To the surprise of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel prize in literature.
As the news broke, I was in the middle of teaching James Joyce to some undergraduates – an author who did not win the Nobel, but is often considered a pinnacle of high literature. Many wouldn’t look to compare these two artists, not least those already protesting that Dylan’s win cheapens the award. But in many ways, they’re alike. I’m thrilled. Dylan’s win has been a slow train coming.
Meanwhile, Dylan will have been gearing up for another gig – much as he has been doing for more than half a century. On his Nobel-winning night he’s set to play Las Vegas, so it’s good to hear that he’s won a prize based on the reasonable judgement of a committee of high-minded enlightened experts and not just on the throw of the dice.
In terms of stamina alone, he’s a worthy winner but – more than that – it is the quality and the generosity of the achievement that is a pleasure to recognise. It’s great for his millions of fans around the world, old and young, great for the prize and great for the idea that popular music and serious literature aren’t necessarily so different after all.
Members of the media react to the news that Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel prize in literature. Jonas Ekstromer/EPA
The world of Dylan’s most distinctive lyrics is probably more Las Vegas than it is Stockholm – his songs are more often populated with gamblers than writers and academics. But his stature as the poet of rock and roll has never really been much in doubt. The significant presence of literary culture in what Variety magazine once mocked as the “deliberately iggerunt” vernacular language of his songs has increasingly been revealed.
The seriousness of the literary as well as musical achievement has gradually gained more and more respect and leading academic critics, such as Christopher Ricks, have been keen to recognise and to try to account for it. His autobiographical Chronicles are packed with references to and anecdotes about writers.
References and anecdotes are also something that filled Joyce’s pages. Curiously, Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records at the time Dylan was beginning his recording career, gave him a first-edition copy of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses. Dylan professed that “he couldn’t make hide nor hair of it”. He wanted the poet Archibald MacLeish to explain it to him but didn’t get around to asking in the end.
Readers of Joyce as well as Dylan might recognise that as just the kind of thing that happens to Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom. Ulysses is full of snatches of songs and music – and if it had been written a few years later Bob Dylan would have been in there for sure.
Dylan performing in 1984. STR/EPA
What a lucky man to own a first edition of such a famous text – now one of the most prized and valuable of all collectable rare and vintage books (one sold in 2009 for £275,000) as well as one that is most valued by serious literary critics and readers all over the world. Not a bad insurance policy just in case the recording career didn’t take off.
But of course it did take off – and how. It’s hard to imagine a more prominent living figure in American culture – perhaps even world culture – than Bob Dylan, or one whose work combines a more richly poetic and surreal artistry in its vision of the contemporary world, a more iconoclastic sense of social justice, more notes of personal intimacy or such a dry and acute sense of humour. There is nobody better capable of provoking his huge and amazingly loyal audience with new challenges, at the same time as endearing himself to them all the more.
I hope the buskers and street singers in the subways and on the street corners around the world dust off their favourite Dylan standards and sing them out loud. It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone with or without a guitar or harmonica who hasn’t tried to strum some Dylan chords or mimic that unmistakeable voice at some point in their lives – just to try to answer that great Dylan anthem question: “How does it feel?”
How does it feel for Dylan to win the Nobel? Let’s hope he tells us in the acceptance speech – or in song.
Bob Dylan has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The media has reported on this surprising choice by asking musicians, poets, and writers if Dylan’s songs are indeed “literature”. Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting (1993), made it clear on Twitter that he didn’t think they were:
If you’re a ‘music’ fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then ‘literature’. Then compare and contrast.
So are song lyrics a type of literature or, more specifically, poetry? The English poet Glyn Maxwell thinks not. In On Poetry (2011), he writes that “Songs are strung upon sounds, poems upon silence”. Inhabiting silence makes poetry the harder and more important art form. Music, Maxwell writes, makes lyrics seem better than when they appear on the whiteness of the page.
