Montaigne dans le labyrinthe: De l'imaginaire du Journal de voyage a l'ecriture des Essais (review)

In the title of her recent work, Montaigne dans le labyrinthe: De l'imaginaire du Journal de voyage à l'écriture des Essais, Élisabeth Schneikert suggests the mythic dimensions that constitute concurrent readings of Montaigne's Journal de voyage and his Essais: verticality, detours, and the uneasy tension between curiosity and anxiety that motivates his travel. Confronted with his personal battle with kidney stones — la pierre — eponymous with his father and a constant reminder of the paternal disappointment with the son's lack of enthusiasm for domestic duties, Montaigne's travel to Italy can be viewed as a medical quest to seek relief from his illness, release from the predictable nature of domestic responsibility, and escape from what he terms the sickness of the times — where opinion and political opportunism threaten the stability of the state.

Schneikert probes the force of the image and its effect on the essayist's imagination as it explores the juncture between geographic and historic sites and the way it is transferred to the printed page. In registering the height of a mountain, the trace of earlier civilizations, or the simple eloquence and beauty of a peasant poetess, Montaigne shows how external and novel sites both penetrate his inner being and provide a pathway to the reader to undertake a symbolic reading of the text — "une lecture initiatique" that brings us back to the beginning of time (42). Montaigne's journey, marked by detours taken by whim or intuition, reflects indecision and wandering (errance) and leads to the risky and sometimes terrifying paths of the labyrinth as described by Eliade and echoing similar itinerary found in Virgil, Ovid, and other poets of Antiquity.

Montaigne's travel is inevitably linked to his writing, and Schneikert attributes his obsession with the inscriptions on the monuments and graves of Rome and other sites to a return to original, foundational writing "ecriture originelle" (87). Perhaps the most engaging part of Schneikert's analysis deals with the shift from the secretary's voice to Montaigne's voice in the first person and the use of Italian. Schneikert explores the essayist's motivation for using Italian. Was he seeking to distance himself from France as he abandoned a more refined speech to assume a tentative and childlike expression? Italian was, after all, a language that mediated between the Latin mandated in his youth by his father and the French of his homeland, what was supposed to be his mother tongue.

Further developing the tie between the initiatory aspect of Montaigne's travels and the effect on the Essais, Schneikert likens Montaigne's two-page description of the ritual of circumcision viewed in the Roman ruins to the effect of the fall from his horse. It was first the experience of the fall, followed by the recounting of the fall in "De l'exercitation," that led Montaigne to penetrate his "labyrinthe intérieur" and to realize that the record or register helped him achieve balance in his life against the forces of movement and instability (285).

Three types fascinate Montaigne: the vagabond, the tightrope walker, and the acrobat on horseback. All run risks, put up with the unpredictable nature of human existence, and achieve a certain self-awareness and self-mastery in the process. For the essayist, it is through the continuity of the text that he gains some self-mastery over the accidents of time. Schneikert points out that Montaigne's texts — his Essais and the Journal de voyage — provide a counterweight to the unleashed energy of his imagination, referred to with such anxiety in "De l'oisiveté" (I.8).

Between Tasso's destructive "furor poeticus" and the simple, natural beauty of the peasant Divizia's poetry, Montaigne finds a middle route to keep him on track — a consistent pattern of observation and record keeping. Schneikert's work establishes the parallel between observing and...