts of mimesis, is analyzed from a psychological point of view by James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 193–200.

Note 6 In speaking of autobiography here, I do not mean to categorize the Essais generically; I wish merely to explore certain problems of autobiographical writing activated by Montaigne's decision to observe and record himself. My discussion draws principally on Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions et limites de l'autobiographie,” in Formen der Selbstdarstellung: Analek-ten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstpoi traits, ed. Gunter Reichenkron and Eric Haase (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1965), pp. 105–23. Gusdorf's article is reprinted in the recently published collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. and trans. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), which contains a number of essays pertinent to the present subject, particularly Olney's own article, “Some Versions of Memory / Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography,” pp. 236–67.

Note 7 Or “bluff,” as Barbara Bowen does in a provocative study, The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972). While I agree with Bowen that Montaigne's claims are part of a literary manipulation of the reader, I believe that they point nonetheless to a textual reality.

Note 8 Frederick Rider, The Dialectic of Selfhood in Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1973); Richard L. Regosin, The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's Essais as the Book of the Self (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977).

Note 9 Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 18.

Note 10 Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 84, 230–34. This invaluable study incorporates, but does not wholly supersede, three earlier essays by the same author that are of significant interest to literary scholars: “Clio and Chronos: An Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time,” History and Theory, Supplement 6 (1966), 34–64; “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought,” Journal of Modern History, 40 (1968), 1–56; “The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance,” Past and Present, 45 (1969), 19–89.

Note 11 Walter J. Ong, “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 9–21 (the excerpt quoted is from p. 12); Lowry Nelson, Jr., “The Fictive Reader and Literary Self-Reflexiveness,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 173–91, and “The Fictive Reader: Aesthetic and Social Aspects of Literary Performance,” Comparative Literature Studies, 15 (1978), 203–10.

Note 12 See, e.g., Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Robert Rovini (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 341; Henry E. Genz, “First Traces of Montaigne's Progression toward Self-Portraiture,” Symposium, 16 (1962), 211.

Note 13 There is no textual or biographical evidence that Montaigne had read the Confessions, although he alludes several times to the City of God. I agree with Regosin, however, that the parallels between Augustine's narrative of the self and Montaigne's are too striking to be coincidental and that the essayist could not have been unfamiliar with the saint's seminal text (pp. 251–52).

Note 14 It is true, however, that individuals may become acquainted through books. Montaigne “met” La Boétie by reading his treatise La Servitude volontaire (although in manuscript, not in print [i, xxviii, 182a]), and he hoped to forge links of friendship through the Essais (iii, ix, 959b). Natalie Z. Davis calls attention to requests from authors for direct response from readers in early printed books in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 216.

Note 15 Eisenstein's discussion draws on Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 395.

Note 16 Charles, Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 289–98.

Note 17 Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 9.

Note 18 The text of 1580 is quoted from Essais, ed. R. Dezeimeris and H. Barckhausen, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: Féret, 1870–73), i, 1; the translation is mine.