‘Crotesques et Corps Monstrueux’: On the Relationship of Montaigne’s Essays to the Grotesque

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, first published in 1580, investigates the nature of humankind through a philosophical lens. In the opening lines of “De l’Amitié” (“On Friendship”), the 28th chapter in the first volume of Essays—a numerical position that situates it at nearly the exact center of the work’s primary volume—Montaigne establishes a relationship between the textual body of the Essays and that body’s pluralistic constitution. In doing so, he defines his own work as a textual embodiment of the grotesque. Montaigne writes, “Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n’ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite?” (“What are these, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together from various members, without certain shape, having no order, sequence of proportions other than fortuitous?”) (Montaigne 183). Critical understandings of the Essays’s grotesque form through Montaigne’s fusion of disorderly beings and monstrous bodies can be most clearly understood in “De l’Amitié,” as well as the ways in which the essays embody the grotesque through textured language, asymmetrical literary structure, and thematic interplay between lack and fullness. In analyzing passages from “De l’Amitié,” I argue that the Essays as a grotesque form at once dissolves conventional literary structures to exist as a voided, seemingly centerless entity, while simultaneously promoting a pluralistic paradigm that reflects Montaigne’s self-referential presence as author and engages in dialogue between the past and the present. Despite early modern understandings of the grotesque as the aesthetic imagery inhabiting the peripheral, inherently centerless space of the picture frame, I argue that through the dualities of dissolved, unstable form and self-referential dialogue between different eras of time, Montaigne establishes a focal point in “De l’Amitié” built off of empty space and controlled disorder. It is this definition of the grotesque that Montaigne’s Essays encompasses: not a peripheral aesthetic framework, but rather an internal, reflective, acutely self-aware form that establishes its center through conflicts of duality and textual and thematic disjunction. 

To argue for the existence of a focal point in Montaigne’s Essays, I first examine the tangible, textured language used in “De l’Amitié,” representative of the Essays at large, and draw parallels between the disjunction of Montaigne’s language, the historical context of the term “grotesque,” and physically tough materials present in the walls of grottos and caves. I then move from the physical/textural level of the grotesque in Montaigne’s language to the manifestation of the grotesque in the structure and architecture of the Essays, expanding my examination of natural versus artificial grotto-spaces into Montaigne’s positioning of his work as a grotesque self-referential body. I lastly explore the thematic manifestations of the grotesque in “De l’Amitié.” I argue that through Montaigne’s dialogue between the dead and the living, overlay of different time periods, and subversive queer love between himself and the late subject of “De l’Amitié,” Étienne de La Boétie, Montaigne establishes a singular, self-identified grotesque voice within these pluralistic tensions and reveals a focal point in his text at which the textural and thematic disjunctions of the Essays converge to occupy the empty space at the center of the work. 

Language in Montaigne’s Essays embodies the grotesque through the linguistic manifestation of material textures found in cavernous spaces. While the grotesque is frequently understood as a thematic concept in our contemporary society—a description of that which is subversive, ugly, or distorted—it first emerged in the art world of early modern Europe as a physical, formal property. Analyzing the linguistic and historical roots of the grotesque, scholar Brad Epps writes that the term “derives from the intricate ornamental designs discovered between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the antique ruins of Italy” (Epps 41). The word “grotesque,” taken from grotta, or “grotto,” originated in the discovery of cave frescoes in early modern Italy. Throughout the sixteenth century, ornamental decorations inspired by these fresco designs served to occupy space within the empty picture frames of portraiture. (Ginzburg 36). Because of its etymological roots in dark, cavernous spaces, the term “grotesque” carries earthy, textured connotations, associated with hollowed spaces like grottos. 