But many don’t share Maxwell’s position. The critic Christopher Ricks has long championed Dylan’s song lyrics as poetry. In Dylan’s Vision of Sin (2004), he places Dylan’s songs in a poetic tradition that includes Tennyson and Donne.
Bob Dylan: he belongs to the tradition of blues, country and Tin Pan Alley. Ki Price/Reuters
Both Maxwell and Ricks, however, ignore an ancient link between poetry and music. Ancient Greek poetry, such as the epics of Homer or the lyric poems of Sappho, were accompanied by a stringed musical instrument called the lyre. It is from the lyre that we get the words “lyric” and “lyrics”.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Swedish Academy drew attention to this ancient link between poetry and music when announcing its decision. The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, pointed out that Homer and Sappho were “meant to be performed, often together with [musical] instruments”.
There are more recent examples, of course. English lute songs of the 16th century set poetry to music. In the 19th century, Schubert and other composers wrote lieder (German “art songs”), which also set poetry to music.
But how accurate is it to compare Dylan with Sappho and composers of art song? Dylan belongs to the tradition of blues, country, and Tin Pan Alley (the commercial American songwriters of the first half of the 20th century). He was central in the rise of “Americana”, a mix of folk and popular American musical forms that have little to do with “elite” musical forms such as opera and lieder.
Bob Dylan took his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Wikimedia commons
Dylan has avoided taking on the mantle of “poet”. He once described himself as a “song ’n’ dance man”. Nevertheless, he famously took the name of a Welsh poet (Dylan Thomas) for his pseudonym. (Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman.) In addition, his songs, as Ricks and others have pointed out, take in numerous literary references, as seen in his many often-playful allusions to the Bible. And while his breakthrough in the early 1960s was as a “folk” singer, Dylan quickly became famous for the complexity and “poetic” quality of his lyrics.
So, do Dylan’s lyrics survive as poetry in the “silence” of the page? You can find out for yourself by reading the 960 pages of Dylan’s The Lyrics: 1961-2012 (2014). And you can compare his work with those of other song writers – such as Lou Reed, PJ Harvey, and Paul McCartney – whose lyrics have been published in book form.
Certainly, many people would argue that the lyrics of Dylan’s classic songs from the 1960s do survive as poetry. The strange, surreal, and often funny lyrics from Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) arguably represent his peak as a lyricist.
Visions of Johanna, from Blonde on Blonde, is a good example of the “literary” Dylan.
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
Visions of Johanna contains some of Dylan’s most celebrated lyrics, and you can see why. It clearly works on the page.
But should we make the printed page the standard of what counts as “literature”? Bob Dylan’s songs are multimedia things. Lyrics are to songs what scripts are to plays or films. We can read scripts for enjoyment, and to better understand the productions they come from. But to pretend that the play or film is somehow secondary is clearly a mistake. Equally, we can’t ignore the music and performances that accompany Dylan’s song lyrics.
Dylan’s Nobel Prize shows up what the Swedish Academy has so far ignored in their award system: film, popular music, and the emerging forms of digital storytelling.
Perhaps what this Nobel tells us more than anything is that “literature” or “poetry” are categories of our own making. To move beyond the page seems long overdue.
In the same way that actual grit accumulates in the cracks and crevices of the landscape, our cultural insistence on possessing grit has gradually come to the forefront of child-rearing and education reform.
In contrast to the range of perspectives on grit offered in academia, the popular media will often frame it as an essential characteristic for healthy, productive maturation – and certainly a necessary component for academic success.
And last year, in a column for The Washington Post, Judy Holland, editor and founder of ParentInsider.com, wrote that the “coddled kids” of the “‘self-esteem’ movement in the 1980s” produced children who were “softer, slower and less likely to persevere.”
“Grit is defined as passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals,” she continued. “Grit determines who survives at West Point, who finals at the National Spelling Bee, and who is tough enough not to be a quitter.”
As someone who specializes in children’s literature and cultural attitudes toward childhood, I’ve been interested in this insistence on fostering grit. I’ve also taught writing and literature over the past year to West Point cadets, who, it seems, must learn how to acquire this somewhat elusive quality.
