4—
The Presumption of Writing:
Between Ovid's Children

Testis nemo in sua causa esse potest.

No one can be a witness on his own behalf.

Et n'est aucun si asseuré tesmoing comme chacun à soy-mesme.
(II, 16, 626)

And there is no witness so sure as each man to himself.

Nemo in sese tentat descendere.
(cited in II, 17, 658)

No one attempts to descend into himself.

Montaigne undertakes explicitly to write about himself, but, after my discussion of textual progeny, of imposing texts and obtrusive readers, we might want to say that all writers write about themselves, whatever else they may write about. The work produced always reproduces the writer, however much he is "found" or "lost" there, it represents him as his offspring and speaks in his name in his absence and after his death. The diverse examples of the affection of fathers for their metaphorical children at the end of "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" imply that all "work," all actions and all deeds, are the other selves of those who produce them, especially the writings that are conceptions of the mind—as the long history of the topos of the book as child indicates. The metaphor is so pervasive that Montaigne can attribute paternity to those who might not have intended it or even thought of it; he can extend what he calls the affection that writers have for their writings and designate any writing as a child, that of Epicurus and even of St. Augustine. From this perspective Montaigne's declaration that he is himself the matter of his book and his claim that the text is his child announce the undeclared program of all writing and give his work exemplary status insofar as it ex-

plicitly foregrounds the activity by which all authors conceive of their subject—that is, the subject that is always also in some sense themselves.

While it might appear that writing could be taken as a form of self-conception that apparently concerns no one beyond the self, in effect Montaigne's effort to justify his activity also discloses its public dimension and his concern that his writing be considered presumptuous. Seeing himself in the eyes of his readers, the writer imagines that they will misinterpret his intention and misread his text, that they will mistakenly accuse him of self-aggrandizement, of writing to offer himself as exemplary or to satisfy his vanity. Perhaps if he wrote only for himself, or for his family and his intimate friends, the question of his audacity would not arise. But the Essais are a public text destined for a readership beyond this limited circle, and Montaigne's disclaimers of writing for such an audience cannot be taken entirely at face value. The rules of civility and decorum, he complains in "De la praesumption" (II, 17), do not allow a man to speak well of himself, nor do they allow him to speak ill either—that is, they effectively preclude speaking of oneself at all. But Montaigne does speak explicitly about himself, and we want to say as well that because he insists on writing at all he is always in some sense speaking about himself, always inscribing himself endlessly in his text, even when he appears not to be doing so. He thus finds himself, as he says, entangled in the laws of public ceremony and open, as all writers must be, to the charge of being presumptuous.

In "De l'exercitation" (II, 6) Montaigne raises the question again after making a personal anecdote the centerpiece of his essay: "La coustume a faict le parler de soy vicieux, et le prohibe obstineement en hayne de la ventance qui semble tousjours estre attachée aux propres tesmoignages" (378c) ("Custom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it out of hatred for the boasting that seems to be attached to bearing witness to oneself" [my translation]). Paradoxically, Montaigne acknowledges that custom is right to condemn as presumptuous the man who writes of himself, and he acknowledges its authority by addressing its concerns, by explaining and justifying his own activity. At the same time he holds that custom is wrong, that it imposes empty and superficial modes of conduct that mask what is natural and true and prevent man from expressing himself as he is. It may be presumptuous to write about oneself,

Montaigne allows, but he will not refuse any action that will display what he alludes to as this unhealthy quality since it is a part of him. Nor, he avers, does he want to conceal this fault, which he claims not only to practice but to profess (378). All public display of oneself, all writing, is "ventance," boasting of a sort, all "parler de soy," all "propres tesmoignages," are presumptuous, but they are to be performed, and both condemned and excused, as that which is both "propre" (one's own and therefore proper) and improper (in the eyes of others).

I am suggesting, then, that there is no other way to write except to write about the self and thus no other way to write except presumptuously, no other way to consider the performance of self-conception and self-perpetuation. It could not be otherwise as the author sends his progeny out into the world. Writing itself is always a public call and a public calling, simultaneously a call to the reader that demands that the writing be read and a call from the reader that elicits the text and demands that the writing be written. Without this fiction that brings the readership into being no writing can come into being. Montaigne claims that he and his text are not meant to be shown off in public like a statue mounted in the village square ("Je ne dresse pas icy une statue à planter au carrefour d'une ville, ou dans une Eglise, ou place publique" [II, 18, 664a]), but neither can his presentation resemble an intimate tête-àtête, as the quotation from Persius that he disingenuously inserts would imply: "Secreti loquimur." Writing cannot be meant in any simple way, "pour le coin d'une librairie, et pour en amuser un voisin, un parent, un amy" (664a) ("for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend" [503]). That is why Montaigne must come back repeatedly to the issue of his presumptuous writing, why the man who claims in all modesty to be capable of speaking only of himself must come back to excuse himself before his readers for presuming to speak at all.

Montaigne shares the anxiety of all writers about the public perception of their enterprise and thus makes the question of presumptuous writing an explicit subject of his discourse. The essayist anticipates the reception of his text and the meaning attributed to it (and to him) by his readers and responds in advance to their objections. But if he is concerned that others will misperceive him as presumptuous, he also worries that his presumption will cause him to misperceive himself, both as he writes about himself and as he reads his own text.

Here are the terms in which he defines presumption in the essay of the same title:

Il y a une autre sorte de gloire, qui est une trop bonne opinion que nous concevons de nostre valeur. C'est un' affection inconsiderée, dequoy nous nous cherissons, qui nous represente à nous mesmes autres que nous ne sommes: comme la passion amoureuse preste des beautez et des graces au subjet qu'elle embrasse, et fait que ceux qui en sont espris, trouvent, d'un jugement trouble et alteré, ce qu'ils ayment, autre et plus parfaict qu'il n'est. (II, 17, 631–32a)

There is another kind of vainglory, which is an over-good opinion we form of our own worth. It is an unreasoning affection, by which we cherish ourselves, which represents us to ourselves as other than we are; as the passion of love lends beauties and graces to the object it embraces, and makes its victims, with muddled and unsettled judgment, think that what they love is other and more perfect than it is. (478)

Montaigne associates presumption with philautia , the classical concept of blinding self-love that was considered the source of folly, and of evil, by Renaissance writers and theologians. In a series of adages that Montaigne surely had read, Erasmus depicts philautia in the doubleness of its error, its excessive concern with the faults of others and its disregard of its own, recalling in its many reiterations (including Catullus, Persius, Horace, and St. Jerome) Aesop's fable of the man who keeps a double wallet over his shoulders with the faults of others in the front where he can see them and his own in the back where he cannot (I.vi.90). Montaigne himself frequently quoted Persius, and he found there the critique of self-love and the complaint, which he borrowed in "De la praesumption," that "no one attempts to descend into himself" (I will come back to this in some detail). In the Satires , this line is followed by, "They watch the wallet hanging on the back / Of him that walks before" (4.23–24). Like the distorting passion of those smitten with love for another, self-love troubles and alters the judgment, hiding its own defects and weaknesses, and it depicts the self to itself in flattering, and false, terms.

Everything is thus at stake in seeking to avoid presumption: for the philosopher who attempts to respond to the Delphic injunction and to know himself (only he who knows himself is worthy of being called a philosopher, Erasmus quotes Socrates as saying) and for the writer whose text both generates him and is his offspring, who both

conceives himself as a text and seeks to read (and have others read) himself there. Presumption is thus doubly dangerous to the essayist, distorting his vision as he writes, blurring his vision as he reads. In "De la praesumption" Montaigne opens the wallet on his back. He confesses his faults ("quant aux bransles de l'ame, je veux icy confesser ce que j'en sens" [633a]), he dares to show himself as he is ("oser se faire veoir tel qu'on est" [647a]), and to make himself known ("pourveu que je me face connoistre tel que je suis" [653a]), so that in his openness and humility he will avoid presumption and assure the truth of self-presentation.

