1—
Textual Progeny

Car ce que nous engendrons par l'ame, les enfantemens de notre esprit, de nostre courage et suffisance, sont produicts par une plus noble partie que la corporelle, et sont plus nostres.
(II, 8, 400)

For what we engender by the soul, the children of our mind, of our heart and our ability, are produced by a nobler part than the body and are more our own.
translated by Donald Frame

One of the thorniest interpretive problems posed for modern readers of Montaigne's Essais is to determine the value of its discursive content. This was not always the case because historically the content has been accepted at face value, the essayist's words taken literally to mean what they say. Although apparently not always appropriately titled, most often digressive and aleatory in form, each of the essays seemed to contain two parallel strands meant to be read in conjunction and always literally, with a modest allowance made for the essayist's gentle irony: a discourse on a given topic of philosophical, historical, political, or social interest and a series of intercalated personal reflections about the essayist himself, his attitudes, character, and writing. The self-portrait or presentation of the writer—which Montaigne claimed in his prefatory "Au lecteur" as his goal—emerged from each of the strands: from the topical discourse as the "trial" of the writer's judgment, from the reflexive commentary that was both "trial" and explicit self-revelation, and from the twining of the strands. The essayist's comments on his subject matter and his efforts to elucidate his meaning and intention served as a privileged metatext, the text of insight in which Montaigne came to know himself and the reader to know Montaigne. And on those occasions when this literal reading of Montaigne's ideas and of the idea of a literal Montaigne encountered specific rhetorical figures or flourishes, it tended either to ignore them or to ascribe to them a literal

function. Montaigne writes as he thinks, we were told; rather than elements operating within a rhetorical or literary construct, figures are the literal and concrete manifestation of the essayist's mental processes, the unmediated expression of the mind's own discourse. The essayist's outspoken preference for a plain, direct, and unadorned style, and his explicit antirhetorical stance, lent confidence to such a reading, in spite of, or because of, the evidence of Montaigne's own practice.^[1]

What has provoked the interpretive issue I raise has been a challenge to explicitness that has motivated a host of contemporary readings of the Essais .^[2] The apparently straightforward elements of the content—the subject matters of the essays, the writer's commentary on himself and his writing—and the supposedly transparent elements of form have been given significance as components of a vast and complex textual system. The Essais —as the direct representation of the attitudes and characteristics of an individual subject prior to and outside of the writing—have been textualized, that is, opened to the invitation that aspects of content, and most centrally the writing subject himself, be interpreted as figurative elements in the writing and often, most strikingly, as figures of the writing. Thus, for example, the literal terms of Montaigne's friendship with La Boétie and the death of the friend presented in "De l'amitié" are read metaphorically as the loss of the sense of a self possessed and used to explain what occasions the writing and how it attempts to recuperate that self and to make it known.

This emphasis on the rhetorical, or figurative, however, has its own pitfalls. The Essais can become something resembling a self-enclosed play of figures if form is dogmatically or exclusively given priority. Or they can be reduced to a vast allegory (of writing, for example) if the letter is effaced and subjects such as friendship, or education, or vanity, or sincerity relinquish their experiential significance. In both cases Montaigne's text suffers a weakening of its links to that existential life that appears so forcefully and centrally to generate the writing and to be its ultimate creation as well. But while the risk of overemphasizing the figurative is real, we have gained from this perspective a stronger sense of the presence and operation of rhetorical elements within a discourse that has traditionally been treated as primarily, and even exclusively, philosophical and autobiographical; and we have gained a better understanding of how writing can be said to mirror its own functioning.

The story of our understanding of the Essais seems to be traced by this opposition of the literal and the figurative and by the tendency of each to eliminate, reduce, or ignore the other. The task before us is to attempt to overcome the choices imposed by the competing polarities and their corresponding values. One of the important contributions of contemporary critical theory has been the challenge to traditional binary oppositions and the suggestion that they be seen as fluid, unstable, dynamic, and interactive rather than as separate and exclusive. Here the Essais themselves can provide an important perspective. Although Montaigne explicitly affirms the literal emphasis and disdains what he considers the figurative excess of rhetoric, he also discloses how language, its forms, and its figures allow the reader to produce meaning. The essays draw our attention to the way essential literal elements of its discourse—the voyage, for example, or the child—are meant at the same time to function figuratively. Both levels or meanings maintain their integrity, so that the literal retains its proper experiential value and also acquires value as a trope.

In order for the Essais to function simultaneously as self-portrait and the means to self-knowledge, as memory and as essays of judgment, as personal commentary and as the effort to construct a self, both the literal and the figurative—or what might be transposed as the historical and the literary, or the existential and the rhetorical—must interact and overlap. For example, Montaigne's "voyage" is literally his trip to Italy and other travels, all of which provide the basis for essaying judgment through reflections that are cultural, moral, social, and political. But it is also the passage through time that is the life lived, in the world and in the book, as it moves toward death. And in that self-reflexivity that makes Montaigne's writing its own subject, the voyage is also that movement of or through the writing that is his essays, the writing and rewriting of the evolving and elusive self that is the unfolding of his text. All of these meanings exist at once, so that when one reads "voyage" the meanings slide into each other, are simultaneous, mutually intrusive, and never without some tension among them. It is only in this overlapping of terms, without privilege and without priority, that we can appreciate the complexity of Montaigne's project and understand his claim that he and his book are one, that things and words, life and text, coincide. We might want to recall here that traditional biblical exegesis aimed to preserve the literality of the letter and at the same time

sought to coax forth truths that were also, and simultaneously, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. While Montaigne's Essais obviously cannot share the metaphysical status of scripture or yield its truths (nor do they seek to), they aspire on their own secular terms to knowledge, truth, presence, and being. In a way that could be said to depend on the interrelationship of history and writing, the letter and the figure.

In the closing pages of "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8) Montaigne turns from the affection of fathers for their literal, physical offspring to the love of authors for their writing and to his own feelings for his Essais . Writings are like children, he says as he works the traditional trope, productions of the mind more worthy than those of the flesh, and more the effect of their progenitor: "Ce que nous engendrons par l'ame, les enfantemens de notre esprit, de nostre courage et suffisance, sont produicts par une plus noble partie que la corporelle, et sont plus nostres; nous sommes pere et mere ensemble en cette generation" (400a) ("For what we engender by the soul, the children of our mind, of our heart and our ability, are produced by a nobler part than the body and are more our own. We are father and mother both in this generation" [291]). To their authors, whom they more vividly represent than progeny of flesh and blood, these children of the mind bring honor, Montaigne claims, if they are well formed, and immortality.

We thus encounter in the child a textual subject that Montaigne himself treats both as letter and figure and that has been ignored by most readers of the Essais .^[3] And this is so in spite of the facts that the literal child is pervasive in Montaigne's text and that the figurative child of the mind is a powerful emblem of his own writing. Perhaps we have overlooked the literal because Montaigne's own child is conspicuously absent from the Essais . I sense that we have undervalued the force of the figure because it is, and was, a literary commonplace, less original and therefore, perhaps, less revealing or representative than other images of Montaigne's thought. Yet both the letter and the figure, and their relationship, compellingly invite interpretation because their complex status allows us to raise concerns central to our understanding of authorship, textuality, and writing and in the process to shed light on the Essais themselves.

Let us begin to restore the child, both literal and figurative, to its rightful place by remarking that the absence of Montaigne's own children from the Essais seems to create a space in which textual children proliferate. With the exception of one surviving daughter, they were also absent from his life: "[b] ils meurent tous en nourrisse; mais [c] Leonor, [b] une seule fille . . . est eschappée à cette infortune" (II, 8, 389) ("They all die on me at nurse; . . . Leonor, one single daughter . . . escaped that misfortune" [281]). But children are everywhere in the Essais : "enfants" is the eighteenth most frequently used noun in the work, appearing 237 times in 56 of the 107 essays; other forms such as "enfance," "enfant," "enfanter," "enfantement," and so on appear another 147 times.^[4] Four essays contain the word "enfant" in one of its forms and directly address issues in which children are central: "De l'institution des enfans" (I, 26), "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8), "D'un enfant monstrueux" (II, 30), and "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres" (II, 37). Montaigne's children are both classical and modern, they appear in essays treating subjects as diverse as affections (I, 3), custom (I, 23), solitude (I, 39), drunkenness (II, 2), cowardice (II, 27), and vanity (III, 9) and are evoked 18 times in the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond" (II, 12) alone. They are successively heroes, victims, or fools, either models of a natural wisdom or examples of a stupid simplicity. At times children represent continuity with the past and at other times they allow the essayist to speak about the future. And, most striking, they are both literal, physical children and figurative children of the mind as well. Leonor is Montaigne's only surviving child, but the Essais is also his child; the essayist identifies his two children in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8).