But I can’t help but wonder if we’re talking about grit in an unproductive way. And maybe one of the problems is that it’s presented as a concept: abstract, indeterminate and somewhat magical or mysterious.
How can we define grit, or the idea behind it, in a way that means something? What if we’re not framing the discussion of grit in the right way, since grit can mean something entirely different for a kid living in the Chicago’s South Side than it does for a kid living in the suburbs?
A slippery buzzword?
In 2014, National Public Radio’s Tovia Smith looked at how educators and researchers are using the concept of grit in the classroom. She interviewed MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Angela Duckworth, associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” which was published in May. In it, she considers how teaching grit can revolutionize students’ educational development.
“This quality of being able to sustain your passions, and also work really hard at them, over really disappointingly long periods of time, that’s grit,” Duckworth told Smith in the NPR segment. Expanding on the national significance of grit, Duckworth added, “It’s a very, I think, American idea in some ways – really pursuing something against all odds.”
But more recently, Duckworth has backtracked from some of her earlier advocacy. In March she told NPR’s Anya Kamenetz that the “enthusiasm” for grit “is getting ahead of the science.” And Duckworth has since resigned from the board of a California education group that’s working to find a way to measure grit.
As Kamenetz notes, part of the problem with buzzwords like “grit” – and the attempt to measure or implement them in the classroom – “is inherent in the slippery language we use to describe them.”
Is grit something that can even be taught? Can we measure it? Is it a trait or a skill? If a quality like grit is a trait, then it may be genetic, which would make it difficult to simply instill in kids. If it’s a skill or habit, only then can it be coached or taught.
Grit’s place in children’s literature
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that grit – the kind that describes “firmness or solidity of character; indomitable spirit or pluck; stamina” – originated as American slang in the early 19th century. It’s easy to see its kinship to the other definition of grit: “minute particles of stone or sand, as produced by attrition or disintegration.”
It’s come to represent a refusal to give up, no matter the odds – a refusal to wash away, break down or completely dissolve.
American children’s literature has long had “gritty” protagonists: characters who’ve arguably instilled moralistic values of bravery, industry and integrity in generations of readers.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, another word featured in the Oxford English Dictionary’s “grit” definition figured more prominently in mainstream children’s literature – pluck.
Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn both exhibited pluck, seen in their wily charm, adventurous spirit and underlying moral conscience. But the notion of pluck, grit’s forefather, was largely popularized in Horatio Alger’s stories, which are known for their hardworking young male protagonists trying to eke out livings and educate themselves within the American urban landscape.
“Dick knew he must study hard, and he dreaded it,” Alger wrote in his landmark text, “Ragged Dick.” “But Dick had good pluck. He meant to learn, nevertheless, and resolved to buy a book with his first spare earnings.”
Grit goes mainstream with Charles Portis’ plucky protagonist Mattie Ross. Author provided
Though he hates it, Dick studies hard because he believes he needs an education “to win a respectable position in the world.”
The determined, plucky child figure arguably evolved into one of grit through Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’ 1968 western novel of revenge set in the late 19th century.
The novel quickly establishes Mattie’s resilience and resolve, which solidify after the murder of Mattie’s father. Mattie, reflecting on her doggedness, says, “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood.”
Grit to what end?
Mattie Ross and Horatio Alger’s clever street boys helped shape an American ideal of youthful grit. But these fictional characters asserted their grit because they had goals. What good is grit if you feel like you have nothing to strive for?
In early children’s literature for African-Americans, publications such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ monthly youth magazine The Brownies’ Book attempted to also give its young readers an idea of what they could achieve. While much of American children’s literature during the turn of the last century – and even today – filters ideas of grit through the perspective of the middle-class white child, The Brownies’ Book specifically addressed the lives and experiences of African-American children. First published in 1920, the magazine encouraged African-American children to fully embrace their cultural identities, participate in their communities and become citizens of the world.