Montaigne thus confesses in "De la praesumption" to a profound dissatisfaction with himself and his work, to an inability to please, to the most common physical attributes, to a poor memory, to ignorance, to indiscretion and incivility. In fact, he goes much further as self-debasement becomes self-abnegation: "(a) De toutes les opinions que l'ancienneté a euës de l'homme (c) en gros, (a) celles que j'embrasse plus volontiers et ausquelles je m'attache le plus, ce sont celles qui nous mesprisent, avilissent et aneantissent le plus" (634) ("Of all the opinions antiquity has held of man as a whole, the ones I embrace most willingly and adhere to most firmly are those that despise, humiliate, and nullify us most" [480]). If the presumptuous man deludes himself by thinking too highly of himself, Montaigne will avoid the error by lowering his esteem, by bringing it as low as selfesteem has ever been brought: "Il est bien difficile, ce me semble, que aucun autre s'estime moins, voire que aucun autre m'estime moins, que ce que je m'estime" (635a) ("It would be very difficult, it seems to me, for any one to esteem himself less, or indeed for anyone else to esteem me less, than I esteem myself" [481]). Having affirmed man's nullity and emptiness, the essayist confirms his own and does so in a way that challenges any notion of the self as an origin or ground from which truth could be generated and imposed on the world, with the exception of the truth of man's own vanity. When in a confessional gesture of supreme self-denial Montaigne says that he disavows himself ("Je me desadvoue sans cesse"), he pulls away from himself and renounces himself, as if invoking the etymological weight of avouer (Latin advocare , to call or summon) to verify that the self cannot be called upon, that it cannot respond to any call except by the performance of its own nothingness. What alone can be called up are the faults of which Montaigne is guilty, and which he confesses: "coupa-

ble des defectuositez plus basses et populaires, mais non desadvouées, non excusées" (635c) ("Guilty of the commoner and humble faults, but not of faults disavowed or excused" [481]). Herein lies the response to the charge of presumptuous love for himself and of excessive affection for his textual child.

Montaigne's lexicon of affection and amour that describes self-love repeats the precise terms he uses to describe the feelings of fathers for their children, for both physical and metaphorical offspring. To love another does not appear to differ in kind from loving oneself, even, or especially, when what one loves in the other is oneself. (How could we possibly sort out the role of narcissism in love?) What sets self-love apart as presumptuous seems to be a matter of degree, the excessiveness that makes of it an affection that is "inconsiderée" and produces an opinion of ourselves that is "trop bonne." This intemperance appears to be what distinguishes the infatuation of Pygmalion from the "normal" attachment of the poet for his work—"de tous les ouvriers," Montaigne says citing Aristotle, "le poëte nomméement est le plus amoureux de son ouvrage" (II, 8, 402c)—the poet, who along with Labienus, Lucian, Epicurus, and Epaminondas, exemplifies that laudable affection of fathers for their children of the mind. Is it then this excess of "passion amoureuse" rather than the nature of its object that causes the essayist to condemn these "passions vitieuses et furieuses qui ont eschauffé quelques lois les peres à l'amour de leurs filles" (402a) ("vicious and frenzied passions which have sometimes inflamed fathers with love for their daughters" [293]) and to cite Pygmalion as his only example?

Yet Pygmalion is a most complex example since it is precisely his excessive love for Galatea that prompts the gods to act, precisely the inordinate passion that led him to carress her ivory form and imagine her loving response that caused Venus to answer his prayer and bring her to life. Or rather that caused Venus to have Pygmalion bring Galatea to life, since at his kiss the statue grew warm and at his touch the ivory yielded, as Montaigne's quotation reminds us, just as the stone had earlier yielded beneath his chisel. Here the "ouvrier" as father loves his work beyond measure, with an affection that must be considered as "inconsiderée." Here the sculptor fashions the work as child, as daughter, as another himself, loves the work excessively

for having created it (Montaigne introduces this as another consideration: "Or, à considerer cette simple occasion d'aymer nos enfans pour les avoir engendrez" [399a]), and loves himself in the work. And this incestuous passion, which must be the height of self-love and presumption, finds the gods kindly disposed to honor a request so presumptuous that Pygmalion finally could not utter it: "If you Gods can give all things, may I have as my wife, I pray—" he did not dare to say, "the ivory maiden," but finished, "one like the ivory maid" (Metamorphoses , X.275–77).^[1]

The figure of Pygmalion appears only twice in the Essais , first in the context I have described in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," in which he is cited by name as an example of the "passion vitieuse et furieuse" that is the improper excess of the father's ("ouvrier") love for his daughter but also the paradoxical source of life itself. He appears again in the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," but indirectly and without being named, and only to those who recognize the lines Montaigne quotes from Ovid of Hymettan wax softened by the sun and worked by men's fingers into different shapes. The simile that serves in the Metamorphoses to capture the sense of the ivory statue yielding beneath the touch of the impassioned sculptor, and that also functions as a metaphor of the creative process of the artist properly shaping his work, lends its resonance to the fashioning of self and text that is Montaigne's own essaying.^[2] The striking relevance of these fleeting and understated appearances of Pygmalion to the themes of writing, conception, and self-love that I have been discussing and the curious ambivalence that suggests that the sculptor's story is both unpardonable and exemplary give Pygmalion an emblematic function in the Essais and help us address the problematic nature of presumption that appears to initiate and inhabit the project of writing about, essaying, oneself. The analogy between Pygmalion and Montaigne seems to suggest that the Essais are meant in a positive way to be the coming to life of Montaigne himself, that the essayist's desire to naturalize art is in some way an effort to approximate what Ovid calls the sculptor's "art without art." But the analogy also introduces the necessity of coming to grips with Pygmalion's love for Galatea, with his incestuous love for his creation / daughter and for himself in her, and with Montaigne's preoccupation with his own presumptuousness—that is, with his excessive affection for his creation (his daughter?) and for himself.

If Galatea could not have come to life without the sculptor's perverse and frenzied passion, we might speculate that Montaigne's textual child would not have been conceived and come alive without the audacious self-love that the essayist disavows in "De la praesumption." That this presumptuous obsession with the self gives rise to the writing is in fact literally true of that essay (and of all the essays), for he and his own presumption—whether he is guilty of it or not—are the subjects of his text. We might want to see in Montaigne's continual self-reference the most striking form of presumption, even and especially when he refers to himself to deny himself. Let me quote a passage representative of the monstrous (incestuous) presumption of saying "I," of imposing the "I" as the unique and exclusive linguistic and psychological center:

(a) J'ay le goust tendre et difficile, et notamment en mon endroit: je me (c) desadvoue sans cesse; et me (a) sens par tout flotter et fleschir de foiblesse. Je n'ay rien du mien dequoy satisfaire mon jugement. J'ay la veue assez claire et reglée; mais, à l'ouvrer, elle se trouble: comme j'essaye plus evidemment en la poesie. Je l'ayme infiniment: je me cognois assez aux ouvrages d'autruy; mais je fay, à la verité, l'enfant quand j'y veux mettre la main; je ne me puis souffrir. (635)

My taste is delicate and hard to please, and especially regarding myself; I am incessantly disowning myself; and I feel myself, in every part, floating and bending with weakness. I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment. I have clear enough and controlled sight; but when I put it to work, it grows blurred, as I find most evidently in poetry. I love it infinitely; I am a pretty good judge of other men's works; but in truth, I play the child when I try to set my hand to it; I cannot endure myself. (481)

Montaigne insists on the superficiality of his vanity just before the lines I have quoted ("J'en suis arrosé, mais non pas teint"), but the weight of the first-person subject pronouns opening each of his phrases belies his claim. Let me quote again the absolute terms in which he affirms his lack of worth; we can hear the presumptuousness of his claim that no one has a lower opinion of himself: "il est bien difficile, ce me semble, que aucun autre s'estime moins, voire que aucun autre m'estime moins, que ce que je m'estime." By presenting himself as the lowest of the low he does not escape the presumption of his self-conscious hyperbole; rather, he makes of himself the highest of the low, the best of the worst, because "no one" denies himself

better than he does. And this same reversal operates over and again to make him the reference point for the norms and qualities that the essay ultimately values as desirable and redemptive. Every significant fault Montaigne confesses acquires positive worth, every selfabasing statement gives him exemplary status: ignorance becomes the source of wisdom, lack of memory the origin of self-reliance, incivility and the inability to please the marks of naturalness and sincerity, and his litany of faults the sign of that humility by which he redeems himself. Clearly, the denunciation of presumption is not the elimination of presumption.

