MONTAIGNE’S FANTASTIC MONSTERS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER
Je n’ay veu monstre et miracle au monde plus expres que
moy-mesme.
“DES BOYTEUX” (III, 11, 1029)
I have seen no more evident monstrosity and
miracle in the world than myself.
“OF CRIPPLES” (787)
Nostre verité de maintenant, ce n’est pas ce qui est
mais ce qui se persuade à autruy.
“DU DEMENTIR” (II, 18, 666)
Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others
can be convinced of.
“OF GIVING THE LIE” (505)
As early as the essay “De l’oisiveté” (I, 8) (“Of Idleness”) Montaigne informs the reader of the necessity of controlling the movement of his mind. Instead of producing a sense of spiritual tranquillity, Montaigne’s retirement from public life paradoxically generated intense psychic activity embodied in amorphous images of “chimeres” (chimeras) and “monstres fantasques” (fantastic monsters). The condition of idleness allows the imagination to wander about fortuitously so that the mind’s performance, as it is recounted in the text, represents a psychic “reality” whose sheer excessiveness translates the unreal or fantastic qualities of the work. Accordingly, the essayist’s apprenticeship to a contemplative existence is characterized by a formlessness of thought; the reflective subject risks becoming like a runaway horse, out of control, and always already beyond itself:
Dernierement que je me retiray chez moy, deliberé autant que je pourroy, ne me mesler d’autre chose que de passer en repos, et à part, ce peu qui me reste de vie: il me sembloit ne pouvoir faire plus grande faveur à mon esprit, que de le laisser en pleine oysiveté, s’entretenir soy mesmes, et s’arrester et rasseoir en soy: ce que j’esperois qu’il peut meshuy faire plus aisément, devenu avec le temps plus poisant, et plus meur. Mais je trouve,
variam semper dant otia mentem,
que au rebours, faisant le cheval eschappé, il se donne cent fois plus d’affaire à soy mesmes, qu’il n’en prenoit pour autruy; et m’enfante tant de chimeres et monstres fantasques les uns sur les autres, sans ordre, et sans propos. (I, 8, 33)
Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find
Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts. LUCAN
that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose. (21)
The essays are clearly about the parenting of the self and the monstrousness of selfhood; they serve as a locus where the act of writing becomes the tool by means of which the narrating subject can represent itself to itself: “Encore se faut-il testoner, encore se faut-il or-donner et renger pour sortir en place. Or je me pare sans cesse, car je me descris sans cesse” (II, 6, 378) (“Even so one must spruce up, even so one must present oneself in an orderly arrangement, if one would go out in public. Now, I am constantly adorning myself, for I am constantly describing myself” [273]). In this process of self- portraiture, the text reveals the consequences of a fevered imagination. Montaigne sees language and himself in its deformed images; the self that he views risks following its own course, uncontrolled as it is by the power of the imagination. The chimeras—defined as “idle conceits, frivolous thoughts and fruitless imaginings”—reproduce the image of an essentially empty and vain progenitor whose writerly deformities characterize the unreal or fantastic monster as a difference that resists normative meaning.1
For Montaigne, then, writing depends upon a certain kinetic energy, a mobility that is textually represented by an amorphous self capable of undergoing multiple metamorphoses. What began as inactivity becomes a process of self-analysis; in its search for mastery, the figuration of the ego struggles to make sense of the difference within the self. What is striking here is the way in which the mind usurps the female role of engendering and gives birth to a self representing a monstrous narcissism that is transformed into a spectacle or an object to be seen: “Je ne vis jamais pere, pour teigneux ou bossé que fut son fils, qui laissast de l’avoüer” (I, 26, 145) (“I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or hunchbacked he was” [106]).
At the core of Montaigne’s writerly practice is the desire to domesticate the excesses and strangeness of the mind’s activities. When the essayist explains the shift from reflection to writing in this section he recognizes the need to neutralize what he terms the “monstrousness” within himself. Drawing upon an extended metaphor that comprises images of unplanted fields and infertile women, Montaigne’s text discovers the monstrous side of nature as something emanating from what is reproduced without mediation:
Comme nous voyons des terres oysives, si elles sont grasses et fertilles, foisonner en cent mille sortes d’herbes sauvages et inutiles, et que, pour les tenir en office, il les faut assubjectir et employer à certaines semences, pour nostre service; et comme nous voyons que les femmes produisent bien toutes seules, des amas et pieces de chair informes, mais que pour faire une generation bonne et naturelle, il les faut embesoigner d’une autre semence: ainsin est-il des espris. Si on ne les occupe à certain sujet, qui les bride et contreigne, ils se jettent desreiglez, par-cy par là, dans le vague champ des imaginations. (I, 8, 32)
Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and on in the vague field of imagination. (20 –21)
Montaigne’s text thus devalues what has not been properly cultivated by humankind. Untamed growth motivates a genetic process that is unequal, irregular, and yet is perceived as completely natural. The paradox of nature lies in the existence of its monstrous imperfections: the disquieting reality of what appears to be unnatural must be submitted to a “different kind of seed” that will create and not engender a more perfect nature. Here the use of the maternal metaphor is quite revealing. The biological creation of the mother in the genetic process is represented as inadequate without the intervention of a paternal “artistry” that would enable it to transcend the banality of unmotivated reproduction. When the irregularities of the maternal body submit to the paternal rule, the idea of naturalness loses its role as model and origin of beauty. Consequently the figuration of authorship, as it is troped on the image of the maternal body, attests to the desire for writing to project a paternal “artistry” that creates art from life.
