Whosoever shall know himself,
let him boldly speak it out.
—Michel de Montaigne
I spent last summer in France,
living at a camp about an hour's drive from Michel de Montaigne's mansion in
Bordeaux. For miles, if I were to leave camp and walk in almost any direction
I'd be met only by farms, by fields of wheat or grass, or by thickets of tall
trees where I could hide myself from the sun. There were trails around the
camp, littered with the waste left behind by nearby resident swans and ducks,
or with manure from the horses people sometimes rode through the woods. Whenever
I thought of the horses I couldn't help but also think of how close I was to
Montaigne's home—how, if I'd been able to rent a car, I could drive away from
camp and find the place where Montaigne himself liked to walk in fields of
grass or ride his own horse on a fine summer day.
I
once told a friend who was studying philosophy about my introduction to
Montaigne's Essais in my MFA program. He'd also studied Montaigne in
school, and he thought it was fascinating that the course I was in at the time,
History of the Essay, examined Montaigne as a writer, rather than as a
philosopher. It was then that I became aware of Montaigne being taught in
philosophy programs, as well as how infrequently he might be taught within the
milieu of creative writing. I came to understand Montaigne as a writer who fits
neatly in different circles, and who is often taught to students accessing him
from angles far different from my own.
Of
course there are other writers whose work might find its way onto syllabi not
just in creative writing classes but in courses in other disciplines—names that
immediately come to my mind are Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Susan Sontag,
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida—and these are writers
who've adopted modes of writing often examined through kaleidoscopic lenses,
looked at as if they take on different shapes and colors every time we readers
make a turn. In the light of the kaleidoscope, Montaigne's own work is no less
colorful.
It's easy to wonder just how we
should read Montaigne, and especially how to look closely at his essays.
We could read him as a wise philosopher who's teaching us about idleness
or cannibals, but looking at the writing itself is another game, coming at
Montaigne from a wholly different direction—a re-strategizing, if you will, of
our examination of one of France's great writers.
We
can begin, I think, with the qualities of the Montaignan essay, and what have
since become the qualities of the personal essay. For the record, I don't
believe the Montaignan essay is the best or only valid form of the essay, nor
do I, for that matter, want to call Montaigne the “Father of the Essay” (a
moniker I'm more likely to give to Plutarch or Cicero). But I do think that
because the Montaignan essay allows itself qualities like digression and
anecdote, in addition to its conversations with other writers, it encourages
aspiring essayists to follow his lead, and to consider the ways he synthesized
the many elements of essay writing all at once.
In
Terence Cave's book How to Read Montaigne, for instance, Cave writes
(about Montaigne's “To the Reader”) that
“[a]s in letter writing, it presupposes a reader who is not some distant,
impersonal figure, but something like a friend. Or again, it may be expressed
as a form of improvisation: 'essaying' can only be authentic when it avoids all
premeditation and registers the random flow of thought.” Viewing Montaigne as a
great letter-writer, as a belletrist at heart, might help us understand the
position from which he essays, and, furthermore, how to essay ourselves.
Montaigne isn't pedantic. He doesn't pontificate. He isn't condescending or
conceited. He writes to us as friends, the dear in “dear reader” always
hanging overhead, and the reason it might be easy for us to listen is because
it's easy for him to speak. And just as with the epistolary form, Montaigne
frees himself via an avoidance of forethought: He essays (the verb form never
forgotten) in fluid motion, the pen held close and inhibition held at bay.
Conversely,
Jane Kramer tells us in “Me, Myself, and I” that “[t]he best way to read
Montaigne is to keep watching him, the way he watched himself, because the
retired, reclusive, and pointedly cranky Michel de Montaigne is in many ways a
fiction—a mind so absorbingly seated that by now it can easily pass for the
totality of Montaigne's 'second' life.” And Sarah Bakewell, in the
warmly-received How to Live, notes that “[a]s the novelist Gustave
Flaubert advised a friend who was wondering how to approach Montaigne: Don't
read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be
instructed. No, read him in order to live.” It seems that when we read
Montaigne, it isn't as if we merely read the text but that we read Montaigne
himself. This might be the only way to read him properly: First and
foremost as a man.
