Wounded Artifacts: Vulnerability and Montaigne's Essais

"[C]omme j'ay trouvé Villon blessé en ses œuures, il n'y a si expert chirurgien qui le sceust penser sans apparence de cicatrice." Thus Marot in 1533, in the preface to his edition of Villon.¹ While not unexpected in the sphere of humanist textual scholarship in Latin, the term "blessé" is as unusual in the vernacular as it is striking, although in context it is readily justified as part of an extended metaphor of corruption and repair which Marot uses to characterize his editorial task.² Yet if the special vocabulary of woundedness is uncommon in French at this date, the underlying idea, by contrast, might be familiar enough. Such would certainly be the view of Thomas Greene, who, in a chapter of The Vulnerable Text entitled "Vulnerabilities of the Humanist Text," sketches a broad conceptualisation of the field to which vulnerability and woundedness might be applicable.³ Greene's argument takes its cue from his reactions to a specific aspect of Terence Cave's The Cornucopian Text. His query arises over the Apuleian proverb which is cited by Erasmus in Lingua and acts as the epigraph as well as a thematic strand in the first section of Cave's study: "ubiuber, ibi tuber."⁴ Greene concedes that the humanist text is waylaid by difficulties inherent in its own enterprise. He focuses on the relationship between text and commentary in Erasmus, and argues, with seductive fluency, that the humanist gloss cannot dilate the condensed wisdom of the adage except by the immense deployment of an exegesis that will never catch up with its object. Up to this point, Greene and Cave agree on the nature of the text and commentary relationship, but they draw different conclusions. For Cave, the expansiveness which the principle of copia embodies carries with it the danger of mere proliferation; eloquence is threatened by prolixity, verbal ripeness risks becoming overblown. Greene takes issue with what he purposely misdescribes as the "cancerous growth" he detects in Cave's version of the Renaissance text.⁵ In particular, Greene concentrates on the directional properties of the Erasmian adage. He connects such properties with what he terms an "etiology," in his definition, "a retrospective explanation of textual coming-into-being, a process of accumulated significations through time (which does not of course exclude a concurrent loss of signification)."⁶ Anchored in the past, the humanist text follows its wavering way, "incomplete, meandering, perpetually becoming,"⁷ towards "a progressive realization of modern meaning."⁸ The Erasmian adage, which is, for Greene, a surrogate of the Renaissance text in general, is conscious of its own place in the historical pathway, oriented "toward the modern variation and toward the beginning of the etiological line."⁹ Therein lies the text's vulnerability, to use a crucial Greenian term: "to embrace history," he concludes, "is to embrace contingency, incompleteness, the vulnerability of the contingent."¹⁰ Thus whereas for Cave Renaissance writing exposes a wound which it may know but cannot cure, since it is a condition of its operation, for Greene that woundedness is a condition of its existence, its special ontology, and a sign of the birth of the early modern. "Virescit vulnere virtus" is another Erasmian adage that Greene quotes as a summary of his view.¹¹

Greene's starting point is the relationship between the adage-kernel and the gloss that tries to unpack the adage's secrets but can only do so (if it can do so) by drifting away from the adamantine center of the adage. He shares with Cave an emphasis on textual production. Yet one also needs to keep in mind, as Roger Chartier rightly insists, not only the mise en texte of the Renaissance book, that is, in his definition, its rhetorical structure, but also its mise en livre, that is the physical aspects of the printed artifact.¹² For shifting the terms of this whole debate from text to the book as a material object arguably enables different configurations to emerge. By contrast with Greene's search for the etiological origins of the Renaissance text with...