5—
Monstrous Progeny

Et [l'esprit] m'enfante tant de chimeres et monstres fantasques les uns sur les autres, sans ordre et sans propos...
(I, 8, 33)

And the mind gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose...

Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux?
(I, 28, 183)

What are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies?

Je n'ay veu monstre et miracle au monde plus expres que moymesme.
(III, 11, 1,029)

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself.

At the end of "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," when Montaigne turns from natural children to speak of the offspring of the mind, he evokes progeny so worthy that their loving fathers were willing to sacrifice all for them. These are children whose beauty and grace redound to the credit of the father, children whose noble qualities immortalize their progenitor because they reflect him faithfully. In the natural order of things, the child reproduces the image of its author; in this mirror the author's own worth can be read.

Montaigne's preference for textual progeny is philosophically and theologically grounded in the privileged place in Western thought given to mind over body, but in choosing time-honored writers and artists to justify the priority that he gives to the life of the mind, and to the work it generates, he also expresses and affirms a traditional and classical aesthetic. As the discussion of presumption has indicated, however, and as the essayist admits in speaking explicitly of his own work, not all children are beautiful or graceful, not all con-

form to conventional and valued norms, nor, he implies, should they. In fact, each of the three major essays devoted to children and their fathers opens with this particular essayist-father deprecating his offspring, and none more dramatically than the very text that seemed to posit the traditional norms themselves. Montaigne begins "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" by depicting his child as faulty, foolish, strange, wild, extravagant, bizarre, its face uncommon ("un visage si esloigné de l'usage commun"), its body ("subject") empty and vile. What I want to foreground is the incongruity that this essay holds in suspension, an incongruity that it does not or cannot resolve, with its uncommon opening juxtaposed against its ideal conclusion. The text itself seems to have two heads, or two bodies, each connected to yet at odds with the other, each representing a conflicting inclination of the writer and his writing.

We have in fact encountered diversity and disparity throughout the discussion, for it is a characteristic mark of Montaigne's writing. The work as a stable portrait and the expression of passage, as both faithful to its intent and given to treachery, as simultaneously seeking resemblance and performing difference, as both presumptuous and humble, rhetorical and plain, something and nothing, these are all expressions of a discourse at odds with itself, drawn simultaneously to the ideal and to the abject, to the high and to the low. The writing appears to be caught in the antagonism of these oppositions, but it also discloses their paradoxical, and necessary, affinity. In the oft-quoted analogy in "De l'amitié" between his work and a style of marginal decoration practiced by a painter he knew, Montaigne uses the term crotesques to express what he characterizes as the diversity and disorderliness of his writing. He draws from Horace the image of the woman whose body tapered off into a fish to affirm that his text indeed combines different and incongruent orders. In fact, it was precisely this sense of something that necessarily contains within what is foreign to it, an element that is both at home and an intruder, that characterized the Renaissance concept of the grotesque. The joining, the mixture, or the overlapping of disparate elements defies categorization, eludes naming, and thus escapes mastery. In Horace's example, what can this strange being be called except "grotesque," as a sign that it cannot be accounted for in the natural order of things? In Montaigne's textual variety and disparity, we cannot even tell which

element is the intruder and which the home; is this a woman with a fish's tail or a fish with a woman's body?^[1]

In this same context in "De l'amitié," and juxtaposed to "crotesques," the essayist also speaks of his writing as monstrous ("corps monstrueux"), a term that emerged when I spoke at the end of the first chapter of the seed that links the generations and carries resemblance between father and son. What a marvel ("monstre") it is that the seed operates in this way, I quoted Montaigne saying, and I suggested that the expression be taken not only figuratively to refer to the seed as a marvel but literally to make of it also a "monster." In this way I opened the possibility of diversity and of difference within the seed, harbored in the father as the origin of life itself, transmitted to the child as its legacy, always already present in the relation between them. We see from "De l'amitié" that the monstrous and the grotesque have the same face, the face of irreconcilable and necessary disparity and of difference itself. Individual essays, such as the two-headed text that joins the uncommon and the ideal in "De 1' affection des peres aux enfans," as well as the varied corpus of Montaigne's text as a whole, each body bears the mark of the monstrous, each is a "corps monstrueux." It is the status and the fate of that monstrous textual figure and of the monstrous text that will concern me in this chapter.

At telling thematic and structural junctures of the Essais , where the writer confronts the nature of his writing project and what it has produced, he returns to the figure of the monster.^[2] Early in the book, in what is the second half of the one-page essay "De l'oisiveté" (I, 8), Montaigne describes the genesis of his text as his effort to record what he calls the chimeras and fantastic monsters produced (enfanter ) by his mind. In the leisure of his retirement, he tells the reader, he had expected to spend the little of life he had left in rest and seclusion, and he intended that his mind would entertain itself in full idleness and, as he says, stay and settle in itself. What he anticipated was a mental life whose order reflected the design of nature and whose coherence bore the mark of reason. But to his apparent surprise, his mind engaged instead in tumultuous activity that conceived "tant de chimeres et monstres fantasques les uns sur les autres, sans ordre, et sans propos, que pour en contempler à mon aise

l'ineptie et l'estrangeté, j'ay commancé de les mettre en rolle, esperant avec le temps luy en faire honte à luy mesmes" (33a) ("So many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself" [21]). Beyond the exercise of will and of intellect, beyond the control of reason, as if discordant by nature, the mind generates uncommon notions, ideas, imaginings that Montaigne will both deprecate and recuperate in what appears to be the birth of the essays. The irrational, the multiform, and the disorderly may be, as his quotation from Horace implies, "like a sick man's dreams, vain imaginings," but they are symptoms of a sickness Montaigne will not seek entirely to cure.^[3]

The figure of the cure returns frequently in the Essais to suggest that there are many sicknesses—presumption, jealousy, poverty, inadequacy, ignorance, sedition—that might call for remedy, but monstrous thought is not one of them. Here Montaigne will only record and observe (contempler ) or, we should say, read and recognize that which he will not attempt to eliminate or hide. He proposes, in fact, to shame his mind by conserving these otherwise useless fancies. To do so, he must bring the chimeras and monsters to light and put them on display, he must allow them to bear witness to the monstrousness of the mind that produces them. This activity, remarkable also for its passivity, for its acceptance of what one might expect to be disavowed or repressed, makes of Montaigne an essayist and of the essayist a witness, a witness to the monstrous offspring of his mind—both his monstrous thoughts and his equally monstrous text—and, by extension, to his own monstrous nature.

Montaigne prefaces this personal narrative of his retirement and the conception of his writing with references to the wild proliferation of weeds on fertile, fallow lands ("terres oisifs"), to the disordered production of shapeless masses and lumps of flesh by women who have not been impregnated ("les femmes . . . toutes seules"), and to the unruly fancies of the idle mind. Through the figure of analogy the essayist identifies the mental with the agricultural and the biological, naturalizing the workings of the mind through organic associations, as if the rhetoric that both shapes and embodies the reasoning could overcome difference to establish and sustain likeness: "Comme nous voyons des terres oysives . . .; et comme nous voyons que les

femmes . . .: ainsin est-il des espris" (32a) ("Just as we see that fallow land . . .; and as we see that women . . .; so it is with minds" [20]). Within this logical framework, lexical and structural repetition and metaphorical association link the three realms so that notions of birth and germination, idleness, seed, and monstrous offspring become elements of a common generation. What is needed in each case in order to produce proper and natural progeny ("faire une generation bonne et naturelle") is an intervention that tames and works its subject ("il les faut assubjectir et employer"; "il les faut embesoigner"; "si on ne les occupe à certain sujet, qui les bride et contreigne"); in the case of the land and of women this intervention takes the form of an impregnation, the introduction of the seed ("certaines semences," "une autre semence"). Analogously, the mind needs to be restrained, seeded, we might say, with a definite subject, pointed toward a fixed goal, in order not to throw itself in disorder into the vague field of imagination, not to produce mad or idle fancy in its agitation, not to produce sick men's dreams, not to be everywhere and therefore nowhere.