To
read Montaigne “in order to live,” and to watch him “the way he watched
himself,” we initially approach him not as philosopher, essayist, or former
politician, but as someone who allowed the totality of the meaning of his life
experiences to flow through his pen—as a confrère in the duty of living.
Because his character on the page was shaped as much by his omissions as by his
admissions, we trust more than anything else his thinking—the way it
found itself sneakily placed, and its poignant presentation, should be our
biggest considerations as readers.
“Today
we would call him a gentleman ethnographer,” Kramer writes, “more enchanted
than alarmed by the bewildering variety of human practices.” This enchantment
is Montaigne's gravity, and it's easy to think of Montaigne as charming because
of how he marvels at himself, and therefore how he marvels at the rest of us.
Whether in “Of Thumbs,” “Of Vanity,” or “Of Practice,” Montaigne's examination
of human nature never traverses into contempt, and for this we can be deeply
grateful. Montaigne's essays, always so thoughtful, have every opportunity to
cast a dark shadow over his perception of the world, but his writing, even when
it's writing about the darkness of death, somehow gives us a portrait of a man
nowhere near in danger of going scrooge.
The essay that helped me begin to
understand the (Western) personal essay tradition and form was Montaigne's 1574
essay “Of practice.”[1]
In “Of practice,” Montaigne begins with a philosophical position by introducing
a subject, and we dive in with him from the first sentence: “Reasoning and
education, though we are willing to put our trust in them, can hardly be
powerful enough to lead us to action, unless besides we exercise and form our
soul by experience to the way we want it to go; otherwise, when it comes to the
time for action, it will undoubtedly find itself at a loss.” He keeps us seated
in the third person throughout his first paragraph, then opens his second
paragraph with a sentence that serves as a slight turn on his initial thoughts:
“But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot
help us.” This is what we need for an awareness of what Montaigne will ruminate
on throughout the essay—but rather than swiftly introduce death as a subject
in the first paragraph he guides us in slowly, and only once we're waist-deep
will he tell us to swim on our own.
This
is a move Montaigne has borrowed (or learned outright, perhaps) from essayists
before him, like Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero. There's the introduction of a
subject as a part of the essay's introduction, which differs from the essays
working outside of Montaigne's lineage, which might open with an image or a
narrative beginning instead. (An essayist who comes to mind as working outside
of this traditional move might be Joan Didion, while those like Roland Barthes
or James Baldwin have kept the move alive in much of their own work.)
By
the fourth paragraph in “Of practice,” Montaigne has brought the reader into
the first person and into the collective “we,” also bringing those of us
familiar with the literary essay as a form to a place of recognition: A look at
one of the subgeneric attributes of the personal essay. His “It seems to me,
however . . .” (my emphasis) leads us further into the process of essaying:
After introducing the death-subject we come to see that this is beyond mere
report, and that in order to dig into death there's an inevitable sense that,
at some point, he'll have to provide a subjective examination of death itself.
Montaigne's
sixth paragraph finally brings us that narrative switch, where, it could be
argued, we see him get to the heart of what we understand as essaying. He tells
us about a time when he took his horse out for a ride around his property with
another man, and that eventually this man “spurred his horse at full speed up
the little path behind me, came down like a colossus on the little man and
little horse, and hit us like a thunderbolt with all his strength and weight,
sending us both head over heels.” With this thunderbolt came fear: The
momentary fear that, on the ground away from his horse, “ten or twelve paces
beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword,
which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having
no more motion or feeling than a log,” Montaigne would succumb to death's grip.