The Brownies’ Book was a monthly magazine for African-American kids. Author provided
But that was 1920, during the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when the work of African-American artists, activists and thinkers brought newfound optimism to the push for racial equality and cultural pride. Over the course of the 20th century, circumstances for many children of minority communities changed. As Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has explained, a public policy of ghettoization has left many urban school districts impoverished and underserved, with few examples of hope or achievement outside the drug trade. Yes, kids could develop grit – they could find confidence, diligence and resilience outside the law – a version of grit demonized by mainstream society.
David Simon’s Baltimore-set HBO series “The Wire” illustrates the narrow possibilities for black kids growing up in the city. Grit, as depicted in “The Wire,” comes via success in the drug trade. This kind of grit has the bottom line of economic gain. It’s not about a search for identity, cultural understanding or artistry because kids don’t think they have the same opportunities and potential highlighted in the issues of The Brownies’ Book.
A 2014 study from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights found that in America, there still exists a pattern of racial inequality in public schools, whether it’s course offerings, teacher performance or student expulsion. These statistics – the same as those echoed in “The Wire” – leave many somber, dejected, angry or, too often, complacent.
So how can students have – or learn – grit when all kids face different realities – different struggles, different dreams and different social structures?
Yes, it’s important to reevaluate the education system, as monumental a task that may be. But all institutional or systemic change starts with the individual.
“A lot of what ‘The Wire’ was about sounds cynical to people,” Simon said in a 2009 Vice interview. “I think it’s very cynical about institutions and their ability to reform. I don’t deny that, but I don’t think it’s at all cynical about people.”
Maybe the first step is to think of grit not as something to cultivate in students. Instead, maybe grit is the debris – the dream – that lingers. If children and young adults get that piece of grit stuck to them, they’ll be motivated to keep going until the grit is gone.
Perhaps the job of adults, then, isn’t to tell kids to buckle down and work through adversity. It’s about opening their eyes to the innumerable possibilities before them – so they’ll want to persevere in the first place.
Correction: In an earlier version, the academic papers on grit were conflated with popular media coverage. A paragraph has been rearranged and a phrase added to differentiate the two.
There’s been a great deal of excitement over Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s rare for artists who have achieved widespread, mainstream popularity to win. And although Nobels often go to Americans, the last literature prize to go to one was Toni Morrison in 1993. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, “It is the first time the honor has gone to a musician.”
But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”
A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. Rabindranath Tagore, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913.
The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.
Bengal’s own renaissance man
Tagore was born in 1861 into a wealthy family and was a lifelong resident of Bengal, the East Indian state whose capital is Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Born before the invention of film, Tagore was a keen observer of India’s emergence into the modern age; much of his work was influenced by new media and other cultures.
The Nobel website states that Tagore, though he wrote in many genres, was principally a poet who published more than 50 volumes of verse, as well as plays, short stories and novels. Tagore’s music isn’t mentioned until the last sentence, which says that the artist “also left … songs for which he wrote the music himself,” as if this much-loved body of work was no more than an afterthought.
But with over 2,000 songs to his name, Tagore’s output of music alone is extremely impressive. Many continue to be used in films, while three of his songs were chosen as national anthems by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an unparalleled achievement.
The Bengali national anthem, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla.’
Today, Tagore’s significance as a songwriter is undisputed. A YouTube search for Tagore’s songs, using the search term “Rabindra Sangeet” (Bengali for “Tagore songs”), yields about 234,000 hits.
Although Tagore was – and remains – a musical icon in India, this aspect of his work hasn’t been recognized in the West. Perhaps for this reason, music seems not to have had much or any influence on the 1913 Nobel committee, as judged by the presentation speech by committee chair Harald Hjärne. In fact, the word “music” is never used in the prize announcement. It is notable, however, that Hjärne says the work of Tagore’s that “especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics is the 1912 poetry collection ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings.’”
