Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in “Des boyteux” (III, 11)
Les boiteux sont mal propres aux exercices du corps; et aux exercices de l’esprit les ames boiteuses; les bastardes et vulgaires sont indignes de la philosophie. (I, 25, 141)
Cripples are ill-suited to bodily exercises, and crippled souls to mental exercises. (104)
C’est par mon experience que j’accuse l’humaine ignorance, qui est, à mon advis, le plus seur party de l’escole du monde. (III, 13, 1075–76)
It is from experience that I affirm human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the most certain fact in the school of the world.
(p. 824)
Et au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul. (III, 13, 1115)
On the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our rump. (857)
COGNITION, MIRACLES, AND MONSTERS
The relationship between the exemplum of cripples and the theme of causality is central to Montaigne’s representation of the monster in the essay “Des boyteux” (III, 11) (“On Cripples”). The question of causality is discussed early in the essay in order to set in motion an epistemological critique whose target is the weakness of human reason. Montaigne specifically focuses on the defects of human understanding and our need to shift attention away from things ( choses ) in order to reflect more closely on their causes ( causes ). Nevertheless, by engaging in this wordplay the essayist ironically links things to causes and thereby transforms reason into a form of amusement incorporating fiction and desire:
Je ravassois presentement, comme je faicts souvant, sur ce, com-bien l’humaine raison est un instrument libre et vague. Je vois ordinairement que les hommes, aux faicts qu’on leur propose, s’amusent plus volontiers à en cercher la raison qu’à en cercher la verité: ils laissent là les choses, et s’amusent à traiter les causes! plaisants causeurs. (III, 11, 1026)
I was just now musing, as I often do, on how free and vague an instrument human reason is. I see ordinarily that men, when facts are put before them, are more ready to amuse themselves by inquiring into their reasons than by inquiring into their truth. They leave aside the cases and amuse themselves treating the causes. Comical Prattlers. (785)
In differentiating between facts and causes, Montaigne wishes to suggest a concept of being that is conditioned by the artificial contrivances of causality. The essay demonstrates how the quest for causes engages us in a retrospective attempt to inscribe the teleological as the basis for a purposeful and predetermined development. Engaged in a logic based on the affinity of a given sign or act with its specific object, those “comical prattlers” to whom Montaigne refers (as those “plaisants causeurs”) invoke fictions aimed at establishing the sovereignty of reference.
For Montaigne the constitution of meaning for these vanity-stricken subjects is based on the productive power of the imagination, which makes judgments circulate and consequently blurs the boundary between representation and reality. Generated by the force of the imagination, what we call “reason” trades upon naive referential assumptions whose fabrications are nothing less than the presumptive passage from cause to effect: “Ces exemples servent-ils pas à ce que je disois au commencement: que nos raisons anticipent souvent l’effect, et ont l’estendue de leur jurisdiction si infinie, qu’elles jugent et s’exercent en l’inanité mesme et au non estre?” (III, 11, 1034; “Do not these examples confirm what I was saying at the beginning that our reasons often anticipate the fact, and extend their jurisdiction so infinitely that they exercise their judgment even in inanity and non-being?” [791). The faculty of expression is capable of inventing verbal constructs whose foundation is built upon a simulacrum of richness and plenitude derived from the interaction of signs with other signs. With this in mind, Montaigne situates reason in the hyperreality of simulations where images and spectacles nurture a form of thought frozen in a sterile process of invented logic that introduces an unnatural force into the economy of living nature: “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” (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 as on fullness, and with inanity as with matter” [785]).
By associating reason with discourse, Montaigne represents defective thinking, the deformities of the mind, through a trope whose conceptual or explanatory force is derived from the idea of running or the random motion produced by the peripatetic energy derived from error (from the Latin errare ): “Il n’est rien si soupple et erratique que nostre entendement” (III, 11, 1034) (“There is nothing so supple and erratic as our understanding” [792]). At the very least, a strong affinity is established here between cognition and the kinetic force of language, where meaning opens itself up to the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration through the presumptuous activity of human understanding: “Nous sommes tous contraints et amoncellez en nous, et avons la veue racourcie à la longueur de nostre nez… . Nous sommes insensiblement tous en cette erreur: erreur de grande suite et prejudice” (I, 26, 157) (“We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose… . We are all unconsciously in this error, an error of great consequence and harm” [116]). If discourse stands in the service of logic, it is in order to project pseudotruths that are the product of the unbridled wandering of the imagination. In the essay “De l’oisiveté” (I, 8) (“On Idleness”) Montaigne describes “tant de chimeres et monstres fantasques les uns sur les autres, sans ordre, et sans propos” (I, 8, 33) (“so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose” [21]).
