MONTAIGNE ON HORSEBACK, OR THE SIMULATION OF DEATH
Je ne puis tenir registre de ma vie par mes actions: fortune les met trop bas: je le tiens par mes fantasies. (III, 9, 945– 46)
I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts. (721)
To die, to sleep; / To sleep; perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, III, I, 64–68
In the essay “De l’exercitation” (II, 6) (“Of Practice”) Montaigne tries to find a way around the impossibility of describing the experience of death by foregrounding the relationship between the imagination and the body: “Je n’imagine aucun estat pour moy si insupportable et horrible, que d’avoir l’ame vifve et affligée, sans moyen de se declarer” (II, 6, 375) (“I can imagine no state so horrible and unbearable for me as to have my soul alive and afflicted, without means to express itself” [270]). At the beginning of the essay Montaigne intends to reconcile the phenomenon of death with practice, which is to say the habit of experiment or trial. If trial is essentially a matter of exagium, of balance and passage, then death, by contrast, is located in the domain of aporia and nonpassage:1
Mais à mourir, qui est la plus grande besoigne que nous ayons à faire, l’exercitation ne nous y peut ayder… . Mais, quant à la mort, nous ne la pouvons essayer qu’une fois; nous y sommes tous apprentifs quand nous y venons… . Si nous ne la pouvons joindre, nous la pouvons approcher, nous la pouvons reconnois-tre; et, si nous ne donnons jusques à son fort, au moins verrons nous et en prattiquerons les advenuës. (II, 6, 371–72)
But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us… . But as for death, we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it… . If we cannot reach it, we can approach it, we can reconnoiter it; and if we do not penetrate as far as its fort, at least we shall see and become acquainted with the approaches to it. (267)
In adopting the classic topos of death, Montaigne finds a way of entering into a paradoxically dynamic relationship with it. To be sure, the subject in question recognizes the indeterminacy of death; he is conscious of the impossibility of grasping it as such. If he embarks on an inquiry into his own knowledge through a semantic network that refers to the act of trying (exercising, experimenting, testing, tasting), how can he evoke the experience of death when death constitutes absolute difference and inaction? If the moment of death eludes consciousness, and if one then disappears in the nonpassage of death, how can one explain what can be grasped only in this ungraspable impasse? How can one take into account evidence of a nonexperienced phenomenon, an abyss of thought, in a discourse that claims to report the “trials” of a life?
In “De l’exercitation” Montaigne attempts to submit death to an experiment—a notion that in itself is paradoxical since death is a singular, nonrepeatable phenomenon. A test or trial is based on repetition and the examination of difference. This implies a lapse in time, not the absence of time that is inherent in death; in other words, a gap between the temporality associated with one’s “experience” of the test and the atemporal finality of death. Montaigne relies on this distinction in order to provide an existential analysis of death that precedes any biological consideration or ontological assumption.
“De l’exercitation” presents the reader with a simulated vision of death based on the rhetorical claim that in this case testing is only a form of practice, an exercise to illuminate the mystery of death. In order to narrate the experience of dying, he must be able to imagine it. To hold forth on death is therefore a kind of protection in which the desire for transgression clashes with the anguish it produces: “Il me semble toutefois qu’il y a quelque façon de nous apprivoiser à elle et de l’essayer aucunement” (II, 6, 371) (“It seems to me, however, that there is a certain way of familiarizing ourselves with death and trying it out to some extent” [268]). As Freud suggested, the taboo that prohibits talk of death is born of an affective ambivalence; it is the product of a conscious sorrow and the satisfaction of being able to rid oneself of it.2 This suffering is therefore reexperienced when Montaigne describes it. The text portrays death as a place foreign to consciousness, which the latter attains only by asking rhetoric to provide a description of it. In this context, the test becomes an inquiry into the movement of the soul, a substitute for examining death directly that transforms itself in the process of existing despite death. The advantage it affords the essayist is that it provides a writerly space where death can be simulated in a manner similar to the mental activity deployed while dreaming: “Ce n’est pas sans raison,” Montaigne proclaims, “qu’on nous fait regarder à nostre sommeil mesme, pour la ressemblance qu’il a de la mort” (II, 6, 372) (“It is not without reason that we are taught to study even our sleep for the resemblance it has with death” [268]).