Dylan: All about the songs
It may be that the Nobel organization’s downplaying of Tagore’s significance as a musician is part and parcel of the same thinking that has long delayed Dylan’s receiving the prize: uneasiness over subsuming song into the category of literature.
It’s rumored that Dylan was first nominated in 1996. If true, it means that Nobel committees have been wrestling with the idea of honoring this extraordinary lyricist for two decades. Rolling Stone called Dylan’s win “easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote ‘Lord of the Flies,’ which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez.”
But like many great literary figures, Dylan is a man of letters; his songs abound with the names of those who came before him, whether it’s Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in “Desolation Row” or James Joyce in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.”
Why not celebrate Bob by being like Bob and reading something unfamiliar, great and historically important? Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” his most famous collection of poems, is available in the poet’s own English translation, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats (who won his own Nobel in literature in 1923). And YouTube is a great repository for some of Tagore’s most celebrated songs (search for “Rabindra Sangeet”).
Many music lovers have long hoped that the parameters of literature might be writ a bit larger to include song. While Dylan’s win is certainly an affirmation, remembering that he’s not the first can only pave the way for more musicians to win in years to come.
Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade and, despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991.
So why are we still so afraid?
Emerging technology and media could play a role. But in a sense, these have always played a role.
The title page of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World,’ which describes the execution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Wikimedia Commons
In the past, rumor and a rudimentary press coverage could fan the fires. Now, with the rise of social media, fears and fads and fancies race instantly through entire populations. Sometimes the specifics vanish almost as quickly as they arose, but the addiction to sensation, to fear and fantasy, persists, like a low-grade fever.
People often create symbols for that emotions are fleeting, abstract, and hard to describe. (Look no further than the recent rise of the emoji.)
For over the last three centuries, Europeans and Americans, in particular, have shaped anxiety and paranoia into the mythic figure of the monster – the embodiment of fear, disorder and abnormality – a history that I detail in my new book, “Haunted.”
There are four main types of monsters. But a fifth – a nameless one – may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century.
Rejecting rationality
The 1700s and 1800s were an era of revolutionary uprisings that trumpeted a limitless future, when the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment proclaimed that reason had the power to change the world. Emotion was pushed out of the intellectual sphere by scientific reasoning; awestruck spirituality had been repressed in favor of the Clockmaker God who set the universal laws into motion.
Of course, humans have always been afraid. But while the fears of the demonic and the diabolical characterized medieval times, the changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created a whole new set of fears tied to advancements in science and technology, and an increasingly crowded and complex world.
During this age of political upheavals and aggressive modernization, tales of Gothic horror, haunted castles, secret compartments and rotting corpses were the rage. The novels and stories of writers such as Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley soon became bestsellers. These writers – and many others – tapped into something pervasive, giving names and bodies to a universal emotion: fear.
The fictional monsters created during this period can be categorized into four types. Each corresponds to a deep seated anxiety about progress, the future and the human ability to achieve anything like control over the world.
“The monster from nature” represents a power that humans only think they have harnessed, but haven’t. The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, King Kong and Godzilla are all examples of this type. An awesome abnormality that we can’t predict and scramble to understand, it strikes without warning – like the shark in “Jaws.” While the obvious inspiration are real ferocious animals, they could also be thought of as embodied versions of natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
“The created monster,” like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, is the monster we have built and believe we can control – until it turns against us. His descendants are the robots, androids and cyborgs of today, with their potential to become all too human – and threatening.
“The monster from within” is the monster generated by our own repressed dark psychology, the other side of our otherwise bland and blameless human nature (think the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll). When nondescript and seemingly harmless young men turn into mass-murdering killers or suicide bombers, the “monster from within” has shown his face.
“The monster from the past,” like Dracula, comes out of a pagan world and offers an alternative to ordinary Christianity with his promise of a blood feast that will confer immortality. Like a Nietzschean superman, he represents the fear that the ordinary consolations of religion are bankrupt and that the only answer to the chaos of modern life is the securing of power.
