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9. Cannibalizing Experience in the Essais
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Cannibalizing Experience in the Essais Andrea Frisch Anyone who has taught “De l’experience” to undergraduates has probably been asked to explain just what Montaigne means when he tells the reader that he wants to be seen in the Essais in his “simple, natural and ordinary fashion,” since his writing style appears to be anything but simple , natural or ordinary. In response, one could of course appeal to the dominant notion of Montaignian experience: the Essais are an attempt to provide a faithful record of the subjective experiences of their author, who never seeks to iron out his idiosyncratic wrinkles or smooth over his inconsistencies . For this Montaigne, “the world is but a perennial movement” (610);1 his experience of the world and of himself can thus be evoked only in terms of constant change (“passage”). If the Essais perform any premise , we might propose, it is that “resemblance does not make things so much alike as difference makes them unlike” (815);2 this, over and above any prescriptive “message,” is the lesson Montaigne draws from experience, and the lesson we can draw from his book. Now, we are unlikely to face such bewilderment if we’ve assigned “Des 180 9 cannibales”; I, 31 is one of the most systematic, easy-to-follow pieces in the Essais, treating recognizably philosophical subjects in a more or less straightforward way. It exhibits very few of the apparently aleatory twists and turns of most of the other essays, including the other New World essay, “Des coches.” (It happens to be one of the least retouched essays, consisting mostly of first layer material.) Here, Montaigne’s assembly of quotes, anecdotes and reflections mostly work together to send messages that students can easily grasp. No wonder, then, that this essay is so widely anthologized outside of Montaigne studies: it seems to express a coherent, consistent philosophy which can in turn be enlisted to support arguments that have no interest at all in what Pascal termed Montaigne’s “sot projet . . . de se peindre.”3 I would suggest that the experience of reading “Des cannibales” differs so markedly from that of reading “De l’experience” precisely because of the very distinct perspectives on “experience” Montaigne provides in the two essays. Though Montaigne’s elevation of first-hand experience as a privileged source of geographical information in “Des cannibales” is widely recognized , it does not tend to figure in critical discussions of the Montaignian notion of experience, which focus by and large on the Essais’ final chapter. This approach has yielded readings that construe Montaignian experience first and foremost as a subjective, irreducibly singular phenomenon.4 While this model, which I shall call the phenomenological paradigm, certainly applies to many usages of the term in the Essais, it fails to account adequately for just as many or more. “Experience” appears dozens of times over the course of the three books; it should come as no surprise to students of Montaigne that most of those appearances occur outside of the essay explicitly dedicated to the subject. My intention in this paper is to reconsider the term “experience” in the Essais, using “Des cannibales” as my point of departure in order to foreground those aspects of Montaignian experience that lie outside the purview of the phenomenological paradigm. i. cannibalizing experience There are, to be sure, certain similarities between the kind of experience we encounter in I, 31 and that with which we are familiar from III, 13. Like the paradigmatic experiences of the Essais’ final chapter, those of the New World in “Des cannibales” are characterized by their singularity, unprecedentedness , and unpredictability. The “monde nouveau” does not correcannibalizing experience in the ESSAIS / 181 [3.236.81.4] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:28 GMT) spond to anything in previous geographies, as exemplified by references to Plato and Aristotle.5 The newness of the New World is what leads Montaigne to his eyewitness and to his preference for “topographers who would give us an exact account of the places where they have been” (152)6—that is, those who presume to speak only of the places of which they have “particuliere science ou experience”—over cosmographers who go to a few places and then compose ambitious descriptions of the entire world. The latter err by taking experience of one thing to authorize giving an account of other things, thus assuming sufficient resemblance between one event and another to license drawing general conclusions from their juxtaposition . This is...