“O brave new world”: Authority and the Body in Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” (1580-’88) by Linda Bradley Salamon

[In 1991-’92, the Washington University Humanities Faculty Seminar conducted a ten-week interdisciplinary exploration inspired by the Quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival on the island of Hispaniola. Participants included scholars of Latin American history, art history, epidemiological medicine, and Spanish, French, English, and Native American writing, as well as afew kibbitzers. This rhetorical reading is the paper I presented, acknowledging the non-specialist audience; I have removed only the most obvious vestiges of orality. Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions was still in press; textual analysis of the body was still quite new. The translation is Donald M. Frame’s, from The Collected Works (Stanford, 1957). Grateful acknowledgement goes to the late Marcel Tetel, for conducting a lively NEH Summer Seminar on Montaigne at Duke in 1988. Discussion of the passage on the French wars of religion (para. 19) was reprised in my “Blackening ‘the Turk’ in Roger Ascham’s A Report of Germany,” in Rereading the Black Legend, ed. Margaret R. Greer et al (Chicago, 2007). If anyone wishes to use this reading, please extend the courtesy of a credit. LBS, 2014]

As we have been imagining and [re-]constructing the encounter between the Old World and the New – terms that Montaigne used, with rue – I have been struck by a set of emphases that were never foregrounded when I used to read mytexts with Eurocentric eyes. From the earliest Spanish chroniclers’ accounts of what they found in this hemisphere onward, I have heard the insistent discourse of the body at every level, from quasi-factual reportage of cannibalism, torture, and disease to semi-mystical accounts of demonic possession. In this paper I examine a text from high literary culture which for sixteenth-century readers was one

of the most popular representations of the western hemisphere’s inhabitants in all their materiality; it remains potent for us.

For Montaigne, so fundamental was the confrontation between Europeans and the indigenous Brazilians that the vast difference had to be described in terms of the basic elements of existence: food and sex, love and death. I havecome to posit a “red legend,” a narrative of blood contrivedby the Europeans from the evidence of their eyes but heightened by their imagination of the cultural transgressions that most provoked anxiety. These strangers,these barbarians, these absolute Others – the Spanish claimed – violate the integrity of the individual body maintained by the taboo on consuming human flesh and the integrity of the social/economic body maintained through patrimonial inheritance of property supported by monogamy. A “new world/that has such people in it’ (The Tempest 5.1.186-87) may be conceded human, but it cannot be called civilized. What we eat and what we own, how we sustain ourselves and our lineage – these cultural practices define the “black” Spanish and French, and they place the sinning “reds” outside the pale of Church and state.

In “Of Cannibals” (des cannibals) Montaigne constructs hisversion of native American culture in good faith; the production turns in varying degrees on food, on unconstrained sexuality, and on the violence that is presumed to inhere in the natives’ relation to their own andothers’ bodies. To provide a larger context for the core of his essay, before I turn to that representation I will take up the question of authority, vexed in its implications for belief and intentionality in early modern culture – never more so than when the astonishments of the New World are in question. It is notable that Montaigne inscribes long-time inhabitants of that world – his early informant, the “simple, crude fellow” and, at the end, three genuine Indians – who have been transported to and live within the boundaries of a European society. Montaigne, moreover,

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casts his own mind into the world of the Brazilians. Nothing is unambiguous in his view of the encounter between two different cultural structures. But despite the contingency of his careful judgments, he still builds his vision of the New World’s denizens on cannibalism. The bodyis the battleground.

II

Michel de Montaigne, as literary scholars and many anthropologists know, virtually invented the intellectual stance that we now call ‘cultural relativism.’ Although a detached, tolerant, comparative perspective is inherent in his entire project in the Essays, it is crystallized in “Of Cannibals.” In fact, he problematizes the concept of eatingflesh as his enactment of defining cultural difference without condemnation. The principal verbal gestures appear rhythmically. At the end of the beginning of the essay (para. 8):

I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice, for it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the countrywe live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.

And at the beginning of its end, to the extent that Montaigne ever ends anything (para. 33):

And lest it be thought that all this is done through a simple and servile bondage

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to usage and through the pressure of the authorityof their ancient custom, without reasoning or judgment and because their minds are so stupid that they cannot take any other course, I must cite some examples of their capacity.

