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- <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1"><b><a href="lectures.html">INDEX</a></b><br><br><font size="+1"><center><i>Reading Revolutions: Intellectual History</i><br><br>
- Montaigne's Challenge:<br>
- To Dare to Say All That One Dares to Do</font><font size="+1">
- <br><br>
- <font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">Gretchen Legler</font><font size="+0"><font size="+1"><font size="+0"></center>
- <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- <br><br>The following is based on the lecture and notes of Gretchen Legler.</font></font><p>
- <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- Lopate, Mairs, Harrison, Slater—These are some of the personal essayists of our time, baring their souls, revealing
- for you their most intimate secrets, desires, fears, confessing
- themselves—daring to write all that they dare to think or do.</font></p>
- <p><font size="+1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2114ws.jpg" width="400" height="300" align="right"></font><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">Who cares? Well, we all care, because as much as this intimate
- discourse might make us squirm, we want to see ourselves, don’t we? We
- hunger for meaning, we thirst for details of other peoples lives,
- gratefully, so we can hope to find ourselves—so we can say, yes, life is
- like that, that’s how it is, that’s the way it feels.</font></p>
- <p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- Has
- it gone too far? Well, some will always say "yes". That our hunger for
- honesty and truth telling has become mere confessionalism, narcissism,
- exhibitionism, sensationalism. We have live web cams in people's bedrooms
- and bathrooms. We have multiple reality TV shows, including Survivor.
- Today we are in the midst of a babble of voices, maybe even a roar, of
- people who are writing about their lives, revealing things we’d rather not
- think about—their armpits and bowel movements, their incest stories, their
- sexual desires, their lives in faraway lands, their coming of age stories,
- their families—coming in from the margins where they’ve been silently
- waiting. It’s as if the personal essay and the memoir today are taking
- the pulse of the culture at large, not just a little slice of it—the rich,
- the famous, the educated, the important. </font></p>
- <p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- What is it with all this soul barring—this lack of artifice. It’s so
- real it can get ugly, can’t it? And it can be disturbing.</font></p>
- <p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- <a href="pictures/Montaigne/Michel_de_Montaigne_1.jpg">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne_1ws.jpg" width="275" height="300" align="left"></a>My seventy-five year old, mother, for example, is disturbed by even the
- relatively conservative personal revelations I share in my own nonfiction:
- “I think you should stick to journalism," she said. "Why would anyone want
- to write about THAT?”</p>
- <p>How did we get here to this place in the early 21st century, where it
- seems that everyone has a personal, intimate, revealing, sensational,
- scandalous, poignant, important story to tell, and is telling it? Some
- say it all started with St. Augustine, the fourth century Catholic bishop
- who wrote <i>The Confessions</i>, what some regard as the first real
- autobiography. In it he writes of his youthful transgressions, his
- theft of fruit from a neighbor's orchard, his lusts and his intemperance.
- His goal was spiritual growth—to know himself as a way of getting closer to
- God.
- </p>
- <p>Others, however, say it all started with our man here—Michel de
- Montaigne—a French nobleman of the 16th century who is regarded by many as
- the inventor of the personal essay— a philosopher, politician and writer who
- some say is the greatest essayist who ever lived.</p>
- <p>Montaigne lived a long time ago—four and a half centuries ago. Yet,
- his influence on the personal essay and the memoir—on personal
- writing—follows us right up through the early and English essayists of the
- 17th, 18th and 19th centuries—Addison & Steele, Samual Johnson, Hazlitt,
- Lamb, Orwell and Woolf, until today. Montaigne never said this, but I
- believe he could have: "The personal is political." It became the
- mantra of the 70’s
- <a href="http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/pisp.html">feminist
- movement</a>—what you do in your personal life—in private—has repercussions
- in the larger social and economic world.</p>
- <p>
- <font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Michel-eyquem-de-montaigne_1.jpg" width="226" height="347" align="right"></font>Montaigne is political. Why? He chose to write, for one
- thing, not in Latin or in the formal French of his time, but in regular
- language. There is a democracy in this. And he chose to attempt
- what no one before him, he claimed, had attempted—truly honest and intimate
- explorations of the self—with no masks. We know ourselves so little,
- Montaigne felt. We pretend so much. His enemies were ceremony
- and convention.</p>
- <p>
- One of the fundamental principles woven throughout the essays is a belief in
- our humanity.