In this abundant talk of offspring—historical and fictional, real and metaphorical—the central irony is that of talk itself. The essayist who could not (or would not) keep his text from spilling over between the lines and into the margins, and onto additional slips of paper, who after the publication of the Essais in 1580 and 1588 went back to his writing to amend, to revise, to make additions, this verbose writer speaks repeatedly of the enfant, that which by its etymological nature is unable to speak (in + fans , present participle of fari , to speak). Montaigne himself is above all he who speaks, who speaks in order to speak exclusively of himself ("parler seulement de moy" [II, 8, 942]), and who seeks to write as he speaks ("je parle au

papier comme je parle au premier que je rencontre" [III, 1, 790]). The Essais are the "confession" of his ignorance and his vanity, he claims —that is, a form of speaking that is thought to derive from the same root as fari . But what does it mean to speak in the Essais? What is the significance of these children, literal or figurative, who by their very nature cannot yet speak? What does it mean to say that the Essais are Montaigne's child, a child who does indeed speak, and who speaks so copiously? In whose voice and for whom does it speak? And to whom? In addressing these questions let us keep in mind that, because Montaigne intends that his writing be taken for speech, he treats the one as if it were the other and necessarily blurs differences between them. The lessons for proper speaking in "De l'institution des enfans," for example, are most profoundly those for the proper writing of essays; the student of that essay is above all the essayist himself. Later in this chapter I will come back to examine the implications of Montaigne's conversational style.

These questions might once have seemed inappropriate because they appear to obscure the distinction between what is to be taken literally and what figuratively. The recourse to the etymology of "enfant," for example, resurrects a long-forgotten, perhaps even dead, meaning whose own status is not entirely clear (was it to be taken literally that children did not speak or was this a figure for an early stage of physical, moral, or linguistic development?) in order to apply it with apparent recklessness both to "real" children and to tropes. But isn't that precisely the point? We should seek to upset comfortable distinctions, to open up the literal to its figurative possibilities and the figurative to its literal potential. Under this kind of pressure, and in the dynamic interplay it generates, the letter and the figure (of the child) both produce and reflect the image of writing itself, its construction and its operations, its aspiration to be more than it is (like life, for example), and the limitations that make it less. Within and between Montaigne's narratives and examples of literal children and the functioning of the traditional trope of the child of the mind lie central issues of the use of language, authorship and origin, textuality and representation, and reading and interpretation.

Referring to his own childhood experience in "De l'institution des enfans" (I, 26), Montaigne implies that the infant is born "tongue-

tied" and that the acquisition of language is the equivalent of loosening or unknotting the tongue. In order to learn Latin as his mother tongue, the essayist tells us, he was placed in the care of Latin speakers "avant le premier desnouement de (sa) langue" (173). (Or perhaps it is language that is tied up or bound in the child and subsequently unleashed.) Once untied, the tongue (or its language) can speak wisely or foolishly, depending on how it is educated. There is language acquisition in the literal, physical sense and, I would suggest, language learning in the figurative or moral sense. In the Essais , until the child learns the second "language" it remains true to its name, unable to speak. The pedagogical program of the Essais —although there is little that is programmatic about it—consists above all in giving the child the right language, in teaching him how to speak.

In one of the important paradoxes of the Essais , Montaigne represents the uninstructed masses as the model of proper speaking. He depicts them engaged in discussion that is spontaneous, forceful, and true to its purpose in "De l'art de conferer" (III, 8). In "De la phisionomie" (III, 12) they provide Socrates with his own exemplary speech: "[b] Ainsi dict un paysan, ainsi dict une femme. [c] Il n'a jamais en la bouche que cochers, menuisiers, savetiers et maçons. [b] Ce sont inductions et similitudes tirées des plus vulgaires et cogneues actions des hommes" (1,037) ("So says a peasant, so says a woman. His mouth is full of nothing but carters, joiners, cobblers, and masons. His are inductions and similes drawn from the commonest and best-known actions of men" [793]). But untutored speech in itself cannot directly and immediately serve the child of the noble Madame Diane de Foix, comtesse de Gurson, to whom "De l'institution des enfans" is written, just as it could not serve Montaigne himself. Proper language acquisition is a matter of proper schooling, of tutored speech, which requires that the essayist indeed set a curriculum in place (a course, a literal and figurative career, from Latin currere , to run) to guarantee that what came "naturally" to Socrates, or was posited as "natural" for the coachmen and masons, can indeed be learned. Schooling is necessary, one might say, because the coachman and the mason who speak this authentic speech are not historical realities but literary figures who can be found only in books.

Paradox thus abounds: the uneducated embody the ideal of edu-

cation, the natural must be mediated and acquired. I thus bracket "natural" speech in the Essais as a figure by which Montaigne intends to represent the expression of thought and judgment evidently unmediated by a traditional high culture that distorts and perverts. We might hear in his "natural" language, in its idealized simplicity and spontaneity and thus its truth and authenticity, a distant echo of Plato's characterization in the Phaedrus of oral discourse as "living speech," "written in the soul of the learner," the untrammeled expression of interiority. The letter and the figure of "unnatural" language, in Montaigne's terms, is rhetoric, which he treats as a dominant aspect of traditional learning. This tutored speech, with its emphasis on form, participates in the major structuring opposition in the Essais that operates between inside and outside, and, like the outside itself as surface or appearance, it becomes the site of untruth and artifice, suspect because of its potential for deception. The goal of Montaigne's pedagogy is to anchor language inside, in mind and judgment, so that words coincide with thought and express the truthfulness and sincerity he pretends they have in their "natural," spoken usage. "Que les mots aillent où va la pensée," he says in "De l'art de conferer" (III, 8, 924b), an essay in which one might see him instructing adults how to speak.

As a figure of the text, "natural" speech participates in a vast fable of nature and the natural that includes not only coachmen and masons, peasants and children, but animals, cannibals, and the whole New World as well. The essayist tropes on the natural in order to argue against all forms of cultural and intellectual artifice, against its hegemonic practices, against all surfaces that might mask and distort, and, in a further paradoxical turn, against rhetoric itself as a most pernicious deception. Rhetoric suffers Montaigne's scathing attack because it shamelessly and effortlessly exploits the "natural" and dangerous disparity between words and things and because, as part of the institutional, curricular program, it corrupts the innate naiveté (and goodness?) of the child learning how to speak. Montaigne's own rhetoric thus serves ironically as a way both of showing up the facticity of culture and all that is artful—including rhetoric itself—and of affirming positive values such as simplicity, spontaneity, and humility.^[5]

But this (rhetorical) strategy, which turns rhetoric against itself, is risky business because it cannot clear a space in which the natural

exists absolutely as itself; nor can it absolve the writer of complicity. In fact, what rhetoric's "suicidal" gesture announces is precisely the victim's survival and its persistent presence at the very foundations of discourse itself, both oral and written. Perhaps we can see this most clearly if we consider Montaigne's status as essayist. As a writer, the essayist cannot literally "speak," he cannot participate directly in the (alleged) immediacy and authenticity of natural (oral) language, even though he acts as if this possibility were self-evident: "Le parler que j'ayme," he says in "De l'institution des enfans," "c'est un parler simple et naïf, tel sur le papier qu'à la bouche" (I, 26, 171a) ("The speech I love is a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as it is in the mouth" [127]). But the lesson of Montaigne's writing, and the lesson of our reading, is that while he can write about a nonrhetorical, "natural," language, he cannot write it in any absolute sense. At best, he can only represent spoken language in his essays, he can only imitate it, and to do so he must have recourse to the rich resources of rhetoric, to its forms and figures. And, in the process, he must himself irresistibly perform the disparity that he seeks most ardently to avoid in teaching the child how to speak, the disparity between "authentic" or "natural" judgment and thought and its necessarily mediated expression. Montaigne's Essais cast judgment and thought as language, they reveal that judging and thinking are language, and, in the unavoidable gap between desire ("le parler que j'ayme") and its fulfillment ("sur le papier"), rhetoric repeatedly shows its telltale and subversive face.

Montaigne's own writing practice thus confirms the need to bracket the "natural" of language, both because the "natural" shows itself up as a trope and the trope discloses that it is "natural" to language. Discourse (even or especially his own) cannot realize itself without enacting the factitious and the artful that it harbors within. When the essayist expresses his desire that "les mots aillent où va la pensée," he reminds his reader that words and thought do not "naturally" coincide and that some effort of will or habit is required, some effect of education.