Montaigne begins his essay by referring to the Roman nobleman Julius Canius. Like the essayist with his “tests,” Canius wished to study himself in order to know himself better. Sentenced to death, Canius aimed at discerning the moment of its arrival. In asserting the existence of a fixed boundary between life and death, Canius challenged the usual assumptions regarding the two:
Je pensois, luy respondit-il, à me tenir prest et bandé de toute ma force, pour voir si, en cet instant de la mort, si court et si brief, je pourray appercevoir quelque deslogement de l’ame, et si elle aura quelque ressentiment de son yssuë, pour, si j’en aprens quelque chose, en revenir donner apres, si je puis, advertissement à mes amis. (II, 6, 371)
“I was thinking,” he replied, “about holding myself ready and with all my powers intent to see whether in that instant of death, so short and brief, I shall be able to perceive any dislodgment of the soul, and whether it will have any feeling of its departure; so that, if I learn anything about it, I may return later, if I can, to give the information to my friends.” (267)
The example of Canius sheds light upon the enigmatic relationship between dying and witnessing. Death cannot be perceived, for the sudden stop it puts to life eliminates temporality altogether, so that all awareness of oneself disappears in the singular limit constituted by the ending of time. The notion of transposing the atemporal to the sphere of repeatable experience would appear to involve a striking contradiction. Canius nonetheless proposed to do the impossible: to transform the end of life and the stopping of thought by passing beyond the limit; to transcend the difference that constitutes the narrative framework of life.
Canius was thus attempting to be in life and death simultaneously. He therefore imagined a paradoxical death—a death that is not a death. In trying to see “que c’estoit de ce passage” (II, 6, 371) (“what this passage was [267]) and to grasp “l’instant et au point de passage” (II, 6, 372) (“the instant and point of passing away” [268]), Canius sought to exploit a magic form of thought by means of which the difference between life and death could be erased. The hypothetical experience he envisioned requires a transcendence capable of blurring the boundary between passage and nonpassage. If the semantic value of the word “passage” is complicated here, it is because the word is related to the idea of crossing, which signifies both movement (passing from the other side, from life) and stability (finishing life). Conceived of as an active phenomenon, philosophizing implies for Canius the possibility of shifting the demarcation of the end, thereby dispelling some of the finality associated with death; it is a means of transforming death, the voyage without return, into a perpetual voyage: “Cettuy-cy philosophe non seulement jusqu’à la mort, mais en la mort mesme” (II, 6, 371) “This man philosophizes not only unto death, but even in death itself” [267]).
The Montaigne who writes about himself in this essay is intent on imitating Canius’s example; the desire to face up to what he finds lacking in himself amounts to a determination to “form[er] nostre ame” (II, 6, 370) (“form our soul” [267]) and thereby to strengthen himself: “Nous en pouvons avoir experience, sinon entiere et par-faicte, au moins telle, qu’elle ne soit pas inutile, et qui nous rende plus fortifiez et asseurez” (II, 6, 371–72) (“We can have an experience of it that is, if not entire and perfect, at least not useless, and that makes us more fortified and assured” [268]). Montaigne cites this historical example and incorporates it in his discourse in order to assure himself of a freedom of examination that he could not discover otherwise.
Montaigne investigates the paradoxical phenomenon of temporary death through an account that recreates what he believes to have taken place after an accident caused him to lose consciousness. To describe this episode as though it were a lucid experience involves situating himself in a space in which temporality cannot exist. Montaigne devises an imaginary account that inquires into the unknown; he seeks to explore the boundary that divides death from life.