Montaigne’s attempt to give concrete form and order to the mind’s amorphous cogitations is but one way to control the possibility of shaping a life and to displace the otherness within the self onto the fantasist narratives constituting text production: “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” (I, 8, 33) (“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]). Montaigne’s monster can be seen here as a figure for self-portraiture that renders the text the site of the unheimlich, the strange and yet thoroughly familiar. More than a mere object of shame, as the essayist suggests, the mind’s fantastic monsters attest to the omnipotence of thought derived from the fictions that the desiring mind “experiences.” By becoming a stranger to himself, in the language of the essay, Montaigne’s text ironically transcribes his most intimate secrets in a process of self-alienation. Nevertheless, if he writes to contemplate the strangeness and ineptness of the mind’s activity, he does so in order to neutralize it and to seek relief in the concrete realization of the book: “L’ame qui n’a point de but estably, elle se perd: car, comme on dict, c’est n’estre en aucun lieu, que d’estre par tout” (I, 8, 32) (“The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere” ([21]).
The attempt to curtail the unwieldy nature of the essayist’s “fantastic” thought is intertextually rooted in the father’s moral imperative to manage the family estate wisely. Throughout the Essays we witness numerous references to the law of patrimony as it is exemplified in the father’s desire to preserve his household from excessive financial waste and decay by keeping “le registre des negoces du mesnage” (“the record of household affairs”): “Il ordonnoit à celuy de ses gens qui lui servoit à escrire, un papier journal à inserer toutes les survenances de quelque remarque, et jour par jour les memoires de l’histoire de sa maison… . Usage ancien, que je trouve bon à refraichir, chacun en sa chacuniere. Et me trouve un sot d’y avoir failly” (I, 35, 224) (“He ordered the servant whom he used as his secretary to keep a journal and insert in it all occurrences of any note, and the memorabilia of his family history day by day… . An ancient custom, which I think it would be good to revive, each man in each man’s home. And I think I am a fool to have neglected it” ([166]).
Elsewhere I have discussed Montaigne’s ambivalent relationship to his father regarding the transmission of property and his feeling of inadequacy concerning the administration of the inheritance.2 The paternal metaphor in “De l’oisiveté,” realized through the writerly act of recording, serves as an antidote to the negative connotations associated with idleness and waste; the act of self-portraiture preserves the proper balance between saving and spending. Etymologically linked to the concept of the rule of law, the essayist’s “registre” (register) reformulates this writerly practice in terms of the son’s submission to the paternal metaphor as it is transcribed through the desired entry into the symbolic order. The “register” is also the regula or model of the subject’s ideal image of himself that is embodied in another: the father whom he fears he will be unable to live up to. In order to be represented as a totalized and totalizing “self,” the Montaignian subject must be positioned in relation to the paternal phallus as a kind of reparative gesture for what is later revealed as the son’s failure to record the history of patrimony. The dutiful son wishes to establish his legitimacy in the writerly act “qui s’engage à un registre de durée, de toute sa foy, de toute sa force” (II, 18, 665) (“who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength” [504]). One might infer that the desiring subject’s sought-after “solidity” is an attempt to conform to a standard of what a man should be; it acts as a way to control excessive desire and to limit the illegitimate fantasy produced by the force of the imagination.
However, the enduring account that Montaigne sets forth as the goal of his quest is undone in the writing of the Essays; what he terms the “desreglement de nostre esprit” (I, 4, 24) “the unruliness of our mind” [15]) repudiates the image of the father’s desire.3 The monstrous progeny depicted in the text does not reflect a stable identity but rather a multiplicity of selves that is subject to change: “Je ne puis asseurer mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle” (III, 2, 805) (“I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness” [610]). Despite the idealized patriarchal motivation to impose a unified order on the meanderings of the mind, the “living register” inscribed in the text records the self-division of the writing subject. The question of gender identity is signified through tropic self-consciousness and paradoxes; they assert and disrupt meaning and thereby generate tensions between the irregularities of the natural and the unnaturalness of the culturally coded.