Ideally, then, Montaigne seeks to teach a "natural" language that would overcome its own "unnatural" failings, a language that expresses correct judgment, corresponds faithfully to thought and is sincere, and at the same time actively shapes and forms that judgment by its practice. And he teaches not only Mme Diane de Foix and

the reader but the child and his tutor as well, speaking to the tutor and in his place, to demonstrate that proper teaching is most centrally a question of proper speaking. It is a question of speaking and allowing the student to speak, as Socrates did (I, 26, 150); of asking for the recitation of what has been learned rather than memorized (151); of wisely warning (advertir , 155), conversing (entretenir , 155), saying (dire , 160, 161), communicating (163). The essayist as master tutor indicates how the child is to speak the words of others in quotation and paraphrase, citing his own work as example: "Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire" (148c) ("I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better" [108]). He teaches how it is to speak the language of self-correction and confession (154–55), how to learn the language that is written in the book of the world (158), and that of philosophy as well (160–61).

In all of this talk about language, in the copious articulation of this essay in which the essayist, the tutor, and the child all speak, a striking irony of what I am calling "proper language" (which is always synonymous with "proper judgment") is that it is as much a question of not speaking as of speaking itself. There is always the danger of saying too much, even when one has something worthwhile to say, as Plutarch knew: "Il sçavoit qu'és choses bonnes mesmes on peut trop dire" (157a) ("He knew that even of good things one may say too much" [115]). There is also the danger of speaking to the wrong people: "On luy apprendra de n'entrer en discours ou contestation que où il verra un champion digne de sa luite" (154a) ("He will be taught not to enter in discussion or argument except when he sees a champion worth wrestling with" [114]). In the school that Montaigne calls "cette eschole du commerce des hommes," children should be learning to listen to others: "Le silence et la modestie sont qualitez tres-commodes à la conversation" (154a) ("Silence and modesty are very good qualities for social intercourse" [113]), that is, in both social relationships and in speech. Watching and listening silently, being what the essayist calls a "spectateur(s) de la vie des autres hommes" (158c), ideally allows one to judge the life observed and order one's own. The world, figured in the essay as a mirror, requires (in)sight rather than speech; and the image of the world as book

requires reading that by Montaigne's time has become predominantly silent.

Language, then, cannot be expressed in an unbridled, unlimited manner but must be withheld, denied, and negated if it is to function meaningfully, that is, truthfully represent proper judgment and shape judgment to make it proper. Silence thus functions as a language just as language itself could be said to realize its true "nature" when it functions as silence. And what should be said of that language that is expressed? In order that it function properly, language must be transparent, a window to be seen through or a mirror (as one appears to look through the mirror at what it reflects). Speaking of the best poetry in "Sur des vers de Virgile," Montaigne characterizes aesthetic expression in a way that makes form a vehicle for content: "Quand je voy ces braves formes de s'expliquer, si vifves, si profondes, je ne dicts pas que c'est bien dire, je dicts que c'est bien penser. . . . Nos gens appellent jugement, langage; et beaux mots, les plaines conceptions" (III, 5, 873b) ("When I see these brave forms of expression, so alive, so profound, I do not say 'This is well said,' I say, 'This is well thought.' . . . Our people call judgment language and fine words full conceptions" [665b]). If the language draws attention to its own operation, it gets in the way of its purely expressive or communicative function and inhibits the powerful effect of its content. Montaigne's references to "penser" and "jugement" suggest that what I might call "moral" expression functions in the same way. This echoes what is frequently in the Essais a fundamental critique of rhetoric: in its loud and ostentatious trumpeting of form, it perversely betrays language's proper role as the "soft-spoken" medium of judgment's noble aspiration to virtue.

The ideal language then would show nothing of itself, or, put another way, would be nothing in itself. The nothingness of language of course has nothing to do with the vacuousness of vain speech. It is rather the self-effacing quality of a paradoxically substantial language that reveals judgment without revealing itself, that expresses thought without itself being expressed. In his desire for pure signifieds, Montaigne demonstrates his distrust of the signifier that must inevitably contaminate truth by its own presence. My own analytical (rhetorical) strategy has sought to represent this ideal language through a vocabulary drawn from the visual, referring to in-

visibility, transparency, showing, revealing, and effacing in order to emphasize both this language's paradoxical silence and the way it is both present and absent. Here I would harken back to Ramus, whose misgivings about rhetoric and voice led to the recommendation of a plain, unadorned style whose "perspecuity" or translucency derives from the analogy with visual apprehension. Montaigne too, I would say, longs for discourse—both oral and written—that would function like the invisible, and silent, medium that transmits light.^[6]

One of the most striking examples of Montaigne's efforts to make voice and speech function as if they were not there, or not themselves, is his insistence that dire become faire . In "Du pedantisme" he compares the educational programs of Athens and Lacedaemon with a paradoxically rhetorical flourish that aims at the elimination of rhetoric and of language itself:

A Athenes on aprenoit à bien dire, et icy, à bien faire; là, à se desmeler d'un argument sophistique, et à rabattre l'imposture des mots captieusement entrelassez; icy, à se desmeler des appats de la volupté, et à rabatre d'un grand courage les menasses de la fortune et de la mort; là s'embesongnoient apres les parolles; ceux-cy apres les choses; là, c'estoit une continuelle exercitation de la langue; icy, une continuelle exercitation de l'ame. (I, 25, 143a)

At Athens they learned to speak well, here to do well; there to disentangle themselves from a sophistical argument and to overthrow the imposture of words captiously interlaced, here to disentangle themselves from the lures of sensual pleasure, and with great courage to overthrow the threats of fortune and death; those men busied themselves with words, these with things; there it was a continual exercise of the tongue, here a continual exercise of the soul. (105)

The comparison operates a series of displacements by which "dire," "mots," "paroles," and "langue" are purged from education. In the parallel structure of the crafted period Montaigne transmutes verbal action into moral action; the predicates that enclose the student in the vacuousness of language in Athens are transformed by the substantial complements of virtue in Lacedaemon. Language, I would say, paradoxically turns against itself, brings the force of both grammar and rhetoric to silence itself. Education is no longer a question of weaning the child in any simple way from its inability to speak, of untying its tongue and giving it voice. The child does not learn how to speak but how to do. In the binary opposition that structures the

comparison, moral action (faire ) and speaking (dire ) appear to be mutually exclusive, although I might want to put the issue another way and say that here actions are meant to speak in a figurative sense, and to speak louder than words.^[7]

The paradoxical gesture of using the very medium, agent, or faculty one seeks to destroy to destroy itself, of forcing a kind of suicidal self-reflexivity, is a familiar Montaignian move in the Essais . Not only does he turn language against language and use rhetoric to undermine rhetoric, he reasons to challenge reason and quotes to criticize what he calls borrowing flowers from others. What are the implications of such a strategy, and what can its effects possibly be? Can it escape its tautological enclosure and achieve its ends? What are the consequences for the one who challenges or attacks from "within," who provokes the suicidal reversal? I will have to return to these questions. For now let us explore some of the ramifications in the Essais of this language that apparently seeks to transcend its own limitations, to be other than what it is.

It is a supreme irony of the Essais that the imperative of faire requires the practice of dire , that what the essayist does must also be taken literally as "une continuelle exercitation de la langue." He who says in "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres" that, whatever he is, "je le veux estre ailleurs qu'en papier" (II, 37, 784a) ("I want to be elsewhere than on paper" [596]), must admit as de does in "De la vanité" that he is most prominently on paper: "Qui ne voit que j'ay pris une route par laquelle, sans cesse et sans travail, j'iray autant qu'il y aura d'ancre et de papier au monde?" (III, 9, 945b) ("Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?" [721]). Montaigne himself often claims, as in the closing pages of "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres" (II, 37), that his writing is not just writing but a form of virtuous action, or at least an action that seeks to reflect and shape virtuous judgment. Here he appears to reverse the widely accepted Renaissance practice that applied criteria drawn from rhetorical discourse—gravity, decorum, harmony—to the judgment of moral action so that his writing (and its inevitable and inadmissible rhetoric) can acquire moral substance. In terms that evoke the educational program of "Du pedantisme" and "De l'institution

des enfans" he insists that his study ("mes estudes") has been used "à m'apprendre à faire, non pas à escrire. J'ay mis tous mes efforts àformer ma vie. Voylà mon mestier et mon ouvrage. Je suis moins faiseur de livres que de nulle autre besoigne" (784a) ("in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work. I am less a maker of books than of anything else" [596]). But the substitution by which the work of life ("ouvrage," "besoigne")—both the writing and the book—becomes life itself ("ma vie," "mon mestier") reveals itself in the syntax of his discourse as a metonymic structure, a contingent and relational association rather than a necessary identification. And while the rhetorical figure is intended to distinguish Montaigne from those "faiseurs de livres," as he pejoratively calls them, those who write for personal gain, to seek renown or material reward, and who produce only a book, it also implicates him in making a book. Literally speaking, and in the presence of the powerful metonymy, we are reminded that the literal cannot simply be dispensed with or ignored, that no writing is possible without dire and escrire . All writers are contaminated by this literal truth, all writers are always and in some sense also faiseurs de livres.