The structure of Montaigne's avowal thus recuperates the very element it seeks to eliminate, the vain "I" that centers itself as the original effect of its vanity and must center itself again in order to disavow itself. This paradox, in which what saves is what damns and what damns saves, resembles that of Pygmalion's story, as Montaigne recounts it and as I have presented it, where what condemns the sculptor—his self-love expressed as his unnatural, incestuous passion for his image—is also what saves him, what brings the image to life. And Montaigne's case, as these analogies suggest, is based upon a similar paradox, for although he must censure the error of self-love that would represent himself to himself other than he is, only by erring in self-love can he represent himself to himself at all as the subject of his essays. Only his strong opinion of his lack of selfworth, he says, only his continual confession and self-abasement, allow him to avoid being deceived by what he calls "l'affection que je me porte singuliere" (657a) ("The singular affection I have for myself" [499]). It is equally clear, however, that only that "affection . . . singuliere" allows him to concentrate nearly all his affection on himself, to excite it so that he can seek to know himself and, as the writing in this essay seeks to imply, to be present to himself in himself and in his writing. In the lines that follow this statement of the double nature of self-love Montaigne's syntax turns back reflexively upon its subject in insistent self-reference:

Or mes opinions, je les trouve infiniement hardies et constantes à condamner mon insuffisance. De vray, c'est aussi un subject auquel j'exerce mon jugement autant qu'à nul autre. Le monde regarde tousjours vis à vis; moy, je replie ma veue au dedans, je la plante, je l'amuse là. Chacun regarde devant soy; moy, je regarde dedans moy: je n'ay affaire qu'à moy, je me considere sans cesse, je me contrerolle, je me

gouste. Les autres vont tousjours ailleurs, s'ils y pensent bien; ils vont tousjours avant, "nemo in sese tentat descendere," moy je me roulle en moy mesme. (657–58a)

Now I find my opinions infinitely bold and constant in condemning my inadequacy. In truth, this too is a subject on which I exercise my judgment as much as on any other. The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others always go elsewhere, if they stop to think about it, they always go forward; "No man tries to descend into himself;" as for me, I roll about in myself. (499)

Boldly claiming the infinite boldness of his self-condemnation, Montaigne performs the presumptuousness of his singular affection for himself: "Cette capacité de trier le vray... je la dois principalement à moy," he claims; "car les plus fermes imaginations que j'aye, et generalles, sont celles qui, par maniere de dire, nasquirent avec moy. Elles sont naturelles et toutes miennes" (658a) ("This capacity for sifting truth . . . I owe principally to myself. For the firmest and most general ideas I have are those which, in a manner of speaking, were born with me" [499]). Portraying himself as whole unto himself, enclosed within the circle of his self-reflexive gaze, speaking to himself of himself, the taster tasted (or, we might add, the writer written), Montaigne's affection for himself appears to affect himself and give him the unmediated sense of his own subjectivity. The essayist writes himself (down) as the experience of the reflexive gaze, the autoerotic gaze that makes of him a subject who both beholds and holds himself in the consciousness of his own presence and in the presence of his consciousness. In incestuous self-love, the work, the statue, come to life.

Is this not the expression of the most scandalous presumption? And of a presumptuous self-love that lies not outside the self as something that keeps the self from being itself but as that which composes interiority itself, that which gives rise to the sense of self and at the same time obscures it in presumptuous overestimation? The only way that the self can experience itself is in the experience of its presumptuousness—that is, in the emptiness of its vain and unnatural self-love, but no sense of self can come about without this error, this inflated and deceptive embrace of the self that Montaigne calls "un' erreur d'ame" (633). This "erreur" reveals the truth of the

self in all its paradoxical complexity. Montaigne wanders from the truth about himself in the self-deception of his love for himself, but that error (Latin errare , to wander) also enacts the wandering through himself that he calls rolling about in himself, the wandering that both affirms himself and reveals his nullity, affirms himself as his nullity, and calls forth its bold condemnation. And here we might want to recall the story of Narcissus (readers have long been aware of the ways in which the narratives of Pygmalion and Narcissus reflect and refract each other) and say that perhaps Montaigne's double gesture of self-embrace and self-denial is what saves him from the fate of Narcissus and from the consequences of what I have called his autoerotic gaze. When asked whether Narcissus would live to a ripe old age, the prophetic seer answered, "Yes, if he does not come to know himself," as if self-knowledge were possible only at the price of death. Montaigne's text reveals what Narcissus could not or would not "see," that the self cannot be possessed in any absolute way, that the movement that reveals it also conceals it, that self-knowledge is always a question of knowing and of simultaneously being ignorant of the self.^[3]

Montaigne thus escapes the death that consumes Narcissus, the death that Ovid describes as the physical wasting away of the body, the golden wax melting in the gentle heat (we recall that the poet likens Galatea's ivory body to melting wax when the statue—the woman and art itself—comes to life), and that is the figure for Narcissus's confusion of substance and shadow. But we might ask if Narcissus dies because he comes to know himself, as the seer predicted, or if he dies because ultimately he does not know himself, because in the blindness of his self-love he remains ignorant of the truth of himself. Although at first Narcissus does not recognize his mistake, he does come to know himself as the image in the water and to understand his paradoxical position: "Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not deceive me. I am on fire with love for my own self. . . . What I desire, I have. My very plenty makes me poor. How I wish I could separate myself from my body! and, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent from me" (III, 463–68). But the wish to separate himself from his body and to be absent from himself cannot be realized in life any more than his desire to be wholly present to himself. Paradoxically, Narcissus both "has" what he desires and is unable to possess himself.

Only in death can the prayer for release be answered, as Narcissus both realizes and is unwilling to admit. When his tears disturb the water, and the image vanishes, Narcissus once again cries out for the fulfillment of his self-love: "Where are you fleeing? Cruel creature, stay, do not desert him who loves you, cruel one!" (477–78). If the seer's prediction is meant to resonate with the words of the Delphic oracle, can we say that Narcissus knows himself in any real sense? He may overcome his initial blindness to see himself in the water, but he cannot "see" himself and understand the limitations of his nature, which is precisely what the oracle would have one know to know oneself. Narcissus dies because he remains trapped in the error of his self-absorption, because he "sees" only with his eyes. When Montaigne names Narcissus in the Essais , he depicts him as a victim of the senses (and a victim of the poet's recognition of the power of the senses): "Combien donnent à la force des sens les poëtes, qui font Narcisse esperdu de l'amour de son ombre" (II, 12, 594a) ("How much power the poets ascribe to the senses, who make Narcissus madly in love with his own reflection" [449]).

If Narcissus remains an essential subtext of the Essais , as the figure of the constricting and self-destructive side of presumption and self-love that does not know itself, Pygmalion plays a more complex role as both the author of the perverse and furious (self-) love for his creation and the author of the creation itself.^[4] This double role allows the sculptor to escape the fate of Narcissus, for it is also the double role of the writer himself, of both Ovid and Montaigne. In his love for his work, his child, and for himself in it, the artist resembles Narcissus who is so taken with his own image. But where Narcissus is beguiled by a shadow of life and caught in the unnatural circle of his self-enclosed passion that can only result in death, the artist, as the story of Pygmalion reminds us, loves something outside of himself, even though it is also himself and even though this self is also his daughter. Pygmalion's Galatea originates in his revolt against nature, in his turning away from women toward art, but it is through that art that nature, and the sculptor's nature in the form of his love, and his desire work their life-giving transformation and soften the unfeeling stone. Art and nature are not antithetical in Ovid as they are not absolutely opposed in Montaigne. Art can be the way to nature, it can be the means to recuperate and embody nature, to give form and life to the child and to the self. "Si j'estois du mestier," the essayist says, speak-

ing of those who give an artificial color to common things, "je naturaliserois l'art autant comme ils artialisent la nature" (III, 5, 874c) ("If I were of the trade, I would naturalize art as much as they artify nature" [666]). This is precisely the gesture that engenders the analogy between real and metaphoric offspring in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," the gesture that makes intercourse with the muses a natural intercourse and the child of the mind a child of nature as well.

