French Renaissance literature:

The work of Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne's work, successful in his own time, has continued to interest commentators for more than four centuries. In addition to concentrating on the ideas and opinions offered in Montaigne's writing, critics have long studied his work from a stylistic standpoint, considering him a pioneer of the essay form, specifically the genre of the personal essay.

Living, as he did, in the second half of the 16th century, Montaigne bore witness to the decline of the intellectual optimism that had marked the Renaissance. The sense of immense human possibilities, stemming from the discoveries of the New World travellers, from the rediscovery of classical antiquity, and from the opening of scholarly horizons through the works of the humanists, was shattered in France when the advent of the Calvinistic Reformation was followed closely by religious persecution and by the Wars of Religion (1562-98). These conflicts, which tore the country asunder, were in fact political and civil as well as religious wars, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and cruelty.

Critics

The nature of Montaigne's self-representation within his "Essais" or "Attempts" has been studied by a number of critics, who maintain that Montaigne's strategy was to warn his readers that the man and his words are not one ... the face of Montaigne is laid bare but its very openness cannot be taken at face value. Much of the scholarship on his 'Essais' or "Attemps" is devoted to the discovery and acknowledgement of the many ambiguities and apparent contradictions within the text. Earlier critics often considered such contradictions the work's major flaw or, alternately, considered them evidence of Montaigne's evolution as a thinker-the writer had simply changed his mind on various issues as he grew more sophisticated and more knowledgeable.

Recently, however, scholars have begun to appreciate differences in Montaigne's position on various subjects and to consider them part of a deliberate textual strategy on the writer's part. Some critics believe that current scholarship, rather than attempting to establish a new interpretation of Montaigne's work that would compete with earlier theories, should posit an interpretation that "attends to and exploits differences-frictions and discontinuities-within the text." One such "difference" involves Montaigne's views on the public/private split.

Another area of significant critical discussion involves Montaigne's attitude towards women, which is explored by numerous critics. On the one hand, Montaigne advised women to concentrate on beauty, grace, and charm, rather than intellectual pursuits for which he considered them poorly suited. At the same time, however, according to some, Montaigne seemed to situate his voice as a writer within a discourse he himself coded as feminine, that is, a discourse devoted to poetry, history, and moral philosophy. It is sometimes argued that Montaigne's ambivalent attitude towards the monarchy was echoed in his ideas on friendship, and it is through the process of writing "De l'amité," that Montaigne was able to discover and formulate his ideas on political power. In political terms, friendship offered Montaigne a dignified humanist alternative to the rebellion of civil war and the subservience of courtiership. There is also an apparent inconsistency in Montaigne's theory of language. The last words of a dying person were perceived by Montaigne as "transparent and transmissible". This implies a view of language that seems incompatible with Montaigne's frequently expressed opinion that words are equivocal, ambiguous, and ever open to multiple interpretations.

One critic, in his examination of "Des coches," demonstrates Montaigne's ability to see both sides of the Spanish conquest of the New World and present them to his reader. According to Hampton, "Montaigne places the reader both in the position of the Spaniard and in the imaged position of the New World native, in the place of the one who knows that gunpowder is gunpowder and the one who thinks it is thunder."

Montaigne's philosophy

Montaigne saw his age as one of dissimulation, corruption, violence, and hypocrisy, and it is therefore not surprising that the point of departure of the "Essais" is situated in negativity: the negativity of Montaigne's recognition of the rule of appearances and of the loss of connection with the truth of being. Montaigne's much-discussed skepticism results from that initial negativity, as he questions the possibility of all knowing and sees the human being as a creature of weakness and failure, of inconstancy and uncertainty, of incapacity and fragmentation, or, as he wrote in the first of the "Essais", as "a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating thing." His scepticism is reflected in the French title of his work, "Essais", which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or of confident opinion.

Montaigne's skepticism does not, however, preclude a belief in the existence of truth but rather constitutes a defense against the danger of locating truth in false, unexamined, and externally imposed notions. His skepticism, combined with his desire for truth, drives him to the rejection of commonly accepted ideas and to a profound distrust of generalizations and abstractions; it also shows him the way to an exploration of the only realm that promises certainty. That of concrete phenomena and primarily the basic phenomenon of his own body-and-mind self.