In “Des boyteux” Montaigne uses the figure of deformity to describe the monstrous representations that the imagination is capable of engendering though the power of unbridled speculation. The desire to create something out of nothing produces an effect that is the result of reason’s error: “Nos raisons anticipent souvent l’effect, et ont l’estendue de leur jurisdiction si infinie, qu’elles jugent et s’exercent en l’inanité mesme et au non estre?” (III, 11, 1034) (“Our reasons often anticipate the fact, and extend their jurisdiction so infinitely that they exercise their judgment even in inanity and non-being?” [791]). In describing the exaggerated shape that his own discourse takes, Montaigne relates the epistemological thrust of the rhetorical dimension of language. The inflationary economy of discourse depicted by Montaigne unsettles the solidity of truth and enables it to reverberate in the inflections of a voice that dissociates cognition from performance. Montaigne dramatically proclaims:
Moy-mesme, qui faicts singuliere conscience de mentir et qui ne me soucie guiere de donner creance et authorité à ce que je dis, m’apperçoy toutesfois, aux propos que j’ay en main, qu’estant eschauffé ou par la resistance d’un autre ou par la propre chaleur de la narration, je grossis et enfle mon subject par vois, mouvemens, vigueur et force de parolles, et encore par extention et amplification, non sans interest de la verité nayfve… . La parole vive et bruyante, comme est la mienne ordinaire, s’emporte volontiers à l’hyperbole. (III, 11, 1028)
I myself, who am singularly scrupulous about lying and who scarcely concern myself with giving credence and authority to what I say, perceive nevertheless that when I am excited over a matter I have in hand, either by another man’s resistance or by the intrinsic heat of the narration, I magnify and inflate my subject by voice, movements, vigor and power of words, and further by extension and amplification, not without prejudice to the simple truth… . A lively and noisy way of speaking, such as mine ordinarily is apt to be carried away into hyperbole. (786)
The hyperbolic power of language generates a logic of deformation and a deformation of logic; humankind nurtures this monstrous presence through the construction of differences that are merely the effects of rhetorical transformations. “Les autheurs,” claims Montaigne, “mesmes plus serrez et plus sages, voiez autour d’un bon argument combien ils en sement d’autres legers et, qui y regarde de pres, incorporels” (III, 12, 1039– 40) (“Authors, even the most compact and the wisest—around one good argument see how many others they strew, trivial ones, and if you look at them closely, bodiless” [795]).
To be sure, the tropological complexities of Montaigne’s text puts forth a series of figural exchanges in which architectural metaphors are used to represent the instability of knowledge that is accepted as firmly established. Montaigne draws on an example of so-called fact as it passes from one person to another, in the act undergoing a decentering process whose sheer excessiveness might be qualified as a form of monstrousness: “Ainsi va tout ce bastiment, s’estoffant et formant de main en main: de maniere que le plus esloigné tesmoin en est mieux instruict que le plus voisin, et le dernier informé mieux per-suadé que le premier” (III, 11, 1028) (“Thus the whole structure goes on building itself up and shaping itself from hand to hand; so that the remotest witness is better instructed about it than the nearest, and the least informed more convinced of it than the first” [786]). The speed by which knowledge is relayed suggests a process of infinite substitution whereby the repetition of information creates a newly reinvented truth whose differentiality from its site of conception projects a return that is never the same. As stories grow and spread, truth is dissipated, with the “real” deriving from the illusion that the further one strays from the truth the closer one gets to it. As Montaigne suggests, when we are challenged regarding the veracity of what was heard, we get “carried away” by the excitement of speaking to the extent that we defend claims that are unsubstantiated by facts.
Within the context of the essay “Des boyteux,” ignorance thus acquires a strikingly positive value at the expense of absolute knowledge, which is represented as a form of mastery that restrains the production of meaning to the finality prefigured in its beginnings. As Montaigne astutely notes:
Ny le vin n’en est plus plaisant à celuy qui en sçait les facultez premieres. Au contraire!: et le corps et l’ame interrompent et alterent le droit qu’ils ont de l’usage du monde, y meslant l’opinion de science. Le determiner et le sçavoir, comme le don-ner, appartient à la regence et à la maistrise; à l’inferiorité, subjection et apprentissage appartient le jouyr, l’accepter. (III, 11, 1026)
Nor is wine pleasanter to the man who knows its primary properties. On the contrary, both the body and the soul disturb and alter the right they have to the enjoyment of the world by mixing into it the pretension to learning. Determining and knowing, like giving, appertains to rule and mastery; to inferiority, subjection, and apprenticeship appertains enjoyment and acceptance. (785)
The presumption of knowing inevitably extinguishes pleasure and extricates it from the place where it may achieve a kind of plenitude in the bliss of ignorance. The rejection of mastery situates the subject in a position of apprenticeship (implicitly associated with the act of “essaying”) that enables it to transform its inadequacy into a form of enjoyment derived from the absence of “objective” content. Yet humankind’s attempt to be causative and to determine meaning provides the basic matrix for the compulsive attitude that imprisons the vain subject in (metaphorically speaking) a “phallic mode” that can never be associated with unmitigated enjoyment. In short, the essay transmits an ethical stance that refuses to ignore the void that is at the core of human subjectivity and that ultimately gives rise to the vicissitudes of desire.