Both times in the Essais when Montaigne evokes Pygmalion, he quotes Ovid's lines in which Galatea comes to life under the caressing hand of the sculptor, as if to insinuate his own handiwork as the text taking shape beneath the pen and the self emerging through his writing. The frenzied passion of Pygmalion for his "daughter" closes "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" at the supreme moment of artistic creation, the moment when it most closely resembles lifegiving creation itself: "Tentatum mollescit ebur, positoque rigore / Subsedit digitis" ("The ivory grew soft to his touch and, its hardness vanishing, yielded beneath his fingers" X.283–84). Later, in the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," in a passage that begins by paraphrasing Theophrastus to affirm how little man can come to know, Montaigne changes perspective midway to depict how knowledge is fashioned and passed from one person to another, from one generation to another, and finally from himself to his reader, and he concludes with the metaphor Ovid uses to depict Galatea's breast softening at Pygmalion's touch:

Ayant essayé par experience que ce à quoy l'un s'estoit failly, l'autre y est arrivé, et que ce qui estoit incogneu à un siecle, le siecle suyvant l'a esclaircy, et que les sciences et les arts ne se jettent pas en moule, ains se forment et figurent peu à peu en les maniant et pollissant à plusieurs fois, comme les ours façonnent leurs petits en les lechant à loisir: ce que ma force ne peut descouvrir, je ne laisse pas de le sonder et essayer; et, en retastant et pétrissant cette nouvelle matiere, la remuant et l'eschaufant, j'ouvre à celuy qui me suit quelque facilité pour en jouir plus à son ayse, et la luy rends plus soupple et plus maniable, "ut hymettia sole / Cera remollescit, tractatáque pollice, multas / Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu." (II, 12, 560a)

Having found by experience that where one man had failed, another has succeeded, and that what was unknown to one century the following century has made clear, and that the sciences and arts are not cast in a mold, but are formed and shaped little by little, by repeated handling and polishing, as the bears lick their cubs into shape at lei-

sure, I do not leave off sounding and testing what my powers cannot discover; and by handling again and kneading this new material, stirring it and heating it, I open up to whoever follows me some facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more supple and manageable for him: "As Hymettian wax grows soft under the sun and, moulded by the thumb, is easily shaped to many forms and becomes usable through use itself." (421)

Once the context of the Latin quotation has been identified, the analogy between the essayist and the sculptor becomes strikingly apparent. Experience, knowledge, writing, the self are all like the artist's material, all to be shaped and molded, sounded and tested, handled and kneaded, to give them life. And Montaigne's figures suggest that what is manipulated under the thumb of the artist as the work of art is also manipulated as a work of nature, as the sun softens the wax and as the bear licks her young at birth to transform the fleshy lump into the cub who takes her shape (Montaigne would have seen this topos in Ovid, XV.379–81). Again, nature and art intersect, interact, in the conception of life itself. Only by fashioning a work of art, and fashioning himself as a work of art, as both Pygmalion and Montaigne do in presumptuous self-absorption (and, we might add, as all artists apparently do), can the essayist escape the fate of Narcissus. Only by turning his gaze toward himself in the most outrageous and incestuous desire to embrace himself can he experience the nature of his own presumption, can he reveal the truth of his nature and come to know himself. Only by writing, by engendering the metaphoric daughter of the mind, can the artist exploit the power of the figure and bring his art to life.

Narcissus and Pygmalion thus delineate the space of Montaigne's presumptuous obsession with himself, they define the self-love that lies between self-absorption and the death of the one and self-absorption and the transcendence through art into life of the other. Within this space the self is essayed and the essays are written; only within this space can art come into being. The hunter forsakes the imperfect love of others and turns from the world, he turns toward himself and finds himself in what he takes as the perfect love. But in his self-love he loses himself, and in his self-consuming death he is nowhere to be found. This is the danger that Montaigne seeks to

avoid, as our reading of "De la praesumption" indicates. The sculptor also tums from the world, from the degraded love of the women, but toward the ideal woman of stone he has engendered. Loving himself in his art and loving his art as if it were another, he overcomes the lifelessness of stone and returns both himself and his creation to nature. This is the ideal toward which the essayist strives.

And yet, the alternative represented by Pygmalion is not quite ideal for it is not without its darker side, a side that remains buried for three generations before its disruptive and destructive force erupts with disastrous consequences, as if history could no longer suppress or repress its secret. When Ovid turns directly from Pygmalion and Galatea to tell the story of their great-granddaughter Myrrha, his tale of her incestuous passion for her father discloses the truth of the relation of her ancestors, as if it were a reversed image that mirrored the sculptor's love for his daughter / statue. Both are stories of love between parents and progeny, and in spite of the differences between children who are natural or metaphorical, and of the differences between love requited or unrequited, favored by the gods or condemned by them, these are both narratives of incestuous desire.

In a narrow sense, Montaigne evokes Pygmalion in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" to strengthen the analogy he has been developing between fathering physical children and producing the mind's progeny. The analogy holds, he seems to be suggesting by raising this limit case of parental affection, because, just as in natural parenthood, fathers in this "other kind" have also been smitten with a "vicious and frenzied passion" for their progeny. Witness what they tell of Pygmalion, he says. But more than the status of the figure is revealed by Montaigne's rhetorical strategy. What the reference to Pygmalion reveals is the complex nature of paternity, both real and metaphorical, its necessarily incestuous and self-enclosed character. Paternity, Pygmalion's story suggests, is more than a "paternal" narrative; it is a love story whose erotic dimension cannot be left out, and especially not out of Montaigne's story of textual progeny, even if he leaves it out himself. Pygmalion is not the polar alternative to Narcissus. While the hunter is completely overcome in his autoeroticism, the sculptor only provisionally triumphs in the erotic desire for the other, for the story of Myrrha discloses what in the tale of Pygmalion remains unsaid, that the desire for the other is another face of the

impossible and inadmissible desire for the self. Montaigne condemns incestuous love in no uncertain terms, but, as in the case of presumption, its condemnation is not its elimination. Nor, in fact, can it be if art is to be brought to life, as our reading of the story of Pygmalion indicated, although the dark side of the passion has shown that the dangers to the artist and to his soul are real. Myrrha is haunted by her guilt and denied both life and death in order not to defile the living or the dead; she is changed into a tree, and, although she no longer has feeling, she weeps eternally. But the incestuous union of daughter and father, like that of her forebear, is productive and brings beauty to life: Myrrha gives birth to Adonis who, Ovid says, would have been praised for his beauty even by Jealousy personified.

Pygmalion thus reminds us that artistic paternity is not only a story of father and son but also a story of father and daughter that the patriarchal tradition and Montaigne himself have not been anxious to tell. In fact, in the Ovidian account that I have privileged in speaking about Montaigne, it is necessarily a story of father and daughter. The traditional, masculine gender of textuality, like gender itself, is a cultural construct, and culture and tradition in the West have conspired to have males produce male children. To protect long-standing privileges, woman has been elided: the father appropriates the conceptual function of the mother, the offspring is conceived as a son in the image of the father and becomes the sole bearer of the name. Perhaps, too, as long as the father produces the child, imagining that the beloved progeny is male allows the truth of Pygmalion to be repressed and blocks out the truth of Myrrha, the truth that at the source of art, and of beauty, may lie desire and the incestuous passion that we have identified as self-love. Montaigne appears to remain faithful to the traditional position on the issue of lineage and to conceive of his text as a son, but the Essais also disclose the inadmissible imperative that the text be a daughter as well if it is to come to life.

Writing, then, if we return to the example of Montaigne, is fraught with peril. It is not simply a question of condemning the trap of Narcissus and of celebrating the fate of Pygmalion, because one cannot avoid the implications of either story. Montaigne tums inward in response to the Delphic command ("Regardez dans vous, reconnoissez vous, tenez vous à vous" [III, 9, 1,001b]) ("Look into yourself, know yourself, keep to yourself" [766]), and in heeding its words in these essays of the self he risks losing himself in his narcissistic self-

delusion. But by essaying himself as his art, by projecting an image of himself as his writing, he may also recognize himself in the oracle's words (and in his own) and find his presumptuous vanity and his emptiness as himself: "C'est tousjours vanité pour toy, dedans et dehors, mais elle est moins vanité quand elle est moins estendue. Sauf toy, ô homme, disoit ce Dieu, chaque chose s'estudie la premiere et a, selon son besoin, des limites à ses travaux et desirs. Il n'en est une seule si vuide et necessiteuse que toy, qui embrasses l'univers" (ibid.) ("It is always vanity for you, within and without; but it is less vanity when it is less extensive. 'Except for you, O man,' said that god, 'each thing studies itself first, and according to its needs, has limits to its labors and desires. There is not a single thing as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe' "). The God seeks to turn man back upon himself from his audacious concern with the world so that he might know himself in his shame and humility. Yet Montaigne's experience reveals that man cannot return without presumptuous and incestuous self-love; without it he cannot create the image of himself to know, without it there will be no conception, no offspring, no art. The creation will reveal the vanity of self-love and the nothingness of the creator and his image. The self that must love itself cannot escape its own vanity, both its presumptuous self-absorption and its emptiness. It must, however, seek itself in its vanity, recognize and confess its nature. Although the confession of vanity, like the avowal of presumption, cannot be its elimination, it is the only way that the self can come to know itself.