Zombies: A vague, nameless danger
Recently, our culture has become fixated on the zombie. The recent explosion of zombie films and stories illustrates how fear – while it may be a basic human trait – assumes the shape of particular eras and cultures.
The zombie emerged from the brutal Caribbean slave plantations of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were the soulless bodies of undead slaves who stalked plantations grounds – so the myth went. But director George Romero’s pioneering films, like “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), generalized the figure into an unthinking member of a mass consumer society.
The theatrical trailer for ‘Dawn of the Dead.’
The central distinction between the traditional monsters – such as the Frankenstein monster, Dracula or Mr. Hyde – is that the zombie exists primarily as part of a group. Unlike earlier monsters, who all stand alone, even in a kind of grandeur, one zombie is barely distinguishable from another.
What might the horrific image of mindless hordes out to eat our brains represent in the 21st century? It could symbolize whatever we fear will overwhelm and engulf us: epidemic disease, globalization, Islamic fundamentalists, illegal immigrants and refugees. Or it could be something less tangible and more existential: the loss of anonymity and individuality in a complex world, the threat of impersonal technology that makes each of us just another number in an electronic list.
In 1918, German sociologist Max Weber announced the triumph of reason: “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,” he wrote in “Science as a Vocation.” “One can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”
“The world,” he continued, “is disenchanted.”
Weber may have been a bit optimistic. Yes, we are committed, in many ways, to reason and analytic thinking. But it seems that we need our monsters and our sense of enchantment as well.
Author Leo Braudy discusses his new book ‘Haunted.’
When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind. He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.
Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.
The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.
No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage, a subject which repeatedly concerned him.
French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.
If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century.
Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. With an almost Socratic irony, he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.
But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien, as a more recent French icon sang:
Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.
Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex, has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation.
Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire celebrated Montaigne – a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.
Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.
To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“the most universal quality is diversity”); even vice can lead to virtue. Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents. Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.
Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “book with a wild and desultory plan”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.
Philosophy (and writing) as a way of life
Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic, hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars, and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.
Certainly, for Montaigne, as for ancient thinkers led by his favourites, Plutarch and the Roman Stoic Seneca, philosophy was not solely about constructing theoretical systems, writing books and articles. It was what one more recent admirer of Montaigne has called “a way of life”.
Montaigne has little time for forms of pedantry that value learning as a means to insulate scholars from the world, rather than opening out onto it. He writes:
Either our reason mocks us or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment.
Indeed:
We are great fools. ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.
One feature of the Essays is, accordingly, Montaigne’s fascination with the daily doings of men like Socrates and Cato the Younger; two of those figures revered amongst the ancients as wise men or “sages”.
Their wisdom, he suggests, was chiefly evident in the lives they led (neither wrote a thing). In particular, it was proven by the nobility each showed in facing their deaths. Socrates consented serenely to taking hemlock, having been sentenced unjustly to death by the Athenians. Cato stabbed himself to death after having meditated upon Socrates’ example, in order not to cede to Julius Caesar’s coup d’état.
To achieve such “philosophic” constancy, Montaigne saw, requires a good deal more than book learning. Indeed, everything about our passions and, above all, our imagination, speaks against achieving that perfect tranquillity the classical thinkers saw as the highest philosophical goal.
We discharge our hopes and fears, very often, on the wrong objects, Montaigne notes, in an observation that anticipates the thinking of Freud and modern psychology. Always, these emotions dwell on things we cannot presently change. Sometimes, they inhibit our ability to see and deal in a supple way with the changing demands of life.
Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world. Montaigne’s earlier essay “To philosophise is to learn how to die” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.
Yet there is a strong sense in which all of the Essays are a form of what one 20th century author has dubbed “self-writing”: an ethical exercise to “strengthen and enlighten” Montaigne’s own judgement, as much as that of we readers:
And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me: it is a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life …
As for the seeming disorder of the product, and Montaigne’s frequent claims that he is playing the fool, this is arguably one more feature of the Essays that reflects his Socratic irony. Montaigne wants to leave us with some work to do and scope to find our own paths through the labyrinth of his thoughts, or alternatively, to bobble about on their diverting surfaces.
