Montaigne et la mauvaise foi: l'ecriture de la verite & Montaigne ou la verite du mensonge. (Reviews).

Yves Delegue. Montaigne et la mauvaise foi: l'ecriture de la verite 

(Etudes montaignistes, 33.) Paris: Champion, 1998. 241 pp. CHF 45. ISBN: 2-85203-954-0.

Gisele Mathieu-Castellani. Montaigne ou la verite du mensonge

(Les seuils de la modernite, 4.) Geneva: Droz, 2000. 160 pp. CHF 41. ISBN: 2-600-0461-0.

In his preliminary address to the reader, Montaigne stresses the "good faith" in which the Essays have been written. Delegue understands this self-apology as an emblematic manifestation of the doubt undermining the veracity of modern literary discourse. The argumentation of this thesis is split between a catalogue of instances of "bad faith" in the Essays on one hand and the means of compensating for it on the other. Among the first, Delegue lists Montaigne's education, which, despite his father's efforts, fails to develop in him a natural bond with peasant life and with classical Latin; the friendship with La Boetie which, paradoxically, can be nourished only by their tragic separation; the experience of loss inherent to the constitution of Montaigne's self; his Distinguo, the craft of conceptual and rhetorical distinctions, which allows him to claim himself to be both truthful and a liar; his deliberate project to persevere in piecing together the data of experience, regardless of their more or less fictiti ous character. All these factors contribute to a picture of a general alienation impeding any attempt to escape artificiality. Montaigne has therefore to compromise with "bad faith" by constructing an art of living which claims to be identical with the art of writing, despite his consciousness of a growing divorce between word and action. This art includes cheating with Fortune, with others and most importantly engaging with oneself in a game of well calculated candor. In the act of writing, it means striving for the substantiality and the inspirational drive of poetry. Therefore, in the final analysis, Delegue sees Montaigne's attempts to overcome the haunting suspicion of "bad faith" less as an epistemological and moral struggle of literary fiction with falsehood than as a manifestation of the author's acute consciousness of the act itself of communicating.

In this way Delegue's analysis of the Essays develops his previous reflections on the self-invention of the author as subject of modern literature (see his Le royaume d'exil: Le sujet de la litterature en quete d'auteur, Obsidiane, 1991). Mathieu-Castellani's reading of Montaigne has no such far-reaching aspiration, although it springs from the same critical tradition of literary studies. Indeed, since her Montaigne: l'icriture de l'essai (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), Mathieu-Castellani has been interested in tracking the "surplus of signification" in Montaigne's discourse. At that time, she was inclined to look for it in Montaigne's inscription of his own corporeality -- particularly his mortality and his sexuality -- into his seductively half-unveiled writing. In her newest book she asks herself to what extent Montaigne's deceit, troubling omissions or even self-acknowledged lies seek to express obliquely the truth.

In the process of exploring the truthfulness of Montaigne's lies, Mathieu-Castellani encounters some of the fragments of the Essays spotted already by Delegue (among others: the address to the reader; I, xxx, 105; II, i, 335). She deals also with some inescapable themes pertinent to Montaigne's claim of sincerity and its limitations: his insistent downplaying of his work as a writer, his laborious striving for simplicity and naturalness, his systematic removal of La Boetie's works from the Essays, which, contrary to the initially stated project, become nor the monument to his friend's intellectual achievements, but, according to Mathieu-Castellani's formulation, its cenotaph. She is particularly successful in distinguishing between different voices of Montaigne: that of a moralist abhorring lies, but uneasy about baring himself completely; that of a skeptic undecided where to draw the line between truth and untruth; the voice of the pragmatic politician who knows that veracity may jeopardize public peace. It is, however, the intertextual analysis of her book that seems the most appealing: the distinction between the possibility staged by the verisimilitude of poetry and the possibilities of human character and action investigated by the Essays; the hidden polemic of "De la liberte de conscience" with La Boetie's Memoire touchant l'edit de janvier 1562; the unconfessed traces of Saint Augustine's Confessions in the Essays; as well as Montaigne's recycling of Tacitus and Quintilian's reflections on oratory. In this last respect, Mathieu-Castellani notes that when reflecting on Virgil's and Lucretius' description of Venus -- those words which "mean more than they say" (trans. Frame) -- Montaigne alludes in fact to Quintilian's conception of significatio. By evoking this most poetic of rhetorical figures, Montaigne seems to suggest that it is in the poetic "surplus" of signification that one should look for the meaning of the Essays.

For students of Renaissance literature, Delegue's and Manthieu-Castellani's books are useful in the respect that they move the discussion of Montaigne's intentionality from the level of the rhetoric of persuasion (cf. Margaret M. McGowan's, Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais [University of London Press, 1974]) to the level of reflection on writing itself, its generic, stylistic and intertextual implications. For the recently increasing number of students of Renaissance philosophy, these books are an indispensable reminder that the Essays cannot be read as any other philosophical treatise. In interpreting Montaigne's philosophical stance, one should never forget that his statements can rarely be taken at face value, that the obliqueness of the Essays make their propositions good faith lies or truths undermined by the "bad faith" of unconfessed doubt and irony.