Montaigne begins his essay with a discussion of the reform of the calendar by Gregory XIII in 1582, the inability to establish true chronology, and the difficulty of recording a history of the past. What was conceived of as an apocalyptic transformation in the way time is measured ended up failing to effect any real change at all:
Il y a deux ou trois ans qu’on acoursit l’an de dix jours en France. Combien de changemens devoient suyvre cette reformation… . Mes voisins trouvent l’heure de leurs semences, de leur recolte, l’opportunité de leurs negoces, les jours nuisibles et propices, au mesme point justement où ils les avoyent assignez de tout temps. (III, 11, 1025–26)
It is two or three years since they shortened the year by ten days in France. How many changes were supposed to follow this reform! … My neighbors find the hour for sowing and reaping, the opportune moment for their business, the harmful and propitious days, exactly at the same point to which they had always assigned them. (784)
In essence, the attempt to be causative in reforming the calendar, as Louis Richeome suggests in Trois discours pour la religion catholique (1597), is simply an example of a false miracle.1 Instead of producing a wondrous transformation, what one witnesses in the reform of the calendar is the epistemological importance attributed to the workings of reason and its attempt to regulate the processing of time: “Ny l’erreur ne se sentoit en nostre usage, ny l’amendement ne s’y sent” (II, 11, 1026) (“Neither was the error felt in our habits, nor is the improvement felt” [784]). The artificiality of this so-called scientific invention contrasts strikingly with the natural movement intuited through cyclical time: “Tant il y a d’incertitude par tout, tant nostre apercevance est grossiere, obscure et obtuse” (III, 11, 1026) (“So much uncertainty there is in all things: so gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception!” [784]). Here Montaigne mocks those who assign cosmic meaning to that which is only a false miracle.
At the center of this essay is a discussion of the nature of miracles. By playing on the etymology of the word miracle (derived from the Latin miraculum, object of wonder), Montaigne enables it to intersect with the concept of the monster (derived from the Latin monstrum, to show) in order to demonstrate how external representations over-determine the way in which we experience the world: “Si nous appellons monstres ou miracles ce où nostre raison ne peut aller, com-bien s’en presente il continuellement à nostre veue?” (I, 27, 179) (“If we call prodigies [monsters] or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes!” [132]). To be sure, miracles are admirable, a product of the human imagination and a cause for wonderment.2 As Richard Regosin suggests, “We can say … that Montaigne’s monster is that which is shown and which shows itself, and which shows what it is, that it is.”3 The force of the imagination thus has a mesmerizing effect, leading to the collapse of boundaries between the visual and the cognitive: “Tant il y a d’incertitude par tout, tant nostre apercevance est grossiere, obscure et obtuse” (III, 11, 1026) “So much uncertainty there is in all things: so gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception!” [784]).
In the writing of the text, the essayist attempts to represent the marvelous as the recognition of an unusual experience, a spectacle that is both different and beyond the scope of our perception. The wonders that give the “strange” sign what value it has are themselves effects of difference that produce a feeling of alienation through a cognitive myopia that draws on our propensity to be fearful: “Nos tre veue represente ainsi souvent de loing des images estranges, qui s’esvanouissent en s’approchant.” (III, 11, 1029) (“Our sight often represents strange images at a distance which vanish as they approach” [787]). 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.4 Faced with the monstrosity of difference, one reduces the perceived aberration of otherness through a process of recuperation that has a neutralizing effect: “On s’apprivoise à toute estrangeté par l’usage et le temps” (III, 11, 1029) (“We become habituated to anything strange by use and time” [787]). What is most startling here is the change to which strangeness is subjected rather than that which humanity undergoes. If time and spatial proximity make strangeness familiar, it is because strangeness is but a “symptom” of our own inexperience before the threatening diversity of the world. In “D’un enfant monstrueux” (“Of a Monstrous Child”) Montaigne asserts: “Nous apelons contre nature ce qui advient contre la coustume: rien n’est que selon elle, quel qu’il soit” (II, 30, 713) (“We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be” [539]).