A free-thinking sceptic
Yet Montaigne’s Essays, for all of their classicism and their idiosyncracies, are rightly numbered as one of the founding texts of modern thought. Their author keeps his own prerogatives, even as he bows deferentially before the altars of ancient heroes like Socrates, Cato, Alexander the Great or the Theban general Epaminondas.
There is a good deal of the Christian, Augustinian legacy in Montaigne’s makeup. And of all the philosophers, he most frequently echoes ancient sceptics like Pyrrho or Carneades who argued that we can know almost nothing with certainty. This is especially true concerning the “ultimate questions” the Catholics and Huguenots of Montaigne’s day were bloodily contesting.
Indeed when it comes to his essays “Of Moderation” or “Of Virtue”, Montaigne quietly breaks the ancient mold. Instead of celebrating the feats of the world’s Catos or Alexanders, here he lists example after example of people moved by their sense of transcendent self-righteousness to acts of murderous or suicidal excess.
Even virtue can become vicious, these essays imply, unless we know how to moderate our own presumptions.
Of cannibals and cruelties
If there is one form of argument Montaigne uses most often, it is the sceptical argument drawing on the disagreement amongst even the wisest authorities.
If human beings could know if, say, the soul was immortal, with or without the body, or dissolved when we die … then the wisest people would all have come to the same conclusions by now, the argument goes. Yet even the “most knowing” authorities disagree about such things, Montaigne delights in showing us.
The existence of such “an infinite confusion” of opinions and customs ceases to be the problem, for Montaigne. It points the way to a new kind of solution, and could in fact enlighten us.
Documenting such manifold differences between customs and opinions is, for him, an education in humility:
Manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me.
His essay “Of Cannibals” for instance, presents all of the different aspects of American Indian culture, as known to Montaigne through travellers’ reports then filtering back into Europe. For the most part, he finds these “savages’” society ethically equal, if not far superior, to that of war-torn France’s — a perspective that Voltaire and Rousseau would echo nearly 200 years later.
We are horrified at the prospect of eating our ancestors. Yet Montaigne imagines that from the Indians’ perspective, Western practices of cremating our deceased, or burying their bodies to be devoured by the worms must seem every bit as callous.
And while we are at it, Montaigne adds that consuming people after they are dead seems a good deal less cruel and inhumane than torturing folk we don’t even know are guilty of any crime whilst they are still alive …
“So what is left then?”, the reader might ask, as Montaigne undermines one presumption after another, and piles up exceptions like they had become the only rule.
A very great deal, is the answer. With metaphysics, theology, and the feats of godlike sages all under a “suspension of judgment”, we become witnesses as we read the Essays to a key document in the modern revaluation and valorization of everyday life.
There is, for instance, Montaigne’s scandalously demotic habit of interlacing words, stories and actions from his neighbours, the local peasants (and peasant women) with examples from the greats of Christian and pagan history. As he writes:
I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.
By the end of the Essays, Montaigne has begun openly to suggest that, if tranquillity, constancy, bravery, and honour are the goals the wise hold up for us, they can all be seen in much greater abundance amongst the salt of the earth than amongst the rich and famous:
I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one … To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to … laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with our own families and with ourselves … not to give our selves the lie, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …
And so we arrive with these last Essays at a sentiment better known today from another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of A Gay Science (1882) .
Montaigne’s closing essays repeat the avowal that: “I love a gay and civil wisdom ….” But in contrast to his later Germanic admirer, the music here is less Wagner or Beethoven than it is Mozart (as it were), and Montaigne’s spirit much less agonised than gently serene.
It was Voltaire, again, who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Montaigne adopts and admires the comic perspective. As he writes in “Of Experience”:
It is not of much use to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must still walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our own bums.
At the BookShelf 
_-002.jpg){kind=link}
You must be logged in to post a comment.