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Return to Equinoxes, Issue 3 : Printemps/Eté 2004
Article ©2004, Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa

Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa, Harvard University

Autoportraiture and Consubstantiality:

Metaphorical language in Montaigne's "De la vanité"

J'ose non seulement parler de moy, mais parler seulement de moy…
-- Montaigne, "De l'art de conferer."

In his preface to the Essais, addressed "au lecteur," Montaigne foregrounds the ideal of consubstantiality, of the inseparable union of author and text, that conditions his conception of the project of autoportraiture. In a highly ambivalent phrase that conflates self-effacement with self-congratulation, he writes: "je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre: ce n'est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain."(Essais I 3) Montaigne thus at once claims that he has perfected the practice of autoportraiture in achieving a mode of representational expression so transparent and seamlessly appropriate to his person that he has become consubstantial with his text, and yet, in the same breath, characterizes in a tone of ostensible self-deprecation his book and therefore himself - as its "subject" and "matiere" - as frivolous and vain.

The contradiction that we find condensed into the polysemy of the term vain in "Au lecteur" anticipates the polarization of the definitions of vanity that generates the organizing tension in "De la vanité." The antithetical play of Montaigne's simultaneous presentation of himself as inconsequential (vain, in the sense of "pointless") and the ostentatious positioning of his behavior and writing as exemplary (as a performance of vanity, in the sense of conceit) structure, in large part, the complex and paradoxical approach to the question of consubstantiality at the heart of "De la vanité."

In response to the centrality of the self in autoportraiture - the literally "self-centered" nature of writing about oneself - Montaigne redefines the "vanity" of this sort of writing as introspection, in contrast to self-indulgent ostentation, as a way of rehabilitating the concept of vanity. In an explicit presentation of this project, he glosses the eventual valorization of vanity as a whimsical expression of his authorial liberty: "je m'emploie à faire valoir la vanité mesme et l'asnerie si elle m'apporte du plaisir, et me laisse" (Essais III 209). This nonchalant explanation of the defense of vanity does not ultimately, however, ring true. On the contrary, the concept of vanity becomes enormously overdetermined as vanity is effectively mapped onto the practice of representing oneself and, indeed, as the very process of this mapping performs a certain fantasy of consubstantiality, such that Montaigne's defense of vanity becomes, in fact, a cipher for the defense of the entire project of the Essais.

Through a close reading of "De la vanité," I seek to delineate the way in which Montaigne strives towards a consubstantial identity of author and text in rendering the theme of the essay - the definition of vanity - inseparable from his authorial practices andfrom his very person. To these ends, I will first show how Montaigne situates himself in a position of exemplarity. I will then trace the metaphorical tropes that work to imprint the particularities of Montaigne's biography on the apparently abstract, theoretical discourse of his essay. Through the examination of Montaigne's usage of metaphor I will demonstrate that one of his predominant strategies in the production of the textual effect of consubstantiality lies in the workings of metaphorical language where, through a mechanism structurally identical to that of consubstantiality, two elements are expressed simultaneously and thus condensed onto the same site. Taking as my point of departure the idea that the systematic networking of metaphors to bind the author to the text functions through the congruity created between the discourse of the essay and Montaigne's own physical and psychological qualities, I will examine the way in which Montaigne inscribes his own body and illness in language, in the very medium of his text.1

In order to move towards a valorization of introspection, Montaigne starts from the premise that the moral flaw of vanity is inevitable since vanity is the only available mode of relating to the world. In an interestingly dialogic and, moreover, explicitly apologetic, moment, he writes, "Il y a de la vanité, dictes vous, en cet amusement." - Mais où non?" (Essais III 201-202). Introspection is then favored because it represents the "limited" application of vanity; in the closing lines of "De la vanité," Montaigne cites a speech of the Delphic god, in which we are admonished: "C'est tousjours vanité pour toy dedans et dehors, mais elle est moins vanité quand elle est moins estendue" (214). This "extended" vanity, as manifested by an orientation outward, is then condemned as unnatural as well as excessively vain; in the passage cited by Montaigne, the Delphic god argues that all other organisms in the world tend towards introspection: "Voy tu pas que ce monde tient toutes ses veues contraintes au dedans et ses yeux ouverts à se contempler soy-mesme?" (214).

