Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Mapping Woolf’s Montaignian Modernism
in intertextuality instead of fi liation. (43)
While Adorno does not fi nd as much that is useful to the twentieth-century subject in
Montaigne himself as he does in the form he invented, Woolf—in a rather Adornian way,
in fact—sees the two as inseparable.
Nicola Luckhurst points to Woolf’s reliance in letters and diaries on a sort of “talismanic”
paraphrase of Montaigne’s—“Its [sic] life that matters”—that goes hand in hand
with Leonard’s “the journey not the arrival matters.” For Virginia, however, this mantra
is taken more deeply to heart than it is for Leonard as an aesthetic and essayistic credo.
She repeats this paraphrase more publicly in her Common Reader essay about Montaigne
to conclude the same paragraph in which she writes that “the journey is everything,” and
further warns that “in the name of health and sanity” we must “not dwell on the end of
the journey” (CR1 65-66). In an equally Montaignian essay that comes a bit earlier in
the Common Reader—“On Not Knowing Greek” 9 —she writes similarly again that “what
matters is not so much the end as our manner of reaching it” (CR1 32). To Virginia, this
phrase represents more than just a cliché life philosophy as it does, for the most part, for
Leonard. For like Adorno, Virginia sees her “philosophy” as inextricably bound up with
her writing style. Leonard, closer to the Cambridge mindset Toulmin would eventually try
to reject—a mindset governed by order and still deeply infl uenced by Bertrand Russell’s
neo-Cartesianism—was less able than his wife to surrender his subjectivity to the object at
hand to be treated. His more methodical writing style—with the exception of occasional
digressions—ultimately exposed the tensions between his own writing practice and the
philosophy for which he reached.
While our brief glance at literary modernism’s invocation of early modern Montaigne
may bring us no conclusion, that is precisely the reason why, I am suggesting, though
Montaigne is not usually studied in philosophy (or literature) courses as Toulmin points
out, is not read by ladies and gentlemen of leisure as he once was, and is rarely recognized
as a major infl uence on the mighty Shakespeare, he is not, as Juliet Dusinberre fears, so
near to becoming, “for most specialists and all the reading public a dead duck” (43).
But then again: “Que sçais-je?”
Notes
1. In the latter text, Montaigne is directly cited only minimally and accessed mainly through Adorno’s references
to the work of Georg Lukács. Despite an affi nity between Montaigne’s and Adorno’s conceptions of the essay,
the later German philosopher’s lesser emphasis on the Renaissance Frenchman is to some extent infl uenced,
I believe, by Max Horkheimer’s “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” (193). Horkheimer’s emphasis
on the changing role of skepticism over time leads him to overlook, I believe, the very similarities between
post-war and early modern Europe that Toulmin, by contrast, emphasizes too much.
2. I turn to philosophers here because as Geoff rey Hartman points out, in Criticism in the Wilderness
(1980), fi gures like Derrida, Benjamin, and Adorno—non-“‘creative writers’ in the accepted sense of the
phrase”(190)—were among the most prominent theorists and practitioners of the essay form in the twentieth
century. All three, according to Hartman, produce a kind of philosophical criticism which “has a
scope that, though not autotelic, seems to stand in a complex and even crossover relation to both art and
philosophy” (191). Philosophy also serves as a hospitable disciplinary ground over which to draw links
between Leonard and Virginia’s varied and contrasting writings.
3. In the original “Der Essay als Form,” these lines read “Er schreckt zurück vor dem Gewaltsame des Dogmas” (17)
and “De Essay fordert das Ideal der clara et distincta perception und der zweifelsfreien Gewißheit sanft heraus” (22).
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