Throughout the essay Montaigne’s text foregrounds the disintegration of the increasing unreliability of the witness and the ability to represent “experience” in language. Initially deformity is more a function of thinking than it is an anatomical consideration: “C’est merveille, de combien vains commencemens et frivoles causes nais-sent ordinairement si fameuses impressions” (III, 11, 1029) (“It is a marvel from what empty beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions ordinarily spring” [787]). What is characterized as a miracle in Renaissance thought is integrally linked to the notion of admiratio (derived from the Latin for “to wonder or marvel at”), a concept combining epistemological and causal concerns and based, more often than not, on the visual processing of knowledge.
Drawing upon models found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Horace’s Epistles, Montaigne’s essay narrates how testimonial stances, produced by the act of seeing, combine perception with incomprehension and transform them into facts that are the result of ignorance:5 “Iris est fille de Thaumantis. L’admiration est fondement de toute philosophie, l’inquisition le progrez, l’ignorance le bout” (III, 11, 1030) “Iris is the daughter of Thaumas. Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end” [788]). By failing to read visual signs with deep understanding, humanity is prone to find greatness in that which is most distant and incomprehensible. To witness a miracle is thus to fall prey to the self-deceiving nature of one’s vanity, which ultimately produces a situation in which the viewer looks but does not really quite understand. Montaigne’s writerly testimony bears witness to the monstrosity of our judgment and the strangeness of our reason, its “erreur et estonnement.” At times he even goes so far as to suggest an epistemological equation between “looking” and “lacking.” Yet what is perceived as being truly extraordinary, as in the case of divine miracles, should be distinguished from what is merely admirable: “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 comprinses; et est à croire que cette figure qui nous estonne, se rapporte et tient à quelque autre figure de mesme genre inconnu à l’homme” (II, 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” [539]). Montaigne consequently warns us against trying to understand what is beyond our comprehension without being authorized to do so: “De ce qui est hors de sa conception et d’un effect supernaturel, il en doit estre creu lors seulement qu’une approbation supernaturelle l’a authorisé. Ce privilege qu’il a pleu à Dieu donner à aucuns de nos tesmoignages ne doibt pas estre avily et communiqué legerement” (III, 11, 1031) (“What is beyond his conception and of supernatural effect, he should be believed only when some supernatural approbation has sanctioned him. This privilege that it has pleased God to give to some of our testimonies must not be cheapened and communicated lightly” [789]).
In the context of miracles, Montaigne’s essay also explores the phenomenon of witchcraft in early modern France by drawing on arguments found in the preface to Jean Bodin’s De la demonomanie des sorciers (1580). Bodin here opts for the belief in supernatural effects without grounding them in an accurately defined causality.6 As Richard Sayce has suggested, Montaigne composed his essay at a time when the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of its followers had reached its peak.7 In this essay, however, Montaigne indirectly inveighs against Bodin, who attacks those skeptics—the “maistres doubteurs”—concerning the “reality” of witchcraft. Montaigne engages in an epistemic critique of those, such as Bodin, who pursue witches through unusual reasoning and thereby ironically provoke their persecution. The immoderation of the believers in witchcraft permits Montaigne not to condemn them “de fauceté leur opinion” (III, 11, 1031) (“[for] holding a false opinion” [789]). On the contrary, he proclaims with great force: “Je ne l’accuse que de difficulté et de hardiesse, et condamne l’affirmation opposite, egalement avec eux sinon si imperieusement. Videantur sanè, ne affirmentur modo ” (III, 11, 1031) (“I accuse them only of holding a difficult and rash one [opinion], and condemn the opposite affirmation, just as they do, if not so imperiously. Let them appear as probable, not be affirmed positively [Cicero]” [789]).
To be sure, if Montaigne condemns witch-hunting, his goal is not so much to defend the supernatural acts of the unfortunate witches as it is to question the presumption derived from the belief in certitude: “Les sorcieres de mon voisinage courent hazard de leur vie, sur l’advis de chaque nouvel autheur qui vient donner corps à leurs songes” (III, 11, 1031) (“The witches of my neighborhood are in mortal danger every time some new author comes along and attests to the reality of their visions” [788]). By minimizing the miraculous power of the witches, comparatively speaking, the essayist engages in an unmitigated critique of the irrational discourse of scholars who paradoxically ascribe to witchcraft a potency that does not exist. In an attempt to purge the poison that demonology has become, writers such as Bodin serve to reify the omnipresence of this “folly.” Reason itself cannot escape the inanity produced by the errancy of the imagination. As the essay unfolds, it renders the demoniacal somewhat normative so that it may be juxtaposed against the demonization of the monstrous.
