Practising Reform in Montaigne's "Essais" & "D'une fantastique bigarrure": le texte composite a la Renaissance. (Reviews).

Dorothea B. Heitsch, Practising Reform in Montaigne's "Essais."

(Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 99.) Leiden: Brill, 2000. ix + 204 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-11630-3.

Jean-Raymond Fanlo, ed., "D'une fantastique bigarrure": le texte composite a la Renaissance. Etudes offertes a Andri Tournon.

(Colloques, congres et conferences sur la Renaissance, 18.) Paris: Honore Champion, 2000. 314 pp. FF. 290. ISBN: 2-7453-0292-2.

Heitsch's study of Montaigne focuses on six topics, with a chapter devoted to each: the genre of the essay, its style, pedagogy, politics, religion, and historiography. Since Heitsch is also interested in "uncover[ing] the Nietzschean [rhetorical] elements that we find in the Essais," Nietzsche thus serves as Montaigne's "implied reader" in each chapter. She describes the literary affinity between the two writers this way: "Nietzsche's attitude toward his literary precursors corresponds to the humanists' [and in particular to Montaigne's] attitude toward their classical sources; it is the attitude of a double gesture -- that of rejection, because it wants to separate itself from its immediate past in order to, then, search for ancient roots" (1).

Montaigne's essay "De l'art de conferer" is the paradigm through which Heitsch defines Montaigne's personal essay as a written conversation, one which demonstrates the essayist's "ability to keep several viewpoints suspended in dialogue" and reflects "the nobleman's love for a play with abysmal thoughts" (58-59). The style of the essay created by Montaigne is physiological -- it serves to create a human complexion (complicatio bearing fictional traits) grounded in the humanist's physical aspects. What Montaigne "teaches" has little to do with history or morality (the example) but with judgment (conveyed through metaphor and the self-reflective text). Montaigne's teaching of judgment is compared to that of Nietzsche's Schopenhauer: "He teaches a concept of culture that involves, above all, a development of the self into an independently judging human being, who will be strong enough to remove the veneer of custom, to counteract the herd mentality of his rime, and to contribute to an educational reform" (107-08 ).

Montaigne's political texts function to criticize contemporary politics through a personalized, fictitious, yet always compromised self. Protected by Melanchthon's Reformation doctrine of "adiaphora" ("adiaphora are things or actions [ethically] indifferent" [141]), Montaigne's "religion" is his skepticism, which he pits, just like Nietzsche's "active nihilist" did, against fideism in order, ultimately, to criticize contemporary science and its method. Thanks to the notions of adiaphora and skepticism, Montaigne is able to raise doubt (as seen in the Apologie) from its negative connotation of unattainable knowledge to the positive principle of critical thinking. The aim of Montaigne's skeptical thinking is "to re-establish a basis of modest facts...for a new worldview" (148). Finally, the Essais is an autobiographical text that writes history: "writing history thus means drawing a portrait of the self in the process of becoming what one is or, in a far-reaching interpretation of Nietzsche's art of living, of becoming other than what one is" (4).

Not everyone will agree or be comfortable with Heitsch's dual reading of Montaigne and Nietzsche. It is though, to be sure, full of intertextual insights as the above summaries of her chapters would hope to reveal. One quotation from Nietzsche in particular will serve to introduce the second volume being reviewed here. Nietzsche confides: "that I have in my spirit -- who knows? perhaps also in my body -- something of Montaigne's sportiveness" (6). This sportiveness or love for the unorthodox element in the Essais, for the imperceptibly subversive turn of a phrase or thought, for the ironic or multicolored tone of a passage or an entire essay, in a word, this love for the text(ure) of incongruous elements in one's writing strategy is also the subject studied in the essays found in "D'une fantastique bigarrure": le texte composite a la Renaissance. Etudes offertes a Andre Tournon. Now retired from university teaching, Tournon is a master at analyzing textual adiaphora. To honor him, the twenty contributors in t his volume attempt to do likewise. Five essays pertain to Montaigne, with the others covering major and minor Renaissance authors and texts (Claude de Taillemont, Guillaume Bouchet, Rabelais, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and so forth). Fanlo, the editor of the volume, quotes Montaigne himself to justify the "polyphonic" readings: "Traiter diversement les matieres est aussi bien les traiter que conformement" (7). Again, we are talking about Renaissance literature that is adiaphoric: "Les textes composites juxtaposent et combinent discours disparates et idees divergentes[;] en preferent Ia polyphonie au discours univoque, les rencontres (adiaphoriques] experimentent l'enquete incertaine au lieu d'exprimer un savoir" (7, 8). The volumes by Heistch and Fanlo complement each other and shed much light on literary incongruity in the Renaissance.