Reading the essay in this manner from end to beginning highlights the fact that the text itself is not consistent, that what is proposed as a remedy to the production of monstrous thought by the opening section is, in fact, denied or ignored by the closing paragraph. Montaigne's narrative of his own situation appears to describe a generation that resembles that of the land and the woman prior to intervention or impregnation from without, before the introduction of "certain seeds" or "a different kind of seed." His thoughts and imaginings are the precise analogues of the weeds and the pieces of flesh produced by the agent of conception on its own and without cultivation, an asexual birth in the case of the woman, generated from within by the wrong kind of seed, one's own. The essay thus eschews "une generation bonne et naturelle" and accepts what we are obliged to take as an unfortunate and unnatural birth, it recuperates what for all intents and purposes it should refuse, what is variously described in the course of the essay as "inutile," "informe," "folie," "réverie," "fantasque," "inepte," "estrange," "chimeres," and "monstres" and what it admits are objects of shame. The consequences of this attitude are momentous, for the birth of the monsters of the mind signals the birth, by self-generation, from within, of the writer himself and the conception of his text. Within the context of

Montaigne's account in "De l'oisiveté," if the monstrous fancies had not been born there would have been no need to write.^[4]

This reading of "De l'oisiveté" thus affirms an extraordinary multiple and monstrous birth—of thoughts, of writer, of text. But there is something disconcerting about Montaigne's insistence on a program of "chimeres et monstres fantasques," because, in spite of all I have said about the grotesque and the monstrous in the Essais , the text does not literally "perform" it. Montaigne's mind does not throw itself in disorder into the vague field of the imagination, it does not lose itself in an undefinable nowhere, nor does it produce wild and unfettered thoughts without order or purpose, neither here in this essay nor in the work as a whole. In fact, the arrangement of general commentary and personal example, the form of analogy, the lexical and metaphorical patterns all structure the essay and suggest the operations of a careful ordering hand. This means that in spite of itself, or in spite of what I have read as the essayist's intention, the mind is imposed upon from without, occupied by a definite subject, or given a fixed goal.

Writing itself appears necessarily to act as that intervening agent, as that "other" or "different" seed, that through the orderliness of syntax, for example, shapes thought (even if at the time of the composition of the Essais French syntax is not yet quite fixed) or through the structures of rhetorical figures creates coherence. Writing about the need to have a subject to keep the mind from losing itself reveals itself as a subject that keeps the mind from running wild, like a cheval eschappé . Perhaps these are all implied in the expression "mettre en rolle," which with its suggestion of list or register by itself evokes the imposition of order. Later on, in "De l'exercitation" (II, 6), Montaigne will state explicitly that the public dimension of writing / reading requires that there be a certain decorum, a straightening up and arranging that would conflict with the notion of formless or haphazard thought: "Encore se faut-il testoner, encore se faut-il ordonner et renger pour sortir en place" (378c) ("Even so one must spruce up, even so one must present oneself in an orderly arrangement, if one would go out in public" [273]). The monstrous cannot be exteriorized, cannot in fact be known, in a pristine or original form. When it goes out in public, cultivation, or culture itself, we might say, intervenes to mediate its appearance.

Montaigne's project thus appears to some degree to betray its

original intention. Rather than being directly and faithfully recorded, the monstrous is in some sense transformed or displaced in order to be expressed. But again, the displacement of the monstrous is not its elimination. Chimeras and monsters inhabit Montaigne's writing as the deviations from the cultural norms that early detractors of the Essais considered to be the great failing of his writing, the ways in which it contravened prevailing conventions of literary decorum by its disconcerting absence of strict, formal order and logic and its perverse content devoted exclusively to the self, often in the most intimate and physical way. I have emphasized Montaigne's affinity for the very structures of difference that define the grotesque and the monstrous, and I have foregrounded the multiple, the antithetical, and the contradictory within what is presumed to be a single and coherent order. As I speak about the presence of the grotesque / monstrous at this point, I am placing the emphasis on Montaigne's expression, on the rhetorical and the aesthetic dimensions of the Essais , to remind us that what I am calling the grotesque or the monstrous is also, and perhaps foremost, its textual representation. What is encountered and engaged by the writer, and by the reader, is not the referent itself but the mediating forms and figures of paradox, oxymoron, antithesis, contradiction. And because the monstrous is expressed and thus contained by the writing and its categories, what in itself escapes categories and eludes naming, what resists definition, can now be named and defined, although the name it bears is that of the unnamable itself. Or I should say expressed and constrained by writing and its categories, as the essayist himself admits. Montaigne's text enacts the tension between an artless and monstrous self and its necessarily artful and monstrous discourse.^[5]

The monstrous thus appears to be situated between a deformed self that cannot be fully recuperated and a deforming discourse that cannot be fully recuperative. There is, in fact, an elusiveness about the monstrous in the Essais that is emblematic of the larger difficulty of situating and defining it. When characterized as deviant, anomalous, or different from the norm, it seems to be less something in itself and more a question of what it is not. The monstrous is that which does not conform to the law of nature that commands that like produce like, or it does not follow the dictate of reason that produces coherence. And yet, at the same time, it does resemble things in nature, although in uncanny ways, in unexpected forms, in unantici-

pated mixtures, and it does become the subject of a reasoned discourse that seeks to make it part of the larger order of things. In the effort to account for the monstrous, an effort that extended from the classical period through the Renaissance and sought essentially to locate and thus to master it, the urge prevailed to situate the monstrous in relation to nature, either beyond in the realm of the unnatural or within the domain of nature itself. The terms of the debate that informed that history are precisely those of the binaries natural / unnatural, inside / outside. There were those who sought to keep the monstrous outside so as to protect nature's order and congruity from an unthinkable internal inconsistency and contradiction. They argued that what was against or beyond nature's design was a sign or portent from outside sent by God. Others placed the monstrous inside the embrace of nature, as a function of nature, an effect of its intention, an example of its diverse abundance, or even as its mistake.^[6]

Although the debate over the situation and status of the monstrous was carried on in these binary terms, both positions were fraught with problems that represented a challenge to the stability of the opposition. The monstrous that had its origin outside nonetheless entered nature, took its place and functioned there, however uncomfortable that place was or however mysterious the function. The monstrous that was a product of nature had in some way also to be different from nature itself, it had also to be distinguishable to be recognized as monstrous. What Montaigne's text confirms is that in the last decades of the sixteenth century the oppositional structure had weakened to a point where, instead of the monster exemplifying the difference between the separate and distinct realms of nature and the unnatural or the supernatural, it had become in some instances the sign of difference within nature itself.^[7]

In "De l'oisiveté," wild weeds, shapeless flesh, and intemperate fancy all bear the name of chimeras and monsters, but the distinction between natural and unnatural does not itself remain clear or stable. In fact, the powerful images of monstrous generation, of earth and of woman giving birth, are taken from nature herself. The "vague champ des imaginations" and the mind "faisant le cheval eschappé" (obviously in that field) are both images whose effect, as I indicated, is to inscribe the operations of the mind in the natural order of things, however uncommon, disordered, or "unnatural" the essayist con-

siders those operations to be. These tropological associations gather the essayist's unbridled thoughts and imaginings into the encompassing embrace of a nature rich enough, and diverse enough, to contain them.