In the course of the argument, the supernatural activities of the witches become far less threatening than the monstrous reasoning articulated by their accusers.8 The abuse of knowledge alluded to here inflicts blindness upon our acts of seeing and functions as an assault on an utterly proofless reality: “Il s’engendre beaucoup d’abus au monde ou, pour le dire plus hardiment, tous les abus du monde s’engendrent de ce qu’on nous apprend à craindre de faire profession de nostre ignorance, et que nous sommes tenus d’accepter tout ce que nous ne pouvons refuter” (III, 11, 1030) (“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 and our being bound to accept everything that we can-not refuse” [788]). Abuse derives from our inability to see ourselves for what we are; the power of distortion is demonstrated by the need to know and the desire to tell. General testimony becomes impossible because it proves difficult to distinguish the true from the false. Accordingly, the essayist’s desire for moderation and skepticism before the hyperbolic power of the imagination reveals the extent to which he believes that we are caught up in representations and simulations of the monstrous: “On me faict hayr les choses vray-semblables quand on me les plante pour infallibles. J’ayme ces mots, qui amollissent et moderent la temerité de nos propositions!: a l’avanture, aucunement, quelque, on dict, je pense, et semblables” (III, 11, 1030) (“It makes me hate probable things when they are planted on me as infallible. I like these words, which soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions: ‘perhaps,’‘to some extent,’‘some,’‘they say,’‘I think,’and the like” [788]).
If the identity of the unusual is known only from the projection of external features, it is because we traditionally witness the monstrous as that which resists understanding and categorization within the taxonomies of what culture defines as natural. Within this framework Montaigne’s essay discretely combines epistemological and ontological concerns: “Je n’ay veu monstre et miracle au monde plus ex-pres 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” (III, 11, 1029) (“I have 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). Ironically, the variety of miracles one perceives outside of oneself emanates from the strangeness within the self, the grotesque way in which we process reality and interpret it according to the whims of our imagination. The chimera and monsters that the mind produces make the essayist a narcissistic observer of his mind’s monstrous progeny: “Nous aymons à nous embrouiller en la vanité, comme conforme à nostre estre” (III, 11, 1027) “We love to embroil ourselves in vanity, as something in conformity with our being” [786]).
The book that Montaigne writes functions as a receptacle that is, paradoxically, filled with “crotesques” (I, 28, 183), the result of epistemological and ontological emptiness: “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 fortuite?” (I, 28, 138) (“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?” [135]). Within this context, error is the result of humanity’s failure to accept the inadequacies of the self, the errors that make it what it is. Nevertheless, the only way to cope with the crippled judgment endemic to the human condition is to transform oneself into a spectacle, an object to be seen in all its deformity, which ultimately becomes what the word “monster” literally signifies: “Qui veut guerir de l’ignorance, il faut la confesser” (III, 11, 1030) (“Anyone who wants to be cured of ignorance must confess it” [788]). The spectacle that defines the monster and that tries (“essaie”) to cure us of the malady of ignorance facilitates an attempt to overcome the problematic relationship of language to truth by conferring form on the text of the essay.9 Montaigne’s acceptance of self-deficiency, represented by the rambling and inconstant motion of his mind, enables him to acquire strength through the power of a writerly gait that proceeds at an uneven pace (“à sauts et à gambades”) as it stumbles along the circuitous path to self-knowledge. The assumption of a Socratic docta ignorantia enables the essayist to be seen as he is, and in this exhibitionist pose of self-portraiture (from the Latin protrahere, to draw out, disclose, or reveal) he is able to come into much closer contact with the monstrous deformities that might otherwise escape him. The desire to write is concomitant with the monstrous externalization of his inner phantasms. Thus, Montaigne’s essay confirms that the opposition between the natural and the unnatural is artificially constructed and that the monstrous is but a manifestation of the diversity within nature itself: “Rien n’est que selon elle [nature], quel qu’il soit” (II, 30, 713) (“Nothing is anything but according to nature, wherever it may be” [539]).
