Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Yet he also knew that reading always involved some process of selection. He did it himself whenever he picked up a book, and he did it even more decidedly if he then flung it aside in boredom. Montaigne read only what interested him; his readers and editors do the same to him. All readings of the book eventually become an Esprit des Essais de Montaigne , even the most scholarly ones.

Indeed, perhaps these are more prone to it than any other kind. To a striking extent, modern critics seem to remix and remake a Montaigne who resembles themselves, not only individually but as a species. Just as Romantics found a Romantic Montaigne, Victorian moralists found a moralist one, and the English in general found an English Montaigne, so the “deconstructionist” or “postmodernist” critics who flourished throughout the late twentieth century (and just into the twenty-first) fall with delight upon the very thing they are predisposed to see: a deconstructionist and postmodernist Montaigne. This kind of Montaigne has become so familiar to the contemporary critical eye that it takes considerable effort to lean back far enough to see it for what it is: an artifact, or at least a creative remix.

Postmodernists consider the world as an endlessly shifting system of meanings, so they concentrate upon a Montaigne who speaks of the world as a dancing branloire , or who says that human beings are “diverse and undulating,” and “double within ourselves.” They think objective knowledge is impossible, and are therefore drawn to Montaigne’s writings on perspective and doubt. (This book is as prone to such temptations as any other, being a product of its time.) It is beguiling; it is flattering. One looks into one’s copy of the Essays like the Queen in Snow White looking into her mirror. Before there is even time to ask the fairy-tale question, the mirror croons back, “You’re the fairest of them all.”

One feature of recent critical theory makes it more than usually prone to this magic-mirror effect: its habit of talking about the text rather than the author. Instead of wondering what Montaigne “really” meant to say, or investigating historical contexts, critics have looked primarily to the independent network of associations and meanings on the page — a network which can be cast like a great fishing net to capture almost anything. This is not only a feature of strict postmodernism. Recent psychoanalytical critics also apply their analysis to the Essays itself rather than to Montaigne the man. Some treat the book as an entity with its own subconscious. Just as an analyst can read a patient’s dreams to get to what lurks beneath, so a critic can probe the text’s etymologies, sounds, accidental slips, and even printing errors in order to discover hidden levels of meaning. It is acknowledged that Montaigne had no intention of putting them there, but that does not matter, since the text has its own intentions.

Out of this train of thought have come readings which, in their way, are as baroque and beautiful as Montaigne’s own writing. To choose one of the most appealing examples, Tom Conley’s “A Suckling of Cities: Montaigne in Paris and Rome” picks up on a simple remark in Montaigne’s “Of Vanity”: that he knew about Rome before he knew of the Louvre in Paris. “Louvre,” the French royal palace at the time, resembles the French word louve or “female wolf.” For Conley, this reveals the text’s subconscious link to the female wolf who suckled Rome’s founding twins Romulus and Remus. Their mouths opened up as they sucked; in the same way, we open up our perspective on cities such as Rome or Paris by thinking about how they have survived through the centuries. The mouth opens up this perspective; it opens it , which is l’ouvre in French. Therefore, when Montaigne mentions the Louvre in the same breath as Rome, his text reveals a hidden image in which “the essayist’s lips seal themselves around a royal teat.”

The suckling image leads us to breasts, which are multiplied all over Rome in the form of the city’s numerous domes and belvederes. “Erogenous tips that rise on the horizon of the city-view are assimilated into a multiplicity of points of nourishment.” The vision of Montaigne’s lips becomes even stranger:

Montaigne sucks the erect tip of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Saturnian Hill of Rome from above as he puckers his lips about the nipples of the founding she-wolf from below.

This can all be found in Montaigne’s note about the Louvre — but more follows. In the same essay, Montaigne goes on: “I have had the abilities and fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio more in my head [ plus en teste ] than those of any of our men.” Insignificant though this line may seem, tester or teter , in French, means “suckle.” These three classical heroes can be visualized as portraits, perhaps embossed on coins, which Montaigne puts in his mouth: “qu’il teste.” A great “suction and flow of space and time” therefore flows through these few pages.

And still there is more. Montaigne writes in this essay of his being “embabooned” by Roman history —embabouyné , which means “enchanted” or “bewitched,” but can also mean “suckled.” The French word becomes even more suggestive if one reads it as “ en bas bou(e) y n(ais),” meaning, “down in the mud I am born.” This refers, again, to the two infants and the she-wolf, for they had to bend down low in the Tiber mud to suckle from beneath her. Since mud is squishy and brown, the embabooned Montaigne can now be seen as descending into “a presymbolic world of aroma and excrement.”

Conley’s essay is itself bewitching, or embabooning — and he is not merely playing with words like Romulus and Remus flinging handfuls of Tiber mud around. Nor is he proposing that Montaigne “really” had nipples on the brain when he wrote about Rome. The purpose is to pick out a network of associations: to find in a few apparently straightforward words of text a meaning as atmospheric and revealing as a dream. The result has a dreamlike beauty of its own, and there is no reason to become annoyed because it shows little apparent relation to Montaigne. As Montaigne said about Plutarch, every line of a rich text like the Essays is filled with pointers indicating “where we are to go, if we like.” Modern critics have taken this very much to heart.

And all the time, the real patient on the analyst’s couch — the one whose dreams cry out for interpretation — is not the Essays text, nor the person of Montaigne, but the critic. By treating Montaigne’s text as a treasure-house of clues to something unknown, and at the same time separating these clues from their original context, such literary detectives are subjecting themselves to a well-established trick for opening up the subconscious. It is precisely the technique that a fortune teller uses when laying out tea leaves from a cup, or a psychologist when applying a Rorschach test. One sets out a random field of clues, separated from their conventional context, then watches to see what emerges from the observer’s mind. The answer, inevitably, will be something at least as rarefied and whimsical as L’Esprit des Essais de Montaigne .

Regrettably to anyone with a taste for such things, this trend in modern critical theory — the last of the lily pads on this wayward frog-leap tour through the history of Montaigne-reading — seems to be passing into history already. Recent years have seen a reaction against it: a slow change of weather. More and more literary scholars are returning to history. Once again, they soberly study the sixteenth-century meanings of Montaigne’s language and try to fathom his intentions and motivations. It looks like the end of an era — and the beginning of another.