by JARED MARCEL POLLEN
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) by Dumonstier around 1578 IMAGE/Wikipedia
Inventing a literary form is an honor bestowed upon few. We may speak of Don Quixote as the “first novel,” or Emerson as the “father” of American poetry, or Augustine’s Confessions as the earliest example of autobiography, and enjoy doing so because it exercises our desire to create ranks, build consensus and celebrate true originality, even if we know full well that American poetry didn’t begin at any one point, nor was there a first novel. Still, this hyperbole is fun, and lists need to be made. So when it comes to the essay, it should be said that the verdict is essentially unanimous: it belongs to Michel de Montaigne.
When we trace the invention of a form to a single individual effort, what we are really doing is citing the innovation of a style that feels so realized, so accomplished, it fits in seamlessly with later efforts of the same genre, showing no signs of germination or primitivism. It comes to us without comparison or any visible debt to prior works, and yet it comes already completed. The free verse of Whitman is a good example of this. They, like Montaigne’s essays, are a tour de force. They are intellectually and aesthetically total, in which it is impossible, or at the very least unduly onerous to isolate form, and should instead be treated as a sensorium.
In the ancient world up through the middle ages, if you were bright enough, you worked as a philosopher and you wrote either dialogues or treatises. The notion of occasional, brief writings on subjects like law, friendship, education, custom, government, death and civil society by an individual who was not acting in a professional capacity was a new enterprise indeed, and one that the culture of print helped bring into existence. The materials that make up the corpus of the essays, letters and travel logs began in 1571, when Montaigne, “long weary of the servitude of the courts and public employment” went into self-imposed exile in the south tower of his estate near Bordeaux and set about the task, or essais (in French “trial”) of self-examination.
The essays are a series of intellectual self-portraits that together produce an autobiography of the author. But unlike, say, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, or Augustine’s Confessions, which are reflections upon a lifetime of learning, Montaigne is able to provide us with continuously altering snapshots of himself over the course of years, which furnish a diagram of the mind throughout its maturity. It is a personal investigation out of which the author might to sketch a vision of himself: “I have no thought of serving either you or my own glory,” Montaigne tells us at the outset; “I am myself the matter of my book,”––and that “…you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” Indeed, the project is that there is no project, but to record the mind contemplating itself, in which: “the first feature produces the second.” Thus we receive in the opening pages the dismissal of any possible culmination, or end goal, so that the inner narrative of the self is free to evolve. “I do not depict being,” Montaigne says, “I depict passage.”
It is tempting to want to credit Montaigne’s pensée with more methodology and philosophical intent than it really bears. As a thinker who is often referenced alongside Descartes and Pascal, it’s important not to understate just how whimsical and playful Montaigne’s work truly is. The more time is spent with the essays, the more it becomes apparent that there is, in fact, no method at all. In “Of Idleness,” he acknowledges that in committing his truant thoughts to his pen, his hope is to: “make [his] mind ashamed of itself.” This self-doubt––which often casts itself in the hue of self-reproach––is the presiding tone of the essays, so much so at times that one begins to suspect the author is being falsely modest, or blatantly disingenuous. (The essays were massively successful upon their publication, and most people who could read had probably read them.) Throughout the voluminous collection, Montaigne is frequently unserious and pathologically self-aware––ever ready to undermine himself at the moment he appears pedagogical, or didactic. Instead, the essays display a consummate knowledge without pedantry or rigor; the author is erudite without being esoteric.
This lack of agenda becomes the looseness of the writer’s technique––in contrast to the turgid, rococo style of the Ciceronian mode, with its strict adherence to form, which dominated European prose in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. But the essays are not bound by form, in as much as they repeatedly neglect any obligation for organization or procedure. It is a style that is completely internal, malleable and self-justifying. And because there is no imposed structure, the essays are less argumentative than exploratory, speculative while also avoiding relativism, committed but not systematic, and often severed at the moment Montaigne senses he is approaching a conclusion. One such famous example of this is the last line of “Of Cannibals”, which ends with a spectacular shrug: “All this is not too bad––but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.”
Montaigne engages his style through what he calls, “la peinture de la pensée” (“the painting of thought.”) The writer confronts the blank page as the blank canvas of the mind, and as the mind adjusts itself to a topic in the act of unpacking it, so do the “high” and “low” styles of the voice. As he says while apologizing for one of his signature digressions: “My style and my mind alike go roaming.” It is this mimetic representation of intellectual process that defines Montaigne’s technique; and technique, as Oscar Wilde says, is really personality. As readers, we are guided along the contours of the mind in motion, with the writer thinking and discovering as he writes. We, in turn, experience two prongs of thought: the voice of the mind discovering the subject, and the “other voice” of the mind interjecting on itself to reflect as it makes the discovery. Here, style is epistemic, style is judgment, and it reflects the process of induction. Thus, a particular mode of argument it is not simply a demonstration of the how the writer thinks, but the arrival of knowledge itself. The sensation one feels in reading is like that of falling through a consciousness, unprepared and desperate to make sense of itself and the world, a process hideously and perpetually internal that is at once denigrating and self-flattering.
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