MONTAIGNE AND MARTIN GUERRE
In the course of the essay, the acknowledgment of the limitations of human inquiry gains symbolic value; the recognition of impairment carries with it a newly found ability to see. It is therefore not surprising that one finds embedded within the essay “Des boyteux” a selective retelling of the famous sixteenth-century story of Martin Guerre, a tale partly derived from presiding judge Jean de Coras’s 1566 legal account, “Arrest memorable du parlement de Tolose.” a tale that allegorizes the epistemological and ontological issues in Montaigne’s essay. The insertion of the Toulouse case in the essay ostensibly relates to the defense against the persecution of witches. However, as Natalie Zemon Davis points out in her analysis of the story, as a young man Guerre lived in a household where “he had to cope not just with one but with two powerful male personalities who both had fiery tempers.”10 Having married at an early age, Guerre was ashamed of his precarious sexuality, in particular his inability to achieve an erection and consummate his marriage.11 Bertrande’s marriage bed had been the locus of impotence for eight years, during which the couple believed they were the victims of a magic spell. However, even after he had finally consummated his marriage, Guerre abandoned his wife and newborn son, Sanxi, because of his fear of impending paternal punishment for minor theft. He decided to go off and fight a war in Spain, where he was wounded. During his absence, another man named Arnaud Du Tilh appeared, who declared himself to be the “real” Martin Guerre and was accepted by the villagers and by Guerre’s wife. When a disagreement over family property ensued and Guerre’s impersonator commited a number of blunders, a trial took place, the outcome of which reaffirmed the false identity of the impostor. It was only when the court was on the verge of accepting this travesty of justice that the real Martin Guerre suddenly reappeared, entering the courtroom on crutches, thus belatedly revealing his identity through the visual evidence of lameness. The arrival of the lame man paradoxically dramatizes this exemplary fiction, for it ironically foregrounds Arnaud’s “im-posture” by no longer providing him with a “leg” to stand on. The public sentencing of Arnaud du Tilh, who is accused of spreading evil spirits, recalls the earlier referenece in the essay to Bodin’s discourse on witchcraft and demonology. Interestingly, the term “imposture” resurfaces to describe Arnaud, as it had once done in characterizing the “sorcerers.”
Although Montaigne does not call our attention to the question of Martin Guerre’s lameness in his retelling of the narrative, the recognition of lameness and monstrosity for those familiar with the story of the trial become sources of re-vision that ultimately lead to knowledge. Not only does Guerre function as the bearer of truth, but his appearance puts into question the absolutism that characterizes the inflexible nature of our judgment. In a way Martin Guerre’s deformity carries with it a kind of strength, for the man who stumbles, limps, and advances slowly, the tardy cripple who appears at the end of the trial, comes to embody truth.
The figure who emerges from the story is both erotically and anatomically different. In this text the delusory nature of conventional masculinity is put into question on a symbolic level, for the monstrosity constituting Guerre’s difference derives from the representation of a de-phallicized and imperfect male body. Ironically, the man who was incapable of achieving an erection is responsible for the “arrest” (sentence) that stops, stabilizes, and reifies the so-called truth. Moreover, the man who limps and is phallicly limp (and perhaps impotent) symbolically challenges the hypothesis of what modern terminology refers to as the psychoanalytically anchored phallus/penis equation. Like Montaigne, who draws attention to his own sluggishness, and the cripple, whose arrival is quite long in coming, the essayist proclaims that the education of the ideal student must become an exercise in learning, one whose path toward knowledge must be slow, halting, and nondeliberate: “Et si j’eusse eu à dresser des enfans, je leur eusse tant mis en la bouche cette façon de respondre, enquesteuse, non resolutive!: qu’est-ce à dire? Je ne l’entends pas, il pour-roit estre, est-il vray?” (III, 11, 1030) (“If I had to train children, I would have filled their mouths so much with this way of answering, inquiring, not decisive—‘What does that mean? I do not understand it. That might be. Is it true?’” [788]). Quite clearly, the de-phallicized approach to knowledge practiced by the essayist is revealed in his relation to the symbolic as it is experienced at the level of the imaginary: “Qui establit son discours par braverie et commandement montre que la raison y est foible” (III, 11, 1031) “He who imposes his argument by bravado and command shows that it is weak in reason” [789]).
