"Merveilleuse" et "Sotte" Honte: Meting out the Paradoxes of Shame in Montaigne

"Merveilleuse" et "Sotte" Honte: Meting out the Paradoxes of Shame in Montaigne Sassan Meshkinfam MONTAIGNE'S ESSAIS, which are determined by a visual imperative of "se peindre," demand that words make visible the invisible. Rather than taking for granted the fundamental difference between word and image, between writing and painting, they address the process through which writing makes available an "image" of the self through words. In constructing such a visibility through words, Montaigne calls on a mode of self-exhibition governed by shame, a specific topos inherited from Plutarch, that, I will suggest, is transformed by Montaigne's palette into a complex affect appearing through a spectrum of nuanced and conflicting depictions. The paradoxical and conflictual nature of shame emerges in places in the Essais where its inevitability in self-other relationships is rigorously questioned , as in friendship, as well as in others where meting out of shame is shown to be potentially beneficial, as in pedagogical and erotic discourses. In what follows I will trace the dependence of the imperative of "se peindre" on shame in those essays that are engaged in articulating the gaze of the other as the necessary mediation for self-vision, while attempting to isolate Montaigne 's gesture as a move to both rewrite and historicize shame in the context of self-representation. The paradoxical dimension of shame emerges abundantly throughout the Essais as Montaigne tests the limits of the division between private and public, between self and other. At critical moments of his work, Montaigne explores the double nature of shame: its dependence on the other, yet its preoccupation with the self. Insofar as shame emerges through the consciousness of the other in the Essais, this consciousness constitutes the limits of a private discourse. And then, to the extent that shame induces such a consciousness of the self by the self, it bears on the ways in which self-representation relies profoundly on the relation with the other. The double directionality of shame, marking the social bond both towards the self and other, accounts for an overlooked relational dimension in readings of Montaigne that are concerned with the conditions of possibility of self-representation. Que si j'eusse esté entre ces nations qu'on diet vivre encore sous la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t'asseure que je m'y fusse tres-volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud. Ainsi, 150 Winter 1999 Meshkinfam lecteur, je suis moy-mesmes la matière de mon livre: ce n'est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain.1 Montaigne thus inscribes the notion of shame in a double register, significantly enough on the very threshold of his Essais, at the point where the private hinges open to the public, and the public looks in towards the private, the relational space of shame. By alluding to his hypothetical willingness to represent himself without shame (were there a society still living "sous la douce liberté des premières lois de la nature"), "Au lecteur" takes the reader in. However, it also sends him/her away in one circular movement, as a revolving door, through the author's gesture of humility or modesty ("ce n'est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject [moy-mesme] si frivole et si vain"), capturing and returning the reader's gaze in a seductive move. First, the writer wams that the reader is peeping through a private space since this portrait is meant only for intimate eyes: "Je Γ ay voué à la commodité de mes parens et amys"; and then he adds that even this private space is governed by social laws limiting the extent to which a complete and naked self-portrait would at all be possible. On the one hand, shame is inscribed in Montaigne's gesture of speaking to the reader as if from behind his portrait, making the spectator an object of the self-portraitist's gaze by redirecting the arrows of desire; and, on the other, it is precisely shame itself that prevents the self-portraitist from revealing himself entirely naked even to friends and family. Both the reader and the writer are bound...