THE RISE OF THE ESSAY:

MONTAIGNE AND THE NOVEL

By PATRICK HENRY

 Historians of the novel account for its emergence in early seventeenth-century Spain by adhering to one or several of the following explanations: a crisis of exemplarity, an erosion of belief in past literature's value, the breakdown1 of the epic world and a general secularization, and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie. What has not been sufficiently elucidated, however, is the fact that all these explanations for the rise of the novel also account for the rise of the essay in the last quarter of the sixteenth century in France. Indeed, the Essais of Montaigne (l580-l595) reveals the crucial importance of these factors in the genesis and development of that genre in the early modern period in France.

In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, René Girard presents the novel as the genre par excellence for the study of mimetic behavior, and his analyses of Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, and Proust reveal, at the heart of the novel, the crisis of exemplarity.1 Whereas Girard obviously views mimetic desire in ontological terms that transcend historical particulars, Timothy Hampton charts the political and social prehistory of the psychological dramas discovered by Girard, and shows convincingly that the representation of exemplarity underwent a series of transformations which undermined the authority of ancient exemplars as models of action. These transformations produced new modes of representing virtue, of depicting the relationship between politics and literature, and of portraying the self. More specifically, as regards the origins of the novel, Hampton paints the collapse of the humanist heroic ethos and the transformations of public life that, in the case of Don Quixote, rendered useless the hildalgo class's "heroic" role as defender of the state. The complexity of the protagonist undoes the simple opposition between `good' and `bad' model on which exemplarity relies. "By collapsing easy ethical polarities, Cervantes replaces the protagonist of romance and epic with the protagonist of the novel who, as Lukács notes, is exemplary not in that he embodies virtue but rather to the extent that he represents human values and lived experience."2 In any event, by depicting the inability of romance to present viable models for action and the irrelevance of historical models to Don Quixote's quest, Hampton has demonstrated that the novel narrates the impossibility of exemplarity for a displaced aristocracy in a world that no longer offers hope for the unity of politics and humanism.

The genesis of the essay can also be traced to a crisis of exemplarity. Indeed, that crisis and its transcendance emanate from a chronological reading of the Essais.3 In the early years of his retirement and writing, as Pierre Villey suggests, "Montaigne vivait constamment en pensée avec les héros de l'antiquité. Il se représentait sans cesse leurs faits vertueux et leurs préceptes de conduite, il les mêlait à sa propre vie. . . il cherchait en eux ses modèles."4 The choice of model is particularly important for Villey since it serves as a means of verifying the evolution of Montaigne's thought whose early Stoicism is confirmed in the choice of Cato the younger as his first great hero. When the essayist writes "Des plus excellens hommes," however, probably in l578, Cato is not among them. Villey is probably correct to note that, if the essay had been written during the period l572-l574, Cato would have been chosen for inclusion, and to suggest that, had it been written in l588, Socrates would have replaced Alexander.

Even in l580, however, Socrates already warrants a good deal of Montaigne's admiration. In "De la cruauté," for example, Montaigne, comparing his death with Cato's, remarks: "Caton me pardonnera, s'il luy plaist; sa mort est plus tragique et plus tendue, mais [celle de Socrate] est encore, je ne sçay comment,plus belle."5 As we move from edition to edition, Socrates eclipses all of Montaigne's former heroes. Whereas Cato's name appears, for example, l8 times in the "A" text of l580, 9 times in the "B" text of l588, and only 4 times in the "C" text of l595, Socrates is mentioned l4 times in l580, 20 times in the "B" text of l588 and 59 times in the "C" text of l595. In the l588 and l595 editions of the Essais, Socrates is always favorably compared to other figures among the ancients--to Alexander (III, 2, 809), to Aristotle and Caesar (III, l2, l055), and to Cato (III, l2, l037-38).

The movement from Cato to Socrates, however, is not an evolution from one model to another. To say that Socrates is undoubtedly the greatest example in the Essais of how a human life can be led with order, simplicity, and wisdom, is not to say that he is a model to be followed. The Socratic injunction, as Montaigne formulates it, "Know Thyself", is, by its very nature, antimimetic. It throws students of Socrates back onto themselves. Once more, the essayist underscores the inimitable nature of Socrates' behavior; we could not reach him if we tried. In this respect, for example, when considering death in his third book of essays, Montaigne claims to practice diversion instead of preparation: "il apartient à un seul Socrates d'accointer la mort d'un visage ordinaire, s'en aprivoiser et s'en jouer" (III, 4, 833).

The other Socratic device, "Selon qu'on peut," which Montaigne calls a "mot de grande substance" (III, 3, 820) allows individuals to trust their own experience and follow their own nature. In this vein, the essayist often differentiates himself from Socrates. Unlike that of Socrates, for example, the author of the Essais deems his virtue "accidentale et fortuite" (II, 11, 427). He also points out that, as a citizen of the world, he never would have chosen hemlock over exile (III, 9, 973). Finally, it is crucial to note that the Essais close with a plea to keep body and mind together and a celebration not of furor but of tranquillitas that includes an explicit proscription of Socrates' demon and his ecstasies (III, l3, lll5).

This reading of the Essais depicts the same breakdown of exemplarity that Hampton noted in Don Quixote. But whereas Don Quixote's death immediately follows his recognition of the failure and folly of mimetic behavior, Montaigne's does not. Ultimately shunning traditional humanist exemplarity in favor of individual judgment and personal authenticity, the essayist nonetheless retains the deep ethical concerns of the humanists and innovates by removing wisdom from the past and situating it in nature. Rather than looking backward and upward toward historical models of reputed greatness, he points to those closest nature, the peasants and the animals, and makes of his final book the privileged locus for the celebration of the self where the crisis of exemplarity is happily transcended by an original portrayal of self-exemplarity.6

The crisis of exemplarity is one important aspect of a larger phenomenon that characterizes the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Europe: the erosion of belief in the authority and value of past literature. As the Renaissance became more conscious of the specific nature of its own historicity, classical literature began to lose the transhistorical status it had enjoyed half a century earlier in the works of More, Erasmus, and Rabelais.7 In ethics, religion, education, politics, and science, late Renaissance intellectuals faced real, precise, practical problems in an increasingly complex reality that no longer fit the vision of man and world that the ancients had bequeathed to them.8 A growing relativism also undermined the ability to demonstrate universal norms. While there could not have been a Renaissance without a belief in the transhistorical value of classical literature, certainly, at the end of the sixteenth century, the triumph of historicism and relativism (the antithesis of the humanist credo), the crises in cosmology, ethics, physics, and metaphysics, and the establishment of a utilitarian ethical system and the raison d'état indicated its decline.