With all its imperfections, The Self constitutes the only possible site where the search for truth can start, and it is the reason Montaigne, from the beginning to the end of the "Essais", does not cease to affirm that "I am myself the matter of my book." He finds that his identity, his "master form" as he calls it, cannot be defined in simple terms of a constant and stable self, since it is instead a changeable and fragmented thing and that the evaluation and acceptance of these traits is the only guarantee of authenticity and integrity, the only way of remaining faithful to the truth of one's being and one's nature rather than to alien semblances. Yet, despite his insistence that the self guard its freedom toward outside influences and the tyranny of imposed customs and opinions, Montaigne believes in the value of reaching outside the self.

Indeed, throughout his writings, as he did in his private and public life, he manifests the need to entertain ties with the world of other people and of events. For this necessary coming and going between the interiority of the self and the exteriori+om. Human beings have their front room, facing the street, where they meet and interact with others, but they need always to be able to retreat into the back room of the most private self, where they may reaffirm the freedom and strength of intimate identity and reflect upon the vagaries of experience. Given that always-available retreat, Montaigne encourages contact with others, from which one may learn much that is useful. In order to do so, he advocates travel, reading, especially of history books, and conversations with friends. These friends, for Montaigne, are necessarily men.

As for his relations with women, Montaigne wrote about them with a frankness unusual for his time. The only uncomplicated bond is that of marriage, which for Montaigne, is for reasons of family and posterity and in which one invests little of oneself. Love, on the other hand, with its emotional and erotic demands, comports the risk of enslavement and loss of freedom. Montaigne, often designated as a misogynist, does in fact recognize that men and women are fundamentally alike in their fears, desires, and attempts to find and affirm their own identity and that only custom and adherence to an antiquated status quo establish the apparent differences between the sexes, but he does not explore the possibility of overcoming that fundamental separation and of establishing an intellectual equality.

Cultural Relativism

Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the inhabitants of the New World, with whom he had become acquainted through his lively interest in oral and written travel accounts and through his meeting in 1562 with three Brazilian Indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon had brought back to France. Giving an example of cultural relativism and tolerance, rare in his time, he finds these people, in their fidelity to their own nature and in their cultural and personal dignity and sense of beauty, greatly superior to the inhabitants of western Europe, who in the conquests of the New World and in their own internal wars have shown themselves to be the true barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the New World's natives by their conquerors provoke his indignation and compassion.

Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning the independence and freedom of the self and the importance of social and intellectual inter-action in all his writings and in particular in his essay on the education of children. There, as elsewhere, he advocates the value of concrete experience over abstract learning and of independent judgment over an accumulation of undigested notions uncritically accepted from others. He also stresses, throughout his work, the role of the body, as in his candid descriptions of his own bodily functions and in his extensive musings on the realities of illness, of aging, and of death. The presence of death pervades the Essais, as Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with the inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the tyranny of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of nature's exigencies, inherent in life's expectations and limitations.

Although Montaigne certainly knew the classical philosophers, his ideas spring less out of their teaching than out of the completely original meditation on himself, which he extends to a description of the human being and to an ethics of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance. The Essais are the record of his thoughts, presented not in artificially organized stages but as they occurred and reoccurred to him in different shapes throughout his thinking and writing activity. They are not the record of an intellectual evolution but of a continuous accretion, and he insists on the immediacy and the authenticity of their testimony. He refuses to impose a false unity on the spontaneous workings of his thought, so he refuses to impose a false structure on his Essais. "As my mind roams, so does my style," he wrote, and the multiple digressions, the wandering developments, the savory, concrete vocabulary, all denote that fidelity to the freshness and the immediacy of the living thought. Throughout the text he sprinkles anecdotes taken from ancient as well as contemporary authors and from popular lore, which reinforce his critical analysis of reality; he also peppers his writing with quotes, yet another way of interacting with others,that is, with the authors of the past who surround him in his library. Neither anecdotes nor quotes impinge upon the autonomy of his own ideas, although they may spark or reinforce a train of thought, and they become an integral part of the book's fabric.

Montaigne's Essais incorporate a profound skepticism concerning the human being's dangerously inflated claims to knowledge and certainty but also assert that there is no greater achievement than the ability to accept one's being without either contempt or illusion, in the full realization of its limitations and its richness.