The monstrous thus resides as difference within the order of nature, just as difference resides within the monstrous itself. Disparate and diverse forms, doubleness, mixed and hybrid orders, these are the variegated bodies and faces of the monstrous, of nature's monsters and of Montaigne's monstrous progeny. And at the source of monstrousness, in the multiform text as in multifarious nature, lies the complex seed. Let us return to "De l'oisiveté." The seed is integral to nature and to the existence and perpetuation of its life, and yet it also exceeds nature both as the unfathomable marvel that determines resemblance and the monster that embodies unlikeness. The vital profusion of weeds is produced by the "wrong" seeds; evidently there are "right" seeds, what Montaigne here calls "certain seeds." But it is clear that the distinction between right and wrong in this instance is relational, contextual, rather than categorical, that what matters about seeds and weeds is how they are valued—that is, what matters are differences that are cultural, and that are cultivated. Every seed has within it the potential to be the wrong seed or the right one, to produce a monster or a model. Every seed, we might say, is already within itself the right and the wrong seed.

Like the earth, the woman who produces monstrous lumps of flesh possesses a seed, and this seed too is emblematic of nature and of writing. Here the seed is also the "wrong" one for producing what Montaigne calls good and natural offspring. The woman needs to be "embesoigné" (fertilized, the translators say) by another or different seed ("une autre semence") to avoid the monstrous production. But "embesoigné" also suggests by its etymology a working or cultivation that responds to a need or a lack (besoin ). Sixteenth-century medicine, as it was derived from Galen, did attribute semen to women, but it was considered colder and less active than that of the male and therefore insufficient, dependent on this "other" seed to produce "natural" progeny. The difference between "good" and "bad" seeds thus appears to lie between them, in the difference between the female and the male and their semen. But here again, as in the case of the earth's seeds, the difference between is also most significantly a difference within . According to Galenic anatomy, there was

only a single male sex and sexual differences were considered to be matters of degree rather than of kind. In a world in which the body was thought to be more open and less fixed than it was to become in later scientific thinking, where, for example, female genital and reproductive organs were seen as internalized versions of the male organs, the female body and its semen were considered to be inferior forms of the male, different in degree rather than in kind. We recognize in this anatomical hierarchy long-standing ideological and cultural biases; in the next chapter I will use the single-sex theory itself to provide a critical perspective on these traditional notions of sexuality and gender. For the moment I want simply to underscore what we saw in the case of the earth's seed, that it is essentially the "same" seed that differs from itself, and within itself, the same seed that is either colder or warmer, and that produces either monsters or model offspring.^[8]

What my reading of "De l'oisiveté" thus discloses is the presence of difference at the "origin," at the "seminal" moment, present in the multiple folds of a complex and diverse nature and of a complex and diverse text. Both nature and text encompass "within" themselves what is opposed to them, what contravenes their own laws, what is "unnatural" and monstrous. From this perspective the shameful monstrous offspring gain equal voice with what is born of a "generation bonne et naturelle," for they too, in their own right, hold a proper place in the order of things. This picture of a nature that can operate at cross purposes with itself, as if conflicted within, appears again in "De la punition de la couardise" (I, 16), in which the essayist explains the difference between faults of weakness and those of malice: "en celles icy nous sommes bandez à nostre escient contre les reigles de la raison, que nature a empreintes en nous; et en celles là, il semble que nous puissions appeller à garant cette mesme nature, pour nous avoir laissé en telle imperfection et deffaillance" (70a) ("In the latter we have tensed ourselves deliberately against the rules of reason that nature has imprinted in us; and in the former it seems that we can call on this same nature as our warrantor, for having left us in such imperfection and weakness" [48]). The same nature serves man paradoxically to originate the imperative for moral conduct and to justify his moral deficiency. In Montaigne's terms, nature reveals both a normative face and what he called an uncommon face, and, while the essayist will value the ideal face, he will seek especially to

recuperate that other, meaner face of nature as the legitimate subject of his writing, the imperfect and uncommon face, the face that is ineptitude and disorder, unreason and imagination, ignorance and flattery, presumption and vanity—the faces of monstrous progeny.

In the light of this discussion with its emphasis on difference both within nature and within the text, Montaigne's comment that he writes down his monstrous thoughts to shame his mind is richly suggestive. If his thoughts are natural, if even as monstrous they have their rightful place in nature, they do not need to be excused or justified and should not be cause for shame because both they and the one who thinks them are innocent. If, on the other hand, they are cause for shame, the thoughts must contravene some law, derive from some flaw or wrongdoing, and thus themselves be guilty and produce guilt. In this case, the thoughts are in some sense unnatural. One way to resolve this bind would be to posit a fallen nature that produces monstrous thought "naturally" and that induces guilt precisely because it is fallen. But the Essais do not admit of a traditional Christian vision of a fallen nature that calls for transcendence. As in the figure of the essayist's thoughts as a sick man's dreams, visions from a sickness he manifestly does not seek to cure, Montaigne's shame does not have a curative or reformative effect, nor is it meant to. The monstrous thought itself is to be conserved and exposed and, we might even say, celebrated. And since the amphibious thought is both natural and unnatural, Montaigne wears his shame both as a sign of imperfection and a badge of honor.

Ovid's wisp of a narrative of the Propoetides, which introduces the story of Pygmalion, is a tale about shame that sheds light on its complex status in Montaigne's Essais . Having dared to deny the divinity of Venus, the women brought down upon themselves the wrath of the goddess and became the first to lose their good name by prostituting themselves in public. The narrator concludes with this descriptive line: "Then as all sense of shame left them, the blood hardened in their cheeks, and it required only a slight alteration to transform them into stony flints" (X.241–42). Since the loss of shame provokes the transformation into stone, we might infer from the story that shame itself is the sign of life and the sign of humanity. As long as they felt ashamed of their wantonness (monstrousness) the women survived, but when that feeling was lost, their life was lost as well. And as the Propoetides' public action was the source of their

shame, so the essayist's shame signals the public dimension of the writing act. Writing, too, depends not only on being seen but on seeing and judging oneself in or through the eyes of the other, even, or especially, if the other has been interiorized, as Montaigne sees himself through the multiple readers he inscribes in his text and through himself as his own reader. The writing exteriorizes and materializes thought and self as a process of generation, it produces and records the birth of monstrous offspring, it bears witness to what they are and generates in its turn witnesses / readers who see them for what they are. The writer's shame is nothing less, or more, than the sign of the life of that thinking self and of its text, the sign of their monstrousness and of their humanity.