RE-VISITING THE MONSTROUS
In the essay “D’un enfant monstrueux” (II, 30) (“Of a Monstrous Child”) Montaigne records through the trope of the monstrous body an alternative to the rigidity associated with the biologically conceived phallic position; the text allegorizes the possibility of transcending the marginality of the monstrous and the so-called exigencies of gender essentialism. The essayist examines the nature of the monstrous and its relation to the concept of difference. The text begins with a concise yet detailed account—described in “objective” terms— of a Siamese twin with one head that the essayist recently viewed being displayed for money. At first the exemplarity of the monstrous stems from the perception of deviation from the normative; difference, portrayed as a visual “effect,” attests to the rarity attributed to the object of the gaze:
Ce conte s’en ira tout simple, car je laisse aux medecins d’en discourir. Je vis avant hier 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… . Au dessoubs de ses tetins, il estoit pris et collé à un autre enfant sans teste … si vous retroussiez cet enfant imparfait, vous voyez au dessoubs le nombril de l’autre… . Le nombril de l’imparfaict ne se pouvoit voir. (II, 30, 712–13)
This story will go its way simply, for I leave it to the doctors to discuss it. 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… . Below the breast he was fastened and stuck to another child, without a head … if you turned the imperfect child over and up, you saw the other’s navel below… . The navel of the imperfect child could not be seen. (538–39)
The scopic drive portrayed here draws one’s attention to the unusual and transforms it into a public spectacle of sorts, something to be seen (“de le montrer”; “from showing him”). The identity of the unusual can only be known from the projection of its external features. Representing a composite figure whose boundaries are inadequately differentiated, the monster inscribed in the text calls into question the opposition between self and other. The monster is thus born from the power of the image to evoke what is initially perceived as an abnormal sense of human reality. Vision is presented as a means to reify the sense of the word “monster” by reducing the body to its optical dimensions and by foregrounding the strangeness of its existence.4
The representation of the monster in this essay takes on epistemological consequences based on the perception and experience of the viewer. Recognized as an image that resists classification, the monstrous is depicted as lacking consensual practice as a sign: “Nous apelons contre nature ce qui advient contre la coustume” (II, 30, 713) (“We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom” [539]). Even though we attribute value to the monstrous by paying to see it, from the perspective of the divine and natural orders the monstrous can be interpreted as unquestionably normal.5
Ce que nous appellons monstres, ne le sont pas à Dieu, qui voit en l’immensité de son ouvrage l’infinité des formes qu’il y a com-prinses; et est à croire que cette figure qui nous estonne, se rap-porte et tient à quelque autre figure de mesme genre inconnu à l’homme … mais nous n’en voyons pas l’assortiment et la relation. (Il, 30, 713)
What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it ; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man … but we do not see its arrangement and relationship. (539)
Unlike other Renaissance texts, such as Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoire des prodiges (1560), where monsters are portrayed as supernatural beings produced by miracles, Montaigne’s essay domesticates the monstrous and consequently veers toward the erasure of the unnatural. The paradoxical reduction of the other to the same—first through the emblem of the conjoined body and then through the text’s post-1588 metacommentary—returns the body of the “enfant monstrueux” (monstrous child) to itself, in its own image, ironically presented as visually different but still not a shockingly abnormal thing. Difference is just meant to be; the acceptance of diversity neutralizes difference, strips it of its negative connotations, and figuratively represents the possibility of shaping a life free of what is narrowly conceived of as being “natural”: “C’est une hardiesse dangereuse et de consequence, outre l’absurde temerité qu’elle traine quant et soy, de mespriser ce que nous ne concevons pas” (I, 27, 181) (“It is a dangerous and fatal presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend” [134]).
As opposed to the universalizing ethos of reason, the imagination allows for an openness to the particular and the strange. In order to be hospitable toward alterity, however, requires the ability to transcend the self-contained world of narcissism: “Je n’ay point cette erreur commune de juger d’un autre selon que je suis. J’en croy aysément des choses diverses à moy … et, au rebours du commun, recoy plus facilement la difference que la ressemblance en nous” (I, 37, 229) (“I do not share that common error of judging another by myself. I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine …; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us” [169]). By admitting examples of diverse behavior that go beyond accepted norms, the Montaignian subject exempts himself from becoming a self- grounding entity functioning as the measure of the law. The essayist asks the reader to sustain the imperative to be hospitable and requests that the latter contribute to diversity by creating a cornucopia of examples that transgress our horizon of expectations: “Chacun y peut joindre ses exemples: et qui n’en a point, qu’il ne laisse pas de croire qu’il en est, veu le nombre et varieté des accidens” (I, 21, 105) (“Everyone can add his own examples to them; and he who has none, let him not fail to believe that there are plenty, in view of the number and variety of occurences” [75]).
Following the description of the child, an interesting anecdote appears in the essay concerning the representation of another type of monster, namely, one who is monstrous within. The text presents in dramatically visual terms a shepherd with a manly beard but no genitals: “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” (IlI, 30, 713) (“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 continually makes water. He is bearded, has desire, and likes to touch women” [539]). Montaigne’s text reveals the apparent discrepancy between inside and outside, or the gap between the ontological and the biological. In constructing the radical otherness of the shepherd’s body, the Montaignian text represents a desiring subject whose biological sign of masculinity (the genitals) is missing. Despite the presence of the beard, the man’s body becomes the locus of a lack that leaves no self-determined masculinity in place.