The relationship between grottos and the grotesque infiltrates Montaigne’s use of language in the Essays—the use of “crotesques” in “crotesques et corps monstrueux,” the opening lines of “De l’Amitié,” relates Montaigne’s language to the French word “cro(t)e” and “croute.” Epps writes that “the latter means ‘crust’ and ‘scab,’ and has also come to refer to a bad painting,” while “the former, ‘crotte,’ means ‘dung’ or ‘mud’” (Epps 41-42). Together, these two words insinuate a quality of toughness and waste. Montaigne’s reference to the tangibility and textural elements of his language establishes a sense of disjunction within his writing; his style is immediately recognizable as uneven and loose, a method of description enmeshed with the physical qualities one would find in the walls of Italian grottos. Montaigne continues in the opening of “De l’Amitié,” “Ils estoient plus amis que citoyens, plus amis qu’amis et qu’ennemis de leur païs, qu’amis d’ambition et de trouble. S’estans parfaittement commis l’un à l’autre, ils tenoient parfaittement les renes de l’inclination l’un de l’autre…” (“They were more friends than citizens, more friends than friends and enemies of their country, than friends of ambition and trouble. Perfectly committed to each other, they perfectly held the reins of the other’s inclinations”) (Montaigne 189). The word “amis” is repeated throughout the lines, as well as “l’un à l’autre” and “l’un de l’autre,” which, through its slight change, rejects the notion of symmetry. This clunky repetition and asymmetry reveal the disjunction in Montaigne’s language and serves as an embodiment of the materials found in grottos and caves. While grottos harbor this rough and uneven texture, it is important to note that the presence of the tough elements in cavernous spaces also stems from the force of water. Many grotto elements “like crystals, corals, shells, or calcareous inter, are generated by nature herself and have a close relationship to water and its creative power.” (Hanke 106). When we read this quotation as an analogy between the artist and the artist’s creation—like water and the rough texture of grottos—we can understand Montaigne as the force of water, the Essays as his grotto-like structure, and the texture of his language as the corals, crystals, and shells that constitute his grotto’s walls. 

Water, like artistic imagination, serves as an impetus for metamorphosis, containing the ability to dissolve and change the forms of physical entities set before it. Commonly utilized as a tool of spatial organization in baroque gardens, water served to guide the viewer’s eye through the landscapes of artificial garden grottos, architecturally crafted alternatives to naturally formed caves. These garden grottos were the perfect place “predestined to display the dialectic between natural and artificial forms…” While water gave garden grottos spatial order, structure, and brought the movement of water into a dialogue with the stillness of the grotto’s natural architectural features, its presence also challenged the basic notion of what a grotto is. How strict are the definitions of the grotto as a natural space, especially when altered by the metamorphic powers of water? Is the garden grotto a dissolution of the grotto’s natural form or a reconstruction of it? Just as the structures of garden grottos probe the pluralistic paradigm of artificiality and naturalness, the Essays grapple with similar questions of plurality, though Montaigne’s text raises this paradigm in terms of his work’s self-referential identity. The Essays are both a product of Montaigne and an entity existing separate from him. In the opening quotation—the Essays as “crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n’ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite” (“grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together from various members, without certain shape, having no order, sequence of proportions other than fortuitous”)—Montaigne characterizes his own work as an amalgamation of disjunction and difference, brought together into a grotesque space. 

By defining himself and his work as “grotesque and monstrous bodies,” Montaigne creates a gap between himself and the traditions of classical writers, who rejected grotesque imagery even when confined to the space of the picture frame. Despite this conceptual separation from classical tradition, Montaigne’s Essays are imbued with quotations from writers such as Horace, Aristotle, and Virgil. Montaigne, furthermore, opens “De l’Amitié” with Horace’s Latin sentiment, “Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne” (“The beautiful woman ends in a fish’s tail”) (Montaigne 183). Montaigne presents Horace’s grotesque visualization of a woman’s body tapering off to form a fish, and while Horace’s use of this image is to ultimately reject it and all elements of the grotesque in favor of traditionally beautiful, homogeneous, classical imagery, Montaigne notes, “Je vay bien jusques à ce second point avec mon peintre, mais je demeure court en l’autre et meilleure partie: car ma suffisance ne va pas si avant que d’oser entreprendre un tableau riche, poly et formé selon l’art” (“I will go up to this second point with my painter, but I remain short in the other and better part: for my sufficiency does not go so far as to dare to undertake a rich, polished, and formed painting according to art”) (Montaigne 183). In this quotation, Montaigne defines his own limitations as an artist and how his abilities fall short of creating rich, polished pictures like those of classical artists. This idea of self-definition and self-referential identity is spread throughout the Essays. When we read this self-reference in connection with the strangeness and monstrosity of the grotesque, we see that the grotesque “styles the self as twisted round and shot through with otherness. This is an important point, for to depict and describe one’s self is to risk a narcissistic self-absorption in which the other is denied” (Epps 41). Epps defines the self as inherently entangled with the other. Thus when considering the grotesque as the content within the empty space of a picture frame—as well as its origins in the hollow space of the grotto—it is evident that Montaigne’s self-identification in the Essays incorporates the presence of otherness. 

