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READING MONTAIGNE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2009

FELICITY GREEN
FELICITY GREEN
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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 1085 - 1109
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 ‘A register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory’ (iii.ii: 845, 908).

2 ‘I get lost, but more from licence than carelessness. My ideas do follow on from each other, though sometimes at a distance, and have regard for each other, though somewhat obliquely … My pen and my mind both go a-roaming’ (iii.ix: 1040–1, 1124–5).

3 Jean-Yves Pouilloux, Lire les Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1969); Montaigne: l'éveil de la pensée (Paris, 1995).

4 ‘Montaigne is a thinker; the Essais are a book of “philosophy”’. Pouilloux, Lire, p. 14.

5 On Montaigne as a philosopher: André Comte-Sponville, ‘Je ne suis pas philosophe’: Montaigne et la philosophie (Paris, 1993); Marcel Conche, Montaigne et la philosophie (2nd edn, Paris, 1993); Ian Maclean, Montaigne philosophe (Paris, 1996); Philippe Desan, ed., La philosophie et Montaigne, special issue of Montaigne Studies, 12 (2000). See also the work of Ullrich Langer, Divine and poetic freedom in the Renaissance: nominalist theology and literature in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1990) and Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu: littérature et philosophie morale au XVIè siècle en France (Geneva, 1999). Several recent studies have been devoted to Montaigne's scepticism, including Frédéric Brahami, Le scepticisme de Montaigne (Paris, 1997), and Le travail du scepticisme (Montaigne, Bayle, Hume) (Paris, 2001); Jan Miernowski, L'ontologie de la contradiction sceptique: pour l'étude de la métaphysique des Essais (Paris, 1998); Sylvia Giocanti, Penser l'irrésolution: Montaigne, Pascal, La Mothe Le Vayer: trois itinéraires sceptiques (Paris, 2001); Marie-Luce Demonet, A plaisir: sémiotique et scepticisme dans les ‘Essais’ (Caen, 2003); Marie-Luce Demonet and Alain Legros, eds., L'écriture du scepticisme chez Montaigne (Geneva, 2004); Vincent Carraud and Jean-Luc Marion, eds., Montaigne: scepticisme, métaphysique, théologie (Paris, 2004); Emmanuel Naya, ‘La loy de pure obeïssance’: le pyrrhonisme à l'essai chez Montaigne (Paris, 2004).

6 ‘A difficult philosophical work, of unusual complexity’; ‘a necessary intersection between literary and philosophical investigations’.

7 See for example David Quint, Montaigne and the quality of mercy: ethical and political themes in the Essais (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Patrick Henry, ed., Montaigne and Ethics, special issue of Montaigne Studies, 14 (2002); Zahi Zalloua, ed., Montaigne and Ethics, special issue of L'Esprit Créateur, 46 (2006); Philippe Desan, ed., Montaigne politique, special issue of Montaigne Studies, 18 (2006).

8 ‘To take up the challenge of recent critics, by asking to what extent a ‘moralist’ reading of Montaigne can withstand the attacks made by an approach that privileges a rhetoric of movement'. ‘In the face of repeated attacks made by certain modern critics, traditionalist criticism – and more particularly that which is focused on an ethical reading of the Essais – has no need to remain on the defensive.’

9 Hartle takes as her starting-point Montaigne's description of himself, in the ‘Apologie de Raimond de Sebonde’, as a ‘nouvelle figure: un philosophe impremedité et fortuit’ (‘a new character: an accidental philosopher, not a premeditated one!’) (ii.xii: 578, 614). Tournon prefaces his study with a quotation from ‘De l'experience’: ‘Ce n'est rien que foiblesse particuliere, qui nous faict contenter de ce que d'autres, ou que nous-mesmes avons trouvé en cette chasse de cognoissance: un plus habile ne s'en contentera pas. Il y a tousjours place pour un suivant, ouy et pour nous mesmes, et route par ailleurs’ (‘It is only our individual weakness which makes us satisfied with what has been discovered by others or by ourselves in this hunt for knowledge: an abler man will not be satisfied with it. There is always room for a successor – yes, even for ourselves – and a different way to proceed’) (iii.xiii: 1114–5, 1211). Tournon's subtitle refers to the following passage from the ‘Apologie’: ‘Je voy les philosophes Pyrrhoniens qui ne peuvent exprimer leur generale conception en aucune maniere de parler: car il leur faudroit un nouveau langage. Le nostre est tout formé de propositions affirmatives, qui leur sont du tout ennemies’ (‘Pyrrhonist philosophers, I see, cannot express their general concepts in any known kind of speech; they would need a new language: ours is made up of affirmative propositions totally inimical to them’) (ii.xii: 556, 590).