Because on the face of things Montaigne cannot simply make his language be his thought or his life, because he is drawn in spite of himself into the potentially vacuous realm of langue, mots , and parolles , he insists that speaking / writing be transformed into what it is not, into something else, into doing, making. Repeatedly the essayist attempts to differentiate his book from all others, stressing its originality ("C'est [c] le seul livre au monde de son espece" [II, 8, 385]) primarily in terms of the novelty, or the stupidity ("cette sotte entreprise," "un dessein farouche et extravagant" [385a]), of the project of making himself the primary matter of his book and also, perhaps, in terms of its nontraditional, apparently unfinished form as "essays." But Montaigne's writing is perhaps most wild and extravagant in its effort to make dire into faire and to make langue, mots , and parolles be what they are not. Words, he implies again and again, must become things (choses ), they must be transformed from the inherently airy medium that he evokes in "De l'exercitation" (II, 6, 379) and made substantial. The ephemeral word, projected as it were into the air to fly off in the very instance it is articulated (verba volant ), the vain word, semantically as empty as wind (flatus ), this common,

pervasive language must acquire the materiality of things. But what does Montaigne mean by "things"?

The primary "things" for Montaigne are ideas, concepts in the mind; these are always referred to as "choses" in his text, as "res" in the Latin he quotes. Words, he insists, can become secondary "things," they can follow and can gain substance as they express substantial matter of the mind. This appears to run counter to what I posited earlier as the transparency of "proper" language, the selfeffacing quality of a language that was most natural when it was nothing in itself, when it let the light shine through. Here language must be capable of literally embodying thought. Speaking of the best poets in "Sur des vers de Virgile" (III, 5, 873b), Montaigne describes language that is "tout plein et gros d'une vigueur naturelle et constante" ("full and copious with a natural and constant vigor" [665]); he speaks also of words "enflées" by imagination, and in other essays of words that are "remplies," "farcies," "vives." These are writings in which "le sens esclaire et produict les parolles; non plus de vent, ains de chair et d'os" (873b) ("the sense illuminates and brings out the words, which are no longer wind, but flesh and bone" [665]). In a literal sense Montaigne would be "fleshing out" his writing, making the Essais a kind of secular (and parodic) incarnation. When language is semantically and morally impoverished, when it fails to embody thought, it is nothing but words, and he speaks about it as if it were bloodless, fleshless, what I might call death itself. "J'avois trainé languissant apres des parolles Françoises, si exangues, si descharnées et si vuides de matiere et de sens, que ce n'estoient voiremerit que paroles Françoises" he says, describing his reaction to reading borrowed words in "De l'institution des enfans" (I, 26, 147a) ("I had dragged along languidly after French words so bloodless, fleshless, and empty of matter and sense that they really were nothing but French words" [108]).

Montaigne is thus concerned to write a substantial prose, to express the abstract in concrete terms, to present the Essais as a textual body, and as his own incarnation: the writing appears as a "skeletos" in "De l'exercitation," a "livre consubstantiel à son autheur" in "Du desmentir," the "excremens d'un vieil esprit" in "De la vanité." This is both a moral and a rhetorical issue that expresses yet another effort to transcend contingent and factitious language.^[8] As in the case of

language that must deny itself in transparency, or of language that negates itself in silence, or language that longs to become pure substance (faire ), we once again have language that must be transformed into something other than itself. My discussion has revealed that these are not consistent strategies, related systematically to each other; rather they are the diverse and conflicting expressions of Montaigne's desire for unmediated and stable truth. But we have seen that postlapsarian language resists such stabilizing gestures; it shifts and turns semantically, disturbing its signifying habits and straining its referential links. The limitations of language cannot be transcended from within language itself, as language itself constantly reminds us.

For my purposes, the unsettled name of the child as "enfant" can serve as an emblem of linguistic instability, of the restless displacement of signs and meaning, a sign itself at once lexical and semantic, developmental and social. Philippe Ariès has shown that at a time in Western history when most people still had only an approximate idea of their age the concepts of child and of childhood, and their corresponding vocabularies, remained equally imprecise.^[9] The periodization of human life that was called "les âges de la vie" varied in number in medieval treatises, corresponding to the four temperaments, the seven planets, or to the twelve signs of the zodiac. Released from its etymological mooring, "enfant" became a fluid expression that referred to very young children as well as to young people in their teens and even twenties,^[10] subsuming a broad range of terms that included puer, adolescens, valet, garçon, fils , and beau-fils . Rather than a prelinguistic state, "infancy" designated a condition of dependency. In a formal or legal sense the offspring were "enfants" as long as they were under the authority of the father, although I might want to say that as long as they depended on that authority and were not authorized to speak for themselves, in their own names, they did exist, in a certain sense, in a "prelinguistic" state. That authority could also be exercised by a metaphorical father, as in the extended, and popular, usage of enfant to refer to members of the lower social class, those in household service, and those in the military (cf. the etymology of infantry , from the Latin infans , child). Montaigne may found his pedagogical project on the premise that proper language learning provides the child the stable foundation for a moral life, but language itself, as the very example of the child shows,

in its imprecise and problematical signifying function reminds us that it can never serve as a firm, fixed ground.

One might argue that the Essais' preoccupation with the child betrays its own concern with learning how to speak, that the writing situates itself anxiously between the initial unloosening of the tongue (language) and the mature moral expression (action) toward which it strives. To write is of course literally to "dénouer la langue," to loosen the tongue and to let language loose, and I think it not amiss to speak of the anxiety of writing, even (or especially) in the case of Montaigne, allegedly so settled and serene. What talking about the child has uncovered so far is precisely the presence of elements that disturb, displace, unsettle, and destabilize from within comfortable, conventional notions of speaking, writing, and language itself. What disturbs is not that Montaigne attacks accepted rhetorical practice or upsets a traditional curriculum in which it plays a part but that even in his attack he himself is always implicated in its use, in its excess and artifice. What destabilizes is not that he seeks a direct, immediate moral expression but that in this effort he forces language into paradoxical postures it cannot sustain: silence, invisibility, substantiality. And what is unsettling about silence and invisibility is not that they are intended as the guarantees of truth and the authenticity of being but that they can also be emptiness, vacuity, as I suggested, nonbeing that proclaims itself as loudly as if it spoke for itself. The word made flesh? Montaigne's attempt to transcend language through language itself can only parody incarnation as the impossible (and scandalous) object of his desire, can only temporarily muzzle the irrepressible voice of the trope that pushes forth to speak in the name of its own factitiousness.

If Montaigne could have realized the intentions of his writing project, it would have signaled the end of writing, the end of language, for being would have been wholly present in all its plenitude and no longer needed to be spoken. Paradoxically, these are the terms of Montaigne's friendship with La Boétie, which the Essais situate before the writing and which obviated the need for writing, as numerous critics have pointed out.^[11] When the death of the friend shatters the ideal of presence it creates a void that the writing project can (must) fill. But what the complex status of the child reveals, as it strives to be

what it cannot logically be—simultaneously a child and a speaker—is that the project cannot entirely "be" either, that the writer must continually write, must continually urge language toward that which it can never be or do.