These summary passages precisely frame Montaigne’s ethnography.

The paramount exemplar of philosophical skepticism in the sixteenth-century literary canon, Montaigne found problematic the question of authority for any claims about this fabulous, fantastic new-found land with whose strange customs he plans to regale his readers. In line with his method throughout the Essais, he turns for buttress both to the classical authors who are a humanist’s natural resort and to a form of personal experience, where possible eye-witnessing and where necessary evidence gathered from a witness accepted as reliable. (I choose courtroom metaphorsnot because Montaigne uses them in this essay but because heseeks an almost judicial credence through the multiplicity and the nature of his evidentiary claims.)

The Essais appear to have begun as a personal commonplace-book-cum-meditation-on-venerable-sententiae, and Montaigne’s use of the classics for support in “Of Cannibals” would seem almost instinctual if he had not selected such heavy hitters, surely a premeditated effect. One cannot beat Plato and Aristotle (especially given a learned recognition that Aristotle did not write everything attributed to him in the middle ages,) and quotations from Virgil, Horace, and Propertius are hard to top. Of course the enormous authority of Holy Scripture, silently introduced in the assumption of the historicity of the Flood, does not even require citation. There is one large difficulty: Montaigne’s beloved classical writers knew nothing about the New World, as he must gracefully but concessively acknowledge in his second paragraph: “so many

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personages greater than ourselves having been mistaken aboutthis [unanticipated discovery.]”

What, besides prestige, does Montaigne accomplish by intoning the sonorous names? These inscriptions, it seems to me, fulfill three functions. First, classical anecdote introduces what will become the theme of cultural relativism, then some marquee names validate the factuality of what otherwise might seem fable, and finally – in a mode familiar to sixteenth-century Ciceronians and their readers – Montaigne calls upon antique authority to help assert a set of intellectual and moral judgments that have ancient weight. In fact, however, Montaigne’s usage of this mode utterly subverts the European value-system that he signifieswith Roman virtu. And he understands, I believe, exactly what he is doing.

The opening strategy for “Of Cannibals” is blandly brilliant. In his first paragraph, Montaigne refers off-handedly to a 1700-year-old event with which the congnoscenti are no doubt familiar; he employs his trademark skepticism by quoting his speaker uttering “I do not know what…”; he generalizes his single example into a broad truth by casually adding two more of a similar stripe; he silently attacks an essentialist stance that believes a point is madeby using an epithet; in a final flourish he enlists his readers in a cozy understanding that “we…[who] judge thing by reason’s way” are above vulgar opinions and popular talk (la voix commune) – what ordinary folk think and say. And what are ‘we’ well-educated readers rhetorically bullied into confirming? Why, that civilized status – or whatever the opposite of ‘barbarism’ might be – is defined not by national origin but by ability, that good order can be ownedby the marginal as well as the dominant, that ‘we’ (for surely we stand on the hill with King Pyrrhus) must not condescend but look to our laurels. As the crowning touch, ‘we’ are invited to join the glory that was Greece in a tip of the hat to the grandeur that was Rome. Who would dare name anyone ‘barbarian,’ on such a showing? Montaigne’s

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final clever insinuation: the test for non-denigration is a capacity for well-conducted war.

The other functions that ancient authority fulfills are less original. Plato is evoked in an apparently-digressive tale about Atlantis, which he learned from Solon who heard it from Egyptian sorcerers, in a triple-decker, three-star testimonial that must therefore be true. Aristotle fills a similar role as enunciator of a wonderfully salubrious worldlost to Europe not by a Flood (from God or from nature) but by conscious abandonment of a perfection that threatened thearrangements of mere Mediterranean mortals. Virgil and Horace too appear largely as a good reporter’s sources, confirming that nature has in the past changed the landscapeboth for the worse and for the – fertile, food-growing – better. The body of the land can be plowed, be sown, be productive.

The strategy here seems clear. Montaigne is about to tell us of marvels on the earth in our day that, to the uninformed, beggar credulity; it is simply sensible preparation to summon past events of astounding magnitude that were certified at the very top. Atlantis and Aristotle’s island were different places from the New World but, in vast extent and in paradisiacal appeal, they set fine precedents for what Montaigne wants to spring on the unwary. And, like Propertius on uncultivated nature (para. 8,) they keep the notion of exotic foodstuffs on the agenda.