This split in the self demonstrates that the question of gender is not solely bound up with the question of sexuality. If identity does not stem from the biologically given ( what is considered “natural”), then one may infer that biology is clearly not destiny. Here the concept of the monster (derived from the word monere, to portend) loses its prognosticating capacities since what we see (that which is visually absent) does not necessarily represent what we get (desire). In suggesting that the equation between the penis and masculinity and the representation of desire is misrecognized, this anecdote teaches us that the only way to read the signs of gender is “à reculons” (II, 30, 713) (“backward” [539]). Montaigne’s text thus implies that desire is capable of producing an invisible signifier without the biological means to represent it; the example suggests that even without anything visible, this absence literally represents the paradoxical presence of the monstrosity of desire.
The shepherd’s castration therefore makes him no less a man. Within the chiasmatic logic of the essay, the so-called concept of “normality” is viewed as a consequence of the potency of desire (we are told that he likes to touch women) and not as a biological fact. According to this perspective, the absent penis does not foreclose the functioning of the phallic (an emblem of libidinal [psychic] potency); rather, it redefines masculinity as a biologically nonreferential version of sexualized thought. Consequently, what makes a man a man is placing him in the position of “being” rather than “having.” In other words, the penis does not make the man. If the ontological plenitude of desire displaces the anatomical emptiness of the shepherd, it is because phallic potency is more a psychological than a physical “reality.”
MONTAIGNE’S SEX-CHANGE OPERATIONS
In “De la force de l’imagination” (I, 21) (“Of the Power of the Imagination”) Montaigne’s text focuses on the relationship between psychic activity and sexuality, as well as on how the concept of nature is more a question of mind over matter.6 The essay is composed of a series of tales, each of which carries within it a figural representation of the imagination’s power. Attributing anthropomorphic force to the imagination’s activity, the essay also demonstrates how it is capable of inflicting various forms of violence: “Son impression me perse… . Je ne trouve pas estrange qu’elle donne et les fievres et la mort à ceux qui la laissent faire et qui luy applaudissent” (I, 21, 97–98) (“Its impression on me is piercing… . I do not find it strange that imagination brings fevers and death to those who give it a free hand and encourage it” [68]). The imagination, viewed as potentially hostile to the desiring subject, constitutes a threat to its well-being through the illusory force of its destructive drive. However, the unwilled effect of the imagination can also produce its share of pleasure, as in the case of the nocturnal emissions of “boiling youth.” Montaigne notes: “Et la jeunesse bouillante s’eschauffe si avant en son harnois tout endormie, qu’elle assouvit en songe ses amoureux désirs” (I, 21, 98) (“And boiling youth, fast asleep, grows so hot in the harness that in dreams it satisfies its amorous desires” [69]).
Nevertheless, Montaigne essay describes the dangers of the imagination’s speculative power as capable of producing fictions comparable to the force of the death instinct. From this perspective, the anxiety of anticipation is indeed the cause of the very antagonism inducing the paralysis of the thinking subject. Montaigne cites the Latin quotation “Fortis imaginatio generat casum” (I, 21, 97) (“A strong imagination creates the event” [68]). Montaigne’s text presents several case studies in which an overly active and tense imagination submits the ego to an inhibiting and repressive authority. For example, in working too hard to comprehend the nature of madness, Gallus Vibius subjects his mind to such a state of tension that he quickly becomes the victim of the very object of his reflection: “Gallus Vibius banda si bien son ame à comprendre l’essence et les mouvemens de la folie, qu’il emporta son jugement hors de son siege, si qu’onques puis il ne l’y peut remettre” (I, 21, 98) “Gallus Vibius strained his mind so hard to understand the essence and impulses of insanity that he dragged his judgement off its seat and never could get it back again” [68]). In another tale a condemned prisoner receives a last-minute pardon, but when he is finally set free to hear his reprieve read aloud he dies of fear: “Et celuy qu’on debandoit pour luy lire sa grace, se trouva roide mort sur l’eschafaut du seul coup de son imagination” (I, 21, 98) (“And one man who was being unbound to have his pardon read him dropped stone dead on the scaffold, struck down by his mere imagination” [69]). The fear generated by an overactive imagination in each of these cases imprisons the anxious subject in the inner theater of affective quiescence. In both examples Montaigne’s text foregrounds the effort required by the imagination to realize the self’s extinction. The repeated use of the word “bander”—a term that Cotgrave defines as “to bend, to bind, to tie, and to tighten”—translates the paradoxical result of the imagination’s drive toward self-expression, namely, the person’s subjugation to the omnipotence of thought. However, far from simply limiting the power of the imagination to the paralysis of the subject, Montaigne’s text borrows a remarkable example from Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et des prodiges to illustrate how the transformative powers of the imagination can enact “sex changes”: “Ce n’est pas tant de merveille, que cette sorte d’accident se rencontre frequent: car si l’imagination peut en telles choses, elle est si continuellement et si vigoureusement attachée à ce subject” (I, 21, 99) (“It is not so great a marvel that this sort of accident is frequently met with. For if the imagination has power in such things, it is so continually and vigorously fixed on this subject” [69]). Sexual metamorphoses are realized when conventionally developed gender roles are transgressed. The body, recognized as being anatomically distinct, is nevertheless capable of undergoing transformation through a fashioning of the self that enables one to be perceived as a sexual subject.7
In Montaigne’s rewriting of Paré’s story of Marie-turned-Germain, we learn about a twenty-two-year-old woman who strained herself while jumping, underwent biological metamorphosis by sprouting a penis, and was finally declared a man. The performative construction of gender undercuts the notion of what is considered natural and consequently erases its distinctive marks.