Et quand seray-je à bout de representer une continuelle agitation et mutation de mes pensées, en quelque matiere qu'elles tombent, puisque Diomedes remplit six mille livres du seul subject de la grammaire? Que doit produire le babil, puisque le begaiement et desnouement de la langue estouffa le monde d'une si horrible charge de volumes? Tant de paroles pour les paroles seules! (III, 9, 946)

And when shall I make an end of describing the continual agitation and changes of my thoughts, whatever subject they light on, since Didymus filled six thousand books with the sole subject of grammar? What must prattle produce, when the stammering and loosening of the tongue smothered the world with such a horrible load of volumes? So many words for the sake of words alone! (721])

"What can the child's prattle produce?" Montaigne asks of his own writing. The Essais are always in some sense "babil," "begaiement," the not yet fully formed speech of the child of the mind. They also bear in some sense the trace of Babel, that originary "desnouement de la langue" that indeed threatened to suffocate the world with words. When the tongues of both essayist and child are loosened, when the language of the essayist as child is unleashed, only empty speech is produced unless proper instruction intervenes. But the formation of the child and the development of substantial speech can only represent an ideal toward which the child, like the essayist, endlessly strives and whose conclusion remains endlessly beyond reach. Montaigne imagines his text as a child who does not (will not or cannot) grow up, the very performance of inadequacy, of limitation, the enactment of the shortcomings of language and of the essayist / child coming up short of his own ends.

Given this inevitable situation, one might ask not only, "Why the compulsion to write?" or put the other way, "to beget a child?" but also, "Why continue to write?" If the loss of the perfect friendship represented in "De l'amitie amitié" (I, 28) and the consequent loss of the sense of self ("luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image, et l'emporta" [III, 9, 983b]) ("he alone enjoyed my true image, and carried it away" [752]) serve as figures of an alterity that defines Montaigne's relationship to himself and to others, what motivates the writing, and makes

of Montaigne an essayist, is the effort to overcome difference both within himself and between self and other. The desire to know and to possess himself is accompanied by the poignant call to the absent other ("O un amy" [III, 9, 981b]), by the need for a friend like La Boétie, and by the need to be known by others as he is and for what he is: "Je suis affamé de me faire connoistre; et ne me chaut à combien, pourveu que ce soit veritablement; ou, pour dire mieux, je n'ay faim de rien, mais je crains mortellement d'estre pris en eschange par ceux à qui il arrive de connoistre mon nom" (III, 5, 847b) ("I am hungry to make myself known, and I care not to how many, provided it be truly. Or to put it better, I am hungry for nothing, but I have a mortal fear of being taken to be other than I am by those who come to know my name" [643]). With striking intensity Montaigne reaches out; the Essais , the child of his mind, are conceived to allow him to be known and to guarantee that he will not be taken amiss.

Eminent people, Montaigne says as he begins his discussion of presumptuousness (II, 17), those whom fortune has made famous, are known by the public actions that bear witness to what they are: "ils peuvent par leurs actions publiques tesmoigner quels ils sont" (632a). But those others, like himself, who have been relegated by fortune to anonymity, those people will only be known for what they are if they speak of (for) themselves. Montaigne thus speaks out about himself, he writes as a public act by publishing his discourse, so that his actions too will speak for him and bear witness to what he is. Justifying his project, he defends himself and others who talk about themselves and seeks to deflect the charge of presumptuousness: "ils sont excusables s'ils prennent la hardiesse de parler d'eux mesmes envers ceux qui ont interest de les connoistre" (ibid.) ("they may be excused if they have the temerity to speak of themselves to those who have in interest in knowing them" [479]). What does it mean to be known by speaking of oneself, to bear witness to what one is?

Claiming not to be a famous person, Montaigne considers that his private action, by itself, would not (or could not) have borne witness to what he was, although he did indeed act on the public stage as he reminds us periodically in the Essais . The figure of the modest unknown is thus a pose, a rhetorical persona that ironically serves the writer in two ways: it allows him (or it requires him) to talk about himself (and so be a writer, an author), and it obliges him to excuse

talking about himself (as he does in "De la praesumption"), but of course this is another excuse to continue speaking about himself. What would have been the consequence had he not written of himself? A reading of "De l'oisiveté" (I, 8), which evokes the time of his retirement prior to the Essais , suggests that he would have produced ideas and imaginings like an unfertilized woman who produces formless and purposeless "amas et pieces de chair" or like fallow land that teems with wild and useless weeds. Only through speaking / writing can he acquire the form that makes him what he "is"; only in this way can he situate himself and thus avoid the pitfall he recognizes, that to be everywhere is to be nowhere.

The figure of the writer bearing public witness to himself provides yet another perspective on the need to speak. If Montaigne had not spoken / written, he would have been silent about himself and everyone else would have been silent about him. No one, including Montaigne himself, would have said what he is ("quel il est"), and that is another way of saying that no one would have said that he is. He would have remained "private" in its several senses: withdrawn from the public body, not holding public office, removed from public knowledge, and, most striking, deprived (Latin privare , to deprive), deprived of self-knowledge, and in a profound sense deprived of life. Earlier we saw that a certain silent and invisible language is required if the essential and authentic self is to be known. In "Consideration sur Cicéron" Montaigne claims that he prefers to remain silent so that his true intentions can be read in his heart: "[c] Et me presente moins à qui je me suis le plus donné: [b] il me semble qu'ils le doivent lire en mon coeur, et que l'expression de mes paroles fait tort à ma conception" (I, 40, 253) ("And I tender myself least to those to whom I have given myself most; it seems to me that they should read my feelings in my heart, and see that what my words express does an injustice to my thought" [186]). In the context of the private person who does not speak about himself, however, we see another face of silence. Not to speak and not to be spoken of: silence, nonbeing, death. To speak of (for) oneself, I would argue, is to save oneself from nothingness, from death. I will come back to this in the course of my discussion.

Neither exclusively private nor entirely public, Montaigne will both enjoy the prerogative of the famous and have his public act, his essays, speak for him and remain at the same time a private person, away from the public eye, in retirement. In fact, to bear witness is

always in some sense a public act since it always needs to be witnessed in turn by another in order to be what it is. In the self-reflexive gesture of writing about himself Montaigne becomes both the subject and object of his judgment and testimony, he begins by being his own witness: "et n'est aucun si asseuré tesmoing comme chacun à soymesme" (II, 16, 626a) ("and there is no witness so sure as each man to himself" [474]). He also imagines his distant and anonymous public to be his witness, seeing his readers in his mind's eye reading and seeing him in his text. Beholding and beheld in this way, Montaigne self-consciously engages in his reflexive performance, but he holds in fact that all writers write themselves into their texts, represent themselves, regardless of whatever else their writing represents. This is the lesson of the closing pages of "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8) in which a broad range of writing—literary, historical, philosophical, religious, and confessional—as well as the work of sculptors, and even the heroic deeds of Epaminondas, are characterized as children of the mind, as "autres nous-mesmes," as images of the "father" that bear witness to him. Montaigne recognized the generative power of writing for the writer, a power that he expresses through the figure of generation itself—the production of the child—and the act through which the father (re)produces himself.

At this point an essential tension in Montaigne's work begins to emerge clearly. On the one hand, in his quest for self and self-knowledge the essayist needs to be concerned only with himself in order to write himself into his text and to be both its producer and its product. This self-reflexive preoccupation has long been considered the focal point of the Essais . On the other hand, I have been insisting on Montaigne's public concern, on his need to bear public witness and to engage the "other" who must respond to this need. The Essais express these conflicting inclinations in the opposition between figures of interiority and exteriority. We encounter a centripetal tendency that translates the dominant emphasis on self and a centrifugal force that leads out toward the other. But while each is necessary, each also has its dangers. The need to move inward toward the self raises the possibility of a solipsistic enclosure, a circle within which text and self endlessly (and presumptuously) mirror each other. The drive to move out creates the real possibility of wandering off and getting lost in otherness. Since the natural urge appears to be outward and away, the Essais seek both to call man back to himself and to respond them-

selves to that call. "De la solitude" (I, 39) and "De la gloire" (II, 26) simultaneously issue that call to turn away from the outside world and address what is personal, interior. The oft-cited closing passage of "De la vanité" (III, 9) again summons man (and the essayist himself) from the outside, citing the Delphic oracle to exhort him to look within: "Regardez dans vous, reconnoissez vous, tenez vous à vous" (1,001b).

The project of self-knowledge, and self-recovery, depends for its realization on the movement back and into the self, and it is equally and paradoxically true that it depends as well on its countermovement. Montaigne will thus seek himself by moving toward the other, with all the risks of losing himself that such a movement entails. He will express this need for the other in his need to bear witness and in the need for the discourse of bearing witness to be a form of inter- locution. It is apparently not enough for him simply to show himself; nor is it enough simply to be acknowledged, once and for all, as if that were possible. A sustained linkage appears necessary, one that connects the self to the other, that allows exchange to affirm the sense of self, as the self speaks its subjectivity through the projection of an "I" and as it is addressed and recognized as the subiect "you." But it is important to stress that, however much Montaigne's text longs for something like a dialogue, and however much we as readers subscribe to the conventional impression that the essayist "dialogues" with us and we with him—that we are in the presence of each other—the Essais remain in a profound and literal sense a monologue.