From
here we're given a meditation on what it means to die. More accurately, we're
given Montaigne's observation that there is no way we can practice
dying, the way we can practice our other skills and occupations. He illustrates
through his narrative a philosophy appearing earlier in the essay, that “for
dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us
[. . .] we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it,”
giving us the image of a helpless but ruminative Montaigne ready to pass away
in that field, his body battered and broken but his mind still racing.
He
tells us how he's saved—by nearby family and friends who rush to his aid after
believing he might've been killed by the fall—before returning to
Montaigne-as-essayist in his eighth paragraph with “this recollection, which is
strongly implanted on my soul, showing me the face and idea of death so true to
nature, reconciles me to it somewhat.” Montaigne's own wandering mind took him
to a place of reflection in order to better make sense of the death-subject,
and in many of our own essays today we can see what we've learned from
Montaigne's writing moves in “Of practice”: 1) that essays, by their very own
meditative nature, employ narratives without necessarily becoming them, 2) that
a linear (and non-digressive) form is difficult to maintain if an essay is
going to essay, and 3) that in order to write our “honest-to-God” essays we
need to make meaning out of our narratives—because that's what essays
are supposed to do. Otherwise, we might as well try our hands at short stories.
In Phillip Lopate's 1996 essay “In
Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film,” Lopate spends considerable energy
defining the essay-film for the unknowing reader, but works toward a definition
of the essay-film by first illustrating the qualities of the personal
essay. While these two subgenres of nonfiction need distinction from each
other, discerning between them shines an accidental light on the qualities I've
learned to use to classify the personal essay—or, at least, my ideal of the
essay as a form.
The essay, Lopate writes, “tracks down a person's
thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its
strands. An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something.”
This lines up nicely with Montaigne's use of the term essai, from
the French “to attempt.” I'll piggyback on Lopate's idea here in saying that
the essay is an attempt at working through the author's mental knot; at
figuring out what we really think about our subjects. And especially within
the Montaignan tradition, the characteristic we look for as we judge the
quality of an essay bears on how much digging into their own mind the essayist
is willing to do. To keep the metaphor going: Good, Montaignan essays are going
to search for the essay's bedrock moment, the place where you can't dig any deeper
without it actually being therapy.
In digging, Montaigne gives us a bodiless epistolary
voice—bodiless because he doesn't actually address the reader by
breaking the Fourth Wall, yet we never lose the sense that he perceives us as
friends. I think this technique is one that's trickled down through other
essayists, and Lopate might agree: He asserts that readers of an essay “must
feel included in a true conversation, allowed to follow through mental
processes of contradiction and digression, yet be aware of a formal shapeliness
developing simultaneously underneath.” When I go to contemporary essayists like
Baldwin or Barthes, like Didion or Biss, I assume that Montaigne's
disembodiment somehow coached them, that it influenced a slightly indirect “dear
reader” attitude they employed while writing their essays.
It's this emphasis on mental processes that also
helps define the Montaignan essay, and that gets us closer to understanding
which tools (a shovel or a spade, perhaps?) we need to de/construct the essays
in this tradition that we've described as sharp, poignant, heartfelt. When
Montaigne returns to his essaying after detailing the story of his fall from
his horse, for instance, he grounds us in his “dear reader” voice again with a
reminder of the importance of recounting his fall. He tells us that
[t]his
account of so trivial an event would be rather pointless, were it not for the
instruction that I have derived from it for myself; for in truth, in order to
get used to the idea of death, I find there is nothing like coming close to it.
Now as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the
capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching,
but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.
Montaigne's statement about
how “the capacity to spy on oneself from close up” is useful primarily to
himself, but might what's useful for Montaigne to reflect on also be useful for
others? This spying is an occasion not just for “Of practice” but for all of
his most personal essays, and with Montaigne's self-study we become witnesses
to the usefulness of reflection within the essay form. It's not merely for the
purposes of exposition or confession, or for Montaigne to say to us “this is
this weird thing that happened to me once,” but to mix meditation on a subject
with a reflection that might illuminate this meditation, the product of which
moves us both toward grasping “the idea of death” as well as—if we're essayists
reading Montaigne in order to essay by his example—what it means to experience
a brush against death. We have as much reason to ponder what Montaigne has done
as an essayist as what he's done as a model for how we might learn to live.
