Abstract
A close kinesic reading of the opening page of Essais I.26 provides an example of Montaigne’s kinesic intelligence: how he thinks with the body. The mind (cognition) is embodied, but through language, the body becomes a palpable mind. This chiastic relation becomes explicit in a later passage where Montaigne describes his pleasures as “intellectually palpable, palpably intellectual.” A chiastic figure in one of Scève’s dizains offers evidence that, far from repeating formal figures and topoi, both writers are intent on embodying powerful responses to the lived world. These readings raise the question of the role of cultural-historical specificity in a cognitive methodology, while focusing primarily on the kinesic intelligence of writer and reader as an instance of the interaction between reflective and pre-reflective cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
See Guillemette Bolens, Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008; English version: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Bolens acknowledges the importance of Ellen Spolsky’s founding article, “Elaborated knowledge: reading kinesis in pictures,” Poetics Today 17 (1996): 157–80.
- 2.
I offer a less explicitly cognitive reading of this same passage, and of passages from Essais III.5 (“Sur des vers de Virgile”), in my essay “The Transit of Venus: Feeling Your Way Forward,” in Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar and Wes Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), 9–18. The two readings are designed to complement one another.
- 3.
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-Louis Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1965), 146 (I.26); this reference is valid for the whole of the passage discussed here. For the purposes of this discussion, I cite the 1580 text without the later additions in order to recover the initial dynamic of the text, and also to avoid complications and deviations into issues that are not essential here. All translations in this essay are my own.
- 4.
It is customary to gloss Montaigne’s mention of nail-biting with a reference to Horace’s Satires I, x; but the point here must be that, even if Montaigne reflectively remembered that literary instance and meant to echo it, it is only meaningful to him and to the reader if the sensorimotor echo is triggered. In other words, the sensorimotor trumps what used to be referred to as the “intertextual.”
- 5.
For a detailed account of “tonus ” and its role in literary works, see Guillemette Bolens, L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016). The term (more common in French than in English) refers to muscle tone, or, more specifically, a normal state of continuous slight tension in muscle tissue that facilitates its response to stimulation.
- 6.
Spolsky, “Elaborated Knowledge,” 159.
- 7.
“Implicature” is an implication that the speaker intends the interlocutor to derive. This term, like “procedural expression” used below, is adapted broadly speaking from relevance theory, a theory of communication that insists on the dynamic character of communicative utterances, and on the extent to which they elicit from the interlocutor a reciprocal activity. See my study Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially 24–6 and chs 3 and 6.
- 8.
For a technical account of the conceptual/procedural distinction (proposed by Diane Blakemore), see Robyn Carston, Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 160–4.
- 9.
“Thinking on the wing” is an expression designed to capture the dynamic character of language in use, in other words the way in which relevance theory thinks about language.
- 10.
On rethinking the “metaphorical” and the “literal” in response to embodied cognition, see Kathryn Banks in this volume.
- 11.
“Et, entreprenant de parler …” (146).
- 12.
“The Transit of Venus,” 11–13.
- 13.
I have wanted to avoid “self-expression” as a rendering of “s’expliquer” for reasons that will perhaps be obvious: Montaigne is not talking about the personal, confessional mode here; “s’expliquer” has the sense of “getting across one’s meaning,” “making oneself clear.” Communication of thoughts is what is at issue here, not the expression of feelings, etc.
- 14.
I have added quotation marks simply in order to make the structure of the chiasmus immediately apparent.
- 15.
The imagination is already, in the sixteenth century, associated with a quasi-Platonic ascent whereby the corporality of material things is “raised up” towards conceptual understanding. In later ages, this upwards movement will become associated with balloon flight: see Thinking with Literature, chs 3 and 5.
- 16.
Essais, III.13 (“De l’experience”), 1107.
- 17.
The ascription of Scève’s poetry to the category of the metaphysical (in the sense used for the poetry of John Donne and others) was first made, as far as I am aware, by Odette de Mourgues in her study Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953), 110–25; for her analysis of the dizain I discuss here, see 21–2. The dizain has been revisited many times since; this is not the place to provide a bibliographical review.
- 18.
The “Délie” of Maurice Scève, ed. I.D. McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 320 (dizain 367).
- 19.
On the possibilities offered by the dizain form, see my article “Rime et structure du dizain dans la Délie de Maurice Scève,” in Les Fruits de la saison. Mélanges de Littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles offerts au Professeur André Gendre, ed. Philippe Terrier, Loris Petris, Marie-Jeanne Liengme Bessire (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 49–57 (56–7 for a discussion of the chiastic figures in dizain 367).
- 20.
See Ullrich Langer’s essay in this volume on Virgil’s lovers turning towards each other, and on more or less embodied versions of this scenario in later poets including Scève.
- 21.
This objection continues to be made, despite rebuttals and counter-examples in a number of recent publications; these include Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2010), Introduction; Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs, eds, Cognition, Literature, and History (New York: Routledge, 2014); and my essay “Situated cognition: the literary archive,” in Poetics Today 38 (2017): 235–53. See also the Introduction to this volume, pp.1–12
- 22.
Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden,” probably composed in the 1660s in a different country and a different language, is another item for the archive: see my brief discussion of two stanzas from the poem in “Far Other Worlds and Other Seas”: Thinking with Literature in the Twenty-First Century, the sixth annual lecture of the International Balzan Foundation (Milan: Olschki, 2015), also in “Situated cognition” (see above, n. 21), pp. 248–50). Cf also John Donne’s “The Ecstasy.”
- 23.
The point is valid also within the macro-perspective of evolution, where a gradual emergence of human reflective capacity from mental processes anticipating or affording that capacity (providing a platform for it) needs to be assumed. Early hominin cognition in general, one might say, was characterized by pre-reflective processes. For a more extended discussion of the relation between pre-reflective and reflective cognition, see Thinking with Literature, especially 21–4, 40–2.
Bibliography
Bolens, Guillemette. Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire. Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008. Translated as: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
———. L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016.
Bruhn, Mark J., and Donald R. Wehrs, eds, Cognition, Literature, and History. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Carston, Robyn. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Cave, Terence. Rime et structure du dizain dans la Délie de Maurice Scève. In Les Fruits de la saison. Mélanges de Littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles offerts au Professeur André Gendre, edited by Philippe Terrier, Loris Petris, Marie-Jeanne Liengme Bessire, 49–57. Geneva: Droz, 2000.
———.“Far Other Worlds and Other Seas”: Thinking with Literature in the Twenty-First Century. The Sixth Annual Lecture of the International Balzan Foundation. Milan: Olschki, 2015.
———.Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016a.
———. The Transit of Venus: Feeling Your Way Forward. In Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, edited by Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar and Wes Williams, 9–18. Oxford: Legenda, 2016b.
———. Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive. In Poetics Today 38 (2017): 235–53.
de Montaigne, Michel. Les Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey and Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Paris: PUF, 1965.
de Mourgues, Odette. Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953.
Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Scève, Maurice. The “Délie.” Edited by I. D. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Spolsky, Ellen. Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures. Poetics Today 17 (1996): 157–80.
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Cave, T. (2018). Chiastic Cognition: Kinesic Intelligence Between the Reflective and the Pre-reflective in Montaigne and Scève. In: Banks, K., Chesters, T. (eds) Movement in Renaissance Literature. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_2
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