When Montaigne writes about the nullity of the self he opens the possibility of the recuperation of the self, for the text that makes nothing of man is not itself nothing. On the contrary, its language declares itself as something, as a center that both affirms the nullity of the self and rescues it linguistically.^[5] When Montaigne denigrates himself in the confession of his "erreur," he saves himself; his writing annihilates and by annihilating saves. But it is important to understand that the self that in its presumptuousness took itself for the center of language, for its origin and referent, has now become the subject of language and a metaphor of self. The self is displaced into language, it is figured by and through a series of chiasmic reversals where the denial of self becomes its affirmation and its affirmation denial, where text becomes self and the self a text. The writing reveals itself not only as the expression of the philosophical truth of

being (as nothingness) but as the enactment of the rhetorical mode of substitution and reversal that produces the figure of self.

Montaigne's essays tend to underplay the implications of this displacement of the self and its recuperation through the rhetorical structure. Insofar as they lay claim to the essayist's unmediated presence, to the consubstantiality of writing and being, they must treat their language as a transparent medium, as no-thing in itself: at the center of language and as the center of language, the self pretends to be the same as its textual double. Is this not Narcissus's water as a transparent medium, a medium in which the self takes the image for itself, and where even the ripples in the lake disturbed by the falling tears do not draw attention to the facticity of representation and to the mediating function of the medium itself? In his claim to be confessing what he feels and to be saying what he thinks, Montaigne implies not only that consciousness and its thought are present in voice but that a certain kind of direct, unadorned, and self-effacing discourse—the spontaneous discourse of voice itself as the interpreter of the soul—guarantees its truth. The essayist's aversion to rhetorical speech, his scorn for a use of language—or a kind of language—composed of figures and tropes that can make things appear as they are not and that draws attention to itself, is a commonplace of the Essais that I have already examined in my discussion of the child learning how to speak.

In "De la praesumption" Montaigne specifically rejects a vain and debilitating concern with eloquence, grammar, and "les beaux mots" in favor of what he calls "la vraye philosophie" (660), which lives in the morals and the talk of peasants. Of course this is not "philosophie" at all in any conventional sense, just as the "peasants" are not historical peasants. These are figures based on a principle that reverses convention and, for the purposes of Montaigne's presentation, are intended to represent the spontaneous and natural expression of truth and being. Clearly, the denunciation of rhetoric is not the elimination of rhetoric, nor can it be, because rhetoric, like presumption and self-love, cannot simply be expelled or expunged. The self can be conceived only as an image projected, as I said, as a figure or a trope that allows form and meaning to be conferred. Rereading the passage in which Montaigne depicts himself rolling around in himself, looking within himself, considering, tasting, taking stock of himself, distinct from others and from the world (657), we can appre-

ciate how the conception of self is generated by the syntactical and lexical oppositions between inside and outside, between self and other, and how the impression of the essayist's presence to himself derives from the carefully structured and balanced phrasing, and the play of antithesis, of hyperzeugma (each phrase with its own verb), of repetition, and the suggestive richness of rhyme.

We are in a sense again between Ovid's children, between the elusive watery image and the substantial ivory figure, between the mirror reflection of self and the sculptural refraction of self, between the destructive delusion of self-absorption and the productive illusion of art. If the essayist takes his rhetoric wholly as life—that is, if he overlooks the facticity of his self-creation—he falls into the scandalous trap of Narcissus. But if he takes his work as art alone and does not aspire to transcend it and bring it to life as Pygmalion did, he will remain trapped in his rhetoric or, we might say, trapped as his rhetoric. It is telling that in those instances in which he alludes to the sculptor, Montaigne evokes the moment when the statue undergoes its metamorphosis, when it is both inert and living at the same time, both art and nature. As if the work acknowledged its artificial, manmade quality, its contingency, its essential nontruth and simultaneously expressed its desire that it be something more, an authentic discourse, as solid as stone and at the same time representing its author to the life. The Essais will not, cannot, metamorphose into life as Galatea did, although Montaigne will insist that they are lifelike, consubstantial, but the writing will seek to be the place where form, subjectivity, and history converge, however problematical or unstable that convergence may be.

In the midst of his most telling affirmation of self-affection—in the long passage in which he most assertively claims his self-sufficiency and presence to himself as he rolls about in himself—Montaigne quotes from Persius to distinguish himself from others: "nemo in sese tentat descendere" (658). No one, the grammar of the quote establishes categorically and unequivocally, no one attempts to descend into himself, no one moves from the outside or the surface to seek inner or deeper knowledge of the self. Misled by a presumptuous "affection inconsiderée" that gives him the false impression that he is the center of meaning, man goes out of himself to judge the

world and to impose his meaning upon it. We recall that this line in Persius is followed by the image of the double wallet, the emblem of philautia, which blinds man to his own faults. Montaigne's striking figure in this same essay of those people perched astride the epicycle of Mercury to look into the heavens can stand for this obsession with all that lies beyond, an effect of "la trop bonne opinion que l'homme a de soy" that drives him to seek the cause of the ebb and flow of the Nile when he does not know the motion of what he moves himself, as the essayist puts it (634). And yet Montaigne does claim, and in this very context, to be looking within himself, as if in response to the Delphic injunction to be seeking that knowledge that will prove ultimately to disclose the nullity of both knowledge and self. He appears, in effect, to be the unique exception to Persius's rule and, in fact, to be the exception that proves the rule. How can Montaigne descend into himself when no one attempts to descend into himself?

The same grammatical sequence whose literal reading bars Montaigne from attempting to descend into himself engenders another meaning, a figurative meaning that is mutually exclusive and opens the possibility of self-knowledge. If we take nemo as a proper name (Nemo), as a persona called "no one"—as Renaissance tradition did in numerous literary and iconographic presentations—then the figure of the no one is the subject of the sentence and precisely the "one," the "no" one who is someone, the nemo, who attempts to descend into himself.^[6] In the essay on presumption Montaigne has made himself into a no one, affirming his nullity. But as I have remarked, by displacing himself into his text as a self-negating nemo he allows himself to descend as a self-affirming nemo, a figure (of speech) born of the absurdity of language who does indeed come to know himself. Only by denying himself can the essayist find himself in his writing, only by asserting his existential nothingness can he claim something textually, only in the deceptiveness and the ambiguity of a rhetorical joke can he find the truth of his self. No one is someone, the quotation tells us, and nothing is something; the statement of nothing is something as a statement and the experience of nothing is in truth an experience. Rhetorically, syntactically, the essayist predicates something from nothing (affirming the difference between grammatical and logical subjects); writing reveals that the experience of the nothingness of the self is the truth of experience and the truth of the self.

