Assignment for 11/4 - Montaigne

Reading Montaigne is a lot of fun. He is a very smart man, and yet, he does not belabor his intelligence as something peculiar to him. I expected that I was reading an Enlightenment thinker. Finding myself in the Renaissance was a shock only because his spelling has doubtlessly been modernized. (For which, let it be said, I am eternally grateful.)

The over-arching organizational structure of Montaigne’s essay XV is that of a point-by-point dialogue with another writer, a form which remains fairly popular today, especially on internet message boards. In Montaigne’s case, he is responding to some Virgil. He, as far as I can tell, does not directly translate any of the verses. This is not surprising, since in Montaigne’s day, it was a safe bet that whoever was reading his essays in the first place could read Latin as well. He only really needs the Latin verses as an organizational principle, since his opinions far outstrip the scope of responding to, in most cases, is only a fraction of a sentence of Virgil. It is possible to strip the Latin from the piece completely, and lose barely any meaning, but much organization. Without knowing what the Latin says, it is hard to tell how close he stays to the form of a strict response to a classical thinker, but it is a safe bet, given the way he writes, that he roams far afield.

He refers to many classical thinkers, although it seems that he restricts himself to quoting Virgil. Keeping the classical philosophers and writers in mind was a way of showing his audience how educated he was. It gave him legitimacy. This was, and still is, a common way of establishing authority in an argument. However, Montaigne does not seem to be arguing any one thing. He makes a lot of observations, many contradictory, most interesting.

Montaigne’s subject meanders in this essay. He uses the running style to draw a reader in to his mindset and thought process. He goes from one subject to another, hinging on one of the Latin phrases. On page 22 he switches from discussing women, marriage, adultery, and jealousy, to discussing language, writing, his own writing, its deficiencies, and his process. This change is sudden, achieved through his response to a certain excerpt of Virgil.

Montaigne never writes about only one thing at a time. He is always considering multiple ideas. His sentences are full of the interplay between one thought and another. He follows a thought until he is done writing about it, or until something interests him more. He hardly ever returns to an earlier thought. Each of the collections of subjects in the essay that he touches on could be the singular focus of a piece of writing. By modern standards, most of the topic-sections in this piece stand as their own essays, albeit essays without theses.

His writing is dense, packed with ideas about whatever is holding his attention in that particular paragraph. Either he is responding in short bursts to different passages of Latin, or he is jumping off a passage for pages of writing at a time. His sentences are complicated, being long strings of what, in another writer, would be hypotactic sentences. In his writing, they are merely clauses. In his longer sentences, there are usually lists of ideas, or qualities, that he ascribes to some particular part of an argument.

Take the following: “The wisdom of my instruction consists in liberty, in truth, in essence: disdaining to introduce those little, feigned, common, and provincial rules into the catalogue of its real duties; all natural, general, and constant, of which civility and ceremony are daughters indeed, but illegitimate.” (33)

We have liberty, truth, essence. Little, feigned, common, provincial rules. Natural, general, constant. Civility and ceremony. And this is a sentence on the simple side.

He uses expostulation where appropriate, bringing the emotion of his piece up by dramatically crying out in the middle of a paragraph, or a sentence.

He is self-conscious about his writing. But whether this is real or a conceit of his time, it is hard to tell. He is certainly dedicated to criticizing his abilities as an author.

He draws everything he has been talking about back in the last page of the essay, and ends with a joke. There is very little else to say at that point, except perhaps, “I wish I could do that.”