Introduction: The Essay—That Heretical Genre

Abstract

The emergence of the essay at a time of tremendous civil, religious, scientific, and social upheaval suggests that new times demanded new discursive and narrative modes to cope with the changes. Two modern critics, Theodor Adorno and Karlheinz Stierle, have each demonstrated—Adorno with the essay, Stierle with the exemplum— how Montaigne as well as other practitioners write against the myth of reaching permanent truths and principles unclouded by difference and temporal fragmentation. In “The Essay as Form I,” Adorno comments on the radical, heretical nature of the essay: “[The essay] is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (Adorno 9). In a similar fashion, Stierle shows how the essay, as practiced by Montaigne, “wanders from one exemplum to another,” emphasizing plurality, variety, difference, so as, in the multitude of examples, to keep “the discourse of reflection going” (Stierle 585).¹ The plurality of examples in Montaigne’s work reinforces the notion of nature’s diversity coming back from the New World: animals, plants, customs, diseases previously unknown, many of which will find their way into the Essais.