Montaigne’s final use of classical sources characterizeslater portions of the essay and subtly directs the reader’s evaluation of the customs of the New World. To be sure, he says, in The Republic Plato invented a felicitous Utopia, but what we see actually practiced by the barbarians at the behest of nature surpasses the fashioning of even the wisestof humans.

This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which here is no sort of traffic, no

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knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, nometal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon – unheard of. (See, famously, The Tempest 2.1.148-62.) How far from this perfection would he find the republic that he imagined.

With this passage Montaigne segues into his sustained ethnographic report. Virtually all the classical citations that follow serve to make the same point: indigenous societyis often analogous to something we can find in European intellectual history – maybe better. Stoics like Zeno said cannibalism is acceptable in cases of great need (para. 20).Claudian claimed that the most honorable goal in warfare is mastery over the opponents’ will (para. 24). Leonidas at Thermopylae and Ischolas against the Arcadians proved that defeat can be more glorious than victory (para. 27, 28,) a concept that we – 415 years later in the game than Montaigne– might extend to the entire Conquest. Both the Old Testament and the Roman Empire admired senior wives who provide their husbands with juicier sexual pleasures (para. 32,) a sophisticated French notion that might attract men atany time. From such bland juxtapositions we can read Monatigne’s meaning: the Brazilians are not so bad, and theymay be as valorous as ‘our’ civilization’s forefathers.

I turn now to the other source of authority that Montaigne cites, also distinctively characteristic of early modern European epistemology and yet distinctly his own – ina word, experience. In “Of Cannibals” experience enters thestage in two forms: the actual lives of individuals, and

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something like proto-scientific empiricism. The summoning of a witness is clearly an important verbal act, for such a person leads off the essay’s second paragraph, ceding pride of place only to Pyrrhus and Philip.

I had with me for a long time a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in that other world which has been discovered in our century, in the place where Villegagnon landed, and which he called Antarctic France.

Reliance upon this man apparently causes Montaigne some anxiety, for he turns immediately to a powerful statement skeptical of human observation and reason, then to the long digression on Atlantis and its avatars. Just as abruptly, however, he returns to his first-personal source in a lengthy excursus on the special value of naïve witnesses who– unlike some of us – lack the will or the knowledge to interpret or invent (para. 6). Still and all, corroboratingwitnesses are valuable.

We need a man either very honest, or so simple that he has not the stuff to build up false inventions and give them plausibility; and wedded to no theory. [Consider the binary opposites of these three qualities. . . . ] Such was my man; and besides this, he at various times brought sailors and merchants, whom he had known on that trip, to see me. So I content myself with his information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say about it.

Some, to be sure, whether wedded or merely betrothed, still have theories. . . . And some have corroborating physical evidence (para. 14):

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There may be seen in several places, including my own house, specimens of their beds, of their ropes, of their wooden swordsand the bracelets with which they cover their wrists in combat, and of the bid canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances.

Montaigne takes this direct information, these material artifacts, and becomes his own ethnographer. The “simple, crude fellow,” though he stayed with Montaigne for some time(longtemps,) is never named, nor is he quoted. We are instructed, rather, “I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told” (para. 8)– an extraordinary assertion, advanced as his own by the Sieur de Montaigne and two-term mayor of Bordeaux acting as omniscient reporter. Through the translucent optic of his personal evaluation, we learn that Brazilian bread is sweet and a little flat (para. 12) and that Brazilian poetry is anacreontic in verse-form and softly agreeable in sound (para. 33). Who could name such folk barbarian, given the counter-assurance of a French critic and connoisseur?

There are additional witnesses to call, witnesses who’veobserved indigenous society from the inside, but we learn ofthem only at the end of the essay that has been guiding our judgment all along. And their evidence is made ambiguous with a withering assessment before they ever offer it (para.34).

Three of these men, ignorant of the price they will pay some day, in loss of repose and happiness, for gaining knowledge of thecorruptions of this side of the ocean; ignorant also of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin (which I suppose is already well advanced: poor wretches, to let themselves

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be tricked by the desire for new things, and to have left the serenity of their own sky to come and see ours!) – three of these men were at Rouen, at the time the late King Charles IX was there (1562).