Both the link between self and other, between monologue and dialogue, and their opposition operate within Montaigne's use of the term conversation , which in sixteenth-century usage expresses personal contact or intercourse with others. I have intimated that the Essais are a form of "conversation" (from the Latin conversari , to turn oneself about, to frequent) as they turn to contact or frequent the other. But by making his "conversation" a mode of verbal intercourse Montaigne also anticipates its modern usage, drawing attention not only to its oral dimension but in this case to its textual dimension as well, to his writing as the incorporation and imitation of dialogue. The text assumes the task of making self and other present to each other but what I might call discursively present as je, tu, vous , and nous inscribed in the instance of written discourse. What conversation also reveals, however, is that this textual turn toward the other, this

inscribed frequenting of the other, is also and most profoundly the tum toward and the frequenting of the self. It is particularly revealing that to converse derives originally from the middle voice of the rare Latin verb conversare , because it is precisely in the verbs of middle voice that Benveniste shows the subject to be inside the process of which it is the agent. Barthes claims that to write is a modern verb of middle voice that operates in this way—in an analysis that he derives from Benveniste—and we can see that Montaigne's use of the verb to converse functions in similar fashion. Modern literature, Barthes says, is trying to establish a new status in writing for the agent of writing, a status where the subject is immediately contemporary with the action, being effected and affected by it.^[12] One might say that in the context of the Essais the family resemblance of to converse and to write speaks volumes; it discloses that in the act of interlocution where Montaigne turns toward the other he does effect and affect himself as he speaks—that is, as he writes.

This then is what motivates the so-called conversational style of the Essais , so-called because it can only resemble oral discourse and imitate dialogue and conversation through the addresses, questions, and responses that operate within itself. This style is also the motive (the motor or the mover) for a writing that cannot end, and it is its product as well, for dialogue, like the self hungry to make itself known, can never definitively realize itself or absolutely conclude. It seems particularly significant that in the three direct conversations with historical readers—Diane de Foix in "De l'institution des enfans," Mme d'Estissac in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," and Mme de Duras in "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres"—Montaigne speaks to them of children. In the first two cases, the dialogue engages the other as "mother" and speaks with her of her child and, by extension, of the essayist's own.^[13] Conversing with the mother, Montaigne bears witness to himself, and he bears the child that makes him what he "is," a father (and a mother as well?), an essayist. He frequents the community of child-bearers who can (should) acknowledge him for what he is, and as one of their own.

The paradox of reaching out to come back to the self is thus only one of several profound incongruencies I have raised in this discussion. The confusion of gender, of Montaigne's gender as childbearer, and the place of the feminine and the masculine in literary conception are other curious and thorny questions to which I will also have

to return. In fact, in my reading, the place of the feminine in Montaigne's text appears to be no place at all, for while the mothers to whom he writes are inscribed as such in the writing, it appears as if the essayist writes them out of his text, subsumes or sublimates them in the paternity / maternity that appears to be his and is reflected in the unique status given in his titles to "pères." This displacement of mothers to the background both announces and reflects the status of daughters, for Montaigne's writing explicitly perpetuates a patriarchal ideology that privileges both conception of the male child and its role as heir. Offering his essay on education as a gift to the "little man who threatens to come out so bravely from within" Diane de Foix, Montaigne explains parenthetically (but not inadvertently) that he considers her "too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male." For these reasons I have begun my reading by treating textual progeny as a son and by analyzing the relation between author and text in terms of male lineage. But Montaigne's text will also serve in later chapters to reveal the limitations of this reading and the necessity of bringing the feminine back from the margins to which it had been relegated.^[14] For the moment, let us leave these issues aside and turn to another paradox directly related to the question of Montaigne's writing as dialogue: that of absence.

In spite of Montaigne's textual strategies designed to create the impression of conversation and to heighten the sense of presence and proximity, what the essayist's testimony bears witness to is that both writer and reader, as witnesses, are absent to each other. The separation between author and audience, experienced in Montaigne's time in the still-recent advent of printing, and by the sense of an enormous physical and psychological distance created by an anonymous, dispersed readership, cannot be concealed or overcome by what I might call the stylistics or the rhetoric of dialogue. There remains a tension between literal absence and discursive presence, a necessary and inevitable tension that both generates literature and is its creation. Facing the blank page that mirrors his own nothingness—his absent self—and the nothingness of silence and of death, and in the face of an absent and mute public, the writer writes himself as testimony to himself. And in this language in which he is written, he writes his reader, his interlocutor, the witness who testifies to his presence. The

book printed, published, circulates in public bearing his name and in the hands of his readers, before their eyes, in its materiality, claims to be Montaigne's child, the generation of self that overcomes nothingness and death itself.

This is a function of children, and particularly of the children of the mind ("les enfantemens de nostre esprit") who are evoked in the closing pages of "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8, 399–400). All progeny, Montaigne infers, "nous representent et nous rapportent" and the spiritual children "bien plus vivement que les autres." These children's role is to represent, to be the agent or surrogate who speaks in the father's place, or name, who "speaks" the father ("nous rapporter"). Thus, the Essais , and all writing, I might suggest, fulfill their role as children able paradoxically to speak, but perhaps the child also speaks the absence of the father. In sixteenth-century France, only when the father no longer exercised his authority, when he died or otherwise was absent, was the child legally authorized to speak in his place and in its own name. And it is so linguistically as well, for the book is both the sign of the author and of his absence itself, both mediator and substitute.

Thus far I have been using the notion of absence in two complementary ways, as that physical disappearance caused by death (the dead are spoken of in French as disparus ) and also as physical non-presence, as when the writer is not present to the reader. But there is another form of absence that also compels the kind of production that the child of the mind represents. I would call this the absence from oneself, the deficiency, the gap, that is one's alienation from oneself, the sense that one does not wholly possess oneself or, in Montaigne's case, know himself in the fullness and plenitude of his being. In personal terms, the death of La Boétie and Montaigne's consequent feeling of loss, of being only half of his former self, figure this condition. Historically speaking, the Delphic injunction "Know thyself," as it comes to be understood in the Western literary and philosophical tradition, implies that the self is not already known, that man is in fact separated from himself. As Montaigne reads that injunction and as it motivates the Essais , the writing becomes the means through which that absent knowledge and with it the self will be (might be) restored, made manifest. In or through the writing as the child who speaks, Montaigne the father / writer might come to know and thus recuperate himself.

The production of writing reveals, however, that writing does not restore the self to its plenitude. This is perhaps why Montaigne's project can never conclude in any absolute way. What the essayist comes to know in his absence to himself is that the self he seeks to recover always remains in some sense absent. It cannot be totally mastered or possessed, and what can be known of it is overwhelming in its negativity, in the emptiness, vanity, and ignorance that predominate and in the variety, diversity, and difference that characterize both Montaigne (in his relation to himself) and the human condition in general. He who knows himself in his imperfection and weakness and knows the nihilité of the human condition, Montaigne says at the end of "De l'exercitation" (II, 6, 380), let him, like Socrates, boldly make himself known by his own mouth. Here the essayist conceives of his vocation as writer and as father. In the space created by the absence of self-knowledge, by the lack that is ignorance itself, the child of the mind is born as testimony to the father's ignorance and to its own.

The concept of absence in its various manifestations helps to explain the ubiquitous and central presence of death in the Essais by reminding us that all absence to some degree evokes, recalls, or represents death. All that is missing, that is no longer in place or simply no longer, all that wears down or wears away and so announces its own demise, all that is not yet foregrounds our own temporality, our mortality. In "De l'experience" (III, 13) Montaigne imagines life as successive losses, successive deaths of which Death is only the last: "La derniere mort en sera d'autant moins plaine et nuisible: elle ne tuera plus qu'un demy ou un quart d'homme" (1,101b) ("The last death will be all the less complete and painful; by then it will kill only a half or quarter of a man" [845]). Death inhabits life as a series of subtractions: "Dieu faict grace à ceux à qui il soustrait la vie par le menu" ("God is merciful to those whose life he takes away bit by bit"); as progressive failings or fallings (like Montaigne's tooth, "qui me vient de choir" [fall out]), as a kind of physical (and spiritual) melting away so that one is no longer what one was: "C'est ainsi que je fons et eschape à moy" ("Thus do I melt and slip away from myself"). Death also inhabits life as the absence of one's true self possessed and known, represented in the Essais by the absence of La Boétie, who, as Montaigne says, possessed his true image and "carried it away." And finally, I might add that death intrudes into life in

the image of the future, in the future as an abyss from which the self will ultimately and eternally be absent. In his liminary address to the reader Montaigne imagines himself writing from beyond the grave so that having lost him, he says, his friends and family will have something to keep their knowledge of him more complete and alive.