- We
- are all human. We are all average human beings. Although a
- French nobleman, he farted when he ate
- beans, he loved sauce, he scratched his ears, prefers glasses to metal
- cups…and he made fun of himself. </p>
- <p>In his writings about education, he stressed that we should know that
- position and wealth does not make us different from anyone else. We
- still have the same frailties and weakness of others. He wanted men to
- strive to know themselves and to live well.</p>
- <p> </p>
- <p> </p>
- <p><font size="+1">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/DSCN2128ws.jpg" width="316" height="350" align="left"></font>Many words are used to describe Montaigne: common sense; down to earth
- view of human nature; humorous; skeptical; irreverent; aware of human
- limitations. He created four and a half centuries ago a flexible,
- informal, highly personal, introspective and free roaming kind of writing
- whose goal and purpose was to explore the continent of the human—roaming
- over multitudes of subjects from loyalty to friendship to education to sleep
- to smells and even cannibals. His motto was not “This I know,”
- but—“What do I know.” Que scais-je?<br>
- <br>
- He was born in Bordeaux France in 1533, at the beginning of the Renaissance,
- to a very rich family. Educated formally in Latin, he studied law, became a
- lawyer and member of the Bordeaux parliament. He ran in the high crowds with
- kings and queens—and even served as a sort of ambassador during wars and
- arguments between Catholic and Protestant forces in the later part of the
- century. He was also a philosopher (a skeptic and humanist) and a
- writer. I will be talking about him mostly as a writer.</p>
- <p>He began his essays in about 1570 and by his death in 1592 had written
- three volumes. They were first published in 1580. The editions
- that we have here for you to look at were translated into English by Charles
- Cotton and were printed in 1685.</p>
- <p>The Renaissance of the 16th century found Europe in the midst of a
- cultural movement that brought a period of revolution in science, art,
- philosophy, religious thinking. The 16th century is regarded as the
- transition between the middle ages and the modern era—a period of rebirth in
- learning and knowledge. Other Renaissance figures who may or may not
- have been contemporaries of Montaigne: Writers: Shakespeare,
- Christopher Marlow, John Milton, Rabelais, Miguel Cervantes, John Donne.
- Painters: Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci.
- Science: Copernicus (1543—his idea that earth is not center of universe),
- Galileo, Kepler. Philosophers/Religious leaders: Machiavelli, Martin
- Luther.</p>
- <p><font size="+1">
- <a href="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2279wl.jpg">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2279ws.jpg" width="338" height="450" align="right"></a></font>This is the time when explorations were being undertaken all over the
- world, as ships sailed out from Europe, fueled by a new wealth of a growing
- merchant class in Europe, in search of money and goods. At the beginning of
- the century Cortez was off to mess around in South American with other
- conquistadores. Columbus was “discovering” the New World, Magellan was
- sailing around out there. Montaigne was part of this milieu. Humanism
- was in the air. And the doors were opening to freer, more speculative
- and more open ways of thinking.</p>
- <p>Montaigne
- has a license, as it were, to write about the body, about pleasure, about
- the individual mind. He too was sailing off, in a way, into another
- country. He delved into an enormous range of topics from vanity to
- Virgil, from cripples to coaches and from truth to cannibals. He was exploratory, undogmatic, and curious about other
- cultures that he was learning about though explorations (e.g. of Cannibals).</p>
- <p>He was a revolutionary in more than one way—it wasn't just subject
- matter—the writing about the personal life—it was also in form. For
- one, he wanted to write these essays in a form of writing that would be free
- of the formal and elaborate<span style="background-color: #FFFFFF">
- structures </span>that were common in scholarly works of the time. He wanted to write on
- a variety of subjects. He wanted to explore his own thoughts and
- explore human beings. He wanted to put his ideas in a tentative
- form—not pretend they were absolute truth. Scholars say his favorite terms
- were "Perhaps," "Maybe," "I think," "It could be." rather than "You should,"
- "It is true that," etc. </p>
- <p>He devised a term for his writing: essay—from the French essayuer, to try
- or attempt, to make an effort, to set out on a journey. The root meaning of
- the word is to travel, to try things out, to explore, to journey.