My reading of the Essais thus foregrounds the conception of what I have been calling the monstrous self and text; or, put another way, the Essais (and my reading) conceive of that monstrous self and text through writing. From its origin in the problematical seed, the monstrous is born as Montaigne's writing, disordered yet possessed of form, useless yet worthy, abnormal and unconventional yet normative in its own right, alienated from nature and a part of it, something that, for all its deformity and its vanity, Montaigne seeks to conserve and even to cultivate. The Essais themselves provide a striking emblem for the paradoxical doubleness and diversity that characterize this monstrous textual progeny: the Siamese brothers of "D'un enfant monstrueux" (II, 30). And the essay that shows them off reveals how showing off itself, as Montaigne does in the public register that he also calls his Essais , lies at the very heart of monstrousness.^[9]

In a tone easily recognized as matter-of-fact, objective, even coldly analytical, Montaigne begins this short essay by describing in ample detail a strange child with one head and two bodies that he saw "the day before yesterday" being shown off for money. But the story that he claims is self-evident elicits two different commentaries. The first concerns prognostication. Montaigne refuses to "read" the child as an allegorical sign, to take him, for example, as a favorable portent to the king to maintain under the union of law the diverse parts and factions of the state. Predicting is risky business, he suggests, and quotes from Cicero's De divinatione to conclude ironically that it is safer to work backwards from the event, "à reculons," if one is going

to hazard an interpretation. Montaigne's second commentary (which he adds to the text after the 1588 edition) juxtaposes multiple perspectives to reduce the monstrous to an effect of unaccustomed novelty. The monstrous is not monstrous either to God or to nature; man's limited vision and lack of experience alone induce him to astonishment and error and to the mistaken assumption that what he cannot account for has no place in the order of things natural or divine. "Nous apelons contre nature ce qui advient contre la coustume" (713c) ("We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom" [539]).

Montaigne's commentaries have the effect of neutralizing the monstrous, of removing the stigma of aberrance, and of eliminating its conventional referential value as meaningful sign that points beyond itself (as prophecy, prediction, omen). Recuperated into the infinity of God's creation and into the diversity of nature ("rien n'est que selon elle [la nature], quel qu'il soit" [713c]; "nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be" [539]), the "monstrueux" has no special status, it belongs to the order common to all other things, even if its appearance flaunts what is customary or accepted. The monstrous is cut off from its etymological root, monere (to warn, advise). It is no longer God's way of using the supernatural as a sign that instructs or portends; it no longer subordinates itself through an allegorical or hermeneutical gesture to an exterior referent that it serves. Thus enclosed in nature, in its continuing strangeness, the monstrous signals nature's plenitude, but in effect, by circumscribing the monstrous in this way, Montaigne also limits and encloses it in itself. In its self-reflexivity it points to or shows itself, it is and means primarily itself. But what does it mean to say that the monstrous means itself? To respond we must return to the beginning of the essay to reread Montaigne's presentation of the "enfant monstrueux."

Montaigne begins in this way: "Ce conte s'en ira tout simple, car je laisse aux medecins d'en discourir. Je vis avant hier..." (712a) ("This story will go its way simply, for I leave it to the doctors to discuss it. The day before yesterday I saw..." [538]). The story goes its way simply, he suggests, it tells itself, because Montaigne's concern will not be with what it means, at least not in the conventional sense. While the "enfant monstrueux" does not need commentary, Montaigne will comment in order to foreclose the possibility of a certain

kind of interpretive "commentary." If the medical doctors can reason and discuss causes and meaning, it is because the meaning of the monstrous is circumscribed by its natural and physical existence. Upon rereading, we understand that the essayist can only be the witness, can only recount what he has seen, matter-of-factly, coldly, objectively, because there is no other way to narrate, to speak about that which is only what it is. Since there is nothing else to say outside of the fact of that being, the narration can provide only the physical details of this strange child who has what appears to be a normal body to which is attached frontally a headless body, even to the extent of mentioning that the child urinates "par tousles deux endroicts" (713a). As "what it is," the enfant monstrueux is pure object, the object of Montaigne's eye as witness and of his narration that bears witness.

"Je vis avant hier," Montaigne tells his reader, and he tells what he saw: "un enfant que deux hommes et une nourrisse, qui se disoient estre le pere, l'oncle et la tante, conduisoyent pour tirer quelque sou de le montrer à cause de son estrangeté" (712a) ("The day before yesterday I saw a child that two men and a nurse, who said they were the father, uncle, and aunt, were leading about to get a penny or so from showing him, because of his strangeness" [538]). "De le montrer": to show the child off, to show him as spectacle, to exhibit him. But the child's monstrousness and his "showing" derive from something more profound than the pecuniary motives of the family. A richly suggestive etymology (genealogy) links montrer to monstre and anticipates Montaigne's own gesture of the circumscription of the sign. From monere the monster is born, and in an unexpected and perhaps monstrous back-formation the monster (monstrum ) engenders in its turn the verb monstrare , "montrer," to show. A portent that points beyond itself to social, political, or theological meaning contracts, constricts, in a word, reduces, to the modest act of showing (itself). Montaigne's French captures and allows us to play on the homophony that we lose in English with the verb to show —although it is preserved in to demonstrate . We can say then that Montaigne's monster is that which is shown and shows itself, that which shows what it is, that it is. The essayist's own seeing and narrating reifies the monster and uncovers that what is proper to it is always already inscribed in its name. The monstrous child is spectacle itself.

By showing off the monstrous child for money, the father, uncle,

and aunt apparently displace it from the object of pure display into a commercial object, from "show" into "sideshow." By paying to see, Montaigne participates in the new economy of the monster, the capitalist economics of commodification, of exchange (a "look" for a sou ), the economics that here exploits the labor of the absent mother. Montaigne's representation of the episode (and the emphasis is on representation from the beginning, "Ce conte . . ."), in its objectivity and its visual detail, narrates the child as object of his gaze and as object of the writing, it recuperates monstrosity and reinscribes it as spectacle in / as the text, allowing it once again that exhibition that is only the performance of itself.

Immediately after presenting the child and arguing against prognostication, Montaigne briefly describes a shepherd from Médoc whom he also claims to have seen. As in the presentation of the child, and for the same reasons, observation replaces "commentary": "Je viens de voir un pastre en Medoc, de trente ans ou environ, qui n'a aucune montre des parties genitales: il a trois trous par où il rend son eau incessamment; il est barbu, a desir, et recherche l'attouchement des femmes" (713a) ("I have just seen a shepherd in Médoc, thirty years old or thereabouts, who has no sign of genital parts. He has three holes by which he constantly makes water. He is bearded, has desire, and likes to touch women" [539]). Although monstrousness is always a question of "showing" and of being seen, what shows and what Montaigne has seen when he claims to have "seen" the shepherd appear problematical. The child is made monstrous by his excess, by the useless supplement to his own already sufficient body that shows for all to see; the shepherd is made monstrous by his deficiency, by the lack of genitals that do not and cannot show ("aucune montre"), and this deficiency itself does not necessarily show for all to see. But in fact, it is precisely in the relation between what shows and what does not show, and in the incongruity between them, that we can locate the shepherd's monstrosity. When the shepherd is clothed, we might say that from the outside, on the outside, nothing shows but the conventional signs that he is a man: he has a beard, Montaigne says, has desire, and likes to touch women (and be touched by them, as Montaigne's expression also allows). On the inside—that is, concealed beneath his clothing although outside his body—we also have to say that "nothing" shows that he is a man and nothing shows that is a sign of masculine desire. But nothing in this case is also something, for what shows in the nothing between the

shepherd's legs is both the monstrous absence of genitals and the incongruous presence of the beard, desire, and the wish to touch women. The testicles (Latin testis , witness) are the missing witness to the shepherd's virility, but precisely because they are missing they do, in fact, testify to the shepherd's monstrosity.^[10] And when the shepherd becomes a figure of Montaigne's writing, when through the writing Montaigne can finally "see" all that there is to see, the man from Médoc shows all and shows off the monster that all can see. In this complex play of what shows and what does not, the shepherd shows himself, or itself, as strangely different within, a "man" and not a man, a creature double and diverse, not unlike the monstrous child, and not unlike the essayist and the writing itself.