Passant à Victry le Françoys, je peuz voir un homme que l’Evesque de Soissons avoit nommé Germain en confirmation, lequel tous les habitans de là ont cogneu et veu fille, jusques à l’aage de vingt deux ans, nommée Marie. Il estoit à cett’heure-là fort barbu, et vieil, et point marié. Faisant, dict-il, quelque effort en sautant, ses membres virils se produisirent: et est encore en usage, entre les filles de là, une chanson, par laquelle elles s’entradvertissent de ne faire point de grandes enjambées, de peur de devenir garçons, comme Marie Germain. (I, 21, 99)
Passing through Vitry-le-François, I might have seen a man whom the bishop of Soissons had named Germain at confirmation, but whom all the inhabitants of that place had seen and known as a girl named Marie until the age of twenty-two. He was now heavily bearded, and old, and not married. Straining himself in some way in jumping, he says, his masculine organs came forth; and among the girls there a song is still current by which they warn each other not to take big strides for fear of becoming boys, like Marie Germain. (69)
In this tale of a girl chasing her pig in Vitry, we learn that not only gender but also sex is variable. If gender is a state of mind, then gender construction can miraculously operate sex changes. Although born Marie, when she acts like a man the robust activity of her inappropriate behavior magically inscribes the marks of sexuality on her body. In becoming a man, Marie/Germain takes on a particular body language that ultimately produces the biological sign of maleness. If gender is actively chosen, then sexuality is passively received as the fatal consequence of thinking difference.
In another example that precedes the Marie/Germain story, Montaigne quotes a line from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IX, 793) that refers to the topos of sexual transformation, suggesting the imagination’s preoccupation with sex. This line is the conclusion to the tale about a young girl who was born a female and raised as a boy in order to prevent her father from killing her. Engaged to marry a girl, Iphis, the beneficiary of her mother’s prayers underwent a metamorphosis and eventually received a penis to reflect the man within her: “Vota puer solvit, que foemina voverat Iphis” (“These offerings, vowed by Iphis as a maid, / By Iphis, now a man, are gladly paid”).8 To become a male thus requires acting like a man. Accordingly, a penis may be the biological mark of masculinity, but it is not the ultimate cause of becoming a man. Viewed from this perspective, the male member is regarded as a mere appendage, an outward sign, a consequence of habit and the potency generated by the force of the imagination.
Montaigne’s “sex-change operations” are therefore contingent upon the ways in which we construct ourselves through culturally coded gender roles. As it is represented in the text, gender functions as the variable cultural determinant of sex; it is involved in an ongoing revisionism of corporeal or biological identity. This is perhaps why Montaigne’s rewriting of Paré’s naturalistic explanation for Ma-rie/Germain’s “sex-change operation” is so revealing. According to Paré, “the reason why women can degenerate into men is because women have as much hidden within the body as men have exposed outside; leaving aside, only, that women don’t have so much heat, nor the ability to push out what by the coldness of their temperament is held bound to the interior.”9 Paré’s so-called clinical observations are physiologically rooted and independent of the performance of gender; sex changes, contingent on the outward movement of the concealed member, depend on bodily heat for their appearance. Of prime importance here is the way in which Paré views sex. Firmly rooted in an androcentric tradition dating back to Greek antiquity, his case study confirms the belief in an archetypal body, with men being more capable of realizing perfection.
Montaigne proceeds otherwise by adding a moral injunction to the denouement of Paré’s story. By treating the man trapped in a woman’s body as a psychic “reality,” the essayist suggests that the only way to control the other within the self is to give women penises as a way to regulate their desire and thereby obliterate the discrepancy between gender and sex:10 “Pour n’avoir si souvent à rechoir en mesme pensée et aspreté de desir, elle a meilleur compte d’incorporer, une fois pour toutes, cette virile partie aux filles” (I, 21, 99) (“In order not to have to relapse so often into the same thought and sharpness of desire, it is better off if once and for all it incorporates this masculine member in girls” [69]). The consubstantiality that Montaigne seems to be opting for here is merely an allegory of the need to create a more balanced, natural self that he conceives of as being thoroughly phallocentric in character. Ironically, the gift of the penis undermines women’s capacity to think “difference” by biologically reducing the other to the same and discretely establishing the primacy of the male member. Montaigne’s representation of the man within the woman ultimately gives birth to a male identity inscribed on a female body, only to claim for it the universalizing function of sexual indifference.