I don't think that I
typically write Montaignan essays. I'm likely to ground myself in a narrative
first, and then I try to make sense of that narrative, like Montaigne might do
were he to begin with his horse instead of with the death-subject. I
take my cues from James Baldwin or E.B. White, placing myself in an image
before looking at the little pieces that eventually come together as a bigger
picture. Montaigne's essays haven't driven me toward strict imitation, but I
see the merit in using Montaigne to learn how to essay well.
Reading “Of practice” taught me a lot about writing
essays, though, and what it taught me most of all is how the personal essay
operates as a subgenre of nonfiction, making me wonder how it hasn't been seen
by more readers as essential—quintessential, even—to Montaigne's corpus. I want
to root for it more than “Of thumbs,” “Of cannibals,” “Of the education of
children,” or “That to philosophize is to learn to die.” I want it to be the
essay that teaches us all how to essay.
It also makes me a little sad. Not because of Montaigne,
but because of readers and writers trying their hands at nonfiction who easily
ignore what Montaigne shows us is the potential for the genre. I'm sad when
college composition students think the essay is only an academic thing,
which makes me wonder how we might rescue the essay from its history in
classrooms. I'm equally sad when writers of “creative nonfiction” write
narratives without questions and call them essays, when the essay as a form
resides in the space between scrutiny, philosophical investigation, and
self-interrogation. I'm all for narrative nonfiction, but let's not write
narratives without questions while still calling them essays.
“An essay is a continual asking of questions,” Lopate
writes, “not necessarily finding 'solutions,' but enacting the struggle for
truth in full view,” and “Of practice” is an excellent example of how we can do
the work of asking questions without necessarily getting every one answered. We
have no certain answers about death, for instance, but this shouldn't keep us
from talking about how it affects us, how our perceptions of death might alter
with age or experience, or how it feels to look death in the eye—to know that
we might be put beside our own lives by accidents that shock us into
reflection.
I leave you as Montaigne himself might: Not with my own
words but with those of another. Specifically, I leave you with Montaigne's
words. Words that might guide us in both essaying and in life, and that shed
light on how and why we essay: to paint our own thoughts, and to give testimony
of ourselves.
My
trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my
sense, experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of
buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to
another man's knowledge, not according to his own. If it is vainglory for a man
himself to publish his own merits, why doesn't Cicero proclaim the eloquence of
Hortensius, Hortensius that of Cicero?
Perhaps they mean that I should
testify about myself by works and deeds, not by bare words. What I chiefly
portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to
expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy
medium of words. Some of the wisest and most devout men have lived avoiding all
noticeable actions. My actions would tell more about my fortune than about me.
They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture
and without certainty: they are samples which display only details. I expose
myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance,
each part in its place. One part of what I am was produced by a couch, another
by a pallor or a palpitation of the heart—in any case dubiously. It is not my
deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.
Works Cited
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: Or A
Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. New
York: Other, 2011. Print.
Cave, Terence. How to Read Montaigne.
London: Granta, 2007. Print.
Kramer, Jane. “Me, Myself, and I.” The
Best American Essays 2010. Ed. Christopher Hitchens and Robert Atwan.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010. 53-63. Print.
Lopate, Phillip. “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film.” Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film.
Ed. Charles Warren. Hanover, NH: U of New England, 1996. 243-70. Print.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Of practice.” The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal,
Letters.
[1] Translated here by Donald Frame. The essay
also exists in Charles Cotton's translation, entitled “Use makes perfect.”
*
Micah McCrary’s essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is a doctoral student in English at Ohio University, and holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. His book manuscript, Island in the City, was a finalist in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2015 Essay Collection Competition and a semifinalist in Ohio State University Press’s 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize Competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment