New World writing as a reflection on the Old World
Kevin Zimmer, English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, Brown University, 2002
[Home —> Nonfiction —> Some Writers of Nonfiction —> Discussion Questions for Michel de Montaigne]
In assessing the merits of native, non-European culture, Montaigne uses Plato's vision of ideal state of man as a lens to view the native society:
"It seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not
only all pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their
inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and
the vey desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure
and simple as we see by experience; nor could they believe that our society
maintained with so little artifice and human solder. This is a nation, I
should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of
letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political
superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poeverty, no contracts, no
sucessions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any
but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or
wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation,
avarice, envy, belittling, pardon — unheard of. How far from this
perfection would he find the republic that he imagined;
How does Montaigne's strategy of negative identification indicated by a long train of 'no...' clauses illustrate that his European point of view limits his interpretation of the New World? How does his description of this native society as a natural, pure utopia comparatively illustrate how European social constructions are corrupted and flawed? Through negative identification and continual comparisons, do we actually learn much more about Montaigne's critique of European society than we do about the native society that he purportedly describes? Does the inherent subjectivity and complete other-ness of a European writer prohibit him from adequately describing a foreign, New World culture?
Last modified 3 December 2006