Montaigne’s text, however, cannot proceed without introducing ambiguities by suggesting that female desire functions as the generative force of the imagination. In Paré’s text the female imagination is described as being capable of giving birth to monstrous offspring. Paré suggests that such children result from the “ardent and obstinate imagination [impuissance] that the mother might receive at the moment she conceived—through some object or fantastic dream.”11 To be sure, Paré’s text foregrounds the passive character of the mother, who is forced to focus her gaze on the image of Saint John the Baptist during conception and thereby project the bestiality perceived in that image onto the figure of the child. Playing the role of moralist, Paré ends his observation with a didactic commentary destined to mitigate the power of the female imagination: “It is necessary that women—at the hour of conception when the child is not yet formed … not be forced to look at or imagine monstrous things.”12
In rewriting Paré’s text, Montaigne implictly challenges him for ascribing to the maternal imagination a psychic power that puts into question the supremacy of the biological power of sexual reproduction.
Tant y a que nous voyons par experience les femmes envoyer aux corps des enfans qu’elles portent au ventre des marques de leurs fantasies, tesmoing celle qui engendra le more. Et il fut presenté à Charles Roy de Boheme et Empereur […] esté ainsi conceue, à cause d’un’image de Sainct Jean Baptiste pendue en son lit. Des animaux il en est de mesmes, tesmoing les brebis de Jacob, et les perdris et les liēvres, que la neige blanchit aux montaignes. (I, 21, 105)
Nevertheless, we know by experience that women transmit marks of their fancies to the bodies of the children they carry in their womb; witness the one who gave birth to the Moor. And there was presented to Charles, king of Bohemia and Emperor, a girl from near Pisa, all hairy and bristly, who her mother said had been thus conceived because of a picture of Saint John the Baptist hanging by her bed. With animals it is the same: witness Jacob’s sheep, and the partridges and hares that the snow turns white in the mountains. (75)
Whereas in Paré’s version the female figure is forced to look, Montaigne’s account presents the story of a mother who focuses her gaze on John the Baptist’ss bestial form and thereby enables the power of her imagination to engender a monster. The result of this re-visionary practice suggests that the performance of gender, as it is enacted in this narrative, is one that allows for difference through the staging of desire. What we accept as natural in this context results from gender performativity.
The heart of Montaigne’s essay involves a discussion of impotence in men and the anxiety associated with sexual performance. In this context the penis becomes the focal point of the male body, the corporeal locus from which manliness might conceivably be “measured” and judged. The fear of inadequacy produces tension in the desiring subject stemming from the inability to conform to a phallic ideal characterized by strength and potency:
Je suis encore de cette opinion, que ces plaisantes liaisons, dequoy nostre monde se voit si entravé, qu’il ne se parle d’autre chose, ce sont volontiers des impressions de l’apprehension et de la crainte. Car je sçay par experience, que tel, de qui je puis respondre, comme de moy mesme, en qui il ne pouvoit choir soupçon aucune de foiblesse, et aussi peu d’enchantement, ayant ouy faire le conte à un sien compagnon, d’une defaillance extraordinaire, en quoy il estoit tombé sur le point, qu’il en avoit le moins de besoin, se trouvant en pareille occasion, l’horreur de ce conte lui vint à coup si rudement frapper l’imagination, qu’il en encourut une fortune pareille. (I, 21, 99–100)
I am still of this opinion, that those comical inhibitions by which our society is so fettered that people talk of nothing else are for the most part the effects of apprehension and fear. For I know by experience that one man, whom I can answer for as for myself, on whom there could fall no suspicion whatever of impotence and just as little of being enchanted, having heard a friend of his tell the story of an extraordinary impotence into which he had fallen at the moment when he needed it least, and finding himself in a similar situation, was all at once so struck in his imagination by the horror of this story that he incurred the same fate. (70)
The paradox of impotence is dramatized in the figurative language of the text, according to which the “tying” of the imagination corresponds to the idea of a decline or symbolic fall; stability is depicted as a form of imaginative impotence. The imagination, considered intermittently as the true seat of power, the place where manliness resides, reveals that the phallus (the symbolic) and the penis (the biological) are not always one and the same.13 Having a penis and being a male is no guarantee of being able to activate the manliness associated with the functioning of the imagination and the generation of libidinal energy.
Within the context of sixteenth-century thought, Montaigne’s essay seeks to distance itself from the more popularly conceived etiology of impotence.14 Based on the misogynist traditions associated with superstition, impotence was regarded as having roots in demonology. The ligatures, transcribed by the metaphor of “nouer l’aiguillette,” are defined as that which “empêche[r] le mari ou la femme … de se mettre en état d’accomplir, normalement et utilement, les rapprochements sexuels nécessaires à la propagation de l’espèce.”15 However, in Montaigne’s essay this symptomology—the impairment of biological functioning—appears to be a consequence of that which is phantasmatically constructed. Through a curious identification with a hypothetical friend, the subject of the narration (the voice representing Montaigne) describes how the fear evoked by the story of another’s impotence generates the malady itself: “La veue des angoisses d’autruy m’angoisse materiellement, et a mon sentiment souvent usurpé le sentiment d’un tiers” (I, 21, 97) (“The sight of other people’s anguish causes very real anguish to me, and my feelings have often usurped the feelings of others” [68]). In constructing the other as a masked version of the same, Montaigne’s text reveals how narrative (and language) can move the unsuspecting subject away from the body and paradoxically subjugate it to the effects of a horrific trope of potency that “lui vint à coup si rudement frapper l’imagination, qu’il en encourut une fortune pareille” (I, 21, 100) “was all at once so struck in his imagination … that he incurred the same fate” [70]).