Here again, Don Quixote exemplifies the new skepticism concerning the authoritative value of past narratives. The chivalric romance and the pastoral, for example, are therein shown to be as outmoded as the Golden Age eulogized by Quixote in the first part of the novel. As Grisóstomo chants in his Song of Despair:

"For if I'm to tell you my woes, why then, I vow,

I must new measures find, new modes invent."9

 With the chivalric romance lying in ruins in the Cave of Montesinos and Marcela having sounded the death knell of the pastoral, Cervantes invents a new form designed to explore a reality ever increasing in difference and complexity and populates that fictional world with an aristocracy devoid of the deep-seated concern for virtue that had constituted such an important part of the humanist program.

Even more so, however, do the Essais record the demise of the authority of prior literature. Indeed, the essayist's pedagogical views suggest the total breakdown of the humanist educational system. Not only do the Essais themselves represent the triumph of the vernacular but, exactly fifty years after the founding of the Collège de Trois Langues, their author downplays the importance of Latin and Greek in favor of the study of modern foreign languages (I, 26, 173). Unlike the humanists of the early Renaissance in France, Montaigne knew little Greek and edited no classical texts. His views on education record the failure of the humanist program in France, a half-century after the establishment of humanist colleges throughout the country where the study of Greek, Latin, and classical literature formed the center of the curriculum. A practical minded nobility had come to seek a more concrete education that, for one thing, had more to do with arms than letters, with action than theory.10

Whereas traditional educational practices had given a large role to memory, minimized the significance of individual judgment, and assigned a more or less passive role to the reader, the essayist establishes no facile dichotomy between the author as producer and the reader as consumer of texts. What the books of antiquity actually say is devalued in the Essais in favor of how they open up their readers to themselves. Books have become "pretexts" for self-discovery. We do not learn from them but through them, for the object of study, the self, is outside the text. The essayist instructs by example, teaching us how to read by telling us what use he makes of books in his writing: "je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire" (I, 26, 148). The value of the texts of antiquity is further put into question by Montaigne's general skepticism regarding the interpretation of all texts. "J'ay leu en Tite-Live cent choses que tel n'y pas leu," writes the author of the Essais. "Plutarque en y a leu cent, outre ce que j'y ay sceu lire, et, à l'adventure, outre ce que l'autheur y avoit mis" (I, 26, 156). The books of the ancients can indeed serve as springboards to self-knowledge but it would be difficult to argue for the authority of Aristotle, for example, in the late sixteenth century in France, if readers were unable to discern authorial meaning in his texts.

Finally, Montaigne's relativism, the importance he attributes to his own experience, and his project of writing about the details of his life as a sixteenth-century Frenchman incarnate a real break with the past. Predicated in large measure upon the contemporary value of ethical maxims from the ancients, the idealism of Budé and Erasmus had, by l580, dissipated in a world of religious wars and unyielding civil strife. Regarding virtuous public action, Machiavelli undercuts the authority of the past when, in The Prince, he depicts virtù as historically based and defines it as a skill for deliberating about "particulars." This text, which implicitly refutes the exemplar theory of history, is as responsible as any for the destruction of the authority and pertinence of Ciceronian ethics in the modern world of politics.11 Montaigne too questions the authoritative nature of ancient maxims of ethical wisdom in late sixteenth-century France. To choose but one example, he writes that "Le bien public requiert qu'on trahisse et qu'on mente et qu'on massacre..." (III, 1, 791). Since one could no longer enter public life without abandoning certain humanist ethical principles, he suggests that we resign this commission "à gens plus obeissans et plus soupples" (III, 1, 791) and, in defending his own mayoralty, he goes on to champion "non-doing" in an age of excess, fanaticism, and cruelty (III, 10, 1021-23).

The rise of the novel has also been traditionally associated with the breakdown of the epic world. No one has depicted this more persuasively than Lukács who, in The Theory of the Novel, explains that "the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms which stem from a rounded totality of being--that art has nothing more to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself. And this is not for artistic but for historico-philosophical reasons."12 Whereas the epic chanted the totality of life and the immanence of its meaning, the novel comes into being in an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given and the immanence of meaning in life has become problematic.

The novel emerges, then, in a post-Hellenic, post-Christian age of secularism, two centuries after the unity of the Christian epic (Dante) and the philosophical conditions that supported it had been destroyed. Peter Berger defines this secularization at the dawn of the modern era as "the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols,"13 and Lukács defines the novel as "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God" (88). In Lukácian terms, the problem of the novelist is, on the one hand, the knowledge that "meaning can never quite penetrate reality" and, on the other, the sense that, "without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality" (88). For Lukács, the novel narrates the adventure of "interiority" and is "something in the process of becoming" (73). His choice for "the first great novel of world literature" (l03) is Don Quixote, a parody of the chivalrous novels which had "lost their roots in transcendent being" (101). Cervantes's masterpiece relates the end of the epic at a time "when man...could find meaning and substance only in his own soul" (l03).

It follows that the hero of the novel would be a totally different animal from the hero of the epic. Indeed, as we pass from the epic, which sang of the destiny of the community, to the novel, we move into individual consciousness and subjectivity. Lukács finds the novel an expression of "transcendental homelessness" (41) and its hero a seeker adrift in a world gone out of joint whose immanent meaning has been lost. No longer an Odysseus or an Aeneas, the hero of the novel comes from outside the mainstream; Lazarillo de Tormes, El Buscón, Guzmán de Alfarache, and Don Quixote are all, at least initially, alienated and marginal characters. The Montaignian essay is, like the novel, a noncanonical literary form born in that same age of nascent secularism where the totality of life and the immanence of meaning in life had become problematic. As the second part of this study will show, the Essais assumes, to some degree, the (auto) biographical form of the early novels, thereby creating a situation where, in the process of becoming, the problematic individual narrates the adventure of interiority and journeys towards himself over a lifetime. Like the novel's hero too, the persona of the Essais paints himself at the outset as a solitary figure (I, 8, 33) whose skeptical and relativist account of reality finally signals the end of the epic because, as Carlos Fuentes has said in relation to Don Quixote, "there is no longer a restorable ancestral order or a universe unequivocal in its normativity."14 The rise of the novel is perhaps most often associated with the ascendance of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of formal realism. Whatever its limitations, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding is still deemed by many a persuasive, if nationalistic, account of this phenomenon.15 Attempting to determine how the novel differs from other past prose fiction and why it appeared when it did, Watt depicts how that genre breaks with earlier romances, frees itself from traditional plots based on past history, fable, legend, and previous literature, and turns to the contemporary in order to "put man wholly into his physical setting" (27). Breaking with the earlier literary tradition "of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities" (22), the novel insists on the "truth [of] individual experience--individual experience which is always unique and therefore new" (l3). Realism, for Watt, the placing of particular individuals in the contemporary social environment, became "the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction" (l0).