If we conceive of absence in this metonymic relation to death, we might say that Montaigne always writes in the face of death, that whatever else he is writing about—friendship, self-knowledge or ignorance, children, or writing itself—he is always writing to face up to death in the form of absence and in a sense to face it down. I am reminded in this context of Scheherazade, for whom speaking alone forestalled death. As long as there were words there was breath, and the teller of tales—both speaker and writer—was able to postpone the inevitable silence and nothingness of the end. In an essay entitled "Language to Infinity" Foucault saw the self-reflexive nature of language itself as the hedge against death: "Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits."^[15] The figure of language giving birth to a self-reflexive image as the way to defer death strikingly echoes the lexicon of production, of procreation in the Essais , of children as "autres nous mesmes" (II, 8, 399a), of children of the mind who effectively become "enfans immortels, qui immortalisent leurs peres, voire et les deïfient" (400c) (immortal children, who immortalize their fathers, and even deify them [291]). This is not the immortality sought after by some, the hollow and superficial glory conferred by public approbation that Montaigne eschews in "De la gloire" (II, 16), what I might call the child of fame or destiny that is always in the keeping of others. Something much more profound and profoundly personal is at stake here than a reputation that might survive on the lips (in the words) of others. Only Montaigne's own voice can postpone death, only the essayist speaking about himself and himself speaking, in language turned back upon itself in an endless play of mirrors, only that procreation that re-creates the self, that generates the child of the mind who continues to speak in the father's name, in his absence. In the void of the future, even and especially after death, the text will endlessly repeat what / that Montaigne (still) is.

But the effort to stave off death by conceiving of writing in this

way entraps the writer in a double bind. The child is the source of the father's life as such: in the most literal sense, without the child there is no father, just as there is no survival. But the child is also the source of the father's death, as Montaigne reminds us in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8). Evoking the jealousy of those whose children assume a place in the world just as the parent is about to take his leave, "[a] il nous fache," he says in the first person plural, which includes himself among the envious fathers, "qu'ils [the children] nous marchent sur les talons, [c] comme pour nous solliciter de sortir. [a] Et, si nous avions à craindre cela, puis que l'ordre des choses porte qu'ils ne peuvent, à dire verité, estre ny vivre qu'aux despens de nostre estre et de nostre vie, nous ne devions pas nous mesler d'estre peres" (387) ("it vexes us that they are treading on our heels, as if to solicit us to leave. And if we had that to fear, then since in the nature of things they cannot in truth either be or live except at the expense of our being and our life, we should not have meddled with being fathers" [280]). To be a father means to begin to take one's leave, to relinquish one's place, to give up one's authority and one's voice since the child's life and being can only occur at the expense of the life and being of the father. This is not some contingency but the very order of things from which there is no escape. The irony here is overwhelming. The father seeks to save himself by becoming a father, and he condemns himself; he begins to absent himself before his death, when the child learns to speak and speaks for the father. Once the child is given the proper language and takes its place in the world, it does not wait for the father to disappear of his own accord. The child speaks, and its voice displaces and replaces that of the father and the father himself. Even though it purports to represent the paternal, the child draws attention to its own voice and to itself.

That the child inevitably supplants the father it meant to save is not the only irony of conception (writing). The child (as the text) cannot fulfill the ardent desire of its progenitor for protection; it cannot guarantee the father's integrity, no matter what the father does or how hard the child tries. Circulating out in the world in the father's name, inscribed with his signature as author, the child of the mind cannot completely impose its authority. The faithful repetition of the authoritative words of the father, the loyal effort to secure his intention, to assert his meaning, must ultimately fail to guarantee that the father will be taken for what he is once and for all. Speaking to

represent the father and to assure his place, the child inadvertently opens up the possibility of violent displacement. And this opening reveals that there is always a gap in the way representation functions, a gap that is the insurmountable difference between the signified and the signifier, and it exposes as well the aporia that lies between intention and interpretation, between what is meant and what is understood.

Montaigne recounts his own concern in "De l'amitié" that La Boétie's La servitude volontaire has been misread and has thus misrepresented his friend. Used by the Protestants for political purposes for which it was not intended, the text has communicated a false image of its author. This of course is Montaigne's reading, and he asserts for himself the privileged position of the friend who, like the child, would be "autre nous mesmes" and thus able to express La Boétie's true intention, his will, and his meaning. And also like the child, the friend will speak for the other who is also himself, he will stand in for his friend to maintain him as he was: "Et si à toute force je n'eusse maintenu un amy que j'ay perdu, on me l'eust deschiré en mille contraires visages" (III, 9, 983b) ("And if I had not supported with all my strength a friend that I lost, they would have torn him into a thousand contrasting appearances" [752]). The violence of the figure is striking. The voice of the child, La Boétie's writing, does not suffice to safeguard the integrity of its father and the wholeness of his presence that purports to reside within it. A second surrogate is needed, a guardian for the child as well as for the father, one whose own voice supplements that of the child and prevents the father, the model, the original, the signified, from being torn asunder, fragmented into a thousand contrasting appearances.

In "De l'amitié," as a sign of friendship and to fulfill its obligation, Montaigne becomes that surrogate, he explains and justifies La Boétie's motives and his meaning: "Et affin que la memoire de l'auteur n'en soit interessée en l'endroit de ceux qui n'ont peu connoistre de presses opinions et ses actions, je les advise que" (I, 28, 194a) ("And so that the memory of the author may not be damaged in the eyes of those who could not know his opinions and actions at close hand, I beg to advise them" [144]). But who will speak for La Boétie after Montaigne is silent? And who for Montaigne himself? "Je reviendrois volontiers de l'autre monde pour démentir celuy qui me formeroit autre que je n'estois, fut ce pour m'honorer" (983b) ("I

would willingly come back from the other world to give the lie to any man who portrayed me other than I was, even if it were to honor me" [751]), the essayist says, not entirely facetiously. The text will be left alone, on its own, to speak the intention of the father, to represent him. But this dynamic demonstrates that representation is never self-sufficient, it never can say all that it has to say, or that must be said, once and for all, so that nothing else need be said. The representative does not have final authority, it cannot speak so as to silence the voices of others who impose upon it and thus have the last word. Representation is not closure but the opening to others to speak in its place.

The reading that puts pressure on both the letter and the figure of the child in Montaigne's Essais thus reveals the inability of any authority, intention, or will to impose itself absolutely, to close itself off and to remain impervious to the outside. And this is because the challenge from without is always in response to the openings and gaps that already inhabit the inside. In the case of reading and interpretation, the opening that produces or allows them resides deep within writing itself, regardless of any specific text's desire to open itself up or to close itself off. The opening is, however, not a space of free and unimpeded passage but an arena of confrontation and of tension in which reading must negotiate between the writer's intention and its unrealizable textual expression, between the constraints of the textual matter and form and their inevitable and necessary misreading, between the irreconcilable demands of the historicity of both text and of reader.

In the Phaedrus Socrates belittled writing for drifting and wandering about like an errant son, getting into the wrong hands, addressing the wrong people, both mindlessly repeating the same thing forever and, in the analogy he draws with painting, maintaining a silence that discloses both its stupidity and its treachery. But the genealogical tales I have been telling reveal that the text does not always and everywhere say the same thing and is never really silent, even in the face of unexpected questions. Nor can it be said to fall entirely in the "wrong hands." Textuality always speaks in the different voices of its own unruly brood, it responds by opening itself up to the different possibilities of what it (or the parent) is saying,

even (or especially) when it responds in ways that were not anticipated. In fact, we are ultimately unable to determine if the response is that of the text as child speaking for its parent or as child speaking for itself. Nor can we confirm with absolute assurance that what we as readers are hearing is anything more than our own ventriloquized voice. Perhaps it is the nature of writing always to be made to speak the words of others, as Socrates feared, words that are attributed to it as if they were its own. These are not questions that I ask in the hope of resolving the problematical status of spiritual parenthood and the complex relationship among writer, text, and reader. They are, rather, questions that define and delineate the space of textuality, the unstable, unmasterable space of writing and reading.

