Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form: Shaping the Essay by Deborah N. Losse (review)

Deborah Losse’s study of Montaigne offers a balanced account of the short narrative tale and its changing fortunes within the development of the Essais. For Losse, the early Montaigne made significant use of techniques of brief narration popularized by sixteenth-century contes and discours bigarrés. Yet the expansive tendencies of the later Essais suggest a move away from the short conte, a change that, in Losse’s view, ensued from a unique combination of historical circumstances in the essayist’s later life: civil–religious strife encroaching on his region, his reading of New World proto-ethnographic texts, and the onset of his chronic kidney problems. Reflecting on these diverse circumstances, Montaigne expands earlier versions of his writing and hones his idiosyncratic technique of extended self-portraiture to give ‘expression to the full range of feelings surrounding the chaos around him’ (p. viii). Losse develops the first half of her argument solidly, building on older studies by Lionello Sozzi and Gabriel-André Pérouse, which have previously focused on the transition from conte to essai. Losse justifiably draws attention to the subtle changes Montaigne made at the level of form in his early reworking of ancient sources: lively dialogue, rapid pace and characterization, witty twists (Chapter 1). All of these techniques are developed from recent conteurs: Bonaventure Des Périers, Marguerite de Navarre, Henri Estienne (Chapter 2). Less developed, in Losse’s study, are the ways in which Montaigne engages with the histoires prodigieuses of the likes of Pierre Boaistuau and Ambroise Paré (and there is no reference to recent groundbreaking scholarship by Wes Williams on these two). Chapter 3 offers detailed close readings of how Montaigne reshaped accounts of the New World by the chroniclers López de Gómara, André Thevet, and Jean de Léry. This is now very familiar territory thanks to the work of Frank Lestringant and Stephen Greenblatt, among others. The specificity of Losse’s contribution is to pinpoint where the streamlined style of the conteurs surfaces in Montaigne’s ethnographic writing: but the focus here on pace and wit is not as sharp as in previous chapters. Nevertheless, Losse gets back into her stride in the second half of this book. Chapters 4 to 6 tease out the second main strand of her argument: that shortform narratives gradually coalesced into something much more dilatable — the Essais. These chapters examine the interaction of different types of modest portraiture in Montaigne’s writing, showing how he exhibits anecdotes (petites histoires) of contemporary chaos in and around sketches of his self. Deploying the concept of ‘storied life’, Losse traces a movement across the Essais, away from economically shaped exempla of the remote past, towards more pressing and disturbed accounts of France’s present suffering in the civil–religious wars. Intermingling with these portraits are terse diagnostic comptes of the essayist’s own ordeals —his recurring pains from kidney stones. For Losse, short self-stories were part of Montaigne’s coping strategy in the midst of adversity. Overall, her study helpfully illuminates a literary outworking of that strategy, expressed in the emergence of the idiosyncratic Montaignian essai.