W. L. Reed, among others, shows convincingly, not so much that Watt is wrong, but that he "fails to weigh adequately the claims of earlier prose fiction to the status of `novel'."16 Watt's criteria for the novel, Reed argues, can be applied with equal effect to the Spanish literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One cannot define the novel as Watt does and exclude such picaresque works as Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, and El Buscón, not to mention Don Quixote, which incorporates the picaresque into the larger picture it paints of early seventeenth-century Spain. Reed goes on to advance interesting and original ideas of his own regarding the genesis of the novel in early modern Europe. He theorizes, on the one hand, that the novel arises at different times in different countries as each culture reacts against and breaks away from neoclassicism and, on the other, that the genre was developed first in Spain in part because, comparatively speaking, the impact of Renaissance humanism was minor there, allowing a certain "medievalism" to continue unabatedly and precluding the establishment of a strong neoclassical tradition. This sense of alienation from Renaissance traditions was aided by the creation in l558 of a new Spanish Inquisition and Index that restricted the production and distribution of books.

The question of the realism of the Essais has been approached from two different angles. In two exhaustive volumes, Géralde Nakam paints the historical exterior to which Montaigne alludes, while Philippe Desan unveils the extratextual reality of the Essais by a rigorous and sustained analysis of the essayist's language. Both commentators depict the centrality of the contemporary within the fabric of the Essais. Nakam shows, better than anyone before her, how Montaigne's book reflects and inveighs against the times in which it was written. She paints accurately and in vivid colors the France of the essayist's lifetime, giving richly documented accounts of the numerous historical events to which the author alludes and, digging deeply into the social and political terrains, produces a detailed picture of the contemporary environment. Among many other topics, we find here a record of the politics of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, an analysis of the conquest of the New World, a picture of the city Montaigne governed, and accounts of the plague, the witch-hunts, censorship, burnings at the stake, judicial tortures, cruelties, and general intolerance of the times. In proving that Montaigne's book is indeed a chronicle of contemporary French history, Nakam represents the everpresent religious/civil wars as the true backdrop of the Essais.17 Desan, for his part, explains how the expansion of markets, concentration of capital, and rapidly increasing inflation caused the emergence of an economic discourse during the Renaissance. Monetary and market metaphors initially invaded everyday speech and then the literary domain. He presents the Essais as the battleground where the conflict between the old discours nobiliaire (universal values, military ideal, glory, virtue) and the emerging discours économique (realist, pragmatic, market vocabulary) is waged. Montaigne's work becomes a "discursive heterology" that mirrors the still present but eroding power of the noblesse d'épée and the economic success and social mobility of the French merchant bourgeoisie. Desan offers illuminating explications de textes of commercial expressions that not only contain a new set of values, but a new way of conceiving of all human relationships, whereby social relationships are defined in economic terms and infrastructure and superstructure become one. Unable to ward off the invasion of the new commercial language into his own discourse, the essayist is nonetheless aptly depicted struggling to uphold the fading discours nobiliaire, to defend "l'honneste", for example, even while he recognizes the need for "l'utile."18

What Reed, leaning on Goldmann, claimed for the novel, we can assert for the essay: "a homology of structures" between the Montaignian essay and "the structure of the social milieu within which it developed;"19 "a rigorous homology between the literary form of the [essay]...and the everyday relation between man and commodities...in a market society."20 The essayist's resistance to the emergent discours économique indicates that the essay, like the novel defined by Goldmann, is "a literary form bound up certainly with history and the development of the bourgeoisie but not the expression of the real or possible consciousness of that class." Essentially critical and oppositional, it is "a form of resistance to developing bourgeois society."21

Much has been written about the influence of print culture on the rise of the novel. Marshall McLuhan, for one, has observed that the novel is the characteristic literary expression of "print culture,"22 while Robert Alter claims not only that the novel is "the only major genre that comes into being after the invention of printing" but that its first great masterpiece, Don Quixote, critiques the first genre to have enjoyed popular success because of the printing press, "the Renaissance chivalric romance."23 Watt, for his part, also stresses the fact that the novel is "perhaps the only literary genre essentially connected with the medium of print."24 He is speaking, of course, about eighteenth-century England. Reed too emphasizes the technology of the printed book but in early seventeenth-century Spain where the instant popularity of works such as Don Quixote and Guzmán de Alfarache contributed to the expansion of the publishing trade and "helped undermine the still powerful ethos of the manuscript as the norm of literary production."25

The essay is, however, another genre that came into being after the invention of printing and, even more than the novel, is a literary genre essentially connected with the medium of print. The first printing press arrived in Paris in l469 and, ll9 years later in l588, Montaigne remarked that he had one thousand volumes in his library" (III, 12, 1056). Given the more than 1300 quotations in the Essais--almost all of them in Latin--it would have been absolutely impossible for the essayist to have written the book he did had not Erasmus and the early humanists insisted on getting "the classics" into print. Just as Cervantes's masterpiece was a commentary on the chivalric romances that were read everywhere because of an emerging print culture, the Essais was a genre of criticism of the great classical texts that never could have been accessible to Montaigne in Bordeaux without the existence of the printing press.

Whether the rise of the novel created a greater sense of the private or an increasing sense of the private accounted in some measure for the rise of the novel, the two, privacy and the novel, have been often linked together. Whereas medieval literature was, in the main, oral and public, and the consumption of literature was not conceived of "as a strictly individual act,"26 the Renaissance experienced "the privatization of reading,"27 one of the major cultural developments of the early modern period. This did not mean that reading aloud in family and other gatherings ceased; nor did it mean that the original oral nature of most literary forms no longer affected their conventions after the advent of print. What it did mean was that silent, private reading had become the norm and this privacy of literary consumption created a new relationship between text and reader which, outside of any public setting, developed the inner life and increased the sense of self as the reading individual meditated in solitude and silence.

Bakhtin notes the importance of this phenomenon for the novel, remarking that the printing of books "served to shift discourse into a mute mode of perception, a shift decisive to the novel as a genre,"28 while Brooks carefully traces the rise of the novel and growing importance of the idea of privacy which characterizes both the reading and writing of novels as well as the genre's subject matter.29 Like Watt, Brooks deals mainly with the postclassical novel and its relation to the new eighteenth-century upper- and middle-class leisure and family life associated with the rise of the modern city where we find a crucial development in the domain of privacy--private apartments, boudoirs, alcoves, etc.--and in the concept of the individual's intimacy and inner life. Brooks views the eighteenth-century novel as preoccupied with privacy and its violation and ties this to the centrality of the erotic in eighteenth-century fiction. But the mass production of printed books in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had already allowed for the private consumption of literature, having detached it from the public recitation of the storyteller and similar communal experiences. Solitary reading and meditation had already given value to privacy and the proper use of leisure time.