In "Des boyteux" (III, 11) Montaigne also speaks of strange and imperfect beings (the headless half of the "enfant monstrueux" was characterized three times as "imparfait"; the "boiteuses" of this essay have an "imperfection") and again attributes the wonderment they produce to their novelty, to the narrowness of custom, to the limitation and weakness of human reason. This too is an essay about seeing, and it is also about witnessing and bearing witness to phenomena that are often characterized as miracles (from Latin miraculum , object of wonder) and that the essayist, against the pressure of common opinion, would reinscribe in the domain of nature or on which he would reserve judgment altogether. Montaigne's plea for moderation in these issues, for a healthy skepticism that would make one wary of supernatural claims, derives as much from his wariness of his own personal inclination to hyperbole as from what he perceives as the common human tendency to make something out of nothing, to build worlds with words: "Nostre discours [both reason and language] est capable d'estoffer cent autres mondes et d'en trouver les principes et la contexture. Il ne luy faut ny matiere ny baze; laissez le courre: il bastit aussi bien sur le vuide que sur le plain, et de l'inanité que de matiere, 'dare pondus idonea fumo'" [1,027b] ("Our reason is capable of filling out a hundred other worlds and finding their principles and contexture. It needs neither matter nor basis; let it run on; it builds as well on emptiness as on fullness, and with inanity as with matter: 'suited to give solidity to smoke'" [785]).

In this later essay, Montaigne again seeks to neutralize and naturalize that which is perceived as strange, to domesticate it by making

it familiar—in a word, to transform and thus to eliminate it: "On s'apprivoise à route estrangeté par l'usage et le temps" (1,029b) ("We become habituated to anything strange by use and time" [787]). Grammatically speaking, through the action of the reflexive verb, man transforms himself, or is transformed, but estrangeté has undergone the most radical change: can strangeness still exist as such if it has become familiar? In the context of these two essays, "strangeness"—and here we must bracket it to indicate its own strange status—can be conceived only as a function of our own inexperience, as a function of time and "usage," as a misconception or misperception. Strangeness and the wonderment it produces are nothing in themselves, in a sense, are nothing to wonder about. As we get close to something strange, it vanishes: "Nostre veuë represente ainsi souvent de loing des images estranges, qui s'esvanouissent en s'approchant" (ibid.) ("Thus our sight often represents strange images at a distance, which vanish as they approach" [ibid.]). In "Des boyteux" Montaigne undermines the integrity of the eyewitness and of language that claims to bear witness to strangeness as he implicates knowledge in the unreliable realm of representation and its images, both visual and verbal. Neither what we see nor what we say escapes the deceptive performance of our own vanity or the distorting effect of image making. We might say that in challenging strangeness the essay testifies to the unreliability of testimony itself and bears witness to the deceptiveness of witnessing itself. But in a reprise of the formula that we have seen operative in the Essais , the challenge to strangeness is not its total elimination, nor is the questioning of the witness its absolute denial. Strangeness, testimony, and the witness remain central to Montaigne's monstrous project.

Montaigne testifies in "Des boyteux" to the limping and crippled vagaries of man's reason and to his self-deceiving nature, to his vanity, and he discovers that, rather than having been eliminated, wonderment and its object have been displaced from phenomena or events in the world to man himself. "J'ay veu la naissance de plusieurs miracles de mon temps" (1,027b) ("I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time" [786]), the essayist says wryly: man makes miracles, he conceives them in imagination and nurtures them by rhetorical prowess, props them up by public opinion, and authenticates them by calling on the testimony of the ancients. And in this vain and frivolous activity man reveals himself as the true miracle and displays the genuine estrangeté of his own wondrous ways.

Monsters and miracles are no longer seen outside ("Jusques à cette heure, tous ces miracles et evenemens estranges se cachent devant moy" [1,029b]), not only because their causes cannot be substantiated but also because the seeker of causes is himself the (unsought) cause, not only because the causes are not before man's eyes but because they are within him.^[11] The marvelous, as Montaigne's language here reveals, has been appropriated as a function of man himself and of his vain and empty functioning: "C'est merveille, de combien vains commencemens et frivoles causes naissent ordinairement si fameuses impressions" (ibid.) ("It is a marvel from what empty beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impresssions ordinarily spring" [787]). Man, we understand, is the empty origin and frivolous cause, and he is the most extraordinary effect as well, and that, we also understand, is cause for wonderment.

The marvelous that man witnesses, the true miracle he sees, is thus himself, himself in his monstrous emptiness and vanity and, as we will see, in his ignorance. The monstrous, like the miracle, the monstrous as the miracle, is interiorized and personalized: "Je n'ay veu monstre et miracle au monde plus expres que moy-mesme. On s'apprivoise à toute estrangeté par l'usage et le temps; mais plus je me hante et me connois, plus ma difformité m'estonne, moins je m'entens en moy" (1,029b) ("I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself" [787]). With Oedipean irony, Montaigne discovers himself (and man) in his deformity (perhaps not coincidentally in the essay on "des boiteux"), and he uncovers himself as the very monstrousness he sought outside. And this estrangeté cannot be tamed or gotten used to, it cannot be domesticated, because it is already at home. At the end of "D'un enfant monstrueux" Montaigne's exhortation to universal reason sought to eliminate the monstrous as a factor of novelty and of wonderment: "Que cette raison universelie et naturelie chasse de nous l'erreur et l'estonnement que la nouvelleté nous apporte" (713c) ("Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings" [539]). These lines suggest that the error of mistaking the unfamiliar for the monstrous is also the wandering (errare ) of reason itself. And they imply as well that the astonishment provoked by what is an error is an error in itself. In this earlier essay, these errors of

reason and astonishment, and astonishment itself, must be expelled from the mind and from human experience. In "Des boyteux," on the other hand, the astonishment (wonderment, I have called it, caused by the marvelous) provoked by deformity is authentic, and the deformity, we might say, is precisely that of reason in its natural "erreur et estonnement," in its limp. The novelty of this deformity can never wear off, never become familiar. Its strangeness can never vanish or be overcome: the closer one gets to it, the more of it one sees, the less one understands. "L'estonnement" thus becomes the genuine sign of a self that can only know that it does not know itself, that must forever in some sense remain alien to itself and experience that alterity as the Inescapable, and imponderable, doubleness of its own monstrous nature. It becomes the incontrovertible sign of that lack of understanding, the sign of that monstrous deformity that is Montaigne's (man's) ignorance of himself.^[12]

And ignorance, as "Des boyteux" makes abundantly clear, must be confessed. Speaking again of our ignorance of the causes and effects of things, and as always of our ignorance of ourselves, Montaigne attributes error to man's inability to see and to acknowledge himself for what he is: "[b] Il s'engendre beaucoup d'abus au monde [c] ou, pour le dire plus hardiment, tousles abus du monde s'engendrent [b] de ce qu'on nous apprend à craindre de faire profession de nostre ignorance" (1,030) ("Many abuses are engendered in the world, or, to put it more boldly, all the abuses in the world are engendered by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance" [788]). The only possible way to avoid the abuses engendered by ignorance is to confess it, that is, to acknowledge it and to show it off. Montaigne thus professes ignorance, he admits and exhibits it, he makes a spectacle of it and of himself: "Qui veut guerir de l'ignorance, il faut la confesser" (1,030b) ("Anyone who wants to be cured of ignorance must confess it" [788]). Presumptuously making himself known as nothing, he performs the paradoxical status of nemo, and what he makes known as well as he shows himself off is the monstrousness of nemo and of his confession.