Readership

Throughout the ages the "Essais" have been widely and variously read, and their readers have tended to look to them, and into them, for answers to their own needs. Not all his contemporaries manifested the enthusiasm of Marie de Gournay, who fainted from excitement at her first reading. She did recognize in the book the full force of an unusual mind revealing itself, but most of the intellectuals of the period preferred to find in Montaigne a safe reincarnation of stoicism. Here started a misunderstanding that was to last a long time, save in the case of the exceptional reader. The "Essais" were to be perused as an anthology of philosophical maxims, a repository of consecrated wisdom, rather than as the complete expression of a highly individual thought and experience. That Montaigne could write about his most intimate reactions and feelings, that he could describe his own physical appearance and preferences, for instance, seemed shocking and irrelevant to many, just as the apparent confusion of his writing seemed a weakness to be deplored rather than a guarantee of authenticity.

In the 17th century, when an educated nobility set the tone, he was chiefly admired for his portrayal of the 'honnête homme', the well-educated, non pedantic man of manners, as much at home in a salon as in his study, a gentleman of smiling wisdom and elegant, discreet disenchantment. In the same period, however, religious authors such as Francis of Sales and Blaise Pascal deplored his Skepticism as anti-Christian and denounced what they interpreted as an immoral self-absorption. In the pre-Revolutionary 18th century the image of a dogmatically irreligious Montaigne continued to be dominant, and Voltaire and Denis Diderot saw in him a precursor of the free thought of the Enlightenment. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, the encounter with the Essais was differently and fundamentally important, as he rightly considered Montaigne the master and the model of the self-portrait.

Rousseau inaugurated the perception of the book as the entirely personal project of a human being in search of his identity and unafraid to talk without dissimulation about his profound nature.

In the 19th century some of the old misunderstandings continued, but there was a growing understanding and appreciation of Montaigne not only as a master of ideas but also as the writer of the particular, the individual, the intimate-the writer as friend and familiar. Gustave Flaubert kept the Essais on his bedside table and recognized in Montaigne an alter ego, as would, in the 20th century, authors such as André Gide, Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes.

At the end of the fifth volume, which was published around 1564, the divine bottle is found. The epic journey ends with Pantagruel producing a large piece of faeces, perhaps the ultimate commentary on the subjects of politics and religion which the books satirise. Although some parts of book 5 are truly worthy of Rabelais, the last volume's attribution to him is debatable. Book five was not published until nine years after Rabelais's death and includes much material that is likely to have been borrowed (such as from Lucian's True History and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) or of lesser quality than the previous books. In the notes to his translation of Gargantua and Pantegruel, Donald M. Frame proposes that book 5 may have been formed from unfinished material that a publisher later patched together into a book.

Analysis

Gargantua and Pantagruel is named after the legendary Medieval giants who were notable not only for their immense size but their immensely gross appetites. The two giants were symbolically expanded by Rabelais in order for him to make very pointed and often quite funny observations about the failing of men and to further his own belief in the philosophy of naturalism. Rabelais was very much in line with the humanism of Erasmus. What that means is that Gargantua and Pantagruel reserves much of its sharpest satirical claws for the ripping up of the highly ritualistic ceremonies of the Catholic Church, while also pulling out the shears to shred the equally arrogant perspective of scholasticism. Rabelais focused his attention on denuding the idiocy of superstitious beliefs regardless of from where they stemmed.

Where Francois Rabelais differed from Erasmus was in his choice of language. While Erasmus wrote in the elevated classical style that appealed only to the educated, Rabelais wrote in an earthy style that spoke to the common French man. He was especially enjoyed because of his ability to inject crudity and even vulgarity into his tales. While this lower class of writing was doubtlessly instrumental in making Rabelais popular to the multitudes, it must also be concluded that he became popular because of his unwillingness to become too preachy and to avoid the path of moral mongering.

Gargantua and Pantagruel takes the giants as symbols of entities who lust for life. Rabelais himself believed that every human desire and endeavour was healthy as long as it was not directed towards oppression of others. As such, the ideal of a Rabelais utopia is one where repression of emotions that do not inflict damage upon others is the norm. A world built upon the idealization of Rabelais would be one in which laws were not constructed to interfere with any pursuit of happiness that did not inflict authority upon others.

By the way that he shows the giant in Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais is satirizing two schools of thought. He shows effectively that both Medieval and Renaissance, in their extreme forms are limited. By presenting both, using satire Rabelais suggests that both Medieval and Renaissance thinking will pass and that learning is a necessary attempt to understand the world.