The linking of reading and privacy in the Essais is explicit. At the moment of his official withdrawal from public office, the essayist created and dedicated a formal space where he would spend his leisure time in the company of the muses. In "De trois commerces," he welcomes us into this quasi-sacred terrain on the third floor of his tower. An idle reader who finds enormous consolation amidst his textual friends, Montaigne, above all, insists on the right to privacy in his "librairie": "J'essaie à m'en rendre la domination pure, et à soustraire ce seul coin à la communauté et conjugale, et filiale, et civile" (III, 3, 828).

The essayist is also not only aware that what he writes will be consumed privately but that he is involved in a double paradox, of publishing what he writes about his private life and intruding into the private life of his readers. Chartier informs us that, in seventeenth-century England, "books were found more often in the bedroom than in the `study' or `parlor' probably because it had become common to read before going to sleep."30 A similar situation existed in late sixteenth-century France, and Montaigne is happy in his anticipation that his chapter, "Sur des vers de Virgile," will move his book out of the parlor into the bedroom (III, 5, 847). We need not await the eighteenth-century novel to discover that "the notion of privacy [in literature] is consubstantial with the idea of its violation."31 Although we have not yet advanced to the postclassical moment in the late eighteenth-century where the erotic novel transforms the reader into a voyeur who, in private, observes the most intimate acts which, themselves, are performed in private, the essayist's frank discussion of sex, both in and out of marriage, will be consumed in that most private of places, the boudoir. It will also, in no small measure, account for the repression of the Essais (no edition of Montaigne's book appeared in France between l670 and l723) during the classical age, which tended to discuss issues as they related to the public rather than the private sphere.

We have seen that a crisis of exemplarity, an erosion of belief in the value of past literature, the breakdown of the epic world, and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie account for the rise of both the novel and the essay and mark the waning of the Renaissance. These phenomena are contemporaneous with the advent of print culture and a new major development in the history of privacy in Western culture. The novel and the essay, two noncanonical genres born at the same time, relate the posthumanist rupture with antiquity and signal the origins of modernity. It remains to discover what internal parallels can be drawn between the novel and the Montaignian essay.

Although he loved history, Montaigne differentiates the Essais from history--"Il y a des autheurs, desquels la fin c'est dire les evenements. La mienne, si j'y sçavoye advenir, seroit dire sur ce qui peut advenir" (I, 21, 106-07). These and other considerations have led many formalist critics to deem the Essais "fiction" and their persona a "fictional" creation. Wayne Booth, for example, insists on the differences between the flesh and blood Montaigne and the persona of his book. He draws our attention to passages in the Essais where the author admits to adorning himself (II, 6, 378; II, 18, 665), and to following a decorum that precludes his telling all ("Au Lecteur", 3). He concludes that "the Montaigne of the book is by no stretch of the imagination the real Montaigne, pouring himself onto the page without regard for `aesthetic distance'."32

Although one can readily agree with Booth that, on the one hand, "the `Montaigne' who emerges is as fascinating as any fictional hero could be" (226) and, on the other, that the essayist pays a good deal of attention to "aesthetic distance," it is an exaggeration to claim that the person who says "I" in the Essais is "[a] created fictional character" (228). Certainly the persona is not the flesh and blood Montaigne. As the essayist indicates in "De la gloire," it is impossible to abolish the space between the sign and the referent (II, 16, 618). But this does not in itself mean that the persona is a fictional character even if it is on occasion touched up or not fully revealed. Once more, Montaigne argues too strenuously and too often for the similarity between himself and his book--"livre consubstantiel à son autheur" (II, 18, 665); "tout le monde me reconnoit en mon livre, et mon livre en moy" (III, 5, 875)--and in "Du repentir" insists that this is what constitutes the originality of his writing project. Consubstantiality of author and literary self-portrait is the ideal that the essayist approximates but cannot fully attain. It is this sustained effort of approximation, however, that differentiates his self-portrait from a full-fledged fictional character and creates the everpresent tension between history and fiction in the Essais.

Neither history nor fiction, Montaigne's Essais is an imaginative literary exploration of existence that shares attributes with other imaginative forms of writing. If, as John Lyons maintains, the novel "fills the gap created by the juxtaposition of two previously dominant genres, the romance and the novella,"33 the essay, a critical genre rather than a commentary, was born of the juxtaposition of the adage and the dialogue, whereby lived experience discursively evaluates or tests the compendium of received wisdom in a nondogmatic manner.

With Montaigne, however, the essay is not only critical but personal. In this respect, the essay touches the other noncanonical genre that emerged at the same time in the late Renaissance or early modern period, the novel, whose outward form, for Lukács, is "essentially biographical" (77). His essays constitute a journey, an odyssey; they assume the (auto) biographical form of the early novels, whether these first novels are considered Spanish (Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, Don Quixote), English (Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe), or French (La Princesse de Clèves, Gil Blas, Manon Lescaut, Jacques le fataliste). Even though there is no sustained narrative and no chronological account, the essayist presents a life, his own--"je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre" ("Au lecteur", 3)--and, writing in the present tense rather than relating his story retrospectively, attempts to make that life available as it unfolds, in the process, as it were, of being lived. "Je veux representer le progrez de mes humeurs...le train de mes mutations" (II, 37, 758), he writes; and elsewhere: "Je ne peints pas l'estre. Je peints le passage...de jour en jour, de minute en minute. Il faut accomoder mon histoire à l'heure" (III, 2, 805). When Don Quixote frees the galley slaves, he learns that one of them, Ginés de Pasamonte, is writing his life story, one so rich that it "will cast into the shade Lazarillo de Tormes" (173). To Don Quixote's question "Is it finished?", Ginés responds: "How could it be finished...when my life is not finished as yet" (173). Like his fictional counterpart, the essayist is keenly aware that his writing project, whether self-portraiture or autobiography, can only end with his death: "Qui ne voit que j' ay pris une route par laquelle, sans cesse et sans travail, j'iray autant qu'il y aura d'ancre et de papier au monde" (III, 9, 945).