Montaigne appears to sense the futility of the effort to impose one's authority in any absolute way, whether it be the authority that the father would exercise over his offspring or, by extension, that the writer would seek over his text or the reader. In "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" (II, 8) he argues against those fathers who use money and material wealth to control their families or who use the legal force of wills and testaments to extend their domination into the future. "Nous prenons un peu trop à coeur ces substitutions masculines," he says, referring to the line of succession and inheritance that could be specified in the will in case the heir died before the testator, "et proposons une éternité ridicule à noz noms" (397c) ("We take these male entails too much to heart. And we look to a ridiculous eternity for our names" [289]). The father's proper role is to pass on his goods in the present, to pass on a measure of his authority, because, as we saw earlier, it is in the natural order of things that the father relinquish his place and allow the child to live. For the father not to make way usurps the proper place of the child. Montaigne criticizes those cruel, greedy, and tyrannical fathers who unnaturally stifle the life that is rightfully the child's.

To emphasize how he has acted differently, Montaigne uses the language of the more liberal and reasonable donation entre vifs as he liberates the child of his mind, his writing: "Ce que je donne, je le donne puremerit et irrevocablement, comme on donne aux enfans corporels: ce peu de bien que je luy ay faict, il n'est plus en ma disposition; il peut sçavoir assez de choses que je ne sçay plus, et tenir de moy ce que je n'ay point retenu et qu'il faudroit que, tout ainsi qu'un estranger, j'empruntasse de luy, si besoin m'en venoit" (401–

402c) ("What I give I give purely and irrevocably, as one gives to the children of one's body. The little good I have done for it is no longer at my disposal. It may know a good many things that I no longer know and hold from me what I have not retained and what, just like a stranger, I should have to borrow from it if I came to need it" [293]). The relation between the generations should be defined by affection, not the exercise of authority, and by the recognition of filial autonomy and paternal debt. The son should be allowed to make his own way in the world, whatever the risk to the father.^[16]

In his own case Montaigne presents himself as a son who has both respected and challenged paternal authority, that of his biological father and of his intellectual fathers, the bookish tradition within which he writes. He recognizes the fundamental linking of generations and marvels at the resemblance of children to their fathers—that is, at the ability of the father to reproduce himself in the son, to carry himself over into the next generation so that the son carries (him) on. "Quel monstre est-ce," he asks, "que cette goutte de semence dequoy nous sommes produits, porte en soy les impressions, non de la forme corporelle seulement, mais des pensemens et des inclinations de nos peres?" (II, 37, 763a) ("What a prodigy it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced bears in itself the impressions not only of the bodily form but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!" [578]).^[17] At the same time, in the poignant relationship he evokes with his late father, the son explains and justifies not "carrying on" in the way the father had desired and intended. Montaigne describes how he has not carried out his father's wishes in the management of his household, and we also see that he has not produced a text that is entirely consistent with the historical precedent established by his intellectual fathers. The Essais announce and incorporate the authority of the classical (paternal) tradition, particularly of Socrates and Plutarch, at the same time as they critique a slavish adherence to it and insist on their own originality. And they do so in the still immature, filial language of the vernacular rather than the Latin of earlier generations, the Latin that his own father had him taught as his mother tongue.

The son is thus caught in the impossible position that requires him to be true to his father(s) while remaining true to himself. Montaigne finds that in order to bear witness to what he was, and to affirm his presence, his being, he was obliged to turn against the fathers to

speak for himself. Not completely, as the Essais remind us, for neither the son nor the writer as intellectual child can entirely reject the past even when he claims for himself absolute originality. The past inhabits the present and the future just as the father inhabits the son, even in spite of what the son would hope, or claim. One might even argue that absolute rupture is never possible, that the presence of the father is indelibly inscribed in the child, that that is an aspect of what it means to be a child. The genetic link can never be broken, nor, it could be claimed, can the psychological one. Even neglecting the father, breaking with or revolting against him, is another affirmation of his presence and his authority, since the father still remains the source of motivation and desire, and even after his death. What is always written and read—whatever else is written or read—is the inexorable tension of the generations and the generation of tension itself: the tension between past and present / future generations; between the competing demands of imitation and originality that generate writing; between authorial control and the generation of the polysemous text; and tensions between intention and the multiple possibilities of interpretation that reading generates; and tensions among those readings themselves.

These tensions that lie at the heart of writing and reading are captured in (generated by?) the problematical relationship between the literal and the figurative that I have located at the center of my reading and that figures prominently in the Essais in the metaphor of the child of the mind. I have been attempting to elaborate on the implications of writing and textuality by drawing out two thematic and rhetorical elements that the Essais juxtapose and seek to associate: the father / child relationship and that of author and text. The structure of this association resembles the metaphoric form that Aristotle in the Poetics calls analogy or proportion, in which the second and fourth terms can be exchanged or substituted for each other. In Montaigne's case the substitution seeks to transfer to the relationship of author / text the natural and organic bond that exists between parent and offspring and is represented in the Essais through the biological transfer of the seed, the semence . Montaigne does not simply repeat the commonplace that the text is a child, he reinvents the metaphor and reinvests it with an energy intended to allow it to transcend the

limitations, the factitiousness, of its own rhetorical origin, to participate in the substantial link of father to son and to share the essential characteristics of consubstantiality and resemblance. What I might call the literalizing power of metaphor, or its naturalizing force, of course represents the ultimate aspiration of the figure, and perhaps the ultimate aspiration of all figures, to take on the properties of the letter, to become its truth. The history of those readings of the Essais that have taken the text literally as Montaigne's offspring, as a substance produced by him and identical to him, offers striking testimony to the persuasive force of the child of the mind.

The analogy between biological offspring and writing is obviously meant to advantage textuality, to endow writing with animate qualities and to give it life. But a problem arises because the terms of analogy and the making of metaphor allow the process to reverse. The transfer by which the text accedes to the status of the son opens up the play of substitution that allows the son to take on the properties of a text. This double movement reveals that the son, whose desired, paradigmatic qualities motivated the transfer, was not (ever) entirely what he was taken to be, that he was not a homogeneous entity whose unified truth could be carried over in any simple way to benefit writing, but that he was already complex, contradictory, and different from himself. What the writer was seeking to overcome by the creation of metaphor in the first place—the factitiousness of writing, its status as mere representation, its internal contradictions—shows up as inhabiting the very agent that was meant to elevate or redeem the writing. Here is how the reversal works.

Earlier I quoted the words that Montaigne speaks as he marvels at the ability of the seed to transfer the qualities of the father to the son, to ensure their resemblance. They bear repeating in this context because they suggest that the relationship between the family generations cannot be expressed without recourse to the language of textuality—impressions, signs, marks—and without recalling the process of mimesis. "Quel monstre est-ce," he asks, "que cette goute de semence dequoy nous sommes produits, porte en soy les impressions , non de la forme corporelle seulement, mais des pensemens et des inclinations de nos peres [my emphasis]?" In a reversal of the transfer of natural properties to the artificial, the wondrous and unfathomable natural link is made familiar and explained by a figure borrowed from the artificial, mechanical process of printing or writing.

Ancient culture had already expressed such a conflation of the natural and artificial in the concept of "character" as a mark or impression on the soul. Montaigne's language implies that physical, mental, and emotional attributes are marked on the seed in the same way that letters are inscribed or printed in the text. The seed reproduces those attributes just as writing represents the sounds uttered by the voice in speech or as its content, its subject, functions to represent nature, or an action. The natural resemblance of children to their fathers is thus expressed as if it were the effect of another sort of mimesis; it is thus unavoidably contaminated by the arbitrary and contingent status of both mimesis and writing itself precisely at the point when it insists that resemblance is both natural and necessary.^[18]

This reading has important consequences for Montaigne's desire that his text be taken as a natural child and for the metaphoric transfer he operates to accomplish that end. The natural, my discussion reveals, is not absolutely originary, nor can it wholly transform what is inorganic or factitious by transferring its own properties because those properties are never primordial, pure, and integral but are always already inscribed in a context of difference. When Montaigne asks the question, "Quel monstre est-ce," he asks not only what this "marvel" is. His language and the form of the rhetorical question exceed this figurative and commonplace meaning to affirm that the seed is also literally a "monstrous thing" and thus by definition mixed, multiple, and impure. In its monstrousness the seed betrays this complex nature: that which transfers resemblance between parent and offspring as a seed also transfers difference as a monster, for the name of monster applies precisely to the child whose shape does not conform to that of its parents.^[19] The child and the text as child, the seed and the word: forms of resemblance and of difference, of fidelity and of betrayal.