On another level, however, impotence is produced by the conflict between desire and the dangers of intimacy: “Ce malheur n’est à craindre qu’aux entreprinses, où nostre ame se trouve outre mesure tandue de desir et respect” (I, 21, 100) (“This mishap is to be feared only in enterprises where our soul is immoderately tense with desire and respect” [70]). If respect is evoked as a hindrance to the realization of desire, it is because respect implies the need to control the excesses of sensuality—the monstrous within the self—and to remain within the boundaries of acceptable behavior. By keeping desire separate from sensuality, Montaigne’s text represents the fear of enjoying a woman’s body and experiencing the pleasures derived from making love. Potency, however, can only be achieved through the relaxation of the imagination—“sa pensée desbrouillée et desbandée, son corps se trouvant en son deu” (I, 21, 100) (“with his mind unembroiled and relaxed and his body in good shape” [70])—a phenomenon producing a fluidity of thought that literally “reembodies” the male subject with the “tool” of erectile force. In this context, then, the inflation of the male member operates independently of the biological position of power. Montaigne rewrites male subjectivity here: he brackets tension out of desire and lets the body transcend the masculine paradigm of erotic pursuit for an erotic responsiveness tempered by the moderation of female desire: “Or elles ont tort de nous recueillir de ces contenances mineuses, querelleuses et fuyardes, qui nous esteignent en nous allumant” (I, 21, 101) (“Now women are wrong to greet us with those threatening, quarrelsome, and coy countenances, which put out our fires even as they light them” [71]).
The “c” version of this essay contains the story of Louis de Foix, comte de Guerson, who fears impotence but is able to overcome it through a fantasy of empowerment realized through a surrogate object. Montaigne relates the story of a young friend who marries a woman previously courted by someone else. Frightened by the possibility of having his rival cast a spell on him resulting in impotence, the groom expresses great anxiety to Montaigne before the impending wedding. In a gesture of friendship Montaigne offers the friend a gold medal, a valued object, on which “estoient gravées quelques figures celestes, contre le coup de soleil et oster la douleur de teste” (I, 21, 100) (“were engraved some celestial figures, to protect against sunstroke and take away a headache” [71]). Beyond having the power to relieve bodily pain, the talisman can also induce pleasure by miraculously reversing impotence if the proper ceremonial procedures are adhered to. The gold piece is therefore invested with a surplus value; the inanity of the trick paradoxically grants it the “poids et reverence” (I, 21, 101) (“weight and reverence” [71]) necessary for generating an inflationary economy of desire. The will may well be incapable of curing impotence—“On a raison de remarquer l’indocile liberté de ce membre” (I, 12, 102) (“People are right to notice the unruly liberty of this member” [72])—but the power invested in the talisman by the imagination liberates the paralyzed libido through a cathectic transaction that temporarily shifts the focus of desire from the body to this mediator of magical thinking.
Believing himself the victim of a rival’s evildoing, on his wedding night the count is unable to consummate his marriage: “Il avoit eu l’ame et les oreilles si battues, qu’il se trouva lié du trouble de son imagination” (I, 21, 101) (“He had had his soul and his ears so battered that he did find himself fettered by the trouble of his imagination” [71]). Following Montaigne’s instructions to tie the gold piece around his waist so that it rests directly above the kidney, the groom “en toute asseurance … s’en retournast à son prix faict” (I, 21, 101) (“should return to his business with complete assurance” [71]). The medal thus achieves a desired effect. Virility, as represented here, is the consequence of magical thinking motivated by the psychic investment in a phantasmatic force:
Ces singeries sont le principal de l’effect: nostre pensée ne se pouvant desmesler que moyens si estranges ne viennent de quelqu’abstruse science… . Somme, il fut certain que mes characteres se trouverent plus Veneriens que Solaires, plus en action qu’en prohibition. (I, 21, 101)
These monkey tricks are the main part of the business, our mind being unable to get free of the idea that such strange means must come from some abstruse science… . All in all, it is certain that the characters on my medal proved themselves more venereal than solar, more useful for action than for prevention. (71)
However comic this may appear, the realization of potency is nevertheless the work of the wish itself. The medal takes on a counterfeit value, enabling the amorous subject to transcend the paralysis of his own nonbeing. This identificatory bond takes hold of the subject and engages him in a mimetic relation whereby the ego temporarily becomes the object of desire. By displacing the excessive desire for success from the impotent subject to the gold coin, the text “allows the marital act to regain a beneficial and ‘natural’ indifference”16 Ironically, the process of naturalization is realized through a fiction-making process, represented as a simulacrum of the “real,” a phenomenon that once again blurs the distinction between the biological and the symbolic.