The narrated life in the novel, as Lukács makes clear, is that of the problematic hero, a product of the age of nascent secularism from which the immanence of meaning in life has vanished. Unlike the heroes of the epic, the novel's heroes are estranged from the community and aware of an insurmountable rupture between themselves and the world. Whatever their ultimate destiny, alienation is the initial condition of Lazarillo, El Buscón, and Don Quixote. As Benjamin has noted: "The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual."34

This is also the birthplace of the essay. After the death of La Boétie--which cast the essayist into "une nuit obscure et ennuyeuse" (I, 26, 193)--and that of his father, Montaigne formally withdrew from public office at the age of thirty-eight. He created and dedicated a quasi-sacred space in his tower where he would escape from "la danse" (I, 39, 240). The l580 stratum of "De la solitude" records the justification for the retirement, the author's estrangement from society, and his desire to avoid contagion: "deprenons nous de toutes les liaisons qui nous attachent à autruy" (I, 39, 240). Shortly thereafter, he began writing and, as he makes explicit in "De l'affection des pères aux enfants," the writing was produced by a melancholy humor born of solitude: "C'est une humeur melancolique...produite par le chagrin de la solitude...qui m'a mis premierement en teste cette resverie de me mesler d'escrire" (II, 8, 385).

It is crucial to understand that this narrated life of the solitary individual implies a real commitment, both in the novel and the essay, to the importance of individual, lived experience as a source of truth and point of departure for the creation of values in the alienated world of the hero. This has always been the claim of the novel--to give "a full and authentic report of human existence"35 by shunning "abstract truth" in favor of the truth of individual experience. The essay too, fifty years before Descartes, turns to the individual self for a new beginning and, like the novel, produces what is radically different from the clear and distinct methodical approach to reality taken by the author of the Discours de la méthode. Whereas Descartes--who explicitly tries to transcend the skepticism of Montaigne--seeks certain knowledge and an irrefutable method of achieving it, the author of the Essais records the diverse experiences of his changing self in a world in flux. It is never his intention, nor does he deem it possible, to erect whatever knowledge he draws from these experiences into a system. Descartes goes on to discover the cogito, but no such illumination produces a new beginning for Montaigne, who continues to question all his assumptions, including the famous "Que sçay-je?" (II, 12, 527)--the ultimate skeptical query--that is abandoned in the very essay in which it is enunciated: "les Pyrrhoniens ne se servent de leurs argumens et de leur raison que pour ruiner l'apparence de l'experience; et est merveille jusques où la soupplesse de nostre raison les a suivis à ce dessein de combattre l'evidence des effects" (II, 12, 571). Also, where Descartes negated the epistemological significance of the corporeal, Montaigne, without denying the relative importance of reason, to a large degree transfers the task of knowing to the body.

Like the novel, the Montaignian essay is antisystematic, transitory, and exploratory. It begins in medias res (with an example) and, without any pretense of having exhausted its subject, ends where it wants to end. Refusing to move from the simple to the complex--it is "methodically unmethodical"36 --the essay meets existence head-on by immediately confronting the complexity of the self. "It rebels," Adorno reminds us, "against the doctrine, deeply rooted since Plato, that what is transient and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy" (10) and, like the novel, elevates what is produced historically--lived human experience. It rejects claims to totality, critiques ideology, embraces ambiguity and discontinuity and, like the novels of Sterne, Diderot and others, progresses by digression. Not only the novel, as Lukács claims, but the Essais of Montaigne, do what would have been "an act of the most ridiculous arrogance" in an age of constitutive systems: "[they] represent the exemplary significance of an individual life as the vehicle of values rather than as their substratum" (77).

The turn to the self in the novel and the essay is the result of the discovery, unknown in the epic according to Lukács, of otherness. There was no interiority in the epic, for there was not yet any exterior, "any `otherness' for the soul" (30). Thus this discovery of the exterior triggers off a journey into the self that the novel will narrate, an adventure of interiority of the alienated individual who, having lost his roots in transcendent being, seeks adventures and attempts to find meaning in his soul.

It is striking how the Lukácian description of the journey of the novel's hero actually depicts the path taken by the essayist who, in the midst of the French Renaissance's failure to employ successfully the traditional forms of tragedy and epic to express its metaphysical status and aspirations, invented "the only authentically modern literary form produced by the sixteenth century in France,"37 the essay, which would enable him to travel inward. "The content of the novel," writes Lukács, "is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence" (89). This is also the content of the Montaignian essay. Although the essayist calls it "his self" rather than "his soul", Lukács's words do indeed describe his quest on the road to self-knowledge, proving himself in a series of textual adventures, roaming from one discourse to another, testing (essayer) each of them and himself in his pursuit of self-recognition and the ultimate awareness that "[his] selfhood is [his] home" (87).

Interiority is the hallmark of the novel of all ages. Lukács finds in Don Quixote, for example, "the first great battle of interiority" (103), while Watt, following Mme de Staël, sees interiority as characteristic not only of the eighteenth-century Richardsonian epistolary novel but of modern literature in general, which is more subjective, individualistic, and of a more private orientation than classical and neo-classical literature.38 Milan Kundera maintains that the novel is always concerned with the enigma of the self and, in order to seize that self, it eventually moved inward: "Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him....So the time came when the novel, in its quest for the self, was forced to turn away from the visible world of action and examine instead the invisible interior world."39 At the very moment of the birth of the novel, Montaigne also differentiates between action and being and declares on numerous occasions that the essay is not a chanson de geste: "Je ne puis tenir registre de ma vie par mes actions....(III, 9, 945-46); Les effects [my actions] diroyent plus de la Fortune que de moy....Ce ne sont mes gestes que j'escris, c'est moy, c'est mon essence" (II, 6, 379).

Turning inward, however, does not mean not looking outward; nor does it imply a closing off. Indeed, the noncanonical nature of the novel allows it to become the most open of forms. Marthe Robert notes, for example, in Origins of the Novel that: "The novel can do what it wants with literature; it can exploit to its own ends description, narrative, drama, the essay, commentary, monologue and conversation....There are no proscriptions or restrictions to limit its choice of subject matter, setting, time or space."40 While the novel is liberated from literary tradition and proclaims the need to invent new forms to relate contemporary experiences of reality, it is also free, as Bakhtin makes clear, to "include, ingest, devour other genres and still retain its status."41

The essay, in this respect, once again resembles the novel. It is a noncanonical genre that critiques prior literature and, as the 1300 quotations in the Essais demonstrate, it too is free to incorporate other texts within its limitless borders without negating its legitimacy. Wilden correctly views the unrestricted discourse of the Essais as one of the "authentic spiritual ancestors of the open-ended contemporary novel"42 the novel of self-experience described by Lukács.

