Narrative and Subjectivity in “De la diversion” (III, 4)
Montaigne’s “De la diversion” (III, 4) (“Of Diversion”) dramatizes and exemplifies the manner in which the human subject shies away from the anxiety produced by the fear of death. The essential question raised in this essay is how one should talk about death or, rather, how one can avoid it. If diversion is an issue in this text, it is ultimately the result of the essayist’s inability to become consubstantial with the object of the act of writing itself, namely, death. “Nous pensons tousjours ailleurs” (III, 4, 834) (“Our thoughts are always elsewhere” [633]) proclaims the essayist. According to Montaigne’s own formulation, the human subject is always already the victim of the radical discontinuity of the self; the kinetic energy generated by the mind renders it other to itself by displacing the subject from the locus where in principle it should be. As Montaigne comments in “Du repentir” (III, 2) (“Of Repentance”) in connection with the writing of the essays: “C’est un contrerolle de divers et muables accidens et d’imaginations irresoluës et, quand il y eschet, contraires: soit que je sois autre moy-mesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects par autres circonstances et considerations” (III, 2, 805) (“This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects” [611]).
Montaigne’s “De la diversion” enacts the vain movement of diversion by mirroring the theoretical strategy that is the subject of his writing. By essaying the idea of diversion through a variety of examples of the mind’s remarkable ability to redirect its own thoughts, the text becomes the symptom of the very malady that it claims to diagnose, namely, displacement and diversion. In essence, the performance of the essay becomes the object that it designates by becoming the example of that which it describes. Through the displacement of the subject of diversion, the writerly subject displaces itself in a series of fragments that emblematizes the subject’s failure to become whole.
Montaigne’s narrative thus produces a text not just about diversion per se but one in which a theory of the self emerges as the rhetorical effect of the subject’s quest to come to terms with the idea of death. As such, it can be described as the interminable story of the difficulty of uttering the name “death.” Conscious of its mortality, the human subject, as described by Montaigne, can only relieve itself through a discursive ex-centricity that leaves in its wake a lack or void that is the result of its ontological emptiness. Accordingly, the diversion before the abyss of death allows the subject to partake in the magic of its own “méconnaissance” and thereby forestall the possibility of true self-recognition. In the case of Montaigne, essaying provokes a displacement of knowledge of which it is itself the cause.
My theoretical concern in exploring the dynamics of the representation of subjectivity in this essay is threefold: to investigate the relationship of the topos of diversion to self-portraiture; to explore how the figuration of subjectivity theorizes desire and anticipates what are today considered psychoanalytic concerns; and to study how the preoccupation with death functions as the condition of narrative in its digressive movements or detours. Although the analysis presented here does not derive from the application of specific psychoanalytic models per se, my reading of “De la diversion” attempts to demonstrate how in this essay psychoanalysis supplants literature by foregrounding the rhetorical processes and topological dynamics underlying the writing of the text. Montaigne’s “death sentences” in “De la diversion” reveal the implications between literature and psychoanalysis, dramatizing how the essay anticipates the preoccupations of psychoanalytic theory by speaking of itself in the language of literature. Through the fictions of desire that this essay projects, the essayist’s drives emerge through a discourse contingent upon a series of identificatory representations from which the subject of enunciation is figured.
The essay is constructed around a series of displacements framed by repetitions of the diversion topos. For Montaigne death is a source of anguish. The narrative largely consists of an account of how the human subject turns away from that anxiety. By playing on the root meaning of the word “diversion” (derived from the Latin divertere, to turn one’s attention away from), the essay literally engages in the “acting out” of diversion through the slippage of its meaning. In other words, the performative dimension of the essay identifies it with the processes of metonymy (as displacement) and repetition (as resistance to recognition) inasmuch as, through its rhetorical swerves, the diversions on “diversion” enable the essay to defer the possibility of making death a self-contained presence.