Interestingly, although Montaigne appears to valorize lameness indirectly, he is also quick to condemn the excesses of justice, as exemplified by the judge of Toulouse, who condemns a man to be hanged without the benefit of fully substantiated evidence against him. On the contrary, Montaigne would have opted for suspending his judgment before the lameness of his reason:
Il me souvient (et ne me souvient aussi d’autre chose) qu’il me sembla avoir rendu l’imposture de celuy qu’il jugea coulpable si merveilleuse et excedant de si loing nostre connoissance, et la sienne qui estoit juge, que je trouvay beaucoup de hardiesse en l’arrest qui l’avoit condamné à estre pendu. Recevons quelque forme d’arrest qui die: la court n’y entend rien, plus librement et ingenuement que ne firent les Areopagites, lesquels, se trouvans pressez d’une cause qu’ils ne pouvoient desveloper, ordonnerent que les parties en viendroient à cent ans.(III, II, I033–34)
He seemed to me, in describing the imposture of the man he judged guilty, to make it so marvelous and so far surpassing our knowledge and his own, who was judge, that I found much rashness in the sentence that has condemned the man to be hanged. Let us accept some form of sentence which says “The court understands nothing of the matter,” more freely and ingenuously than did the Areopagites, who, finding themselves hard pressed by a case that they could not unravel, ordered the parties to come back in a hundred years. (788)
If in this essay the cripple is figured as the carrier of truth, the judge is presented as the arrogant enforcer of the law: “Combien ayje veu de condemnations, plus crimineuses que le crime?” (III, 13, 1071) (“How many condemnations I have seen more criminal than the crime!” [819–20]). In this context, the overriding judicial metaphor contributes significantly to a sense of changelessness and the stability associated with phallic identification. The posture (from the Latin positura, position) that Montaigne wishes to put forward derives from the need to eradicate the difference between dominance and opposition: “Je suis d’avis que nous soustenons nostre jugement aussi bien à rejetter qu’à recevoir… . Ma creance ne se manie pas à coups de poing.” (III, 11, 1030 –31) (“It is my opinion that we should suspend our judgment just as much in the direction of rejecting as of accepting … My belief is not controlled by anyone’s fists” [788, 789]). By adopting a more mediocre posture, the essayist permits himself the flexibility that ironically empowers him.
CRIPPLES AND FEMALE DESIRE
If difference is an issue in this essay, the exemplary rarity constituting the monstrous is used as a tool to valorize the representation of female desire. Near the end of the essay, a direct reference is finally made to cripples and the novelty of corporeal imperfections. Here the essayist transforms the female body into the locus of libidinal investment as well as the object of specular surveillance. He suggests in a somewhat matter-of-fact way the deep pleasure derived from making love with a lame person, whose sexual energy becomes more potent due to the lack of movement of the limbs:
A propos ou hors de propos, il n’importe, on dict en Italie, en commun proverbe, que celuy-là ne cognoit pas venus en sa par-faicte douceur qui n’a couché avec la boiteuse. La fortune, ou quelque particulier accident, ont mis il y a long temps ce mot en la bouche du peuple; et se dict des masles comme des femelles. Car la Royne des amazonnes respondit au scyte qui la convioit à l’amour: arista cholos oiphei, le boiteux le faict le mieux. En cette republique feminine, pour fuir la domination des masles, elles les stropioient des l’enfance, bras, jambes et autres membres qui leur donnoient avantage sur elles, et se servoient d’eux à ce seulement à quoy nous nous servons d’elles par deçà. J’eusse dict que le mouvement detraqué de la boiteuse apportast quelque nouveau plaisir à la besongne et quelque pointe de douceur à ceux qui l’essayent, mais je viens d’apprendre que mesme la philosophie ancienne en a decidé: elle dict que, les jambes et cuisses des boiteuses ne recevant, à cause de leur imperfection, l’aliment qui leur est deu, il en advient que les parties genitales, qui sont au dessus, sont plus plaines, plus nourries et vigoureuses. Ou bien que, ce defaut empeschant l’exercice, ceux qui en sont entachez dissipent moins leurs forces et en viennent plus entiers aux jeux de venus. (III, II, I033–34)
Apropos or malapropos, no matter, they say in Italy as a common proverb that he does not know Venus in her perfect sweetness who has not lain with a cripple. In that feminine commonwealth, to escape the domination of the males, they crippled them from childhood—arms, legs, and other parts that gave men an advantage over them—and made use of them only for the purpose for which we made use of women over here. I would have said that the irregular movement of the lame woman brought some new pleasure to the business and a spice of sweetness to those who try it. But I have just learned that ancient philosophy, no less, has decided the question. It says that since the legs and thighs of lame women, because of their imperfection, do not receive the food that is their due, the result is that the genital parts, which are above, are fuller, better nourished, and more vigorous. Or else that, since this defect prevents exercise, those who are tainted by it dissipate their strength less and come more entire to the sports of Venus. (79I)
In a way, the defect associated with “le mouvement detraqué de la boiteuse” (“the irregular movement of the lame woman”) remarkably acquires an exemplarity by challenging the commensurability of the penis and the phallus in depicting passion. To be sure, the crippling of men by women (Amazons), as the essay suggests, is an attempt to resist the domination associated with the patriarchal order, as played out by Martin Guerre’s deficiency. This disfigurement of the male anatomy demystifies the relationship between the phallus and the penis, for the resistance to the phallocentric order can be achieved only through a newfound potency associated with the impaired body. If, as Montaigne claims, in the case of women the genital parts are fuller and better nourished in this state of imperfection, it is because lameness, no longer considered a deficiency, must be regarded as something to be desired. Montaigne’s text rhetorically enacts a displacement through which sexual difference is constituted and maintained by the projection of a deficiency onto a male subject. By indirectly aligning himself with the feminine (what Montaigne terms “the pleasure brought to those who try it [l’essayent]”), the essayist can pose a libidinal and identificatory challenge to what is traditionally conceived of as potency through references to epistemological issues. In this context, the category of “man” becomes a movable one, for maleness is subject to mutation and exception.12
