Money and Magic in Montaigne: the Historicity of the.

Andrew Small begins the body of his text, Essays in Self-Portraiture, with the intriguing question: "[W]hat is, and how can I describe, that phenomenon of which my proper name is the sign?" (1). Small's description of Montaigne's transformation from "Michel Eyquem" to "Michel de Montaigne" at his father's death provides a satisfying principle around which the notorious incoherence of the writer's "scriptural' persona may be organized. The theoretical apparatus that Small employs in order to enact this critique is reminiscent of the reading lists for graduate students in comparative literature in the 1980s, from Lessing's essay on Laokoon and Propp's plot typologies, to Barthes's S/Z. Small pulls these diverse critical materials together quite nicely, however, in his apt description of Montaigne's self-portraiture: "the name becomes a nucleus, like the dwelling of Montaigne, around which circulate the qualities and the properties defining the noun (and the man) through attribution" (28). Indeed, the "je" or the "moi" of the Essais is constituted by the accumulation of attributes in and around the author's persona. Small somewhat neglects, however, the willful duplicity of Montaigne's rhetoric, which is certainly one of its most fascinating aspects. His readings of the Essais thus do not give one a sense of their astonishing depth and ambiguity.

In general, Small's readings of Rembrandt's self-portraits are much more complete, and it is apparent that he has a greater knowledge of the critical literature on the Dutch painter than he does of the literature on Montaigne. The book provides interesting comments on the material conditions in which Rembrandt produced his masterpieces, and on the artistic traditions with which he maintained a lifelong dialogue. Its discussion of Rembrandt's manipulations of his signature, especially in the Self-Portrait with a Dead Bittern, is fascinating, especially in the comparative context it establishes between the nominal transformations undergone by both artist and writer ("Rembrandt van Rijn" becomes simply "Rembrandt," just as "Eyquem" becomes simply "de Montaigne"). While Small's explication of Rembrandt's self-representations as a courtier is quite convincing, his parallel reading of Montaigne's "De la praesumption" in reference to The Book of the Courtier oversimplifies the significance of the text, and does not give the reader a sense of the rhetorical complexities of Montaigne's discourse. This reading is perhaps emblematic of the rest of Small's text, in that it contains an accurate yet incomplete reading of the essay, accompanied by an informative and well-documented interpretation of Rembrandt's painting. The theoretical framework for the chapter on "the doxology of the self-portrait," which defines this term both as an encomium and as the "radiance and luminosity" (93) of reason and knowledge that permeates both "L'apologie de Raymond Sebond" and Rembrandt's Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul, is brilliantly conceived, highlighting the general character of Small's text. Its author is not afraid to defend difficult theoretical positions, to make bold comparisons, and to write with verve and emotion (see the variations on the theme of Narcissus, 32-34), for which the reader is grateful in the end. Despite its flaws, therefore, this text is well worth reading, and it establishes useful terms of comparison that illuminate both the Essais and the portraits of Rembrandt.

In contrast to Small's often fleeting references to Montaigne, Edward Benson's Money and Magic in Montaigne displays a complete immersion in Montaigne studies from its very first pages. Its introduction reveals Benson in dialogue with some of the best-known "students of Montaigne," including Desan, Defaux, Tournon, Tetel, and Kritzman. Benson brings a formidable bibliography to bear on his argument, which ranges from numerous unpublished Ph.D. dissertations to the immense published literature on Montaigne, and from historical and theoretical texts both from the present day to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to news reports and issues of the New York Times Book Review. The hundreds of notes for each chapter demonstrate a depth of reading experience possible only for a scholar who has been at his task for thirty years, as Benson has. On the other hand, the wealth of this material causes Benson to digress frequently from the main thrust of his difficult argument.

The most satisfying thesis advanced in this text is Benson's conception of Montaigne as a conservative in a rather unique sense: "Montaigne [is] stubbornly medieval. The scripteur's conservatism, in other words, led him to try to preserve the openness to discourse from different orders and milieux that had characterized writing while he was growing up, and that disappeared in the wake of the Reformation, the Council of Trent, and the witchhunt" (187). Montaigne was a conservative, then, on the side of a medieval "heteroglossia" that was being made uniform and univocal by centralizing political forces. The witchhunt was one of the strategies by which an increasingly urban aristocracy imposed its standards upon the recalcitrant countryside where Montaigne situated himself. Benson's development of this thesis is vague in its description of the relationship between money and magic on the one hand and the rhetoric of the Essais on the other. For instance, in his reading of "Sur des vers de Virgile," Benson concludes that the text repeatedly displaces its focus from sex to money, and from money to language, indicating a causal relation between the monetary crisis during the second half of the sixteenth century and Montaigne's problematization of reason and meaning in language: "Money depreciated catastrophically over Montaigne's lifetime . . . he labored throughout the Essais to call into question the relationship between words and desires as well as desires and actions. He strove above all to make language material and perceptible, for instance by comparing it to money. Five such comparisons in "Sur des vers de Virgile," three between sexual pleasure and language, preceded and followed by one of language to money, construct a scripteur much less fixated than he seemed on his own gratification" (141). Benson implies that Montaigne is addressing the possibility of producing a critical discourse in a time in which money (and hence language) has been deprived of its value. While displacements of this type are typical of Montaigne's text, Benson could perhaps make his principal points more succinctly: money and magic belonged to the same early modern episteme that no longer exists for us (195); the monetary crisis generated the witchhunt that was part of a general imposition of centralized power at the end of the sixteenth century (chapters two and three); the monetary crisis was reflected in the crises of interpretation and meaning embodied in the Essais (chapter four); Montaigne's discourses about sex reflect the crises of identity and language that characterized the period (chapter five). In general, Benson conceives of Montaigne as the speaker of a willfully incoherent discourse that resisted the demand for coherent narrative being imposed on the unruly countryside: in the witchhunt, for example, women accused of sorcery were required to produce a story that agreed with proto-modernist preoccupations with narrative coherence. Benson's meticulously-documented text makes a convincing case for these main points. Money and Magic in Montaigne is thus an important contribution to Montaigne studies, as well as a compelling intellectual history of a crucial moment in the development of modernity.

DAVID LaGUARDIA Dartmouth College