But the Essais also anticipates the rambling and digressive movement of novelists, such as Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot. Its most salient formalistic aspect is its ambulatory nature. The author often parallels his pen and his feet--"il faut que j'aille de la plume comme des pieds" (III, 9, 991)--and frequently links traveling and writing. Two passages where his manner of traveling is described are perhaps the best descriptions we have of his style. The first is found in "De la vanité": "Moy, qui le plus souvant voyage pour mon plaisir, ne me guide pas si mal....Ay-je laissé quelque chose à voir derriere moy? J'y retourne; c'est toujours mon chemin. Je ne trace aucune ligne certaine, ny droicte ny courbe" (III, 9, 985). The second is recorded in the Journal de voyage, a text never intended for publication. Here the secretary notes that, if Montaigne were asked why he often led his party, "par chemins divers et contrées," back very close to where they had started, he would answer that "qu'il n'aloit, quant à luy, en nul lieu que là où il se trouvoit, et qu'il ne pouvoit failler ny tordre sa voie, n'aïant nul project que de se promener par des lieus inconnus; et pourveu qu'on ne le revit pas retumber sur mesme voie et revoir deus fois mesme lieu, qu'il ne faisoit nulle faute à son dessein."43 Read metaphorically, both passages insist on the digressive rather than linear trajectory of the essay, which permits the free play of the mind. "Mon stile et mon esprit vont vagabondant de mesmes" (III, 9, 994) writes the author of the Essais and, in "De Democritus et Heraclitus", he speaks of his tendancy to "promener son jugement" (I, 50, 301). The new itinerant genre that he created afforded the essayist the opportunity to wander down sideroads, to make detours, to take his mind for a walk.

Like the novel, the essay denotes a movement away from genre altogether which explains our difficulty in defining those genres, even if we can readily classify individual works under them. The movement away from genre is nonetheless not synonymous with formlessness. The act of writing necessarily imposes a form, however tentative or temporary. This occurs when the essayist finally begins to "mettre en rolle" the "chimeres et monstres fantasques" born in the solitude of the tower (I, 8, 33), even if he judges those monsters "deformed."44 The form of the Essais is a loose one, an open form, one that can always be reopened, "une marqueterie mal jointe" (III, 9, 964) but artistically woven, whose elements are, as Adorno remarks with characteristic brilliance, "coordinated rather than subordinated."45 Ambulatory, experimental, open-ended, free to pass from subject to subject--"tout argument m'est egallement fertille" (III, 5, 876)--always questioning its assumptions, systematically unsystematic, resistant to closure, the Montaignian essay, unlike the treatise, does not build up to a conclusion or come to an end. It is the author who puts an end to it, thus underscoring that the journey is important in the essay, not any destination: "Je ne l'entreprens ny pour en revenir, ny pour le parfaire; j'entreprens seulement de me branler, pendant que le branle me plaist" (III, 9, 977).

Just as looking inward did not imply a closing off, so too subjectivity and interiority did not imply solipsism or lack of recognition of others. We need only understand the Bakhtinian explanation of discourse to perceive how tightly utterances are tied to one another. For Bakhtin, all language, including the monologue, is unavoidably dialogical. The fact that every utterance stands in relation to all prior utterances demonstrates the necessary union of discourses and the inescapable link between individual utterances and the community of speakers, past, present, and future. Bakhtin chose the novel as the genre par excellence for the depiction of dialogism. He examines the novels of Dostoevski where, in his view, two or more contesting voices are recorded and kept alive throughout without final resolution. These novels are judged dialogical and polyphonic. Kundera supports a musical approach to the novel's composition and finds polyphony--"the simultaneous presentation of two or more voices (melodic lines) that are perfectly bound together but still keep their relative independence"46--in the novels of Dostoevski and Brach, and in his own.

What about the essay? Naturally, Montaigne competes with other discourses as he writes his essays, even when he does not cite them; but his dialogism is much more confrontational. Espousing an aesthetics of dialogue and debate--"l'art de conferer"--at every juncture, he invites those with opposing opinions into his text; hundreds of voices join his own in an intertextual polyphony that presents multiple viewpoints voiced simultaneously to a reader who is equally urged to join in the fray.

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin seeks out the ancestors of the novel and, in the tradition of Schlegel, who saw the Socratic dialogues as "the novels of their time," links up these dialogues with the Spoudogeloion or seriocomical genres which, in his judgment, constitute "the first authentic and essential step in the evolution of the novel as the genre of becoming," even though they lack the plot and composition that we have grown accustomed to expect from the novel.47 As Bakhtin enumerates the reasons why the Socratic dialogues belong to the tradition of the novel, the careful reader of Montaigne is astonished by how closely his analysis of the dialogues might apply to the Essais. First of all, Bakhtin points out, contemporary reality serves here as the subject of serious literary representation without epic distance (23). The Socratic dialogues themselves derive from the apomnemoneumata, or recollections, a genre of the memoir type where a conversing man, who often wears the popular mask of a bewildered fool, is the central image of the genre, which itself is full of ambivalent praise. The ambiance of wise ignorance in the Socratic dialogues is perfectly fitting to the genre, as is the heroization of the protagonist and the proximity of its language to popular spoken language. Finally, both Socratic irony which often makes it difficult to determine where reverence ends and where ridicule begins, and Socratic degradations which encompass "an entire system of metaphors and comparisons borrowed from the lower spheres of life," recall the novel because they bring the world closer and familiarize it in order to investigate it and because, exactly like the modern novel, "one often does not know where the direct authorial word ends and where a parodic or stylized playing with the character's language begins" (24, 25, 77).

All these attributes of the dialogues that link them to the novel are essential to the Essais. This is true of the contemporary aspects, the role of the fool, the paradox of wise ignorance, the use of popular language, and the so-called degradations or rhetoric of humility. Once more, although he may criticize the dialogues on occasion for being long-winded and overburdened with preparatory interlocutions (II, 10, 414), Montaigne points with admiration to their stylistic brilliance (II, 17, 638) and their continual questioning nature (II, 12, 509) which, like the Essais, provoke their readers and force them to think for themselves. Bakhtin ties this questing aspect of the dialogues, which we find everpresent in the Essais, to the novel which, for him, is "plasticity itself...a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review" (39).

The essayist himself underscores the plurality of voices in the Socratic dialogues and understands this technique as a means by which Plato can express the diversity and variations of his own ideas (II, 12, 509). Not having an interlocutor, Montaigne achieves the same effect through paradox and enigma and by introducing opposing voices from the ancients. Certainly the essayist's use of paradox and polyvocality constitutes a conscious attempt to recreate the vigorous and lively aspects of the dialogues, and it is precisely this polyphony, so essential to the dialogues and the Essais, that Bakhtin finds at the heart of the novel.