Todd Reeser has suggested that Montaigne’s “essaying” of manliness questions the masculinity derived from excess.13 The Stoic position, as in the thought of Seneca, organized the question of gender around the binary coupling of masculinity and effeminacy, with the former foregrounding an ethic associated with virile military practices. By adopting a skeptical perspective with respect to the essentialism proposed by the Stoics, the essayist reflected the more temperate thought he had discovered in reading Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism on gender identification: “The mother of the Gods accepts effeminate men; and the goddess would not have made this judgment if being manly were by nature bad. There is much anomaly about how fine it is to be manly.”14
I now wish to examine the question of gender in Montaigne’s essay from a methodological perspective and engage in a metacommentary of the preceding analysis. As a new historicist, Stephen Green-blatt has engaged in a critical debate concerning the Martin Guerre case and the use of psychoanalysis. He views this critical approach— in the context of an early modern work such as that of Montaigne— to be overdetermined in its need to discover a “principle of unalienable self-possession” and a “unitary position,” thereby producing an anachronistic reading of the text.15 On the contrary, the exploration of gender in this essay yields a hybrid human subject whose agency is shaped by the tensions it encounted in a patriarchial culture and the subject’s resistance to what was accepted as a socially consecrated norm within sixteenth-century culture. Montaigne’s engagement with the intertexts that his archive has become produces an essay that severs the constraints imposed by the normative process of subjugation in the name of a world of difference. What matters above all else is the way in which Montaigne responds to the Martin Guerre narrative and the manner in which he addresses the question of alterity from an ethical perspective. By his refusal to reduce the other to the same Montaigne is able to transcend what John O’Brien has characterized as “the compulsive urge to narrate.”16
A narrative interlude near the end of “Des boyteux” presents an interesting anecdote that combines the topoi of cripples, lovemaking, and writing: “Qui est aussi la raison pourquoy les Grecs descrioient les tisserandes d’estre plus chaudes que les autres femmes: à cause du mestier sedentaire qu’elles font, sans grand exercice du corps… . Ce tremoussement que leur ouvrage leur donne ainsin assises les esveille et sollicite, comme faict les dames le crolement et tremblement de leurs coches” (III, 11, 1034) (“The Greeks decried women weavers as being hotter than other woman: because of the sedentary trade they perform, without much bodily exercise The joggling that their work gives them as they are thus seated arouses and solicits them, as the shaking and trembling of their coaches does the ladies” (791). The women weavers’( tisserandes, derived from the curious conversion of the Latin texere, to weave, and the Latin textus, tissue of a literary work) activity, like that of Montaigne composing his essays, thematizes the symbolic positioning of desire and the denial of castration. The act of braiding, as it is described here, is tantamount to motivating the drive and the energy that are the source of desire. Far from being negatively conceived, this representation of the sedentary female dramatically portrays the passion and strength that is the result of the art of weaving.
Through the figuration of the monster Montaigne’s essay thus demonstrates a tacit challenge not only to the will to totality but to conventional male subjectivity and the very “nature” of gender identity. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis teaches that identity is based on the internalization of a series of images that are first perceived as external to the desiring subject. In the essay “Des boyteux” the psychic mapping of the male subject is based upon the identification with unconventionally deformed bodily images and, later, with the introjection of a female presence attuned to unrestrained libidinal pleasure. The narrative constructed in this essay finds its power of persuasion in its capacity to illuminate the buried history of the essayist. The politics of desire and identification as foregrounded here therefore presents a revisionist theory of male gender in which the exemplary figures of rarity represented in the text aim at deforming the dominant fictions put forth in the name of the father, while constituting a counterdis-course that indirectly expresses defiance of existing conventions. The resistance to the artificially created authority of man is but an attempt by desire to portray itself in the naturalness of its writerly deformations, and in so doing to combine the desiring subject with the idealized yet imperfect image of the cripple in a kind of specular bliss. The representation of the monster is therefore not based on its isolation from the symbolic order of language but rather on its inability easily to be inscribed within the paradigms of conventional gender identity. By describing the so-called myth of monstrosity, Montaigne’s text proposes a hermeneutic riddle, which is first disguised as an epistemological question and finally takes on ontological proportions that suggest that the cultural system in which individual subjects are inscribed is monstrously artificial. In the end, Montaigne’s exemplarity derives from the projection of a marvelously imperfect self.