In relating the incident of Montaigne’s fall from a horse—an accident caused by one of his men, who, eager to make a show of his daring, came up galloping behind him at full speed—the text draws attention to the danger that arises when the essayist is no longer at home, namely, a loss of balance.3 The progress of his horse was marked by a false step (“faux pas”), a fatal accident that triggered an episode of mental aberration. The following passage retrospectively dramatizes the narrative interlocking of what ontologically must escape consciousness:
Pendant nos troisiesmes troubles ou deuxiesmes (il ne me souvient pas bien de cela), m’estant allé un jour promener à une lieue de chez moy, qui suis assis dans le moiau de tout le trouble des guerres civiles de France, estimant estre en toute seureté et si voisin de ma retraicte que je n’avoy point besoin de meilleur equipage, j’avoy pris un cheval bien aisé, mais non guiere ferme. A mon retour, une occasion soudaine s’estant presentée de m’aider de ce cheval à un service qui n’estoit pas bien de son usage, un de mes gens, grand et fort, monté sur un puissant roussin qui avoit une bouche desesperée, frais au demeurant et vigoureux, pour faire le hardy et devancer ses compaignons vint à le pousser à toute bride droict dans ma route, et fondre comme un colosse sur le petit homme et petit cheval, et le foudroier de sa roideur et de sa pesanteur, nous envoyant l’un et l’autre les pieds contremont: si que voilà le cheval abbatu et couché tout estourdy, moy dix ou douze pas au delà, mort, estendu à la renverse, le visage tout meurtry et tout escorché, mon espée que j’avoy à la main, à plus de dix pas au delà, ma ceinture en pieces, n’ayant ny mouvement ny sentiment, non plus qu’une souche. (II, 6, 373)
During our third civil war, or the second (I do not quite remember which), I went riding one day about a league from my house, which is situated at the very hub of all the turmoil of the civil wars of France. Thinking myself perfectly safe, and so near my home that I needed no better equipage, I took a very easy but not very strong horse. On my return, when a sudden occasion came up for me to use this horse for a service to which it was not accustomed, one of my men, big and strong, riding a powerful work horse who had a desperately hard mouth and was moreover fresh and vigorous—this man, in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions, spurred his horse at full speed up the path behind me, came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse, and hit us like a thunderbolt with all his strength and weight, sending us both head over heels. So that there lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log. (268–69)
In this description of a being “dead and skinned,” the text presents the image of a body in a state of temporary rigor mortis. Represented now as a “thing” through the image of a log, this being-for-death is inserted in a space marking a limit. Deprived of movement and consciousness, the mental for-oneself gives the impression of being locked into an in-oneself lying outside reflective vitality. Curiously, the text conveys the distance that separates the represented object from its narrative vantage point. The simulation of death occurs in a place where memory appeals to a figurative language to transcribe an “experience” that otherwise escapes it. The image of Montaigne on horseback is the driving force behind the allegorical transformation that the text carries out in connection with someone who finds himself “sur le trottoir” (II, 6, 378) (“prominently displayed” [273]). This disturbed being who no longer feels at home in his own skin (“bien dans sa peau”)—indeed, he describes himself as skinned (“es-corché”) (II, 6, 373)—is the product of an imaginary act in which the abdicated self searches for its way in a fiction of alterity.
The narrative voice thus functions as both witness and spokesman of the apparently departed subject. The insistence on the inexactitude of Montaigne’s memory at the very beginning of the passage just quoted underscores the fictive process that underlies his perception of this equestrian episode. The technique is obvious. Through the voice of a rhetorical intermediary, the essay presents the experience of death as one of a disturbed consciousness that, in spite of the derangement it has suffered, is sure of itself. Even though Montaigne does not recollect speaking, his narrative engages in a form of ventriloquism that functions as a reflex action independent of himself. In seeking to deny the void that arises from the defects of consciousness, Montaigne’s account supplies a detailed narrative that bridges the gap associated with death. Suddenly the vacancy of the self is filled with words that lend a certain degree of plausibility to the account. Gradually the “practice” produced by the application of this technique anticipates the return of the departed soul through a transposition of the narcissistic representation of death as a vital force: “Sur le chemin, et après avoir esté plus de deux grosses heures tenu pour trespassé, je commençay à me mouvoir et respirer… . Je commençay à reprendre un peu de vie” (II, 6, 373) (“On the way, and after I had been taken for dead for more than two full hours, I began to move and breathe… . I began to recover a little life” [269]). Suffering thus disappears behind a suspended consciousness in which the body acts independently of thought and paradoxically has a “life” of its own.