Montaigne begins his essay by recounting how he was once charged with consoling a woman who was in distress because of her inability to come to terms with the grief resulting from the loss of her husband. In this narrative the essayist assigns himself the role of physician, who renounces the possibility of a cure and instead opts for the ruse of diversion through the displacement of that malady into less anguished channels:
Que ce plaindre n’est action ny juste ny louable, comme Chrysippus; Ny cette cy d’Epicurus, plus voisine à mon style, de transferer la pensée des choses fascheuses aux plaisantes; Ny faire une charge de tout cet amas, le dispensant par occasion, comme Cicero; mais, declinant tout mollement noz propos et les gauchissant peu à peu aus subjects plus voisins, et puis un peu plus esloingnez, selon qu’elle se prestoit plus à moy, je luy desrobay imperceptiblement cette pensée doulereuse, et la tins en bonne contenance et du tout r’apaisée autant que j’y fus. (III, 4, 831)
That this lamenting is an action neither just nor laudable, like Chrysippus; or this one of Epicurus, closer to my style, that we should transfer our thoughts from unpleasant to pleasant things; nor did I, like Cicero, arm myself with this whole pile of cures, dispensing it according to the occasion. But, very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote, as she gave me more of her attention, I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought and kept her in good spirits and entirely soothed for as long as I was there. (631)
The reference to the woman in pain at the beginning of the chapter will eventually have a metacritical function within the context of the essay. To begin with, the text puts forth a topological displacement whereby rhetoric becomes a trope for psychological processes through the assimilation of insinuatio to digressio..1 Accordingly, the orator-physician cares for the interlocutor-patient by engaging in a diversionary practice—“J’usay de diversion” (III, 4, 831) (“I made use of diversion”[631])—that releases tension through the inducement of a forgetfulness that is the product of digression. What is most striking in this context is the reference to rhetoric—conceived here in anti-Ciceronian terms—as an antidote to the uncontrollable force of passion. From an intersubjective standpoint, the essayist is represented as an omnipotent being whose therapeutic strategy is derived from a form of rhetorical deception. The expression “je luy desrobay imperceptiblement cette pensée doulereuse” (“I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought”) reveals the diversionary tactics necessary for the survival of a subject who must be left unrepresented as a lack in the manifest narrative of the dialogue. The so-called affective attunement established between the essayist and the widow in pain is paradoxically sustained by the tension between separation and connection.
The projection of the active forgetting of pain onto the woman ultimately becomes a figure for survival and self-definition. To be sure, language is conceived as a form of action ( actio ) capable of regulating affect through its persuasive force. Without the outside other, there is indeed nothing to help the helpless subject tolerate the pain associated with internal tension. Through the subterfuge of the orator-physician, the female figure, once viewed in Juvenal’s Satires (VI, 272–74) as the site of simulated affect—“car la plus part de leurs deuils sont artificiels et ceremonieux” (III, 4, 830) (“for most of their mourning is put on and perfunctory” [630])—now becomes the locus where the rhetorician effects a simulation of change through the power of rhetoric. The subjectivity of the woman in pain is demarcated as the object of rhetorical mastery whereby the representation of the essayist’s desire ostensibly motivates the desire of the other. In order to achieve the release of tension, the subject has to take a detour, one that is motivated by the duplicitous discourse of another.
In this initial narrative Montaigne’s text demonstrates how the will to say something transforms itself through the magical movement of a floating signifier; desire is figured as a detour, an imposed delay in the playing out of painful feelings. The diversion topos as used here thus demonstrates how the displacement of affect defers recognition and perpetuates nonknowledge as the defining feature of a motivated repression. The text foregrounds the importance of “rhetoric” as a bridge to the mind in order to show how life deceives us through the magic of language.