In a profound sense, neither the enfant monstrueux nor Montaigne has to do anything in particular to be known for what he is, he has only to be what he is and to be seen for what he is. The phrase from

"De l'exercitation" in which he claims that he has written down his essence rather than his actions ("Ce ne sont mes gestes que j'escris, c'est moy, c'est mon essence" [II, 6, 379c]) is often quoted to affirm that Montaigne is indeed in his writing and that he shows there. It is not sufficient to recount physical actions because they are as likely as not to be accidental to the self, the effects of fortune. The writer must record only himself ("moy"), his profound and authentic "self." Earlier we saw how Montaigne attempts to overcome factitious and deceptive language by conceiving of saying or writing (dire ) as a form of action, a substantial making or doing (faire ). But here he shifts emphasis from the activity of writing as a form of "doing" something to writing as the expression of "being" something.

"Being" in Montaigne's text is thus revealed in his confession that he knows nothing (of himself, of the world, of being, or of truth), does nothing (because of his "naturel poisant, paresseux et fay neant" [II, 17, 643a]), is nothing (as part of "la nihilité de l'humaine condition" [II, 6, 380c]). "There is nothing I treat specifically except nothing," he says (III, 12, 1,057c), "and no knowledge except that of the lack of knowledge," but more is at stake here than what some have taken for Montaigne's expression of a widespread Renaissance skepticism or his adherence to the Pyrrhonism of the ancients.^[13] Because he dares to talk about himself, and in this way, the figure of the nemo does not lose himself, or being itself, in nothingness. What the juxtaposition of nemo and confession reveals is that Montaigne's confession seeks to be redemptive in a personal and secular sense. While in religious confession the self tums away from a personal ethos and identity to be reinscribed into the larger spiritual narrative of transcendence and salvation, losing itself to itself in order to find itself in God, Montaigne speaks a personal language of loss and of gain that returns him to himself and allows him to find himself, and his humanity, there.^[14] By writing down his monstrousness in this way Montaigne provides a means for confronting the implications of his vanity and ignorance, that deformity that the essays cast as "physical" rather than metaphysical.

In my discussion of "De oisiveté" I insisted that Montaigne does not seek to cure his sickness or monstrousness. Here in "Des boyteux" he speaks again as if monstrous ignorance were some sort of malady, but in words we cited above he claims that confession is in fact its cure. The being that is both monster and miracle astonishes

itself as it shows itself and thus embarks on the path toward recovery, toward the recovery of the self and of self-knowledge, and toward its moral recovery as well: "[c] L'admiration est fondement de toute philosophie, l'inquisition le progrez, l'ignorance le bout. [b] Voire dea, il y a quelque ignorance forte et genereuse qui ne doit rien en honneur et en courage à la science, [c] ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n'y a pas moins de science que pour concevoir la science" (1,030) ("Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end. I'll go further: There is a certain strong and generous ignorance that concedes nothing to knowledge in honor and courage, an ignorance that requires no less knowledge to conceive it than does knowledge" [788]). Through the text of confession, Montaigne's ignorance as "lack" becomes an ignorance as "fullness," an ignorance that claims for itself substantial "being" born of knowledge (scientia ). Just as the Essais as confession allow for nothing to be something as well, so they allow for ignorance to be conceived in knowledge, to be conceived as knowledge. Thus they enact the curative and restorative power of writing and allow at the same time for Montaigne to be Socrates, as the closing words of "De l'exercitation" suggest: "Par ce que Socrates avoit seul mordu à certes au precepte de son Dieu, de se connoistre, et par cette estude estoit arrivé à se mespriser, il fut estimé seul digne du surnom de Sage. Qui se connoistra ainsi, qu'il se donne hardiment à connoistre par sa bouche" (II, 6, 380c) ("Because Socrates alone had seriously digested the precept of his god—to know himself—and because by that study he had come to despise himself, he alone was deemed worthy of the name wise . Whoever knows himself thus, let him boldly make himself known by his own mouth" [275]).

This is not the first time we have seen Montaigne propose that there is a remedy for what "ails" him, and it is not the last time that we will underscore the problematic nature of remediation. In the discussion of "De l'exercitation" in the previous chapter we heard him propose "le supreme remede" for presumptuous talk, but I insisted there that an absolute remedy was not possible since the cure—further talk—was also the disease itself. Here in "Des boyteux" the prestige that Montaigne imputes to himself through his association with Socrates cannot obscure a similar conclusion, that to know himself as monstrous in his vanity and ignorance and to confess it "par sa bouche" cannot eliminate or cure his monstrousness in any profound

way. (I use "prestige" in this context and recall its etymology—from the Latin praestigiae , juggler's tricks, illusions—to expose the comparison with Socrates as a rhetorical move.) The path toward recovery—of self and of its moral health—is just that, a path over which the essayist travels (a familiar Montaignian metaphor) in a restless and errant movement that never concludes in full restoration or in complete rest. This is one of the profound implications of positing the "end" of all philosophy as ignorance ("l'ignorance le bout"), for this end is never really an "ending," it can never be known, possessed, realized once and for all.

Among other things, the Essais are the record of this endless movement toward a cure (or end), or it may be more accurate to say that movement "toward" is always at the same time movement "away." The more I frequent and know myself, we heard Montaigne say, the less I understand myself. Even though the confession of his monstrousness is made ostensibly in the humility of ignorance, it must always remain to some degree monstrous and presumptuous itself. The structure of confession recuperates the very element it seeks to eliminate, the vain and monstrous "I" that centers itself as the original effect of its vanity and the embodiment of its monstrousness, and that element must center itself again in confession in order to disavow itself. In a sense the confessor is both saved and dammed, since the confessional gesture must paradoxically exploit and repeat the error of presumption, the monstrous act of saying "I."

Perhaps by now we have sufficiently challenged Montaigne's own image of his writing as a "record" ("registre"), with its implications of a writing "après coup," "to record," since it has become abundantly clear that the writing is the movement itself, the experience that is both "toward" and "away," illness and cure. Although the essayist would exchange a deformed ignorance for an honorable and noble one, this momentous exchange cannot transcend the limitations of his language, his lexicon cannot carry him beyond "ignorance" and thus beyond monstrousness. Perhaps this is yet another sign that the malady or deformity he would seek to cure is not only in him, it is him, it is as much a part of his nature as the monstrous seed at the origin of life itself. To eliminate monstrousness would be to eliminate himself. Circumscribed by his ignorance(s), Montaigne can never fully recover; monstrousness has continually to be shown, the confession endlessly to be spoken, the text forever rewritten as both

sickness and remedy, deformity and ideal form. Montaigne's experience of being is precisely the experience of this paradoxical doubleness that is the manifestation of the monstrous itself.

What I am describing as Montaigne's monstrous confession and his confession of monstrousness bears upon the relation between writer and reader that I raised in chapter 3. There, through the figures of the imposing writer and the obtrusive reader, I challenged the traditional view of the Essais as a congenial dialogue in which the essayist engages his reader-interlocutor and articulates his views and attitudes on a variety of subjects in order to enter into friendly exchange through the reading process. The present discussion appears in its turn to complicate the issue of communication, for it suggests that Montaigne does not write exclusively or even primarily to advance a discursive content, to talk, for example, about friendship, presumption, or experience. His ideas on this or that subject obviously say something in themselves, but they serve essentially as the means by which the essayist shows himself off. And as Montaigne reveals himself in this form of confession, as he seeks to expose himself through his words, and to be heard, or seen, what he needs is not an interlocutor but a listener, not an active reader but a passive one. The recurrent image of the Essais as the "registre" of the essayist's thoughts expresses both Montaigne's effort to manifest himself and the status of the text as an open record. By writing Montaigne makes a (public) spectacle of himself, and the notion of spectacle is important to express the fact that textuality exhibits both the writer and the writing itself to the reader / witness.