After the description of his fall from the horse and the blackout that followed, Montaigne considers the experience of passing over into death. However, instead of representing death as a limit, it describes it as a place of paradoxical passage, with the “locus” of non-passage suddenly becoming an unbounded space incapable of respecting distinctions between life and death as we know them. Simulation, one could say, aims at suppressing the meaning of latent symptoms in the face of the threat of death. The ineffable in the temporal world suddenly springs forth and creates a two-sided illusion:
Il me sembloit que ma vie ne me tenoit plus qu’au bout des lèvres: je fermois les yeux pour ayder, ce me sembloit, à la pousser hors, et prenois plaisir à m’alanguir et à me laisser aller. C’estoit une imagination qui ne faisoit que nager superficiellement en mon ame, aussi tendre et aussi foible que tout le reste, mais à la verité non seulement exempte de desplaisir, ains meslée à cette douceur que sentent ceux qui se laissent glisser au sommeil. (II, 6, 374)
It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go.
It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep. (269–70)
The ending contemplated here reveals a refusal to arrive at a resolution. The essayist’s swan song describes the sensory aspects of finishing out life, but it does so in an almost erotic manner that introduces an image of death exceeding the limits of the concept itself. Thanks to the evocative power of Montaigne’s imagination, this scene paradoxically brings him a measure of added existence. These “approaches to death” set us on the road toward the unattainable aporia of death— toward what Derrida ironically characterizes as “a coming without steps”4 —in the paradoxical movement of nonmovement: “La constance mesme n’est autre chose qu’un branle plus languissant” (III, 2, 805) (“Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion” [610]).
This text opens up an imaginary space, namely, that of the unconscious, and thereby discloses another world: “Nostre monde vient d’en trouver un autre” (III, 6, 908) (“Our world has just discovered another world” [693]). As in the case of dreaming, the scene described here unfolds under the force of desire. The repetition of forms considered at the beginning of the passage suggests the coming of death that constitutes the narration itself. The virtually dead subject is transferred to a space that is closed off to consciousness. The being caught between life and death nonetheless acts by means of reflex gestures that give his body a vital movement, albeit one that lies outside his will: “Chacun sçait par experience qu’il y a des parties qui se branslent, dressent et couchent souvent sans son congé. Or ces passions qui ne nous touchent que par l’escorse, ne se peuvent dire nostres… . Les douleurs que le pied ou la main sentent pendant que nous dormons, ne sont pas à nous” (II, 6, 376) (“Every man knows by experience that there are parts that often move, stand up, and lie down, without his leave. Now these passions which touch only the rind of us cannot be called ours… . The pains which the foot or the hand feel while we are asleep are not ours” [271]).
The relation that Montaigne sustains with death as represented here is the product of desire. Ironically, death literally engenders a renaissance or rebirth of a subject who this time is taken over by an imagined self. Located “sur le beguayement du sommeil” (II, 6, 375) (“in the early stages of sleep” [271]), the figure who sleeps in a blurred state slips “aux bords de l’ame” (II, 6, 375) (“on the edges of the soul” [271]), into the sweetness of unknown pleasures. This hypothetical past is symbolically reconstructed at the price of a certain trickery, through the illusion of a lived experience that ought to be, in his own view, out of reach: “Je ne sçavoy pourtant ny d’où je venoy, ny où j’aloy; ni ne pouvois poiser et considerer ce que on me demandoit” (II, 6, 376) (“I did not know, for all that, where I was coming from or where I was going, nor could I weigh and consider what I was asked” [271]).
In alluding to the sweetness of this experience, the text brings into play chimeras that enhance the subject’s pleasure. As Tom Conley suggests, Montaigne “slides into oblivion through discourse and diction.”5 Dreaming gives him the illusion of directing his will in inventing consciousness of the dream. Ironically, the movement toward death proceeds by means of the detour of a paradoxical resurrection whose driving force passes into the illusion of nonpassage. The belief in the experience of death depends on a movement capable of traversing the no-man’s-land of the aporia while transforming the moment of death into an illusory regeneration. The simulated experience, like that of a dream, discloses a scene where the “reality” of death is changed by crossing an imaginary boundary. The narrative invention implicitly questions our biological and psychological assumptions about death. If life consists in an increase in tension, death, conversely, is pictured here as the consequence of a calming of this tension. For Montaigne pleasure could be defined as the avoidance of displeasure and the search for a voluptuous relaxation. The figurative ballet of the text, tracing the contours of this state, suggests that the elimination of pain is an illusion that requires an abandonment of the self, and in this way produces a pleasure corresponding to the free flow of energy.