Drawing upon a military example taken from Philippe de Commines’s Mémoires (II, iii), in a subsequent part of the essay Montaigne describes an allegory of diversion whereby the displacement of affect (the rage of the citizens before the possibility of surrender) short-circuits the possibility of rebellion:
Ce fut un ingenieux destour, dequoy le Sieur de Himbercourt sauva et soy et d’autres, en la ville du Liege, où le Duc de Bourgoigne, qui la tenoit assiegée, l’avoit fait entrer pour executer les convenances de leur reddition accordée. Ce peuple … print à se mutiner contre ces accords passez… . Luy, sentant le vent de la premiere ondée de ces gens qui venoyent se ruer en son logis, lacha soudain vers eux deux des habitans de la ville … chargez de plus douces et nouvelles offres… . Ces deux arresterent la premiere tempeste, ramenant cette tourbe… . Somme que, par telle dispensation d’amusemens, divertissant leur furie et la dissipant en vaines consultations, il l’endormit en fin et gaigna le jour, qui estoit son principal affaire. (III, 4, 831–32)
It was an ingenious shift by which the Sieur de Himbercourt saved both himself and others in the city of Liège, which the duke of Burgundy, who was laying siege to it, had bid him enter to carry out the terms of the surrender agreed on. These townspeople … broke into mutiny against the accepted agreements… . He, getting wind of the first wave of these people who were coming to burst into his lodgings, promptly released in their direction two of the inhabitants of the town … charged with new and milder offers… . These two stopped the first tempest, bringing this excited mob back… . In short, by thus dispensing pastimes, diverting their fury, and dissipating it in empty discussions, he finally put it to sleep and got through until daylight, which was his principal task. (631)
In its reinscription of the diversion topos, this episode literalizes the previous reference to the woman in pain by demonstrating how language functions as a diversionary tactic to dissipate the irrational forces of desire. In some sense the structure of this historical example clearly reflects the structure of the human mind—its natural drive to diversion—by situating a subject within a narrative that functions as the site of a ruse. The subject’s survival, endangered by the possibility of revolt, is guaranteed through a subterfuge realized within a history that allegorically represents the displacement of a threatening energy and thus quells instability. The motivation behind the citizens’ vain deliberations, a form of empty discursive meandering, represents an attempt to undo their imaginary relation to the symbolic. The general’s ability to manipulate and displace, to turn one thing into another (the passion of rebellion into discursive emptiness) creates a negation of reality derived from a simulation of mastery.
Montaigne’s text draws on these examples of displacement to demonstrate how diversion is proposed as an ideal for survival. This idea is amplified in a subsequent passage, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (X, 666 –67), in which Atalanta is diverted by Hippomenes’ apples. In that story Atalanta tried to rid herself of potential suitors by only accepting those who could race as fast at she could and punishing those who failed to keep up with the loss of their lives. Montaigne’s rewriting of Ovid’s narrative in this context appears to emphasize how the “goddess of this amorous ardor, calling her to his [Hippomenes’] aid,” slowed Atalanta down by means of the gift of the apples that were thrown in her path. By its reference to diversion as a strategy to protect passion, the story of Hippomenes’ survival is linked to the maintenance of his desire (and love) as a means of passing from the dangers of death to the pleasures of life. The goddess’ gift of the apples functions as the cure that prolongs the narrative and recaptures the potentially doomed energy of passion in a life that is subject to plot.
Ironically, each repetition of the diversion topos decenters the narrative, creating new objects of observation that transform the essay into a series of detours dramatizing the imagination’s psychology of displacement.
Quand les medecins ne peuvent purger le catarre, ils le divertissent et le desvoyent à une autre partie moins dangereuse. Je m’apperçoy que c’est aussi la plus ordinaire recepte aux maladies de l’ame… . On luy faict peu choquer les maux de droit fil; on ne luy en faict ny soustenir ny rabatre l’ateinte, on la luy faict decliner et gauchir. (III, 4, 832–33)
When the doctors cannot purge a catarrh, they divert it and lead it off into some other less dangerous part. I observe that this is also the most ordinary remedy for ailments of the soul… . We rarely make the soul meet the troubles head on. We do not make it withstand or beat down their attack, we have it avoid and sidestep them. (632)
The “veering off” that is figured here suggests a lack or absence that ensures the estrangement of a malaise. Diversion can thus be seen as a means of exiling pain and discomfort and masking it through an act of avoidance.