Otherness as part of Montaigne’s grotesque identity in the Essays takes several forms, namely Montaigne’s references to classical antiquity through use of Latin quotations while simultaneously rejecting classical themes in favor of a heterogeneous, textured style, and the interplay between lack and fullness through the positioning of “De l’Amitié” at the center of the Essays’s first volume. Meanwhile the Essays serve as a work whose primary theme is one of emptiness—marked by the absence of Montaigne’s influential, deceased friend Étienne de La Boétie and references to classical antiquity, an era permanently passed and gone. “De l’Amitié” serves as a treatise on friendship and platonic influence—though at times Montaigne’s ardent love and admiration of La Boétie reads more as a queer adoration. Montaigne writes, regarding La Boétie, “Nous nous cherchions avant que de nous estre veus, et par des rapports que nous oyïons l’un de l’aure, qui faisoient en nostre affection plus d’effort que ne porte la raison des rapports, je croy par quelque ordonnance du ciel: nous nous embrassions par noz noms” (“We were looking for each other before we saw each other, and by reports that we heard from each other, which made more effort in our affection than the reason for the reports conveys, I believe by some order of heaven: we embraced each other by our names”) (Montaigne 188). Montaigne and La Boétie shared an intense, boundless friendship, one that can be understood through the plurality and expansiveness of queer connection. 

When read as a supposed memorialization of Montaigne’s queer love for La Boétie, the interplay between lack and fullness, or excess, ties the Essays to themes of the grotesque. Epps examines the ways in which queer people face society’s expectations of gender, which render them “too masculine or too feminine, too little masculine or too little feminine… Others include the sense of the subversive, sinister, and unnatural, or the burlesque, lowly comic, and wildly exuberant, of the strange, odd, and queer” (Epps 46). These qualities of plurality and blurred lines between different states of being embody the core elements of the grotesque as it appears in Montaigne’s work. The potential for queer love between Montaigne and La Boétie can be drawn back to Horace’s Latin quotation in the opening of “De l’Amitié,” “Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.” A woman becomes a fish; her identity is fractured, fragmented like the language employed by Montaigne throughout the Essays. She is a woman, but she is also a fish—she is neither truly a woman nor a fish. 

The quality of otherness and blurred lines within normative identity, exemplified in Horace’s fish-woman, is present in both the classical quotations throughout “De l’Amitié” and Montaigne’s seemingly homoerotic adoration of La Boétie. It spreads as well into the dialogue that Montaigne constructs between himself and La Boétie. La Boétie, of course, is a deceased writer, whose works followed the traditions of classical antiquity far more closely than Montaigne’s own grotesque writings were able to. In the same manner that the grotto is an inherently hollowed space, Montaigne’s chapter “De l’Amitié” exists in a state of emptiness. It is written about a great writer, though given that this writer is deceased, it is truly written about this great writer’s absence. Thus, Montaigne positions a chapter of empty space at the center of his first volume. What does he place at the center of this emptiness? While Montaigne praises and memorializes the life of La Boétie, his writings in “De l’Amitié” circle back to himself. Following La Boétie’s death, Montaigne sees himself as only half-alive, writing, “J’estois desjà si fait et accoustumé à estre deuxiesme par tout, qu’il me semble n’estrre plus qu’à demy” (“I was already so accustomed to being second in everything that it seemed to me I was only half”) (Montiange 193). In constructing a chapter on the life and influence of La Boétie, Montaigne successfully writes a self-memorialization in which he defines himself and his Essays at large as embodiments of the grotesque, rejects the classical tradition that La Boétie pursued throughout his career, and wraps himself in themes of otherness as a means for self-identification. 

It is through this evocation of otherness as a participant in pluralistic paradigms that draw into dialogue the past and present—as well as the living and the dead, and spaces of lack and fullness—that Montaigne reveals the presence of a focal point amid his grotesque disorder and the complex layering of dualities. Montaigne’s focal point is the presence of himself as author inscribed into the Essays. In the Essays, Montaigne finds “his own voice in a style which is based on the fragmentary, discontinuous, disjointed, contradictory, open-ended paradigm of the commonplace-book. In following the twists and turns of that style, and in finding there the places on which to link chains of thought, he begins to construct himself” (Moss 197). From the textured disjunction, paradigms of plurality, and self-referential identity in the Essays arises a clear authorial voice that, much like water serves as a force of re/deconstruction—constructing, influencing, and controlling the hollowed, geologic space of the grotto—both spreads through its artistic work and places itself at the center. While early modern definitions of the grotesque confine the term to the designs that occupy the empty, centerless space of the picture frame, Montaigne’s Essays establish a focal point through self-definition as a grotesque work, thus revealing Montaigne himself to be the form that constitutes the center of his textual body.