In the Essais, nonetheless, we must distinguish, in another sense, between the dialogical and monological. Here the dialogical represents what is debatable, open-ended, up for grabs; that is, opinions, the domain where "l'agitation et la chasse est proprement de nostre gibier" (III, 8, 928). On the other hand, we have the monological, what is spoken as truth, what is closed off, nondebatable. Under this rubric would come the absolute condemnation of cruelty, injustice, and the death penalty for opinions. Essays that concentrate on these condemnations are monological; they conclude definitively and constitute a closed, finalized discourse. To a large extent, however, these monological discourses are there to underscore the dignity of all human beings and the value of free inquiry; that is, to create the only possible basis for dialogism. The monologue is not the domain of the artist, who opposes propaganda, but of the regime and, by uniformly proscribing torture and cruelty, the essayist paves the way for true dialogue which refuses to silence, coerce or marginalize the discourse of the other.

The solitary individual in the tower ultimately finds self-knowledge in his relations with others to whom he had always been linked through language. Communication is the cornerstone of the community--"Nous ne sommes hommes, et ne nous tenons les uns aux autres que par la parole" (I, 9, 36)--and dialogue the center of communal life. This explains both the essayist's continual and forceful condemnation of lying and his invitation to the reader to join the debate. Here one finds no facile dichotomy between the author as producer and the reader as consumer of texts. Whereas the texts that Roland Barthes calls lisibles in S/Z only offer the reader "la pauvre liberté de recevoir ou de rejeter le texte," Montaigne's text must be considered scriptible because its reader is "non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte."48 The phenomenon of dialogism in the Essais incarnates écriture as exploration and quest and celebrates variety, diversity, and flux. Without implying a renunciation of the self, it nonetheless depicts the collapse of the autonomy of the individual that its author is so often made to represent.

In the postscript to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera observes that: "The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude....The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place."49 Nor does the essay which, by most accounts, is a critique of ideology. All the adjectives we have applied to Montaigne's Essais (antisytematic, transitory, exploratory, open-ended, ambiguous, skeptical, discontinuous, fragmentary, ambulatory, experimental, nondogmatic, and undefinitive), indicate that it too presents the world as a question and projects a wisdom of uncertainty that leads necessarily to tolerance.

The essay's unity, as Adorno implies, is thematic rather than conceptual.50 It abandons the quest for absolute truth and has no will to system, for it privileges individual experience which, itself, always remains open. As Kundera asserts for the novel, the Essais "undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before."51 It is dogmatically undogmatic. In his "Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe," Kundera cites the Jewish proverb: "Man thinks, God laughs", and goes on to explain that he is pleased to think that "the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God's laughter."52 Perhaps the essay too can boast of the same genesis: "Nos folies ne me font pas rire, ce sont nos sapiences" (III, 3, 823).

* * * * * * * * * *

Postscript

Don Quixote and Montaigne come from the gentry class. They are roughly middle-aged, solitary men of arms who, unlike their medieval counterparts, are also prodigious and intense readers of books. In an age when private reading had just become the norm, each has acquired an enormous library and obsessive reading habits. For quite different reasons, both experience a real uneasiness in maintaining the arms/letters balance. Montaigne endlessly makes excuses for his writing and Quixote for his exploits. The essayist is about forty when he takes to his tower and begins writing; the Don fifty when he saddles Rocinante and goes out in quest of adventures.

While Don Quixote's exploits have been amply discussed, the metaphorical level of Montaigne's adventures has been largely ignored. We have recognized the validity of Lukács's claim--"The content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and by proving itself, to find its own essence" (89; italics mine)--without seeing how well it applies to the Montaignian essay. The dominance of the aristocratic and medieval imagery of the tilt in the middle chapters of Book Three--"la meslée," "ces paladins," "[les] combats," {les] joustes" (III, 7, 918), "jousteur" (III, 8, 923)---leaves no doubt that the essayist viewed his discursive confrontations as intertextual struggles. He is the essayist errant doing battle, not with lions, galley slaves, or windmills, but rather taking on the textual masters of the past, giants in their own right. He relishes "l'ardeur mesme du combat" (III, 8, 925) and depicts the world of discourse as a melee where he encounters authors who "me presse[nt] les flancs, me pique[nt] à gauche et à dextre" (III, 8, 923). An enemy of received wisdom in search of himself, this jouster moves from topic to topic, from author to author. He tests himself, assays himself, proves himself in a series of textual adventures aimed solely at self-knowledge. It is no wonder that Frame translates "boutades de mon esprit" (III, 8, 943) as "sallies of my mind" and "publier mes verves" (I, 40, 252) as "publish my sallies;"53 nor that Samuel Johnson defines the essay as "a loose sally of the mind."54

The textuality of Don Quixote and the Essais is truly extraordinary. We sense everywhere the formidable influence of the nascent print culture which tended to make reading and writing the subject of the only two major genres born after the advent of print. Both protagonists seem to inhabit a universe of books--the one is obsessed with the Renaissance chivalric romance, the other incorporates over twelve hundred quotations from the literature of antiquity into his book of the self.

Perhaps because each work inaugurates a genre, they are nothing if not manuals of literary criticism. To say that these texts are self-referential is to understate hyperbolically. Part One of Don Quixote (1605) becomes a major theme in Part Two of the novel (1615). There we meet characters who have read Part One, who comment on it, and discuss the relationship between the "character" and the "real" Don Quixote. Something similar takes place in the Essais, where the essayist's book becomes a major topic within the book the more he advances in the writing of it. In the 1588 and 1595 editions, not only does the author refer to earlier chapters and tell us that he is now recognized in his book as is his book in him, but, as in Don Quixote, he gives us the criticism of the readers of the early editions: "Tu es trop espais en figures. Voilà un mot du creu de Gascoingne. Voilà une frase dangereuse...Voilà un discours ignorant. Voilà un discours paradoxe. En voilà un trop fol. Tu te joues souvent; on estimera que tu dies à droit, ce que tu dis à feinte" (III, 5, 875). The weight of textuality, here and in Don Quixote, could not be greater; the protagonist in both works, each in his own way, tries to disentangle himself from a textual world: Don Quixote, fighting for his textual authenticity, refuses to set foot in Saragossa in order to wrench himself free of Avellaneda's spurious edition of his life (898), while Montaigne, more generally, insists that he is only marginally a "faiseur de livres": "Quel que je soye, je le veux estre ailleurs qu'en papier" (II, 37, 784).

