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Image and Introspective Imagination in Montaigne's Essais
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
One of the most significant bridges between Montaigne, the thinker, and Montaigne, the writer, is in the use of figurative expression. Through application of a portion of Thibaudet's catalog of Montaigne's images, the organic nature of metaphor in the Essais becomes immediately apparent. Sometimes generating each other, sometimes generated within the writer's thought progressions, Montaigne's metaphors are frequently found in clusters. Such clusters depict the movement of the writer's mind as it strives to give a stylistic form to his thoughts. In both their thematic and organic natures, therefore, his metaphors provide introspective glimpses into the operation of the creative mind.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 For a comprehensive study of Montaigne's “mobilisme,” see Thibaudet's notes edited under the title Montaigne, textes etablis, presentes, et annotes par Floyd Gray (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
2 The visual depiction of thought processes is enunciated most effectively in “De l'exercitation”: “Je peins principalement mes cogitations, subject informe, qui ne peut tomber en production ouvragere.” Montaigne, CEuvres completes, textes etablis par Albert Thibaudet et Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 359. Unless otherwise indicated, all further textual references will be to this edition.
3 As it is used in this study, the word “image” may be taken to mean either figurative language and ornamentation, or a mental representation conceived by fancy and imagination. Since, for Montaigne, there is little distinction to be drawn between the mechanisms of conception and the stylistic products of these mechanisms, there appears to be no reason for this study to draw fine lines, except as the requirements of clarity demand. Furthermore, the discussion will be limited almost exclusively to the use of metaphorical expression in the Essais.
4 The concept of Montaigne's psychological and stylistic “mobilisme” was recognized as early as the 18th century (see, e.g., the Encyclopedic, xm, 612). Later, Sainte-Beuve relates this concept specifically to Montaigne's figurative language: “Montaigne a eu, plus qu'aucun peutetre, ce don d'exprimer et de peindre; son style est une figure perpetuelle … La couture de l'idee a l'image est si en dedans qu'on ne la voit ni qu'on n'y songe: pensee, image, chez lui, c'est tout un!” Port-Royal, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 863–64. Albert Thibaudet, the first critic to use the concept of “mobilisme” to explore the total landscape of Montaigne's stylistic creation, writes: “ . . . sa pensee n'est pas ces images, c'est la succession de ces images et chacune de ces images retient autant qu'elle peut quelque chose de cette succession, de cette procession, de ce mouvement” (Montaigne, p. 164).
5 Rhetorica, Book iii, Ch. ix, p. 1,410b, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), xi, n. pag.
6 Gray contrasts Montaigne's early use of simile with its opposite assimilation in Flaubert: “Montaigne, lui, a commence comme Flaubert finira, toutes proportions gardees, en arrangeant, en composant sa phrase comme n'importe quel bon eleve de rhetorique, et c'est a ce moment-la qu'apparaissent la plupart de ses comparaisons. On peut done dire, que chez Montaigne au moins, la comparaison represente presque toujours un effort conscient de la part de l'ecrivain,” Le Style de Montaigne (Paris: Nizet, 1958), pp. 139–40.
7 In his chapter on the simile (p. 140), Gray demonstrates a vital syntactical contrast between the simile and metaphor, the former relying heavily on the passive expression of a substantive, and the latter relying on the active expression provided by the verb and its complements.
8 1 borrow this term from Philip Hallie, The Scar of Montaigne (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1966), who makes an interesting case for comparison of Montaigne with Ludwig Wittgenstein and “the ordinary-language philosophers.” In his analysis of the affective elements of language and their role in human communication, Hallie explains that with the “Poetic” imagination, “the ordinarily experienced objects in the world are illuminated, rendered fresh and fascinating by the images in the mind of the viewer” (p. 76). The use of metaphor is consequently the basic trait of the “Poetic” imagination. On the other hand, for Montaigne, there are also “the Assertive imaginers, the arrogant, prosaic ones who would prove their claims, live a life of conflict with each other, of assertion and counterassertion, proof and refutation, quite alien to the autonomous worlds of poetry” (p. 78). Accordingly, Aristotle is the prince of these dogmatists for whom literal (as opposed to figurative) language is the tool of argument and invective. It is, then, the “Assertive” imagination “that causes the ‘troubles,‘ that obscures the facts, that creates conflicting claims to knowledge” (p. 79).
9 This passage is an interesting prefiguration of the later esthetic dictum of Boileau in VArt poetique, Chant Premier, vv. 153–54: “Ce que Ton congoit bien s'enonce clairement, / et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement.”
10 “Chez Montaigne elles [les metaphores] traduisent la presence d'une imagination spontanee, d'une pensee formee dans l'acte meme de la composition.On n'a jamais eteplus pres du moment de la creation litteraire a son etat pur” (Gray, Le Style de Montaigne, p. 150).
11 I am indebted to Thibaudet's catalog of images for the present discussion. In this catalog, as it appears in Gray's edition of Thibaudet's notes, the images are divided into four categories: (1) “Dedans et dehors”; (2) “Sensations organiques”; (3) “Mouvement et changement”; (4) “Images visuelles,” a miscellaneous grouping that does not possess the thematic unity of the other categories and that I do not intend to use in this discussion.
12 This emphasis upon the clarity of conception is one of the major themes of stylistic doctrine in the Institution.
13 Thibaudet, Montaigne, p. 506.
14 The travel metaphor is, for Thibaudet, one of the subgroups of the metaphors of movement, and is used in the two familiar descriptions of a Platonic “gradus”: (1) “J'avois traine languissant apres des parolles Frangoises . . . ” (i, Ch. xxvi, pp. 145–46); (2) and the passage on Virtue which Gray ascribes to Xenophon (“Elle a pour son but la vertu . . . ”—I, Ch. xxvi, pp. 160–61). See “Montaigne and the Memorabilia;' SP, 58 (April 1961), 130–39.