10 ‘A discursive strategy allowing speech to contest itself without cancelling itself.’

11 ‘Investigations lead to provisional conclusions, to stages on a journey without end; and synthesis is always deferred, which is enough to exclude definitive certainties.’

12 ‘Ruptures’ and ‘inflections’ that ‘disrupt the initial line of thought, overthrow its validating criteria, and set themselves against the conclusions to which it appeared to lead.’

13 ‘The text contains its own critique. Or to put it more accurately, it doubles itself. For this is not, properly speaking, a contradiction, let alone a dialectical progression: the antagonism is between assertions situated in different planes … The whole thing is a metalinguistic game.’

14 A ‘polyphonic’ ‘montage’ of ‘discourses of different degrees’; ‘a form of speech that is truthful in so far as it acknowledges the risk of error, the risk of becoming stuck in the rut which it has traced’.

15 ‘Distortions that regenerate concepts, enigmatic or aporetic configurations, emphatic silences, multiple perspectives, discordances.’

16 ‘The truth, or rather the kind of truth that is able to subsist after the ravages caused by pyrrhonism in the field of objective assertions.’

17 ‘A writer who does not claim access to objective truths, but only to convictions and problems.’ André Tournon, ‘“Mouches en lait”: l'inscription des lectures’, in Noel Peacock and James J. Supple, eds., Lire les Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 2001), pp. 75–88, at p. 87.

18 Desan, Philippe, ‘Montaigne en lopins ou les Essais à pièces décousues’, Modern Philology, 88 (1991), pp. 278–91Google Scholar.

19 ‘Monstrosities and grotesques’ (i.xxviii: 183, 206).

20 ‘To our mind, a pluralist text requires a pluralist approach’.

21 ‘There is no magic recipe allowing us to discover ‘the right perspective’ on the Essais'. ‘The results obtained by Montaigne scholars are a direct reflection of the methodology they adopt.’

22 ‘To better define the nature of the problems posed by a genre which calls our reading strategies into question.’

23 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Albert Thibaudet (Paris, 1934). This edition was later incorporated in the Œuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris, 1967).

24 Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne: edition nouvelle, trouvée après le deceds de l'Autheur, reueuë & augmentée par luy d'un tiers plus qu'aux precedentes Impressions (Paris, 1595).

25 Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, nouvelle édition conforme au texte de l'Exemplaire de Bordeaux, avec les additions de l'édition posthume …, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris, 1922–3; 1930–1), revised by V.-L. Saulnier (Paris, 1965; 1978; 1988; 1992; 1999), re-edited with a preface and supplement by Marcel Conche (Paris, 2004). VS is a compact adaptation of the monumental ‘édition municipale’: Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, publiés d'après l'Exemplaire de Bordeaux, avec les variantes manuscrites et les leçons des plus anciennes impressions, ed. Fortunat Strowski, François Gebelin, and Pierre Villey (5 vols., Bordeaux, 1906–33).

26 Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. André Tournon (3 vols., Paris, 1998).

27 Montaigne: les Essais, ed. Denis Bjaï, Bénédicte Boudou, Jean Céard, and Isabelle Pantin (Paris, 2001).

28 Les Essais de Montaigne accompagnés d'une notice sur sa vie et ses ouvrages, d'une étude bibliographique, de variantes, de notes, de tables et d'un glossaire, ed. Ernest Courbet and C. Royer (5 vols., Paris, 1872–1900).

29 With the exception of three additions in Gournay's hand, dictated to her by Montaigne (at 42v, 47r and 290v). EB is now preserved at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux (Rés. 1238), but has recently been made more readily accessible through a colour facsimile edition: Reproduction en quadrichromie de l'Exemplaire de Bordeaux, ed. Philippe Desan (Chicago, IL, Fasano, 2002). This resource is also available online as part of the ARTFL Montaigne Project, hosted by the University of Chicago, which provides digitalized photo-images of EB accompanied by a searchable version of VS: www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/index.html.

30 ‘A prestigious apocrypha’, IN, i, p. 14.

31 In the case of VS, a number of 1595 variants were also retained in the form of footnotes segregated from the main text (although only those which in Pierre Villey's judgement offered useful complementary information about his own principal research interest, the ‘sources’ and ‘evolution’ of Montaigne's thought). Tournon, too, indirectly acknowledged the importance of the 1595 text by transcribing a number of its ‘significant variants’ in his endnotes.