As the essay proceeds, providing many digressions concerning diversions both public and private, it presents an idealized self exemplified by the figure of Socrates, who is described as capable of avoiding diversion and is thus able to confront death head on. This exemplum carries a symbolic value in its representation of Socrates as a presence made perfect. What is striking in this narrative fragment is that death is directly named (“le mourir”). In the process it constitutes itself as an act of reference, a starting point of a narrative transference whereby the writing subject (Montaigne) acts out his own story, which is always already articulated in the shadow of an exemplary other (Socrates):
Il apartient à un seul Socrates d’accointer la mort d’un visage ordinaire, s’en aprivoiser et s’en jouer. Il ne cherche point de consolation hors de la chose; le mourir luy semble accident naturel et indifferent; il fiche là justement sa veüe, et s’y resoult, sans regarder ailleurs. (III, 4, 833)
It belongs to the one and only Socrates to become acquainted with death with an ordinary countenance, to become familiar with it and play with it. He seeks no consolation outside the thing itself; dying seems to him a natural and indifferent incident. He fixes his gaze precisely on it, and makes up his mind to it, without looking elsewhere. (632)
By facing death and focusing his gaze directly upon it, Socrates finds no need for diversion (entertainment as temporal deferral) and its concomitant state of deviance (detour or spatial displacement). Socrates’ psychic omnipotence, as manifested by his resolution, is represented as the counterpart to the anxiety produced by the fear of death, inasmuch as the lack of tension between inside and outside in that exemplary figure facilitates an absolute relationship of the self to itself. Montaigne’s text seems to suggest that Socrates enjoys an immediate proximity to the “real.” Mastery as it is depicted here is an expression of omnipotence and resolution; the object of the gaze (death) receives the energy the subject directs toward it by an unmitigated willingness to accept it for what it is, “sans regarder ailleurs” (III, 4, 833) (“without looking elsewhere” ([632]). Unlike those fearful others who use language as a form of consolation to alleviate fear, Socrates retains the Logos within the self and thereby affirms his mastery in silence.
In the context of this essay, humankind is described as anti-Socratic in its drive to avoid the infelicitous anguish provoked by the thought of death: “A ceux qui passent une profondeur effroyable, on ordonne de clorre ou destourner leurs yeux” (III, 4, 833) (“Those who are passing a fearful abyss are ordered to close or turn away their eyes” [632]). To be sure, death keeps us off balance since it constitutes an empty abyss, a center that induces anguish and that we therefore seek to avoid. The human subject, characterized as naturally drawn to diversion, inevitably becomes a subject without a center (a “vuide”) whose desire is incapable of reaching a fixed point. If “our thoughts are always elsewhere,” it is because the subject is made to avert the specificity of the object of loss (death) and opt instead for the condition of loss produced through the repetition of displacement.
Montaigne’s text depicts the ways in which the differing symptoms of death-related anxiety are embedded in literary and cultural representations. The collective impact of these representations demonstrates how the various categories of diversion anticipate the Lacanian revision of psychoanalytic theory by rejecting the concept of a self-contained subject and instead proposing one that forever exceeds itself. From that perspective, the essay narrates an example of religious piety and transforms it into a case of psychological weakness. Given what it is—that is to say, its substantive lack of being—the human subject is bound to decenter the centrality of death by focusing on that which is external to it:
Ces pauvres gens qu’on void sur un eschafaut … les yeux et les mains tendues au ciel, la voix à des prieres hautes, avec une esmotion aspre et continuelle… . On les doibt louer de religion, mais non proprement de constance. Ils fuyent la luicte; ils destournent de la mort leur consideration. (III, 4, 833)
These poor people whom we see on the scaffold … their ears intent on the instructions that are given them, their eyes and hands on heaven, their voice on praying aloud, with a violent and continual excitement… . They are to be praised for piety, but not properly for constancy. They avoid the struggle; they turn their consideration away from death. [632])
By diverting their thoughts, those poor wretches not only demonstrate a lack of courage but also a logic of desire, in which the perception of lack is assuaged by the magical thinking realized through the language of prayer:
Nous pensons tousjours ailleurs; l’esperance d’une meilleure vie nous arreste et appuye, ou l’esperance de la valeur de nos enfans, ou la gloire future de nostre nom, ou la fuite des maux de cette vie, ou la vengeance qui menasse ceux qui nous causent la mort. (III, 4, 834)
Our thoughts are always elsewhere; the hope of a better life stays and supports us, or the hope of our children’s worth, or the future glory of our name, or flight from the ills of this life, or the vengeance that threatens those who cause our death. ([633])
In this context, the essay characterizes hope, in a somewhat sacrilegious way, as a means of substituting new objects of desire for the dissatisfaction associated with the unnamed thing (death).
In the course of the essay, ontological concerns devolve to epistemological preoccupations. The language of philosophy creates confusion between sign and substance and diverts us from the possibility of isolating the meaning of the thing in itself: “Voire les arguments de la philosophie vont à tous coups costoiant et gauchissant la matiere, et à peine essuiant sa crouste” (III, 4, 834) (“Indeed the arguments of philosophy are all the time running alongside the matter and sidestepping it, and barely brushing the crust of it” [634]). In constructing its own language, the rhetoric of philosophy can never simply refer to itself; philosophy is therefore a source of diversion inasmuch as it moves elsewhere in the wake of its own pronouncements.
The familiar Montaignian topos concerning the arbitrary relationship between words and things resurfaces as the essay once again undergoes another detour. Montaigne’s text relates how we can be distracted by small things that sometimes say more by simply saying less. By revealing how words can deflect the referential meaning of things while at the same time carrying within themselves the possibility of affective response, the essay demonstrates how euphemisms for death are transmitted through signifiers evoking memories of things past. Language is shown to incarnate the ghostliness of a specter capable of generating a response that stimulates grief more from the sound of words than from their content:
Le son mesmes des noms, qui nous tintoüine aux oreilles: Mon pauvre maistre! ou, Mon grand amy! Hélas! mon cher pere! ou, Ma bonne fille! quand ces redites me pinsent et que j’y regarde de pres, je trouve que c’est une plainte grammairiene et voyelle. Le mot et le ton me blessent. Comme les exclamations des prescheurs esmouvent leur auditoire souvant plus que ne font leurs raisons et comme nous frappe la voix piteuse d’une beste qu’on tue pour nostre service. (III, 4, 837)
The very sound of the names, which rings in our ears “My poor master!” or “My great friend!” “Alas, my dear father!” or “My sweet daughter!” when these refrains pain me and I look at them closely, I find that they are only grammatical and vocal complaints. The word and the sound hurt me, just as the exclamations of preachers move their auditors more than their reasons, and as we are struck by the piteous voice of the animal that is being killed for our use. (635)
If the human subject can be swept away by the sounds of language, it is because it is able to absorb affect representations through the sound of words. Yet this incorporation bases itself upon a partial disavowal of the object of grief. Through a series of linguistic turns, the subject in pain displaces the object of its loss; it focuses its attention less on the “what” of the loss than on the “who” that can now only cathect onto that other through the sound of words.
In yet other examples Montaigne’s text describes the ways in which the human subject attempts to overcome death through a displacement that requires a form of repression engendering an othering of the self: “Celuy qui meurt en la meslée, les armes à la main, il n’estudie pas lors la mort, il ne la sent ny ne la considere: l’ardeur du combat l’emporte” (III, 4, 833) (“The man who dies in the melee, arms in hand, does not then study death; he neither feels it nor considers it; he is carried away by the heat of the battle” [633]). Viewed in these terms, diversion is represented as something heroic. The energy derived from the power of battle requires the repression of the narcissism associated with fear. In essence, the denial of the possibility of loss functions as a mechanism protecting the self from the reality of loss itself.
As the essay progresses, it demonstrates how the substitution of one passion for another enables the human subject to escape itself by allowing simulation to replace reality:
J’ay veu aussi, pour cet effect de divertir les opinions et conjectures du peuple et desvoyer les parleurs, des femmes couvrir leurs vrayes affections par des affections contrefaictes. Mais j’en ay veu telle qui, en se contrefaisant, s’est laissée prendre à bon escient, et a quitté la vraye et originelle affection pour la feinte. (III, 4, 836)
I have also known women, for this purpose of diverting people’s opinions and conjectures and putting the gossips off the track, to cover their true affections with counterfeit ones. But I knew one who, in counterfeiting, let herself be caught in good earnest, and abandoned the true original affection for the pretended one. (635)
The woman’s “acting out” results in the forgetting of the self that becomes the pivotal moment of exile and desire. Through the power of the imagination this diversion of affect paradoxically enables “seeming” to become “Being” at the very moment that the woman in question accedes to a newly born subjecthood founded on a kind of alienation. If Being attains a sense of self in this context, it is motivated by the staging of a desire derived from the image through which the self is constructed.
Throughout the essay diversion becomes the master trope that enables desire to be realized. Accordingly, Montaigne evokes the loss of his friend La Boétie as the motivation to seek refuge in distraction from the pain of his grief:
Je fus autrefois touché d’un puissant desplaisir… . Je m’y fusse perdu à l’avanture si je m’en fusse simplement fié à mes forces. Ayant besoing d’une vehemente diversion pour m’en distraire, je me fis, par art, amoureux, et par estude… . L’amour me soulagea et retira du mal qui m’estoit causé par l’amitié. (III, 4, 835)
I was once afflicted with an overpowering grief… . I might well have been destroyed by it if I had trusted simply to my own powers. Needing some violent diversion to distract me from it, by art and study I made myself fall in love, in which my youth helped me. Love solaced me and withdrew me from the affliction caused by friendship. (634)
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the engendering of Montaigne’s writing is a compensatory gesture for the loss of La Boétie; the feeling of absence and the anxiety of separation are dealt with through the essayist’s endeavor to substitute his dialogic relationship with the text for the lost friend.2 To be sure, the disappearance of the friend’s gaze has resulted in the loss of the essayist’s self-image and the subsequent use of language as mediator of that lack: “luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image, et l’emporta. C’est pourquoy je ne deschiffre moy mesme, si curousement.” (983 n. 4) (“He alone enjoyed my true image, and carried it away. That is why I myself decipher myself so painstakingly” [752]).3 Here the dissolution of the sacred bond of friendship forces the essayist to assimilate the nothingness of death; it describes his self-alienation as a phenomenon that manifests itself in the dismembered fragments of his textual corpus and his desire to see the light of day.
Lack of Being, or the perceived sense of emptiness, is thus the organizing condition of the writer’s subjectivity in “De la diversion.” Victim of an ontological void resulting from an encounter with death, in order to survive the writing subject must compensate for this lack through a series of references that enable self-definition to be situated elsewhere. Accordingly, the staging of desire in this essay is derived from the various narrative fragments through which the self is constructed; the text always acts as a supplement for the man who, as Richard Regosin suggests, “can never simply be.”4 The multiple references throughout the essay to displacement and deferral as a means of survival enables Montaigne to experience desire from someplace else; storytelling becomes the mechanism through which the essayist’s subject-position is obliquely articulated. Subjectivity is the result of kaleidoscopic images (the widow in pain, the leader threatened by rebellion) that retrospectively build the foundation for the subject of enunciation and act as a substitute supplying the content that the subject itself lacks. Just as Montaigne explains how he was able to realize a young prince’s hidden desire by turning his attention away from vengeance to ambition—“Je le destournay à l’ambition” (III, 4, 835) (“I diverted him to ambition” [634])—so the essayist’s desire can be fulfilled through a displacement that liberates unconscious drives through narrative supplementation.
Although Montaigne does not endlessly draw attention to his own preoccupation with death, the form of the essay nevertheless represents it in the substitutions and recombinations through which the unconscious makes itself known. To be sure, to name directly the object of fear functions as a kind of death sentence because of the congealing of its meaning. However, to “essay” it through indirection is to make the subject of enunciation come forth by reflecting the desire for deferral that defines its subjectivity. If to write is to survive, then to live is to be caught in the signifying web of the language constituting the writing of the essay.
In this essay the writing subject therefore declares himself better able to deal with death by viewing it nonchalantly: “Je voyois nonchalamment la mort, quand je la voyois universellement, comme fin de la vie; je la gourmande en bloc; par le menu, elle me pille” (III, 4, 837) (“I saw death nonchalantly when I saw it universally, as the end of life. I dominate it in the mass; in detail it harasses me” [636]). Ironically, the essayist seeks refuge in the very details that his own desire wishes to transcend. Painful thoughts, he proclaims, can be eradicated through a fascinating tendency for diversion in anxiety, producing details that, in principle, should be subject to erasure. The memory of “la robe de Caesar” (III, 4, 837) (“Caesar’s robe” [635]) is more powerful than the reality of his death:
Peu de chose nous divertit et destourne, car peu de chose nous tient. Nous ne regardons gueres les subjects en gros et seuls; ce sont des circonstances ou des images menues et superficieles qui nous frapent, et des vaines escorces qui rejalissent des subjects.” (III, 4, 836)
It takes little to divert and distract us, for it takes little to hold us. We scarcely look at things in gross and alone; it is the minute and superficial circumstances and notions that strike us, and the empty husks that peel off from the things. (635)
As a corrective to the displeasure associated with powerful passions, Montaigne’s text suggests the possibility of converting energy to lesser intensities as a means of dissipating drives and regulating desire:
Si vostre affection en l’amour est trop puissante, dissipez la … car je l’ay souvant essayé avec utilité: rompez la à divers desirs, desquels il y en ayt un regent et un maistre, si vous voulez; mais, depeur qu’il ne vous gourmande et tyrannise, affoiblissez le, sejournez le, en le divisant et divertissant. (III, 4, 835)
If your passion in love is too powerful, disperse it … for I have often tried it with profit. Break it up into various desires, of which one may be ruler and master, if you will; but for fear it may dominate and tyrannize you, weaken it, check it, by dividing and diverting it. (634)
The dissipation of affect prevents true recognition from being realized; it therefore facilitates a mollification of that which threatens the subject.
Within the logic of the essay metonymy, the trope for change, dislocates pain by forcing it elsewhere; it represents the movement by which an idea (diversion) serves as the nodal point of different associative chains:
Une aigre imagination me tient; je trouve plus court, que de la dompter, la changer; je luy en substitue, si je ne puis une contraire, aumoins un’autre. Tousjours la variation soulage, dissout et dissipe. Si je ne puis la combatre, je luy eschape, et en la fuyant je fourvoye, je ruse: muant de lieu … je me sauve dans la presse d’autres amusemens et pensées, où elle perd ma trace et m’esgare. (III, 4, 835–36)
A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky. By changing place, … I escape into the throng of other occupations and thoughts, where it loses my trace and so loses me. (634–35)
Montaigne’s attempted transcendence of pain is nothing less than a forgetting of its origins through a form of trickery ( “je ruse”) that provokes the dissolution of the subject.5 The act of displacement introduces a disorganizing sense of flux whereby the loss of a painful idea originates in a process (“la variation,” or variability) through which it loses its own origin by becoming subject to change. Here diversion (“la variation”) simulates a partial killing of the subject of narration, but the repression that results from the ruse of rhetoric keeps it embodied in its many returns through references to associative subjects.