The rebirth of this phantom subject becomes an effect of language. It establishes a rhetorical function capable of arousing a cathartic process in reverse. The text rids itself of the nothingness of death, which for this reason is found to be slightly less annihilated. The access to dying and the sensation of vacillation perceived at its threshold suggests that the possibility of passing away is a strategy for going forward by means of a certain step. Speech pierces consciousness without its being perceived.
What occurs in the field of speech in Montaigne’s text is therefore sustained by its movement as it is passively received as a series of sensations. The image of pushing life outside oneself gives rise to a psychic phenomenon through which a phantasmic subject results from a figurative configuration capable of accounting for desire as an accomplished fact: “Je me laissoy couler si doucement et d’une façon si douce et si aisée que je ne sens guiere autre action moins poisante que celle-là estoit” (II, 6, 377) (“I was letting myself slip away so gently, so gradually and easily, that I hardly ever did anything with less of a feeling of effort” [272]). This slipping away is governed by a satisfaction that is represented between an imagined perception and what was to have been its beyond. The phantom subject establishes the desire of being not only as it is perceived but also, both on this side and the beyond, as it traverses the mental space dramatized by the portrayal of his demise.
The fear of death is weakened through rhetorical excess. Burying death in a “writerly shroud” plays the illusory experience of death off against death itself. The dream of eliminating all negative feeling associated with death is the symptom of a will to embrace an aberration of desire. Such symptoms are small “tests” of death that are added to each other in order to confront it and, at the same time, to engage in a Pascalian “divertissement” (from the Latin divertire ), meaning to turn away from. In any case, the illusion weakens fear since it evades the “real” world. Montaigne’s narration exceeds reality and thus grasps death in the illusion of sleep. Paradoxically, the subject depicted in this text lives in terms of an absence and savors the pleasure of a virtual history: “Cependant mon assiete estoit à la vérité tres-douce et paisible; je n’avoy affliction ny pour autruy ny pour moy: c’estoit une langueur et une extreme foiblesse, sans aucune douleur” (II, 6, 376) (“Meanwhile my condition was, in truth, very pleasant and peaceful; I felt no affliction either for others or for myself; it was a languor and an extreme weakness, without any pain [272]).
If, in reality, the essayist never experienced the fall he describes, memory will furnish him with the occasion to invent an account of it. In this context, it is a question of impression, for writing contemplates “the impressed effect” of the imagined situation. The use of this rhetorical tool conveys the feeling of crossing over, in which a change of affect takes place that hides itself in the void of temporality. It needs to be witnessed in a state of semiconsciousness. The mirror of limbo is distorted to reveal the sensations that pierce the heart of his soul:
Mais long temps apres, et le lendemain, quand ma memoire vint à s’entr’ouvrir et me representer l’estat où je m’estoy trouvé en l’instant que j’avoy aperçeu ce cheval fondant sur moy (car je l’avoy veu à mes talons et me tins pour mort, mais ce pensement avoit esté si soudain que la peur n’eut pas loisir de s’y engendrer), il me sembla que c’estoit un esclair qui me frapoit l’ame de secousse et que je revenoy de l’autre monde. (II, 6, 377)
But a long time after, and the next day, when my memory came to open up and picture to me the state I had been in at the instant I perceived that horse bearing down on me (for I had seen him at my heels and thought I was a dead man, but that thought had been so sudden that I had no time to be afraid), it seemed to me that a flash of lightning was striking my soul with a violent shock, and that I was coming back from the other world. (272)
The opening up of his memory permitted the essayist to situate himself in a scenario somewhere between the familiar and the unknown. Although the past was partially imperceptible, what was accessible to recollection made an impression thanks to a language that cannot be identical with the instant of the accident. The sudden emergence of this memory creates a fictive past in the present that fills in the gaps surrounding the fall. The essayist insists on the unusual character of the accident. He claims that the effect of the collision on consciousness was essentially ungraspable in order to insinuate himself into the memory of it. Montaigne’s re-creation replaces the lost scene out of a desire to accept what he perceives as the story of his fall. This narrative projection therefore suggests that the illusion of memory is a plausible way of making sense of events, one that can be taken as “real.”