- Montaigne's essay is an excursion—a kind of mental journeying that takes the
- writer and the reader into new country.</p>
- <p>He had deep convictions about the instability of things, the diversity of
- humankind, and flux in the world. <br>
- He even felt that the human form itself—the self—was a mutable thing that
- one could write into existence—one created the self, in a sense, by writing
- about it. </p>
- <p><font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
- <a href="pictures/Montaigne/montaigne.jpg">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/montaignews.jpg" width="251" height="300" align="left"></a></font></p>
- <p>
- He
- had a freewheeling sense of exploration that pushed boundaries of content
- and style—reaching into the dark places of human experience. Such an
- attitude flew in the face of the medieval scholastic, smug in his
- intellectual arrogance, who believed that, armed with the Scriptures and the
- masters of theology, he possessed the sum total of necessary knowledge
- (salvation).</p>
- <p>We can see the hallmarks of today's personal essay in much of Montaigne's
- work. </p>
- <p><i>Intimacy</i>: “I dare to write all that I dare to think.” </p>
- <p><i>Self revelation. Personal details. A confidential manner. Candor. Self
- disclosure</i>. “We must remove the mask,” he wrote. A certain kind of
- nakedness. “How the world comes at another person—the irritations, the
- jubilations, aches, pains and humorous flashes….” This is the stuff of the
- personal essay.</p>
- <p>Montaigne had the idea that there is a certain <i>unity</i> to human
- experience: “In every one of us is the entire human condition.” When a
- writer is telling about herself, she is telling, to some degree, about all
- of us.</p>
- <p><i>Honesty</i>: “The struggle for honest is central to the ethos of the
- personal essay.” “The impulse of the essayist to scrape away
- illusions”
- </p>
- <p>
- <font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/DSCN2254ws.jpg" width="350" height="263" align="right"></font><i>Humility</i>: What do I know? Idea of “true intellectual humility.”</p>
- <p>Of all his practices, some say, was his propensity, to follow his
- thoughts no matter where they led him. This created a spontaneity of
- mental discovery and a challenge to formal structures. He wanted to
- know what he really thought, not what he was supposed to think. His
- conviction that we should look to ourselves and know ourselves in order to
- write about ourselves, others and the world around us, has been a powerful
- model for other writers, including me—I’ve come to him, in many ways,
- through Virginia Wolf, but that, is another lecture….<br>
- <br>
- </p>
-
- <p>
- </p>
- <p>
- </p>
- <p>
- </p>
- <center>
- <hr width="60%">
- <hr width="40%">
- <p align="left"><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
- Following the presentation the audience was invited to examine the three
- volumes of essays.</font></p>
- </font>
- <table border="0" width="100%" id="table1">
- <tr>
- <td><a href="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2269wl.jpg">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2269ws.jpg" width="404" height="300"></a></td>
- <td><font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
- <a href="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2291wl.jpg">
- <img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2291ws.jpg" width="324" height="400"></a></td>
- </tr>
- </table></center>
- <p align="left"><br><font size=-2 face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">Montaigne
- portraits from
- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montaigne">Wikipedia</a> and </font>
- <font size="-2" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
- <a href="http://utopia.utexas.edu/project/portraits/montaigne.jpg">University of Texas collection</a></font></p>
- </font><br><br><br>
- <center><table border="6" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse" width="80%" id="decorative" bgcolor="#cccccc">
- <tr>
- <td width="100%"><center><table border="6" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse" width="100%" id="credits" bordercolor="#111111" bgcolor="#cccccc">
- <tr>
- <td width="100%"><blockquote><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1"><br>Citation:<br><br>"Montaigne's Challenge:
- To Dare to Say All That One Dares to Do." Summary of a lecture by
- Gretchen Legler. University of Maine at Farmington, October 12, 2005. Retrieved _______. <http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/MontaigneT.html>.<br><br>URL: <a href="http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/index.html">http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/index.html</a> <br><br>Marilyn Shea, 2005<br><br>
- </blockquote></td></tr></table></center>
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