Montaigne’s story thus enacts a dramatic scenario in which the desired wish is presented as having been fulfilled by a surrogate object. The subject of the wish—the bridegroom—has no sense of manliness prior to the enactment of a mediated fantasy since it is only in fantasy that the desire for potency can be granted. To be sure, the fantasy attached to the gold medal induces desire and directs it. Beyond the confines of the patriarchal power structure, which depends on the other for value to be confirmed, the fantasy of potency put forth here constitutes a simulation of manliness on the part of the desiring subject. Indeed, manliness may be more an illusion and a subterfuge than a “psychic” reality:17
Nostre discours 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. (III, 11, 1027)
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 and on fullness, and with inanity as with matter: Suited to give solidity to smoke. PERSIUS (785)
Montaigne’s remedy thus naturalizes the artificiality of the cure by giving it potency in the count’s imagination: “Il y a des autheurs, desquels la fin c’est dire les evenemens. La mienne, si j’y sçavoye advenir, seroit dire sur ce qui peut advenir” (I, 21, 105–6) (“There are authors whose end is to tell what has happened. Mine, if I could attain it, would be to talk about what can happen” [75]). In recounting this story, the essayist seeks to satisfy a potentially “threatened” gender role. If the inadequacies of nature are compensated for by the artistry of creative fantasies, it is because manliness is not just a biological issue but one involving storytelling and narrative verisimilitude. Like the essayist’s quest to extract artistry from the disorder of the “monstres fantasques,” the artificially induced cure for impotence represents the attempt to neutralize difference. It acts as a means of controlling nature and paradoxically demonstrates that the “natural” depends as much on the plausibility of fantasy as it does on anything else. We thus construct nature by means of our imagination, a medium through which reality can assure “being.” Or can it? That seems to be the question Montaigne addresses when he suddenly suggests that these narratives of fantastic sex changes might simply be a product of someone else’s fantastic imagination, whose “mollesse” leaves the mind vulnerable to errancy: “Il est vray semblable que le principal credit des miracles, des visions, des enchantemens et de tels effects extraordinaire, vienne de la puissance de l’imagination agissant principalement contre les ames du vulgaire, plus molles” (I, 21, 99) (“It is probable that the principal credit of miracles, visions, enchantements, and such extraordinary occurrences comes from the power of imagination, acting principally upon the minds of the common people, which are softer” [70]).
The rhetorical acrobatics in Montaigne’s text suggest that the self is figured through an other whose gender differences have their own logic: “Mes fantasies se suyvent, mais par fois c’est de loing, et se regardent, mais d’une veuë oblique” (III, 9, 994) (“My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance” [761]). If the penis does not necessarily make the man in the fictions of the Essays, it most certainly can reify the image of the man trapped within a woman’s body. To be sure, the workings of nature reveal themselves as much in the unpredictability of the biological as in the consequences generated by the monstrous (from monere, the power to portend) predictability of the phantasmatically invested: “Aussi en l’estude que je traitte de noz mœurs et mouvemens, les tesmoignages fabuleux, pourveu qu’ils soient possibles, y servent comme les vrais” (I, 21, 105) (“So in the study that I am making of our behavior and motives, fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones” [75]).
However, in order to overcome impotence and the resistances within the self, in a post-1588 annotation to the essay Montaigne ultimately proposes the “talking cure” as a way to moderate tension and give form to the monstrous perception of difference in the spectacle of language: “Il trouva quelque remede à cette resverie par une autre resverie. C’est que, advouant luy mesmes et preschant avant la main cette sienne subjection, la contention de son ame se soulageoit sur ce, qu’apportant ce mal comme attendu, son obligation en amoindrissoit et luy en poisoit moins” (I, 21, 100) (“He found some remedy for this fancy by another fancy: which was that by admitting this weakness and speaking about it in advance, he relieved the tension of his soul, for when the trouble had been presented as one to be expected, his sense of responsibility diminished and weighed upon him less” [70]). By speaking about impotence and incorporating it in the natural order of things as something to be expected (“ce mal comme attendu”), the desiring subject makes the speaker known for what he is and makes this self-knowledge somehow less monstrous. This “record” of thought embodied in language not only neutralizes difference but engenders its own set of rules functioning on its own terms: “Les miracles sont selon l’ignorance en quoy nous sommes de la nature, non selon l’etre de la nature. L’asseufaction endort la veuë de nostre jugement” (I, 23, 112) (“Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from the essence of nature. Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment” [80]). In writing, as in speaking, the register of thought represents the unevenness of the human condition and suggests that the paralyzing fancies of the imagination can be recuperated and transformed through discursive formations. Only gradually does one come to realize through a series of exemplary narratives that the idealized orderliness that Montaigne sought to impose on his “fantastic monsters” was but a way of transforming what could be perceived as strangeness into a new measure of gender: “Je n’ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m’a faict” (II, 18, 665) (“I have no more made my book than my book has made me” [504]). If the goal of the book was originally to articulate the “natural,” the act of essaying has created yet another, more perfect nature figured in this work of art and destined to tame the monster within: “Me peignant pour autruy, je me suis peint en moy de couleurs plus nettes que n’estoyent les miennes premieres” (II, 18, 665) (“Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones” [504]).