This passage uncovers the tension that animates the text. Forgetting is born in a place where the identity of the injured man is mediated by the story of the wild horse. The description given by memory seeks to determine the instant when the accident took place. However, it is fated to involve the immediate, which it constructs through mediations such as the recasting of the injury to the body as a shock experienced by the soul.
The symptom of trauma—“un esclair qui me frapoit l’ame” (II, 6, 377) (“a flash of lightning … striking my soul” [272])—generates a train of substitutions in which the economy of energies produces the illusion that this return from the other world (paradoxically the locus of life) supplies the occasion when that which is is contemplated by its other. The lightning subsequently illuminates the accident by an impression made after the fact. The subject in question appropriates this singular intensity and projects an image that conveys the reality of that which makes the impression. In navigating this passage, the concept of alterity confuses projection with perception. This scenario is therefore suggested by a rhetorical reservoir of memories that ma-terializes after its impact.
When the injured subject regains consciousness, he paradoxically experiences the pain that had disappeared at the threshold of death:6
Quand je vins à revivre et à reprendre mes forces … qui fut deux ou trois heures apres, je me senty tout d’un train rengager aux douleurs, ayant les membres tous moulus et froissez de ma cheute; et en fus si mal deux ou trois nuits après, que j’en cuiday remourir encore un coup, mais d’une mort plus vifve; et me sens encore de la secousse de cette froissure. (II, 6, 377)
When I came back to life and regained my powers … which was two or three hours later, I felt myself all of a sudden caught up again in the pains, my limbs being all battered and bruised by my fall; and I felt so bad two or three nights after that I thought I was going to die all over again, but by a more painful death; and I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision. (272)
Ironically, the return from death snatches pleasure from life; it uncovers a self that is no longer other, floating beyond faintness in spectral longing. Instead, the refound “reality” suggests its anguish. The allusion to the possibility of “a more painful death” suggests that too strong an excitement has weakened the subject’s defenses and prevented his mental faculties from overcoming the pain by opposing it. A rather curious phenomenon manifests itself here that functions thanks to a process of sublimation, in the Freudian sense of the term, involving impulses and affects. If the movement toward death paradoxically leads in the direction of a slightly sexualized “douceur” (to use Montaigne’s term), the return to life requires the transposition of this sweet voluptuousness into a painful impulse. This reservoir of bodily impulses endangers the self-mastery that confronts the subject of the self-portrait. The possibility of dying a more painful death suggests that this perception threatens the conscious subject with a still more memorable fate.
The principal challenge of this essay involves the attempt to know how to taste death (“savoir” here signifying a savoring of it) through an imagination that functions independently of the body and is capable of producing a moderate degree of pleasure in a state of floating consciousness—a “very pleasant and peaceful” condition. In the context of this desire, two quotes from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered occur in succession. What attracts the essayist to this work by Tasso is his treatment of mental aberration. The verses from this epic poem cited in Montaigne’s text stress the contrast between the powerlessness of an injured body and the magical functioning of the mind in the same body. The first reference to Tasso is taken from canto VI and involves the story of the struggle between Tancredi and Clorinda. It tells of Tancredi’s return to life after fainting:
Perhe, dubbiosa anchor del suo ritorno
Non s’assecura attonita la mente. (353)
Because the shaken soul, uncertain yet
of its return, is still not firmly set. (269)
In Montaigne’s second example, taken from the same canto, a Danish knight regains life thanks to the power of a holy man:
come quel ch’or apres or chiude
Gli occhi, mezzo tra’l sonno è l’esser desto. (353)
As one ‘twixt wakefulness and doze,
Whose eyes now open, now again they close. (269)
Tasso’s lines are grafted onto Montaigne’s text to create the possibility of going beyond them. Moreover, they allow Montaigne’s thought to be profoundly altered by crossing over a textual boundary—a process that mimetically reproduces what death cannot deny the imagination in the void of aporia, namely, movement.