The Essais assumes the biographical form of the early novel (Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, Don Quixote) and relates the inward odyssey of its initially solitary hero. In his journey toward the self, this marginal, alienated protagonist again resembles Don Quixote as he transcends a mimetic phase where, in his case, imitation of historical (rather than fictional) models had precluded true individual authenticity. Like the novel, the essay, then postulates lived experience of the individual as the true source of knowledge, and it shares with the novel a form that is ambulatory, open-ended, discontinuous, experimental, dialogical, and polyphonic. In the experience of both protagonists, however, a gap has opened up between action and being. In the second part of Don Quixote, for example, the hero has become more of a spectator than an actor and we are often reminded that "his deeds were all the time contradicting his own best judgment and his judgment his deeds" (783). Montaigne attempts to bridge that gap in his Essais: "Je ne puis tenir registre de ma vie par mes actions" (III, 9, 945-46)..."Les effects [my actions] diroyent plus de la Fortune que de moy....Ce ne sont mes gestes que j'escris, c'est moy, c'est mon essence" (II, 6, 379). The essay here makes explicit what remained implicit in Don Quixote but which caused his melancholy and death: there can be no more chansons de geste.

Don Quixote attempts to keep alive chivalric values, to impose his readings on reality, to project his interiority onto "the prosaic vulgarity of outward life" (Lukács, 104), to experience exploits that would enable romance to be written anew with himself as the shining knight errant. In a larger sense, as Foucault explains,55 the man from La Mancha sallies forth on a quest for similitude. A child conceived in textual intercourse, he ventures out of his library as a middle-aged man to transform reality into a sign, to establish the union of words and things. Surprisingly he succeeds to a certain degree in imposing his interiority on reality and goes on to learn that his story has been published, his adventures recorded. Progressively, however, he comes to the recognition that he has been walking a path between words and things without being able to unite them. The world is simply not the text he has been reading. Unable to live in a world characterized by the divorce between words and things, between language and reality, he takes to his bed and dies of melancholy. The novel begins, and Don Quixote ends, in disillusionment.

Like that other noncanonical genre, the novel, the Essais relates, at once, the posthumanist rupture with antiquity and its own resistance to the developing bourgeois society. Here Montaigne resembles Don Quixote in his preference for the honest over the useful and his attempt to keep alive the nobiliary values of the past in the mercantile world of late sixteenth-century France. Although the essayist begins by negating similitude--"Il y a le nom et la chose," he writes in "De la gloire." "Le nom, c'est une voix qui remerque et signifie la chose; le nom, ce n'est pas une partie de la chose ny de la substance, c'est une piece estrangere joincte à la chose, et hors d'elle" (II, 16, 618)--his twenty year writerly project aims at cutting down on the distance between words and things. "Le seul livre au monde de son espèce" (II, 8, 385) contains a verbal portrait that not only resembles him but is "consubstantiel à son autheur" (II, 18, 665). This is the real presence of an author in the text who threatens to come back from the dead "pour démentir celuy qui me formerait autre que je n'estois, fut ce pour m'honorer" (III, 9, 983). In the end, the essayist establishes the priority of his extratextual existence, admits the necessity of the useful in the world in which he lives, develops a private life to shield himself from the prosaic vulgarity of outward life, and not only avoids disillusionment but miraculously transforms an unhappy consciousness into a happy one.

Whitman College

Notes

1. René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961).

2. Timothy Hampton, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 274.

3. For a more detailed analysis of Montaigne's progressive liberation from models, see my Montaigne in Dialogue (Saratoga, California: Anma Libri, 1987), pp. 101-106.

4. Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l'Evolution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1908), II, 418.

5. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed Pierre Villey et V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), II, 11, 425; future references inserted parenthetically.

6. See Hampton, op.cit., pp. 134-197; John Lyons, Exemplum. The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 118-153; Robert D. Cottrell, Sexuality/Textuality. A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne's "Essais" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), pp. 78-80.

7. Hampton, op. cit., pp. 31-62 and passim.

8. Philippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 1-34.

9. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated by Samuel Putnam (New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1949), p. 100; future references inserted parenthetically.

10. See James Supple, "The Failure of Humanist Education: David de Fleurance-Rivault, Antoine Mathé de Laval, and Nicolas Faret," in Humanism in Crisis, edited by Philippe Desan, op. cit., pp. 35-55.

11. See Hampton, op.cit., pp. 62-80 and Victoria Kahn, "Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli's Prince," Representations, 13 (1986), pp. 63-83.

12. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, translated by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), pp. 17-18; future references inserted parenthetically.

13. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 107.

14. Carlos Fuentes, "Cervantes, or the Critique of Reading," Myself With Others. Selected Essays (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988), pp. 68-69.

15. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). For current views of Watt's theories, see John Richetti, "The Legacy of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel," in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Reflections on an Institution, edited by Leo Damrosch (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 95-112 and W. L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel. The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 19-38.

16. Reed, op.cit, p. 20.

17. Géralde Nakam, Les "Essais" de Montaigne: Miroir et Procès de leur temps (Paris: Nizet, 1984); Montaigne et Son Temps: Les Evénements et les Essais (Paris: Nizet, 1982).

18. Philippe Desan, Les Commerces de Montaigne. Le Discours économique des Essais (Paris: Nizet, 1992).

19. Reed, op.cit., pp. 32-35.

20. Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavstock Publications, 1975), pp. 6-7.

21. Ibid., p. 13.

22. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 2l4.

23. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, l975), pp. 2-3.

24. Watt, op.cit., p. l96.

25. Reed, op.cit., p. 26.

26. Jean-Marie Goulemot, "Literary practices: Publicizing the Private," in A History of Private Life. Vol. III Passions of the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l989), p. 362.

27. Ibid., p. 125.

28. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 379.

29. Peter Brooks, Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 28-32.

30. Chartier, op.cit., p. 140.

31. Brooks, op.cit., p. 37.

32. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l961), p. 228.

33. John D. Lyons, "1678: The Emergence of the Novel," in A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 350.

34. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 87.

35. Watt, op.cit., p. 32.

36. Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form," in Notes to Literature, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), I, 13.

37. Anthony Wilden, "`Par Divers Moyens On Arrive A Pareille Fin': A Reading of Montaigne," MLN 83 (1968): p. 578.

38. Watt, op.cit., p. 176.

39. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1987), p. 24.

40. Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 5.

41. Bakhtin, op.cit., p. XXXII.

42. Wilden, op.cit., p. 577.

43. Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, edited by Thibaudet and Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 1176-77.

44. See Graham Good's discussion of this issue in The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 32-34.

45. Adorno, op.cit., p. 22.

46. Kundera, op.cit., pp. 73-74.

47. Bakhtin, op.cit., pp. 21-22.

48. Roland Barthes, S/Z: Essais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, l970), p. l0.

49. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (London: Penguin, l98l), p. 237.

50. Adorno, op.cit., p. l6.

51. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, op.cit., p. l57.

52. Ibid., p. 158.

53. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, l958), pp. 721, 185.

54. George Core, "Stretching the Limits of the Essay," in Essays on the Essay. Redefining the Genre, edited by Alexander J. Butrym (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 219.

55. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Inc., 1970), pp. 46-50.