The valorization of introspection as natural stands in contrast to the artifice involved in the ostentatious exaggeration (or outright dissimulation) of one's material circumstances. Here, in the binary between the natural and the unnatural, ostentatious self-display is substituted for the outward-looking gaze condemned by Montaigne. Indeed, the former reveals itself to be really only a superficially different manifestation of the latter, insofar as ostentation responds to a perceived submission to the judgment - the outward-oriented gaze - of others. Conversely, in revealing the overwhelming and incorrigible flaws of any personality, introspection works to undermine the foundations of any sort of vanity: "Si les autres se regardoient attentivement, comme je fay, ils se trouveroient, comme je fay, pleins d'inanité et de fadaise. De m'en deffaire, je ne puis sans me deffaire moi-mesmes." (213)

If this passage indeed serves to condemn preoccupation with outward presentation, then the force of its rhetoric should appear immediately suspicious to us. What, for example, is the function of the repeated "comme je fay"? It is not by accident that this rhetorical flourish takes place in the evocation of Montaigne's own behavior. Indeed, the curious refrain "comme je fay" serves to make Montaigne exemplary; he sets himself up as the model for the practice of introspection - and, moreover, as the only one, if we take seriously his usage of the hypothetical tense. As in the citation from "Au lecteur" with which I began this essay, Montaigne masks the ostentatious assertion of his own virtues behind a superficially self-denigrating tone.

In the context of the overarching argument advanced in this passage, the repeated avowal, "comme je fay" constitutes both the assertion of his own good faith and the insistence on the transparency of his self-presentation, thus itself performing a repetition of the opening line of "Au lecteur": "C'est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur" (Essais I 3). And yet, the contradictions between Montaigne's stated argument against ostentation and its underlying logic clearly lead to an aporia. Having criticized others of hypocrisy earlier in the essay (202), Montaigne's insistence that he himself acts in an examined and self-critical manner only serves ultimately to entangle him in a wider net of hypocrisy. Montaigne's condemnation of ostentation, framed as a mark of social distinction and moral exemplarity, cannot itself escape being an act of ostentation.

Moreover, it seems that this entire outcome is determined in advance by the mechanics of autoportraiture itself. The fact that Montaigne writes for publication renders the very opposition between introspection and self-exhibition untenable from the start since the very practice of self-representation is synonymous with the act of putting oneself on display. Montaigne's desire to establish a textual space of consubstantiality, of pure interiority in the identity or unmediated relation of object and representation, is foiled at every turn by a continual opening onto the exteriority of exhibition.

The conflict between the ideal of consubstantiality and the constraints of the textual medium generates a complex ambivalence to writing that oscillates between condemnation and identification. This dynamic is established from the outset, in the introductory presentation of "De la vanité": "Ce sont icy, un peu plus civilement, des excremens d'un vieil esprit" (159). Writing is, on the one hand, abased through its comparison with excrement - waste matter that is expelled because of its "vain" nature, that is, because it does not serve any life-sustaining purpose. On the other hand, the metaphor of excrement strongly evokes the porous relation between inside and outside that is hyperbolized in the notion of consubstantiality into the terms of an absolute identity: writing, made material, is understood as something that passes through the body, that is formed inside the body - in short, something that (at least at one point) is part of Montaigne's very person.

This play of inside and outside, in the framework of this ambivalent villainization of writing, is continued with the pathologization of writing: "L'escrivaillerie semble estre quelque simpthome d'un siecle desbordé" (159-160, my emphasis). Writing is, then, the outward manifestation of internal deterioration; it is the sign or the representation of a cultural crisis. In this way, qua symptom or mere sign, writing is external to the cause of the crisis; Montaigne's simultaneous rehabilitation of writing and vanity characterizes writing as merely symptomatic, as vain and inconsequential. These seemingly negative attributes contribute, paradoxically, to the valorization of writing, through a favorable comparison with elements that are generative of the crisis: "En un temps où le meschamment faire est si commun, de ne faire qu'inutilement il est comme louable" (160). Assimilating the exteriority of writing into the discourse of disease, Montaigne then dismisses the persecution of writing as equally pointless and therefore irrational: "il me semble que ce seroit contre raison de poursuyvre les menus inconvenients, quand les grands nous infestent" (160, my emphasis). He continues to elaborate the thematic of illness by citing a retort made by Philotimus, a doctor, who advised a man afflicted with a pulmonary ulcer that it was not the time to preoccupy himself with his fingernails, eventually concluding: "Il n'est pas temps de se laver et decrasser, quand on est atteint d'une bonne fiévre" (160). The vanity of writing, explained earlier with reference to its futility, is doubled by the vanity of censorship or of any criticism of writing in general, which is here revealed as the preoccupation with outward appearance - a pointless concern with the trivialities of presentation in response to illness that substitutes for an attempt to cure it. Yet, while Montaigne critiques the vanity of tending to superficial concerns rather than to disease itself, his relationship to medicine cannot either be characterized as one of straightforward endorsement. He writes: "Il ne me faut rien d'extraordinaire quand je suis malade: ce que nature ne peut en moy, je ne veux qu'un bolus le face" (195).