Whatever can these heroes of curiosity or assimilation say in mitigation? In the literal last analysis, Montaigne is his own authority for the judgments that carry the essay’s weight.

The only other form of empirical authority that Montaigne introduces is brief and tentative. But the Columbian project has been read for 500 years as an aspect of Europe’s burgeoning attempt to control the world through new knowledge. Thus this ‘proof’ deserves attention. I refer, of course, to Montaigne’s attempt early in the essay to draw attention to what we might call science, or at leastnatural history. Following his classical sources, he presents Atlantis first in terms of location, size, and political history, with the Athenians as heroes. Then he turns to speculation on the physical, earth-moving impact ofa major deluge and vast waves: three large Mediterranean islands, legend (and Virgil) has it, were hydraulically separated from the mainland, while elsewhere tidal areas were added to the mainland. With a skepticism that returns to factual geography and rational probability, Montaigne dismisses any notion that the New World is Atlantis redivivus.Scientific knowledge defeats the fabulous.

But in his long-continued editing process, Montaigne’s imagination is more deeply engaged by the thought of those massive sea-changes (The Tempest 1.2.404), bringing to them now his considerable capacity for observation. A pentimento inscribed in the 1588 B-text:

It seems that there are movements, some natural, others feverish, in these great

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bodies, just as in our own. When I consider the inroads that my river, the Dordogne, is making in my lifetime into the right bank in its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so much ground and stolen away the foundations of several buildings, I clearly see that this is an extraordinary disturbance; for if it had always gone at this rate, or was to do so in the future, the face of the world would be turned topsy-turvy. But rivers aresubject to changes: now they overflow in one direction, now in another, now they keep to their course. I am not speaking of the sudden inundations whose causes are manifest. In Medoc, along the seashore, my brother, the sieur d’Arsac, can see an estate of his buried under the sands that the sea spews forth; the tops of some buildings are still visible; his farms and domains have changed into very thin pasturage. The inhabitants say that for some time the sea hasbeen pushing toward them so hard that they have lost at least four leagues of land. These sands are its harbingers; and we see great dunes of moving sand that march half a league ahead of it and keep conquering land.

What is going on in this long, apparently irrelevant digression-within-a-digression? The themes seem to be these. Natural forces have huge and unpredictable power which we cannot control but which can revolutionize our lives: “if it had always gone at this rate…the face of the world would be turned topsy-turvy.” Change is inevitable innature, in the socioeconomic regime by which we humans have staked our claim somehow to ‘own’ some portion of nature, and even in human nature: “movements in these great bodies,

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just as in our own.” As one of Montaigne’s favorites, Heraclitus, taught, life is a river in constant flux, and weconstruct our lives on the most shifting of sands. Indeed, in the insertion’s final sentence Montaigne represents nature, in the form of personified sand dunes that move likeBirnam Wood, as an ominous conqueror, a threat to the puny cultivation (and by extension culture) of humankind. The unmediated observation of a gentleman-farmer’s life, with its watchful measurement, is here used to domesticate – to make familiar the strange – the concept of enormous, irresistible revolution entering the lives of unself-conscious people. In short, Montaigne is subtly inducing sympathy for the plight of native Americans even before he has introduced them. At the same time, he is pointing to the relation between the world’s body and the human body, the latter subject to nature quite as much as culture. The optic he takes toward the Brazilians, then, can be observational and social-scientific, an approach naturally congenial to Montaigne-as-subject but now self-licensed for this case.

These purposeful divagations complete, Montaigne is almost ready to turn to the difficult topics he has been avoiding. But he has already expressed preliminary attitudes about the New World referentially, before he focuses on its denizens specifically. The words themselves bear witness:

the other (autre) world which has been discovered in our(notre) century (para. 2)

a boundless country (pays infini) [whose discovery] seems worthy of consideration (para. 2)

the new world (monde nouveau) which we have just discovered (para. 3)

our new lands (nos terres neuves) (para. 5) these nations (ces nations)…close to their original

naturalness (voisines de leur naivete originelle)... little corrupted by our [laws] (peu abatrdies par les [lois] notres) (para. 9).

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Everything about this language suggests to me that Montaigneis planting a flag, staking a claim to the western hemisphere quite as much as Columbus, Pizarro, or Villegaignon, though almost casually. ