6 - The Essay as Resistance

Summary

’ Montaigne resists simple definitions’: so opens Donald M. Frame’s introduction to his authoritative 1957 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. Frame elaborates: essayist, skeptic, moralist, prose stylist, student of himself, student of man – ‘no one description tells nearly enough’. Thus, he concludes, we might cut through the matter not by defining the man, but instead by recognizing that ‘the book is the man’, as Montaigne himself encourages us to do. This doesn’t quite solve the problem, however, of the resistance to definition; it seems merely to turn a warmblooded conundrum into one of pressed rags and ink. What is Montaigne; what are the Essais?

In fact, Frame has made it simple: Montaigne resists. And if man and book are one and the same, (‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me’), the Essais also resist. They are ‘radical in [their] non-radicalism’, writes Theodor W. Adorno, nodding to the ‘ironic modesty’ of Montaigne’s experiments and their resistance to conclusions, to the ‘ultimate’.And, as I shall trace in this chapter, Montaigne’s understated formal defiance will in its global inheritors have outsized political potential. Given this particular strand of Montaigne’s legacy – the refusal to ‘play by the rules’, literary, formal, intellectual and even, if we consider the looming threat of censorship, juridical – I want to turn away from ongoing efforts to define Montaigne, to define the Essais, to define ‘the essay’ and turn toward the resistance itself. What can we begin to know by understanding the Essais, and the essay form for which they stand as prototype, template and inspiration, as resistance? How, in other words, can we see Montaigne’s autobiographical resistance to ‘definition’ as a symbiotic sociopo-litical and aesthetic innovation – ‘epitomizing in himself the confusion of his time’, as the Venezuelan essayist Mariano Picón-Salas puts it nearly four hundred years later – that inaugurates a particular global tradition of seeing the formal resistance internal to the essay as a means to protest the conditions of a reality external to it, experimental writings that, perforce, ‘mix and chop the old ways into new ones’?

Resistance, a noun, would seem to name an action (‘the act of resisting’), and we are perhaps habituated to think of that action as having material or energetic force and presence in the world, something we can point to as acting against, or reacting to, something else.