The status of the reader as witness to this spectacular confession, however, is not at all clear. When Montaigne asks in "Du démentir," "Et quand personne ne me lira, ay-je perdu mon temps de m'estre entretenu tant d'heures oisifves à pensements si utiles et aggreables?" (II, 18, 665c) ("And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts"? [504]), and answers his own rhetorical question in the negative, he seems to suggest that once embarked on his enterprise he is entirely self-sufficient, that the confession speaks for itself and does not need to be read (witnessed) at all. He might be encouraged to say this because he is, of course, his own reader and

able in a certain sense to dispense with others. He apparently does not need an other to confer absolution because the confession itself is already a kind of absolution, a way in which Montaigne frees himself (ab-solvere , to free, loosen from) to some degree from the bonds of ignorance and monstrousness. The paradox that to accuse and to condemn oneself would already be to absolve oneself does not escape him, as we saw. And this paradox is precisely what appears to operate here and to obviate the need for an "other," a witness, or a reader.

We have seen Montaigne dismiss his public reader once before, in the "Au lecteur," and so we should be alerted by the fact that that dismissal was also a paradoxical call to the reader and the sign of its appearance on the scene of reading. The readership constitutes a community of hearers who must be silent in order to hear and to witness as the essayist "witnessed" the monstrous child. In terms of his relation to Montaigne the writer Of monstrous confession, the reader in the Essais —if there is one—thus cannot actively grant absolution, unless to be a witness, to listen to the confession—that is, to read—is already in some sense to absolve. And like all confessors whose primary task is to listen, the reader already knows what he is about to hear. The errors that Montaigne confesses are the errors of his humanness, errors he commits in common with those to whom he confesses, errors embedded in the human condition, in the human being. "Nous aymons à nous embrouiller en la vanité, cornroe conforme à nostre estre" (1,027b) ("We love to embroil ourselves in vanity, as something in conformity with our being" [786]), Montaigne says in "Des boyteux," using the first person plural not only to reveal that common character and fate but to underscore as well that it is already common knowledge.

When I argued in chapter 3 on behalf of an obtrusive reader I sought to provide a counter to the imposing text and to posit a model of reading that transformed the tension between them into a creative and dynamic force for interpretation. Here the text of confession exemplifies the weight claimed by the side of the writing and by its intention. The perspective of confession evokes a passive reading, as we have seen, indeed it could be said to necessitate it, and the reader who considers reading to be an invitation to generate his / her own discourse must not be allowed to drown out or to cancel out the silent reader required by the text for it to generate its own confessional

discourse. This tension has been playing itself out in my reading, where I have sought both to be active enough to give the child, and Marie de Gournay, and the monstrous, and textuality itself their due and passive enough to let Montaigne's self-avowing writing speak for itself, in its own name. And I would reaffirm that this is the tension that characterizes—indeed, that allows for—all reading. Montaigne's confession of his monstrousness reminds us that reading always has to take into account that the text is something, intends something, and that its own role is to let it "be what it is" without the reading being anything itself. But reading cannot wholly abdicate its own voice and let the text speak entirely in its place; it would then be nothing more than recitation or "rereading" and not a reading at all. The reader's activity only begins, the active reading role begins (as did the essayist's and, I suspect, my own), with the reader's decision to make his / her own confession, that is, to write essays that are properly one's own and that disclose one's own deformity. In order to be something in itself, reading must also speak in its own voice, for itself. Like the writing subject, and the writing itself, reading must be double and deformed; when it speaks it must show (confess) its own monstrous nature as both something and nothing in order to be itself.

I want to recall the image of the Siamese brothers in "D'un enfant monstrueux," an image that emblematizes the monstrous text and the essayist himself. The perfect and imperfect bodies of the child(ren) joined in a grotesque whole evoke the co-presence of incongruous or incompatible elements that compose the monstrous confession. The humble avowal of ignorance cannot avoid being presumptuous, the remedy contains within itself an accompanying virulence, being is always a function of nothingness. The hybrid and the heterogeneous, the curious conjoining of natural categories that Horace rejected as an unacceptable perversion of the unity and proportion of true literary works, and that he depicted in the Ars poetica by the figures of a horse's neck coupled with a man's head and a woman joined to a fish's tail, these things Montaigne not only resituates within the order of nature but also within the aesthetic order, as the (dis)organizing principle of the Essais .^[15] It is not coincidental that the hybrid tropes of paradox, oxymoron, contradiction, chiasmus, and irony, among others, operate so prominently in Montaigne's writing.

In the famous opening of "De amitié" (I, 28) where he compares his writing to the grotesque and fantastic images that fill the frame around a center destined to hold "un tableau riche, poly et formé selon l'art" (183a), the essayist quotes from Horace to figure his text in the precise terms that the Latin poet rejects: "Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n'ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuité Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne" (ibid.) ("And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental? 'A woman, lovely above, tapers off into a fish'" [135]). In my discussion of "De oisiveté" I called attention to the fact that Montaigne had quoted from the Ars poetica ; there he quotes from the same passage from which he draws here. The Horatian image of hybrid shapes as the vain visions in a sick man's dreams served Montaigne to characterize the wild and foolish thoughts produced by the unbridled mind, which he then designated as the monstrous matter of his writing. What was striking there, as here, is that the essayist applies Horace's vocabulary, and its pejorative weight, to his own writing to insist that the text, like the self, must be double and diverse.

Montaigne's vision of the divided or double nature of man is not a static juxtaposition of incompatible elements as Horace's images of the hybrid text might imply (or for that matter as the image of the Siamese brothers might suggest). The horse's neck topped by a man's head, the lovely woman ending in a fish's tail, and Horace's unquoted examples—the harsh that mates with gentle, serpents that pair with birds, and lambs with tigers—all become in Montaigne's writing figures of a dynamic relationship defined by instability, change, and by what I have identified in the Essais as a central metaphor of the movement and variation of the self—that is, passage. What is at issue is the point or the moment at which the one thing passes into the other, at which it is at the same time both and neither of its composing and opposing parts. We recall that when Montaigne evokes Galatea, he chooses the precise point in Ovid's account when the statue metamorphoses into a woman. Looking at the lovely woman he draws from Horace in "De amitié," we would be unable to determine whether she was a woman changing into a fish or a fish

changing into a woman. Are the Siamese brothers metamorphosing into a headless body, or is that body being transformed into its perfect half?

The opening of "De amitié" helps us to understand that it is precisely this issue of the mingling or the passage that lies at the heart of Montaigne's text. Montaigne appears to distinguish his own writing, the "corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres," as the frame, the outside or margin of instability, but an instability that knows and keeps its place. In this picture change occurs but is contained, so to speak, kept outside and distinct from its other, "le plus bel endroit et milieu," as if the center—to which we might give the names truth, beauty, being, and so on—were the organizing principle that imposed a stable and incontrovertible order. However, the structured relationship of monstrous frame to artful center, the juxtaposition of radically different and separated contents and styles organized in a hierarchical relationship that subordinates outside to inside, collapses as the margin invades the center to mingle the incongruous and to confound distinctiveness. We have seen this process of dynamic mingling or cohabitation repeated endlessly in my discussions of the numerous configurations of the text as offspring and as monster: the father is in the son, the writer in his text, presumption in humility, the malady in the remedy, imperfection in perfection, with each, of course, also in the other. And the list could continue. In each case it is impossible to determine where the one begins and the other ends.^[16] Taking the monstrous as perpetual becoming recalls the terms we used to characterize Montaigne's writing as movement both toward and away from a cure, an end, and it reminds us as well that the monstrous, and writing itself, can never be mastered, never be stabilized or arrested, because it is always "de passage," always passing from one state to another, always both dying and being reborn. Writing as passage, passages.