Although Socrates was able to resolve himself to the reality of death, Montaigne can only confront it through the diversionary process of writing, which therefore becomes a form of entertainment that acknowledges both a closeness with and a distance from death. In this way Montaigne anticipates Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), written more than three centuries later. That text foregrounds the trope of the spool in the child’s game of “fort-da” (here-there); it represents the fiction describing how the child attempts to overcome separation anxiety produced by the absence of the mother. In that game the child throws a reel out of the crib and pulls it back to the alternating cries of “fort” and “da.” When the child makes the toy disappear, it may be viewed symbolically as an attempted mastery of an unpleasurable situation from which the child may not escape. Like the child in Freud’s study, in the writing of the text the essayist, “works out” unpleasurable experiences through active engagement with his anxiety rather than passive acceptance of it. For Montaigne displacement (diversion) is a simulation of mastery. Desire is figured in the digression of the essay, an imposed delay (deferral) in the playing out of painful feelings concerning death. The drama of salvation described in the text (the many stories about “diversion”) repeats itself in the engendering of the text itself (the digressive form that the discourse on diversion takes). In a way the essayist functions in the same manner as the classical orator who, according to the narrating subject, “se laissa piper à la passion qu’il represente” (838) (“will let himself be tricked into the passion he is portraying [636]) when acting out his case. In the example of “De la diversion” the text presents itself as an imaginary space of escape where the symptomatically ridden ego attempts to replace itself with something else. By becoming other through the act of simulation (the relief produced by the essayist’s vain writing), the Montaignian subject becomes, in Lacanian terms, “the playing out of his thought.”6
Over the course of the essay Montaigne’s obsession with death thus emerges as the motivating force behind the compulsion to repeat. The repetition that is actualized at the level of writing—the reinscription of the diversion topos—clearly derives from a desire to eradicate uncomfortable thoughts, thereby enabling the imagination to engage in a simulation of mastery. Ironically, this impulse to master that which is painful carries within it the radical unbinding that characterizes the rhetorical detours, pointing to the narrative subject’s impulse both to approach his subject (death) and yet somehow avoid it. Changing places results when similar yet differentiated narratives are repeated as a result of what Freud described as the work of “some demoniac force.”7 The mastery that the Montaignian essay works out is linked to the desire for an end (the liquidation of the death anxiety) that paradoxically leads us back to new beginnings (the impossibility of ever truly mastering it).
By acknowledging diversion as a defense against the unknown, Montaigne’s essay suggests interesting comparisons with Freud’s theory of repression. Although Freud later uses a definition strikingly similar to diversion, for Freud “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance from the conscious .” The fundamental difference between the two processes lies in the way in which one relates to painful thoughts. In the case of repression, the individual expends the greatest mental effort to erase a painful memory. The purpose of diversion, however, is to project an illusion that allows one to cope with the infelicitous nature of death. Unlike repression, diversion involves the imagination’s power to reconstitute what is originally perceived as a frightening image into a more pleasant one.
In the end, the narrative interpretation of “De la diversion” is the result of a semiotic trajectory that emerges from the metonymic effect produced by the writing of the essay. In its endless references to the idea of diversion, Montaigne’s text manifests the symptomology of the failed repression of its grammatical subject in the displacements that constitute the text of the essay. In this essay the self is not revealed in advance, only gradually emerging from the various fragments that the essay transcribes.
The underlying lesson of “De la diversion” is perhaps that loss can be transformed into a creative productivity that is paradoxically based on the vanity of life: “Il n’en faut point pour agiter nostre ame: une resverie sans corps et sans suject la regente et l’agite” (III, 4, 839) “None is needed to agitate our soul: a daydream without body or subject dominates and agitates it” [637]). The discourse on diversion is born of the fictions that supplement the ontological nothingness of the writing subject by compensating for its absence through endless repetition. The “disembodied fancies” constituting the body of the essay become “real” through a rhetorical effect that accepts them as such. Writing thus becomes a form of self-deception or trickery (“la ruse”) whose diversionary tactics offer proof of the essayist’s desire for self-deception. The metonymic displacement of grief keeps it alive and retroactively installs it as a series of living fictions refracted through the prism of language. Before the emptiness of the essay, the constitutive trope of diversion marks the subject’s accession to language that, in the end, only produces a simulation of mastery derived from the emptiness of words: “C’est priser sa vie justement ce qu’elle est, de l’abandonner pour un songe” (III, 4, 839) (“It is pricing our life exactly as it really is to abandon it for a dream” [638]).