32 It should be said, however, that there are far fewer paragraph breaks in IN than in VS, and that Tournon emphasizes in his preface that ‘le lecteur doit se rappeler que … les alinéas sont factices; et qu'il peut en faire mentalement abstraction, où les redécouper à sa guise’ (‘the reader must remind themselves that … the paragraph breaks are artificial; and that they may mentally disregard them, or divide them anew as they wish’). IN, i, p. 21.

33 Rather less crucially, the original spelling is also preserved, with the exception of a few minor concessions to modern usage. On this point, see André Tournon's persuasive arguments in defence of modernization: IN, i, pp. 15–18.

34 Bernard Croquette, ‘Les Essais mis en pièces’, in Françoise Charpentier and Simone Perrier, eds., Les derniers essais de Montaigne, Cahiers Textuel, 34/44 (1986), pp. 9–18, and ‘Faut-il (re)découper les Essais de Montaigne?’, in Claude Blum and André Tournon, eds., Éditer les Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1997), pp. 197–201; O'Brien, John, ‘Are we reading what Montaigne wrote?’, French Studies, 58 (2004), pp. 527–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 531.

35 R. A. Sayce, ‘L’édition des Essais de 1595', Bibliothèque d'humanisme et Renaissance, 36 (1974), pp. 115–41; David Maskell, ‘Quel est le dernier état authentique des Essais?’, Bibliothèque d'humanisme et Renaissance, 40 (1978), pp. 85–103. See also Michel Simonin, ‘Aux origines de l’édition de 1595', in Marcel Tetel, ed., Montaigne et Marie de Gournay (Paris, 1997), pp. 7–51.

36 EB does not appear to have been homogeneously or consistently revised. Certain passages and chapters have been corrected far more extensively and in much greater detail than others. Some of Montaigne's manuscript additions were clearly copied out having been drafted elsewhere, since they contain few deletions and fit neatly into the marginal space available. Others are evidently still a work in progress, bearing the marks of ongoing revision and of a writer inserting corrections without being able to predict their final length in advance (Desan, Montaigne, p. 86). A list of instructions to the printer features on the flyleaf and the first few pages contain recognizable proof-marking indicators destined for the attention of the typesetter, but these are not to be found in the rest of the work. It seems likely, then, that EB was initially intended as a printer's copy, but then superseded in this function at an early stage. The condition of Montaigne's hand, which is sometimes very difficult to decipher, together with a tendency in some passages to use minimal punctuation and frequent abbreviations, also suggests that EB was only intended for his own use (Desan, Montaigne, pp. 79–80).

37 See Desan, Montaigne, p. 77 n. 32. In Les Advis, ou, les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (Paris, 1641), Gournay tells us that the manuscript of the Essais was sent to her in Paris around March 1594: ‘un an et demy apres la mort de Montaigne la veufve et la fille unique de ce grand homme envoyerent les Essais à Mlle de Gournay, lors retirée à Paris, pour les faire imprimer, la priant de les aller voir après’ (‘a year and a half after Montaigne's death, the widow and only daughter of this great man sent the Essais to Mlle de Gournay, then retired to Paris, in order to have them published, asking her to come and see them afterwards’) (p. 994). In the 1595 preface, Gournay also mentions ‘une autre copie qui reste en sa maison’ (‘another copy which remains at his house’), at Montaigne, in addition to the one used as the basis for her text (p. 24). The 1595 edition had been printed by the end of 1594. However, Gournay herself did not make the trip to Montaigne to see the ‘autre copie’ until the end of 1595, returning to Paris in late 1596. Reinhold Dezeimeris, in his Recherches sur la recension du texte posthume des Essais de Montaigne (Bordeaux, 1866), was the first to draw attention to the existence of these two copies, one sent to Paris in early 1594, and the other only being consulted once the 1595 edition had already been published. One of these is of course no longer extant, but we would expect the copy sent to Paris, the exemplar used by the printers, to have been destroyed after completion of the typesetting process (Desan, Montaigne, pp. 97–8). Given this, it seems safe to identify the ‘autre copie’ which remained at Montaigne as EB, set aside in favour of an alternative copy sent to Gournay. As for de Brach, his precise role in this process remains unclear. In the 1595 preface, Gournay writes, somewhat elliptically, that she is grateful for his careful assistance to Madame de Montaigne (p. 24). David Maskell suggests that the second copy, Montaigne's transcription and correction of EB, was not quite finished at his death, and that de Brach may have helped to prepare it for publication by transcribing further corrections from EB (‘Dernier état’, p. 95). But cf. Simonin, ‘Aux origines’, who attributes a far more modest role to de Brach, arguing that ‘celui qui a eu charge de préparer la copie addressée à Gournay a disposé d'un exemplaire déjà très préparé’ (‘the person responsible for preparing the copy sent to Gournay had at his disposal a copy that was already very well prepared’) (p. 43).