The intersection of the rejection of medicine as artificial and the pathologization of writing evokes Plato's condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus (the "fantastique bigarrure" that Montaigne invokes as a master-text for "De la vanité"), in which he famously refers to writing as a pharmakon, which signifies at once remedy and poison: the cure and the cause of an illness.2 Collapsing together the seemingly contradictory meanings of pharmakon, Plato equates remedy and poison as elements that disturb the course of nature and, on these grounds, rejects writing irrespective of whether it manifests itself as remedy or poison. Jacques Derrida glosses Plato's condemnation of the pharmakon:

The pharmakon goes against natural life: not only life unaffected by any illness, but even sick life, or rather the life of sickness. For Plato believes in the natural life and normal development, so to speak, of disease… In disturbing the normal and natural progress of the illness, the pharmakon is thus the enemy of the living in general, whether healthy or sick. (Dissemination 100)

Montaigne's reasoning is structurally identical to that of Plato's argument against writing. The terms of the metaphorical mapping are, however, inverted. In "De la vanité," writing is likened to neither poison nor remedy but to a manifestation of the illness itself; for Montaigne, it appears that writing is not the unnatural intervention that threatens to alter the course of nature, but the "life of sickness." If then, according to Montaigne, writing is not indeed a pharmakon but an anti-pharmakon - if writing occupies the space of nature in the equation - what role do these prominent metaphors of sickness play in his essay?

It appears that we can only answer this question if we take the idea of consubstantiality as our point of departure. If the written text is intended to be consubstantial with Montaigne himself, then his own physical deterioration is expressed not only through his writing but in the very medium of writing itself. In fact, this attempt to speak disease (rather than speak about disease) only serves to make illness more immediate to language, as if language itself stages the experience of illness. By using the lexicon of disease as a primary source of metaphorical language and allegory, Montaigne transforms his own prose into a corpus afflicted by disease, one that therefore resembled the state of his own body at the time that he authored the essay.

In this essay, I have sought to show that Montaigne's claim to a metaphorical "nakedness," that is, an absolute transparency of representation, in "Au lecteur" - "je t'asseure que je m'y fusse très-volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud" - demonstrates itself to be impossible. Indeed, the shared Latin root of fabric (tissu) and text - textere - cannot have escaped Montaigne, who claimed Latin as his mother tongue. This central contradiction in "De la vanité" gives way to a fascinating performance of consubstantiality where, rather than opting for a stripped, utilitarian language that might correspond to the ideal of a direct communication of content, Montaigne exploits a rhetoric of the body in an attempt to inscribe himself on the very textual medium that clothes him.


Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She specializes in twentieth-century French and Anglophone literature and her current research interests include Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Situationist International and the Frankfurt School.

Notes

1 Because I intend mainly to engage in a close reading of "De la vanité" and to expose the thematics particular to this one essay, I will refrain from the complex practice of cross-referencing Montaigne's other essays. The only other point of reference in Montaigne's corpus will be his preface to the Essais, "Au lecteur," in which Montaigne makes explicit the project of consubstantiality that drives the central philosophical arguments and rhetoric in "De la vanité."

2 Socrates likens the manuscripts of the speeches brought along by Phaedrus to a drug (pharmakon), a metaphor that is central to Derrida's reading of the play.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essais I. Paris : Flammarion, 1969.

-----. Essais III. Paris : Flammarion, 1979.

-----. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca, London: Cornell, 1998.