The two quotations from Tasso will be completely transformed and will subsequently be used to reveal the mind’s ability to obliquely resuscitate a living death. As Marcel Tetel has pointed out, Montaigne’s essay makes use of these textual interpolations in order to demonstrate that “the imagination remains unshakeable despite the temporary collapse of the body.”7 Plunged into the darkness of a coma, thanks to imaginative thinking the wounded essayist is still capable of awakening the force of reason due to an innate, albeit unconscious, movement:
Ils disent que je m’advisay de commander qu’on donnast un cheval à ma femme… . Il semble que cette consideration deut parter d’une ame esveillée; si est-ce que je n’y estois aucunement: c’estoyent des pensemens vains, en nuë, qui estoyent esmeuz par les sens des yeux et des oreilles. (II, 6, 376)
But also (they say) I thought of ordering them to give a horse to my wife… . It would seem that this consideration must have proceeded from a wide-awake soul; yet the fact is that I was not there at all. These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears. (271)
The demand that emanated from this phantom being expresses a need that is revealed by means of the magic of the senses and points to an aporia that mechanically opens up through unconscious contact with the living world. What interests Montaigne in Tasso’s work is the sensation of floating that is revealed in the indefinite space of this half-conscious state and the survival of the mind in the shadows of the unconscious during and after an experience of mental aberration. Tasso’s ontological description allows Montaigne to depict the autonomy of his mind in a self-portrait that unfolds outside the constraints of temporality. The feeling of Christian guilt in Tasso’s work is transformed by means of a liberating analytical process in Montaigne’s essay, in which practice permits a witnessing through the absence in which it is realized. The self-generative power of the mind in Montaigne’s essay functions as a vital force permitting the imagination to be trained through the clouds of introspection: “Or, comme dict Pline, chacun est à soy-mesmes une très-bonne discipline, pourveu qu’il ait la suffisance de s’espier de près” (II, 6, 377) (“Now, as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up” [271–72]).
In the last part of the essay the figure of the writer engages in an attempt to justify the presumption of depicting himself on horseback—literally of course, but also figuratively in the sense that he is astride the aporia between life and death.
La coustume a faict le parler de soy vicieux, et le prohibe obstineement en hayne de la ventance qui semble tousjours estre at-tachée aux propres tesmoignages… . Mais, quand il seroit vray que ce fust necesserement presomption d’entretenir le peuple de soy, je ne doy pas, suivant mon general dessein, refuser une action qui publie cette maladive qualité, puis qu’elle est en moy; et ne doy cacher cette faute que j’ay non seulement en usage, mais en profession. Toutesfois, à dire ce que j’en croy, cette coustume a tort de condamner le vin, par ce que plusieurs s’y enyvrent. On ne peut abuser que des choses qui sont bonnes. (II, 6, 378)
Custom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it out of hatred for the boasting that seems always to accompany it… . But even if it were true that it is presumptuous, no matter what the circumstances, to talk to the public about oneself, I still must not, according to my general plan, refrain from an action that openly displays this morbid quality, since it is in me; nor may I conceal this fault, which I not only practice but profess. However, to say what I think about it, custom is wrong to condemn wine because many get drunk on it. We can misuse only things which are good. (273)
Analyzing oneself has the effect of liberating speech. It is a mental habit that allows the essayist to know himself better and to draw nearer to the unknowable: “Il n’est description pareille en difficulté à la description de soy-mesmes, ny certes en utilité. Encore se faut-il testoner, encore se faut-il ordonner et renger pour sortir en place. Or je me pare sans cesse, car je me descris sans cesse” (II, 6, 378) (“There is no description equal in difficulty, or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself. 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]). If he studies himself to say who he is, it is in order to enact the displacement of an intangible thought and to challenge a tradition that questions the “propriety” of speaking about oneself.
