Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

13. Fadaises & Dictons

Fadaises & Dictons Tom Conley “Montaigne after Theory”: the tourniquet that the essays of this volume address beckons a variety of readings. A monument, do the Essais stand over and above the labor and pleasure of theory that flourished in the final quarter of the twentieth century? In the wake of two or three decades of its années glorieuses, can theory be revised and retooled through close and sustained reading of the Essais? If “Theory after Montaigne” is countenanced in view of an implied “historical turn” in Montaigne studies, can theory intervene “after” the author and his work have been fixed and locked in their milieu? And if theory follows the Essais in the sense of trailing them, one is led to wonder: on what path and toward what ends? Documenting where the Essais figure in works of theory would provide only a partial answer.1 It would seem more appropriate to determine what we can “make” of—and with—the Essais, today, where their relation with theory ties our aesthetic appreciation of them to political motivations. Such is the aim of the paragraphs to follow. In view of the growing industry of Montaigne studies it might be said, 253 13 after all, that little is left to say about the Essais except fadaises et dictons. In this volume, papers have turned communion into communication, and communication into excited turmoil over the words and images of the Essais. They have been shown to be in a condition of constant transformation . Communication has become more than the fantasy that we recall so often from the middle pages of “De la vanité” in which the endless praise of connection, contact, and passage betrays a lucid sense of the illusion at the basis of all communication. We share an uncommon communion over and about the Essais, as to what they are and as what they become as we continue to read them. What remains to be said risks amounting to fadaises, the very word that marks the first sentence of the third volume that seems to offer an ironic take on the entire book that follows: No one is exempt from saying silly things. The misfortune is to say them with earnest effort. (599)2 Few works call their style into question so immediately as this incipit to the third volume of the Essais. Is Montaigne saying that he must use banalities in order to fashion, at the price of an overwrought elegance, a style and signature of his own? That banalities and clichés, like what we hear in the political arena, are effective when they are turned with seductive or emotive allure? Or perhaps, is he saying that he needs to distort inherited fadaises in order to craft a difficult, ornate, but vital and allusive style? The incipit invites the reader to discern a shifting and often dashed line of demarcation between a creative and active agency of the language of the essays, the “vocabulary all [Montaigne’s] own” (853)3 in the very fadaises and dictons from which their originality is fashioned. It invites, too, consideration of the ways that what we take to be their creativity finds agency in our own forms of practice, whether those of the professional teacher and reader, or the ways we deal with the discourses said to shape the ways we think and live. The unspoken and often taboo topic of the force of attraction we share with the Essais requires that what we make or do with them not be stated as such and that, as a result, it be occulted through the labor of erudition. To tag along a remark that Jacques Derrida made when he was crafting his amplified, opaque, and powerful essays of the later 1970s: to write poetry in writing of poetry is to risk expulsion from the republic of letters. To seek to write in the manner of the Essais, as Derrida himself wrote in avowed homage to Montaigne, is also to risk being taken as inept. It appears that that theorist would be he or she who is drawn to the sty254 / tom conley listic force of the Essais. If we recall Lawrence Kritzman’s reference to an “école de Wisconsin” that in his eyes was as important as the highly touted “école de Yale” that included Derrida, Paul de Man, and their acolytes, the name now sustains greater weight than it had...