Who’d have thought a sixteenth-century Frenchman could seem so contemporary?
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I started Montaigne’s Essays (specifically, J. M. Cohen’s translation of selected essays) in the middle of the spring semester, but I got so busy I had to set it aside. I’m glad I got back to it.
Since it’s a collection of essays, not a narrative, I could have just continued from where I left off. But I decided that I had been enjoying Montaigne’s writing so much that I might as well start back at the beginning. The essays are holding up well to a second read, even though my first read was so recent.
I’m also amazed at how well the essays hold up, given that they were written in the sixteenth century—and by a Frenchman, at that.
The term “essay” has shifted its meaning over the years. I hold my profession largely responsible for this problem; we English teachers often demand that our students write “thesis-driven” essays.
In its worst form, this metastasizes into the “five-paragraph essay”—an introduction that leads up to a three-part “thesis statement” or “thesis map,” a paragraph for each topic identified in that (painful) thesis statement, and a conclusion that just repeats the thesis statement.
But even when we manage to break students’ reliance on this inadequate structure—and damn, that can be hard—the underlying problem remains: we want our students to make a clear claim and support it with relevant evidence and reasoning.
It’s not that there’s no place for that type of essay. But it’s certainly not what Montaigne was doing when he named his book Essais. That French word, essai, signifies a try or attempt (e.g., succeeding on my third essai) or an assay (a test to determine something’s quality—e.g., one might perform an essai on a gold ring to determine the amount and quality of its gold).
So for Montaigne, it’s not about making a point (though he does that often enough). It’s about trying out a position, often with the intention of testing his own character. It’s an exploration, rather than an assertion.
Montaigne is, in effect, the ur-blogger, using personal essays (actually, inventing the genre we call “personal essay”) to explore his own character, philosophy, beliefs, ideas, and so on, through an examination of the world around him.
I try to work that attitude into my teaching, with varying degrees of success. I explicitly draw a distinction between what I call an expressive mindset—the belief that the student writer has a clear thing to say before she sits at her computer, and that she just needs to type it down—and an exploratory mindset—the belief that, if there is a “clear thing to say,” it is a result of the act of writing.
A few students have told me that they find this freeing, but a good number of them don’t believe me (or, perhaps, don’t want to work that hard). “I know what I want to say,” they tell me. “I just can’t find the words.”
That’s the standard claim of the expressive mindset—the notion that the argument already exists and just needs to be expressed (ex-pressed, pressed out, like mother’s milk). I suppose there are situations where this might be true; for example, a Punjabi speaker might have something she could say clearly in her own language, but might struggle to find the English words to communicate it. But I would say, more often than not, that these student writers don’t really know what they want to say. They may have a vague idea, but it’s not fully formed. It hasn’t been tested.
That’s been my view, anyway. So you can imagine my pleasure when I stumbled across this passage in one of Montaigne’s essays (“On the Education of Children“):
I hear some people apologize for their inability to express themselves, and pretend to have their heads full of good things which they cannot bring out through lack of eloquence. This is a delusion. Do you know what I think? These are shadows cast upon the minds by some half-shaped ideas which they cannot disentangle and clear up inwardly, and therefore are unable to express outwardly; they do not yet understand themselves. Only watch them stammering on the point of parturition, and you will see that their labour is not at the stage of delivery but of conception.
It’s always nice to find that one’s views coincide with those of a really smart person…
Anyway, I wish we English teachers could find more ways to encourage this version of the essay—testing a position, rather than doggedly defending one. It’s hard, though, given student and institutional expectations (as well as sound pedagogical theory) around, for example, rubrics. If the rubric says, “A successful paper will offer a clear thesis,” it’s hard to reward the student who gets to the end of her essay and discovers that the position she started with didn’t stand up to the essai.
Yet that’s where the actual learning happens…