Reading the monstrous hybrid and amphibian images as expressions of dynamic change and instability allows us also to speak of a monstrous generation. Aristotle claimed that the law of nature decreed that like produce like, and where resemblance was the rule of generation difference became the scandalous aberrance from nature's own norm. Examples of women becoming fish and men metamorphosing

into horses also describe generation. Here one form is perpetually giving birth to another, which, in its dissimilarity, fulfills Aristotle's definition of the monster as the offspring that does not resemble its parent. But I want to take this idea of monstrous generation one step further, because if we have understood that resemblance can never be absolute—recall the seed that both assures resemblance and introduces difference—it is also true that difference is not absolute either. In the static form that I have set aside, the woman / fish represents the grotesque coupling of two different species, placed side by side and connected as the contingent elements of a metonomy. In a sense the two elements remain separate; only in their contiguity do they form a third, monstrous whole. In the dynamic form in which the two species are continually merging into each other, losing themselves in each other, generating each other, the relation seems more than accidental, as if in some inexplicable way the woman and the fish did indeed share something essential. Here we might recognize the movement and the relation of metaphor that brings out, as Kenneth Burke suggested, the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this. The fish emerges from the woman and does not seem to resemble her; but the fish also emerges as what we might call the expression of the woman's own "fishness," a quality that was always apparently latent in her and that needed only the monstrous birth to be recognized and affirmed. This monstrous metaphor should more aptly be called a catachresis, an extravagant, unexpected figure, and we might be tempted to dismiss it as abusive misstatement. But neither the catachresis nor the monster can simply be dismissed because, in its extravagance and abusivehess, each reveals what lies hidden or repressed within its singular and normative other. Just as every metaphor contains within itself the possibility of catachresis, its misstatement or its deformation, so every human carries within the possibility that it is also always a beast. The monstrous, as Montaigne said, is not alien and outside of us but the co-presence of the alien within us.

Monstrosity once again appears to be defined as a difference within rather than as a difference between , just as it was in the seminal case of the seed. In the Aristotelian terms with which we began, where the monster is that which does not take after its parents in any way, monstrosity is a matter of difference between parents and offspring, a matter of nonresemblance.^[17] But the binary opposition between resemblance and difference, between likeness and unlikeness, is

problematical, and this is borne out once again by the situation of the monster within. Montaigne does not discover his own monstrousness within until he produces his monstrous progeny outside. In a sense, the chimeric thoughts and monstrous fantasies that are his book / child surprise him by their difference, as we saw in "De oisiveté," their difference from what he expected his thoughts to be, or from what he knew himself to be. He has produced what for all intents and purposes is both like and unlike him, a monstrous child that is both him and not him, or we might say that the monstrous child is what has produced him as a monster, double and diverse. Father and child resemble each other, author and book are consubstantial. Father and child are different from each other, disparity constantly intervenes between author and book. The textual progeny is the form of the father in the world, and what it discloses in its own monstrous form is the monstrousness of its progenitor, his own doubleness shown off in the grotesque mixture that is the child itself. The father's real nature lies hidden, unrevealed by his appearance, until the birth of the strange child who both embodies and mirrors monstrousness, who bears witness to the heretofore unknown and unexpressed doubleness of the father.

Here the birth of the monstrous child reveals the most extraordinary secret about the father's real nature and the nature of his doubleness. From the beginning of this study I have spoken of the father, and, In a sense, primarily of the father, as the author of both child and text and, until the revelatory discussion of Pygmalion, characterized the progeny as male. There is historical precedent for this way of speaking, a long tradition of patriarchal privilege and appropriation that makes cultural conception a male birth, and it would appear that Montaigne contributes to that history and invites complicity on the part of his reader, as I have already suggested. And yet, an intrusive, active reading of the Essais that foregrounds male birth as a monstrous conception can confront and challenge this myopic perspective, and it can disclose secrets about sexuality and gender that the text "knows" and does not or cannot openly reveal, secrets that it hides or represses even as it lets it be known that it has secrets to tell. In the following chapter I will challenge the oxymoron of male birth in the Essais and examine the "secret" in detail. Here, by way of introduction, I want to suggest that when the monstrous child shows itself and its "father," it also shows that the complex question of

gender, both of author and of offspring, lies at the very heart of its conception.

Let us return to the presence of the female at the birth of monsters and the monstrous text in "De oisiveté." The earth as mother and woman herself figure the generative power of the mind, and they produce grotesque offspring because they conceive on their own, without the benefit of the fertilizing male seed that compensates for their natural deficiency. The mind left to its own devices, his mind, Montaigne's analogy affirms, is like the female body that in its insufficiency or incompleteness gives birth to monsters that are themselves not whole or fully formed. But the mind that produces monsters is also like the female mind, for it was commonly held that the powerful force of the mother's imagination shaped her progeny and could have that precise deforming effect on the seed at conception and on the fetus in the womb.^[18] Here, too, the very strength of the imagination indicates a deficiency or defectiveness, a lack of control of the exercise of reason that allows the mind to imprint its wild fancies and visions on the form of its physical offspring. And here as well the production of the monster is exclusively female. Not that the male is totally absent from conception, for he plays his natural part, but female imagination supplants him as the true source of the child.

In traditional patriarchal terms the resemblance of father and child signals not only the fact of paternity but its privilege. In the situation I am describing, the work of female imagination appropriates the male role in procreation, it displaces the male presence (it is perhaps not too strong to say "replaces" it), erases its trace, and produces difference. "We know by experience," Montaigne says, "that women transmit marks of their fancies to the bodies of the children they carry in their womb," as he tells the story of the birth of the hairy girl born to a woman who had in mind at conception a picture of John the Baptist in animal skins (I, 21, 75). The chimeras and fantastic monsters conceived as Montaigne's mind runs wild in the field of his own imagination, as we read in "De oisiveté," are just so many marks of the essayist's fancy and bear witness to the woman at their source, the female body and female imagination that preside at the birth of Montaigne's monstrous text.

We might be inclined to dismiss this reading of "De oisiveté," and the emphasis placed on the imagination, as just another fabulous tale, a tale told by a patriarchal culture to affirm the hierarchical

differences between the sexes as the opposition between male reason and female fancy. Or a tale told by a fanciful, or overactive, reader. Montaigne characterizes the various stories he recounts in "De la force de l'imagination," including the one about the hairy girl, in precisely these terms, but he refuses to dismiss them. Fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones, he says, they exemplify some human potential whether they actually happened or not: "I see it and profit from it as well in shadow as in substance." The criterion for "acceptance" is not truth but verisimilitude—that is, in Aristotelian terms the criterion is aesthetic, and I would add interpretive, rather than historical or referential. I am suggesting that there is something "likely" about the double gender that the monstrous shows, something that "could be" that is suggested by the network of associations that I have foregrounded. For the moment let us say that something is "showing" that we will attempt to see.