In this context the interpretive act acquires an exemplary, albeit presumptuous, value. It produces a change through an epistemological and fictive crossing in which the essayist resembles the saints in his readiness “de se jetter bien avant sur le trottoir” (II, 6, 378) (“to put [himself] prominently on display” [273]). Although his practice produces no absolute knowledge, the presumption in question, in the etymological sense of the word (from the Latin praesumere, to take beforehand), implies not only crossing the boundary of death but also the realization of a demise ( trépas ) in the juridical sense—a transgression arising from the presumptuousness of pretending to be able to test “death” in the fiction of the essay. This rhetorical step problematizes the idea of presumption as a phenomenon determinable according to the limits established by moral conventions and thus leads off into another avenue of meaning. If Montaigne goes beyond the end of life in the direction of aporia, it is ultimately so that this “possibility of the impossible” may disclose to him the emptiness of his existence and blur the boundary between presumption and nonpresumption: “Nulle particuliere qualité n’enorgeuillira celuy qui mettra quand et quand en compte tant de imparfaittes et foibles qualitez autres qui sont en luy, et, au bout, la nihilité de l’humaine condition” (II, 6, 380) (“No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man’s estate” [275]).
However, to transcribe these thoughts in written form—thereby imposing a form on the formless—prevents the text from preserving the fluidity produced by indeterminate wanderings: “C’est une espineuse entreprinse, et plus qu’il ne semble, de suyvre une alleure si vagabonde que celle de nostre esprit; de penetrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir et arrester tant de menus airs de ses agitations” (II, 6, 378) (“It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it” [273]). The rolling up of thoughts in a written body, or scrolled manuscript, gives birth to a textual cadaver, reflecting the root sense of the Latin word cadere (to fall), which realizes an unbridgeable aporia that dispels the illusion of vitality in the text: “Je m’estalle entier: c’est un SKELETOS où, d’une veue, les veines, les muscles, les tendrons paroissent, chaque piece en son siege” (II, 6, 379) (“I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place” [274]). Like death itself, the practice described in Montaigne’s essay represents the dead matter of this narcissistic object and thus nullifies the kinetic force of the imagination in the empty space of the text. In achieving a mors improvisa (an unexpected death, prior to confession), Montaigne’s essay exercises what cannot, in fact, be exercised. The text in question thus arises from the decomposition of thought, the immobilization of a written body by a series of fragments encouraging a certain stasis and constituting an “arrêt de mort” (a rhetorical strategy to “immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate” the mind): “Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’escris, c’est moy, c’est mon essence” (II, 6, 379) (“It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, my essence” [274]). Indeed, this sentence facilitates the final fall of the essay, namely, that of the ink that falls on the blank page. The procreation to which the activity of writing gives rise suffers a mortal blow: the link between body and script is broken; the contact between the text and the person who composes it is disrupted.
Montaigne’s analysis of the consequences associated with the anecdote of the fall generates a fiction that solicits—in the etymological sense of sollicitare (to totally mix together, from sollus [“all”] and ciere [“to move”])—a figural historicization of the symptom: the desire to transpose death to a locus of pleasure, converting it into a malleable phenomenon. Montaigne’s essay valorizes the role of a phantasmagoric world by attributing to the simulation of death an exemplary function as a remedy. The portrait of being-for-death therefore becomes a supplementary representation of the aporia, a hypothetical projection of what might happen in the future: “A toutes avantures, je suis content qu’on sçache d’où je seray tombé” (III, 2, 817) (“In any event, I am glad to have people know whence I shall have fallen” [621]). This process rhetorically gives voice to a soul that magically converts a feeling both imperceptible and ungraspable into a materialized self-referential representation: “Je n’imagine aucun es-tat pour moy si insupportable et horrible que d’avoir l’ame vifve et affligée, sans moyen de se declarer” (II, 6, 375) (“I can imagine no state so horrible and unbearable for me as to have my soul alive and afflicted, without means to express itself” [270]). Assuming the form of a resurrection that is not one, this rhetorical prosthesis facilitates the simulation of an end postponed and the establishment of a paradoxical immortality in the writerly tomb where the dead matter of Montaigne’s writing rests.