Montaigne thus becomes a witness to himself and bears witness in his confession of ignorance, but it is a central lesson of the Essais that no one bears witness to himself just as no one descends into oneself. Although there is no explicit reference in the Essais to nemo as a witness, there existed, in fact, an ancient legal maxim that Montaigne as a jurist certainly knew and that brings this figure back to proscribe testifying in one's own behalf. This maxim might serve as a subtext for our reading, a text that like so many others reverberates beneath the surface of Montaigne's writing and is recuperated by the reading: "Testis nemo in sua causa esse potest" ("No one can be a witness on his own behalf").^[7]

To say that "no one can be a witness on his own behalf" was to invoke a rule of law operative in certain provinces in sixteenth-century France and to raise the issue of the credibility of legal testimony. No one can be his own witness because testimony is valid only if it is disinterested, if the witness is not a party to the action, if he is located on the margins as a spectator and does not stand to gain personally from the story that is told. The witness speaks in the first person as an "other," he tells what he knows, what he saw or heard, and, to the degree to which he is removed, unrelated, a neutral, dispassionate voice, it is assumed he speaks truthfully. One's own testimony about oneself, then, is always suspect because it is always self-serving, it must always be taken as the expression of selfish interest, even when it is true. And then, as our discussion has indicated, it is always presumptuous to speak about oneself and to assume a public presence, always a sign of an exaggerated sense of oneself and an inordinate concern with oneself, even when one bears witness to one's nullity or speaks to humiliate or to debase oneself. Only in religious confession can one legitimately be a witness to oneself, but perhaps when one testifies before God the situation is different because God already knows what is being revealed. In a sense God has already himself been the witness who, in his omniscience and in his silence, assures the truth and opens the possibility that the speaker will be forgiven (for the sins of which he speaks and also perhaps for the sin of speaking of himself). In Montaigne's case, where the resonances are both theological and legal, the vocabulary of witnessing and confessing that is common to both tends to blur distinctions between the religious and the purely secular. What allows Montaigne to speak of himself if there is no transcendent other before whom he must

speak? What right has he to speak in this way if there is no legal precedent that justifies that he speak of himself? The nature of Montaigne's speaking remains problematical, and this calls for some strategy to protect the integrity of the self-reflexive testimony.

We have seen Montaigne pause numerous times in the course of the Essais to consider the fact that he is speaking of himself, to confront what custom considers a vice and what he admits is presumptuousness. But who would speak of the private man, we heard him ask in "De la praesumption," if he did not speak of himself, if he were not his own witness (II, 17, 632)? Putting the issue in somewhat different terms, he wonders why it is not permissible for a man to portray himself in writing since King René of Sicily depicted himself in his painted self-portrait (653). In "De l'exercitation" (II, 6), after recounting the story of his fall from his horse as an example of how he has "practiced" death without actually experiencing it, Montaigne reacts over the final pages of the essay to an imagined reader who would hold it against him that he publishes what he writes about himself. The book might serve others, he claims; in any event it is a folly that will die with him, without any consequences; it is a new and extraordinary amusement, an activity that only two or three long-forgotten ancients had tried before him; in the other sciences man imparts what he has learned, why not in this one? But beyond these considerations, the figure of Socrates speaking of himself and leading his disciples to speak of themselves, seeking self-knowledge in response to the Delphic injunction, serves as the model and ultimate justification for Montaigne's self-reflexive discourse. We might say that Socrates spoke of himself because he was called upon to do so by the oracle, but it is also true that what allowed him to speak was the fact that he had nothing (good) to say about himself, that his self-study was the expression of his self-scorn. Anyone who knows himself in this way, Montaigne says in the imperative that concludes "De l'exercitation," let him make himself known boldly by his own mouth: "Qui se connoistra ainsi, qu'il se donne hardiment à connoistre par sa bouche" (II, 6, 380c).

No one, we might say, has the right to speak, or even the duty to speak, no one can testify in his own behalf. Making himself into a figure of the Socrates who resides in the pages of the Essais ("Montaigne est notre Socrate," Thibaudet said),^[8] into a figure who responds to the call to know himself and who knows himself as nothing, Mon-

taigne speaks as the avatar of this archetypal nemo. But only because he took himself presumptuously for someone can he now speak as a no one or have something to say about himself. And even as he now speaks in self-deprecating terms, he recognizes the audacity of speaking about himself at all, even or especially in these terms: "Mais, quand il seroit vray que ce fust necesserement presomption d'entretenir le peuple de soy, je ne doy pas, suivant mon general dessein, refuser une action qui publie cette maladive qualité, puis qu'elle est en moy; et ne doy cacher cette faute que j'ay non seulement en usage, mais en profession" (378c) ("But even if it were true that it is presumptuous, no matter what the circumstances, to talk to the public about oneself, I still must not, according to my general plan, refrain from an action that openly displays this morbid quality, since it is in me; nor may I conceal this fault, which I not only practice but profess" [273]). Presumption ("en usage") both engenders speech ("en profession") and is its content, but, while the profession of presumptuousness is a necessary remedy, it cannot be its cure since speaking, even in this way, is also a brazen act. Caught in this vicious circle, Montaigne must go on talking about himself until he runs out of paper and ink, as he says in "De la vanité" (III, 9, 945).

Often Montaigne characterizes presumptuous talk as a disease, as in this quotation ("cette maladive qualité"), yet the remedy he proposes is further talk: "Le supreme remede à le guarir [ce vice], c'est faire tout le rebours de ce que icy ordonnent, qui, en défendant le parler de soy, défendent par consequent encore plus de penser à soy" (379c) ("The supreme remedy to cure it is to do just the opposite of what those people prescribe who, by prohibiting talking about oneself, even more strongly prohibit thinking about oneself" [274]). But as in the case of confession where what damns is what saves, there can never be an absolute remedy ("le supreme remede") because the remedy is also the disease itself. Montaigne might say of presumption what he says of vanity and inanity: "De m'en deffaire, je ne puis sans me deffaire moy-mesmes" (III, 9, 1,000b). Yet this statement is not without its irony because it is precisely his vanity and his presumption that allow him to undo himself ("se deffaire") and a certain notion of self, to claim his total insignificance, his nothingness. And at the same time that vanity allows him to reassert the authority of a self that has descended into itself and now bears witness to itself, a self that founds itself on the claim that it is consubstantial with what

it asserts. Writing of his vanity in vain and presumptuously writing— "Il n'en est à l'avanture aucune plus expresse que d'en escrire si vainement," he says in opening "De la vanité" (III, 9, 945b) ("There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly" [721])—Montaigne both loses and recovers himself.

I should add at this point that the Essais appear to recognize explicitly the felicitous consequence that this paradoxical strategy allows. No man, Montaigne says, ever thought of himself as lacking in sense; that would be a contradictory proposition because the admission of the lack of sense would prove that one is sensible. But it is precisely this contradiction that Montaigne exploits and that he affirms by his quotation of the popular proverb, "S'accuser seroit s'excuser en ce subject là; et se condamner, ce seroit s'absoudre" (II, 17, 656a) ("To accuse oneself would be to excuse oneself in that subject; and to condemn oneself would be to absolve oneself" [498]). While French seems to preclude the absurd conflation of "no one" and "some one," which Montaigne's recourse to the Latin nemo allows (neither "personne . . . ne" nor the essayist's "jamais homme ne" enacts the impossible ambiguity), the proverb restores the paradox and allows the essayist to save himself by condemning himself. His claim that he too is sensible—a common and vulgar claim, he says— betrays his lack of sense, but his recognition of this lack recuperates him and rehabilitates the quality of his judgment. Since so few men engage in this sort of exercise, he adds, he hopes for little commendation and praise, and little renown.

There are implications in Montaigne's posture (posturing?) at this point in the essay that are both disquieting and revealing and that he does not, or cannot, explore. The proverbial status of "s'accuser seroit s'excuser" suggests that it has already become a formulaic response to error, an example itself of common sense but also a common and unreflective gesture that pantomimes self-abasement as the desire for pardon and absolution. Montaigne's open confession of his shortcomings is anything but formulaic, of course, yet at the same time as the axiom speaks its commonly accepted truth it also trivializes and degrades it as a cliché, and one that threatens always to undermine confession and to expose its banality. Any such risk, however, might be outweighed by the benefits for Montaigne's sense of self that derive from the proverb as a formula. Constructed grammatically and rhetorically on principles of equivalence, of reciprocity, and of

repetition, the axiom makes the self the active center of its own meaning, the agent of both commission and remission. The proverb encloses itself in its syntactical symmetry as the predicates respond to each other, it mirrors itself in the verbal reflexivity that returns the action upon the subject, and, in this linguistic circle where the self both initiates the action and becomes its object, where it errs, judges, and absolves itself, the self acts as its own author, the source of its self-sufficiency, in a specularity as unlimited as its infinitival form itself. We encountered this same recourse to the self-reflexive verbal structure before, and to its emphatic repetition, in Montaigne's most insistent statement of his introspective mode and of his claim to possess himself, which follows just two paragraphs later: "je me roulle en moy mesme" (658).