38 See in particular ‘Cinq siècles de politiques éditoriales des Essais’ (Desan, Montaigne, pp. 121–91).

39 On the prominent role of women in the world of early modern book-making and publishing, see Dominique de Courcelles and Carmen Val Julian, eds., Des femmes et des livres: France et Espagne, XIVè–XVIIè siècles (Paris, 1999), in particular the article by Jean Balsamo, ‘Abel L'Angelier et ses dames: les Dames des Roches, Madeleine de L'Aubespine, Marie Le Gendre, Marie de Gournay’ (pp. 117–36).

40 ‘“Cet orphelin qui m'estoit commis”: Marie de Gournay et le travail éditorial des Essais de 1595 à 1635’ (Desan, Montaigne, pp. 193–216). In addition to Tetel, ed., Montaigne et Marie de Gournay, see Jean-Claude Arnould, ed., Marie de Gournay et l'édition de 1595 des Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1996); Giovanna Devincenzo, Marie de Gournay: un cas littéraire (Paris, 2002); Michèle Fogel, Marie de Gournay: itinéraires d'une femme savante (Paris, 2004); and Marie-Thérèse Noiset, Marie de Gournay et son œuvre (Jambes, 2004). This resurgence of interest in Gournay's literary career has been consecrated by the recent publication of the first critical edition of her complete works: Marie de Gournay: œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Claude Arnould, Evelyne Berriot, Claude Blum, Anna Lia Franchetti, Marie-Claire Thomine, and Valérie Worth-Stylianou (2 vols., Paris, 2002).

41 ‘The movement's resolution matters less than its opening, or than the reprise that gives it new impetus or that extends it; endings are provisional, open to being transgressed by a fresh impulse of speech. … It is not a style that … is set forth, but a mode of thinking as much as a mode of expression.’

42 ‘The posthumous edition emends the text and in particular the punctuation of the 1588 edition more frequently and more systematically than the Bordeaux Copy.’

43 ‘The effect of a broken, nervous and vehement style, given solemn emphasis by numerous upper-case letters.’

44 ‘Short additions’ and ‘revisions of the text, even lengthy ones, which have more to do with the work of style than with the history of the author's thought’ (VS, p. xxv).

45 ‘Brève histoire de Montaigne dans ses couches’ (Desan, Montaigne, pp. 297–318).

46 On the history of the Pléiade collection, see Kaplan, Alice and Roussin, Philippe, ‘A changing idea of literature: the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), pp. 237–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 ‘As if to his eyes the form of the book had attained its point of equilibrium … as if our rider had finally and forever found his rhythm and his seat … Between 1588 and 1592, Montaigne felt that his work had reached its definitive configuration.’

48 Cf. Maskell, ‘Dernier état’: ‘La rédaction définitive la plus complète [des Essais] est l’édition de 1588, après laquelle Montaigne n'a rien livré d'autre à l'impression. Certes il y a tout lieu de croire que, s'il avait vécu, il aurait fait imprimer une version des Essais semblable à celle de EB ou de 1595, mais ce qu'aurait été exactement cette rédaction définitive, personne ne le saura jamais. C'est pourquoi je me place sur le plan chronologique et parle du dernier état' (‘the most complete, definitive version [of the Essais] is the 1588 edition, after which Montaigne has nothing else printed. It is certainly probable that, had he lived, he would have had printed a version of the Essais similar to that of EB or that of the 1595 edition, but no one will ever know exactly what that definitive version would have contained. That is why I am taking a chronological perspective and why I speak of a last state’) (p. 86).

49 Terence Cave, The cornucopian text: problems of writing in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1979).

50 ‘Si l'on appelle bricolage la nécessité d'emprunter ses concepts au texte d'un héritage plus ou moins cohérent ou ruiné, on doit dire que tout discours est bricoleur’ (‘If by bricolage we mean the way in which one's concepts are necessarily borrowed from the text of a more or less coherent or crumbling inheritance, then one must also say that all discourse is bricoleur’). Jacques Derrida, ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’, in L'écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967), pp. 409–28, at p. 418. Derrida is himself drawing on a notion deployed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962).