I took that paroxysm of self-reflexivity and self-absorption as an expression of the most scandalous presumption, and here again as he quotes the proverb Montaigne alludes to the presumptuousness of trusting in one's good sense, once more characterizing presumption as a disease. But in this context it appears against all prior evidence to be an unproblematic illness. Although it apparently is never where it is perceived, and in spite of the fact that it is tenacious and strong, the disease here dissipates under the first glance from the patient's eye, like a dense fog in the sunlight, he says. The image of the solar eye ("I") reflecting its illuminating and restorative rays on itself may be particularly reassuring, but its curative power must be suspect. Montaigne's own experience and the experience of his writing remind us repeatedly that the cure can never be absolute, indeed, that the writing, as his "profession," endlessly inscribes itself as both cure and disease. Perhaps when Montaigne mentions that he does not hope for much commendation and praise from this sort of exercise—from what he alludes to humbly as "les simples productions de l'entendement" —he not only draws attention to the rarity of his enterprise but betrays as well his own paradoxical concern with what others do indeed think of him, and with the praise that he will not receive. We might say that the disavowal of the interest in praise is the sign of its attraction. Thus, in the instant that the eye sees the disease clearly it also reveals its own blindness, its limitations, and discloses that the seeing (and curative) "I" is always also contaminated. When Montaigne allows that presumption is never where it is perceived ("c'est une maladie qui n'est jamais où elle se voit" [656c]), he admits that it

can never be mastered, that it will always be in play, even and especially when the eye (I) claims to have seen, known, and eradicated it.

In "De l'exercitation" (II, 6) Montaigne recounts an admittedly common story of his fall from his horse that provokes him to append a long disclaimer of his presumptuousness. Speaking about himself when custom considers "le parler de soy" to be unseemly and vain, the essayist enumerates responses to the anticipated critique of an imagined reader in order to defend and justify his discourse. Since Montaigne often speaks about himself, and since here he does so explicitly by way of example, we might wonder why this context elicits such a vigorous and intense rejoinder to the charge of presumptuousness. Perhaps the very triviality of the narrative accounts for Montaigne's reaction; would he have been less presumptuous in speaking of himself if he had had a profoundly important story to tell? The text seems to argue that in the quest for self-knowledge nothing is trivial and that self-knowledge of a particular Socratic kind is the highest form of knowledge and even justifies the risk of presumption. In a sense Montaigne is defending his entire project in these pages, for the practice of which his essay speaks is precisely the activity of essaying itself, the writing by which the self tries itself out in the effort to come to know itself. It is not coincidental that in this text exercer, essayer , and experimenter (to experience), all privileged verbs in the Essais , are both prominent and interchangeable. The essayist's discursive practice of death in "De l'exercitation" both enacts and exemplifies those myriad other trials that are the substance of the Essais and of the writer himself.

The seemingly trivial story of which he is the center thus provokes Montaigne to defend his first-person discourse, to deflect the charge of presumptuous writing, to claim here as elsewhere that what practice ultimately reveals to him is his emptiness and his nullity. But if it is true, as he stated, that presumption is never where it is perceived, then it may be that to address the audacity of "le parler de soy" alone does not answer the charge. I would argue that where Montaigne does not perceive presumption is also where it is in this case, in the effort to practice death, to try out and to experience the passage from which no man has ever returned, as he puts it. Like the philosophers who prepared themselves for the rigors of fortune by going forth to

meet her and flinging themselves into the test of difficulties ("ils luy sont allez au devant"), the essayist intends to go forth, ahead of time, through his writing, his essay, to experience death. But to go forth in this way ("aller au devant") is to enact the very gesture of presumption itself, as its etymology reminds us: from the Latin praesumere , to take beforehand, to anticipate, or, in the French, prendre d'avance . Can Montaigne avoid the implications of this resemblance? Isn't the practice of death, that taking up of death beforehand that is the discursive essay, also the most presumptuous practice, and not only because Montaigne intends to "essay" what he claims—not entirely ironically—can only be "essayed" once ("mais, quant à la mort, nous ne la pouvons essayer qu'une fois" [371a]) ("But as for death, we can try it only once" [267])? Unmasterable and unknowable, both in the future and outside of time, death represents the ultimate essay (both trial, test, and discursive form), and it represents as well the most presumptuous essaying, both the most audacious and that for which we must go forth the farthest. But what does it mean to practice death ("l'essayer aucunement," Montaigne says, "to some extent," "in a way")?

Practice and experience form the soul and prepare it for action, Montaigne claims in opening the essay, and yet, "à mourir, qui est la plus grande besoigne que nous ayons à faire, l'exercitation ne nous y peut ayder" (371a) ("But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us" [267]). The temporality of practice confronts death as the end of time. Practice is always repetition and succession in time, the rehearsal whose series of recurrences has no necessary end, that anticipates the future and extends into it, that prepares and projects beyond itself towards some realization in a culminating "event" that is also another instance of the unending practice. But death is precisely that which cannot be repeated, that beyond which there is no beyond, temporally or spatially. Death annuls practice, it voids it in its own singular performance.

But even more than the status and function of practice is at stake here. Montaigne's entire project is grounded in the self-reflexivity of human consciousness—that is, on that doubling of the self that allows its division into apprehending subject and acting object. This is the writer written, the observer observed, which is the basis of the descent into the self as self-recovery and self-knowledge, and it is also the form of practice itself that prepares for future action. But this

self-reflexivity is precisely what death does not allow. Montaigne recounts the anecdote of Canius Julius as one of those ancients who were such excellent managers (mesnagers ) of time that they tried even in death to taste and savor it and strained their minds to see what this passage was ("que c'estoit de ce passage" [371a]). "Je pensois," Canius responded to a friend who asked what he was thinking as he was about to die, "à me tenir prest et bandé de toute ma force, pour voir si, en cet instant de la mort, si court et si brief, je pourray appercevoir quelque deslogement de l'ame, et si elle aura quelque ressentiment de son yssuë, pour, si j'en aprens quelque chose, en revenir donner apres, si je puis, advertissement à mes amis" ("I was thinking . . . about holding myself ready and with all my powers intent to see whether in that instant of death, so short and brief, I shall be able to perceive any dislodgment of the soul, and whether it will have any feeling of its departure; so that, if I learn anything about it, I may return later, if I can, to give the information to my friends" [267]). But death is not an instant, however brief, which might be seen (appercevoir ) and in which one might see oneself, as Canius suggests; it is the end of all "instants," not in time but its end, the annihilation that voids both time and the self in time. And no one can ever come back to tell his friends about it, as Montaigne's quotation from Lucretius reminds us: "nemo expergitus extat / Frigida quem semel est vitai pausa sequuta" ("no one awakens from the icy end of life"). Here, it would appear, is one nemo that is an unproblematic negation.

Canius's problem, and Montaigne's as well, is the problem of the passage between time and nontime, between the self and the absence of the self: "et ont bandé leur esprit pour voir que c'estoit de ce passage" (371a); "quant à l'instant et au point du passage" (372a) ("they strained their minds to see what this passage was" [267]; "as for the instant and. point of passing away" [268]). Can one pass between life and death so as to "see" and to "be" on both sides (and so as to see oneself "seeing" and "being" on both sides), as if the passage occurred at the very juncture of difference where difference is paradoxically overcome, where one is both in time and beyond, present to oneself at the very moment of absence, at once something and nothing? What is at issue, I would argue, is not only the passage from life to death but the passage from minute to minute or instant to instant that Montaigne evokes as the fundamental subject of his writing in "Du repentir": "Je ne peints pas l'estre. Je peints le passage:

non un passage d'aage en autre, ou, comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute" (III, 2, 805b) ("I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute" [611]). If it were possible to transcend difference, then through transcendence itself being, presence, and plenitude would be realized and Montaigne could say, "Je peints l'estre." But eschewing transcendence and the transcendental as an inaccessible "beyond" identical to itself, one and eternally continuous, Montaigne does not (and cannot) say this. Grounded in time and space, he can only affirm difference, diversity, multiplicity, and contiguity and portray the passage, the irresistible movement or displacement in time / space toward that which is necessarily absent or deferred "over there," or in the next "minute." But what does it mean "to pass" or to move through difference?

Canius, of course, cannot overcome the difference between life and death, cannot possess them at the same time, or at least, Montaigne suggests ironically, he has not yet returned to tell us the news. To pass from one thing to another over the border that separates them is to experience separation itself, the gap or interval of their differentiation. What we experience is precisely the "in-between," not as some middle ground that links two things or is both at the same time but as the void that is the very condition of their difference.^[9] And as the story of Canius also indicates, the passage never culminates in fulfillment, it is never realized in any apotheosis of knowledge, truth, or being. Either Canius cannot learn of death or he is no longer around to tell us anything, which amounts to the same thing. Death cannot be experienced "in itself" because it can never be experienced as "present," in or as an instant (from the Latin, in + stare , to stand upon, be present). What Canius's experience tells us is that nothing can be experienced "in itself," whether we are speaking of instants in life or the instant of death ("cet instant de la mort," which is either the last instant in life or not an "instant" at all). The present instant, or the present self in an instant, or the place upon which we are standing, can never serve as absolute ground, pure and autonomous, because we can never be both inside it and outside at the same time, because it is always already the lost instant of the past that passes away and the absent instant of the future toward which one passes. The richly suggestive sixteenth-century meanings of le

passage as the action of passing between two things, the place of passing, and the passing that is death itself imply not only that death is a passage—from life to lifelessness, or from terrestrial to celestial life, or the passage of the soul from the body—but that passing is also a kind of death, as if the experience of the "in-between" of passing were also the experience of the nothingness of death. Poulet also sensed the connection between death and the portrayal of passage when he was reading Montaigne: "passage, that is to say the very movement by which being quits being, by which it flies away from itself, and in which it feels itself dying. This decision (to portray passage) is thus joined to the deepest feeling of indigence."^[10]

Nevertheless, Montaigne says, "il me semble toutefois qu'il y a quelque façon de nous apprivoiser à elle (la mort) et de l'essayer aucunement" (371a) ("It seems to me, however, that there is a certain way of familiarizing ourselves with death and trying it out to some extent" [268]). What cannot be tried out more than once can apparently be tried out, practiced, observed in its practice as if one could indeed awaken from the icy end of life. But in "quelque façon," "aucunement"; not death in itself but dying, or what Montaigne calls the approaches to death:

Nous en pouvons avoir experience, sinon entiere et parfaicte, au moins telle, qu'elle ne soit pas inutile, et qui nous rende plus fortifiez et asseurez. Si nous ne la pouvons joindre, nous la pouvons approcher, nous la pouvons reconnoistre; et, si nous ne donnons jusques à son fort, au moins verrons nous et en prattiquerons les advenuës. Ce n'est pas sans raison qu'on nous fait regarder à nostre sommeil mesme, pour la ressemblance qu'il a de la mort. (371–72a)

We can have an experience of it that is, if not entire and perfect, at least not useless, and that makes us more fortified and assured. If we cannot reach it, we can approach it, we can reconnoiter it; and if we do not penetrate as far as its fort, at least we shall see and become acquainted with the approaches to it. It is not without reason that we are taught to study even our sleep for the resemblance it has with death. (268)

The sliding and hedging here is considerable and of consequence, for Montaigne can only try death out by mediation and displacement. He must displace the focus from death to its approaches and operate by the displacement that makes sleep a form of death. He admits that he cannot have a full and perfect experience and so claims a useful

one; he well appreciates that he cannot reach death, or penetrate to where it "is," and thus suggests that it is enough to get close to it and to recognize it. But even with these qualifications and compromises, and this indirection, Montaigne's practice remains problematical because its weight is borne entirely by the common rhetorical figure of analogy, and by an analogy that is itself sustained by the authority of a common and collective wisdom. The nameless "on" of "on nous faict regarder à nostre sommeil mesme" speaks authoritatively precisely because its voice is anonymous, because it has no identifiable source in time or in space and consequently seems as old and as true as time or language itself.

On the basis of this authority Montaigne can make one further substitution, taking fainting and unconsciousness as a kind of sleep and thus as the surrogate of death; this loss of sensation, he says, brings one even closer to the "vray et naturel visage" of death. By this substitution, however, Montaigne himself issues the call for his own story, he opens the way to displace his experience into the text and himself into the "I" of narration. The practice of death is the mediated practice of writing. The "quelque façon de nous apprivoiser à elle et de l'essayer aucunement" is not only a "certain way" that tries out death's approaches but "another way" that is the written essay, the writing out (essayer ) that in a way is also the trying out. The passage that is death is at the same time the written passage, just as the "essai" is both the trial, the weighing (Latin exagium , to weigh) of his judgment of things and the discursive form. We might object that Montaigne's practice is essentially a textual practice, his experience a linguistic one, and point, as I have done, to the role that rhetoric—in the unstable and questionable form of the trope and the axiom—must play to formulate and sustain his discourse. This in spite of Montaigne's own protestation in "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres" (II, 37, 784) that whatever he is, he wants to be elsewhere than on paper. But the semantic richness of "passage" should serve to remind us that however insecure the linkage, only textual experience allows Montaigne to "experience" death, only the narrative gives meaning to the event of his fall, only the projection of the self into the fragmented, and doubled, persona and narrator of his discourse opens the possibility to essay an integral self, if only in passing. Only in the "passage," we might say, can the attempt be made to recover the instant of passage.^[11]

Thus Montaigne narrates his own death (he was "tenu pour mort"; when he regained consciousness he "came back to life" [revivre ], and when he lost it he "died again" [remourir ]) and through the narrative experiences all that cannot be experienced in death itself. And he experiences as well the enormity of speaking about oneself in public, although his whole project depends on it. Montaigne carefully distinguishes himself from "le parler de soy" that is unexamined or uncritical and from those who under- or overvalue themselves; the former are stupid rather than modest and the latter stupid as well as presumptuous. He too presumes to speak about himself, but his is the only way the self can experience itself, it is the only way it can portray its thoughts ("Je peins principalement mes cogitations"), expose itself entire ("Je m'estalle entier"), and put down its essence to bear witness to what it is ("c'est moy, c'est mon essence"). And the lesson of this way, this practicing, essaying, writing of the self that Montaigne offers as the remedy for presumption, is the knowledge that the self is nothing, its knowledge nothing: "Nulle particuliere qualité n'enorgeuillira celuy qui mettra quand et quand en compte tant de imparfaittes et foibles qualitez autres qui sont en luy, et, au bout, la nihilité de l'humaine condition" (380c) ("No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man's estate" [275]).

Presumption is an error to be declared and recognized publicly, a disease whose ultimate cure ("supreme remede") is to continue to talk and to write about oneself, but an error and a disease that cannot be absolutely remedied by open profession and by being made into a profession, as Montaigne has done. Nor could it ever be, since it is in man ("elle est en moy"), it is the nature of man, and since it is never only where it is perceived, as my discussion of the presumptuous practice of death has indicated. But the presumptuous practice of death has led, by a way that is both circuitous and inevitable in the Essais , to the recognition of the nothingness of the self and thus to its recovery, to that knowledge of the self that, as in the case of Socrates, justifies making oneself known by one's own mouth. And the reverse is also true, that the self as nothing has informed the practice of death. Like the nemo who descends into himself and the nemo who is a witness on his own behalf, this nemo, this no one, because of who and what he is, can experience death and return from the icy end and

can experience itself in its own nothingness. In the endless chiasmic reversals that discourse allows, the self uncovers and discovers itself "de passage," in the passages of its writing, in the passage that leads it and links it to the textual progeny it has produced and in which it is both nothing and something, lost and found, both dead and alive.

Echoes of Narcissus who loses himself in the desire to embrace his own image and of Pygmalion who finds himself in the image of the other he embraces. Montaigne's writing confirms that all along these were not two poles, two different stories, but two faces of the same story that reflect and refract each other. The essayist cannot in any simple way escape the fate of Narcissus by producing a work that is both other and himself, he cannot triumph over nothingness and death in any absolute way by conceiving textual offspring. He cannot be Pygmalion without also recalling Narcissus and anticipating Myrrha, because nothingness and death are also part of the sculptor's story. There is no transcendence to plenitude, to presence, to perpetuity. Montaigne can return from the nothingness of death only because he experiences his own nothingness as a form of death, he can find himself only because he loses himself, and he can find himself as something because he finds himself as nothing. The essayist as Narcissus and Pygmalion, as Ovid's child; the essay as son and daughter.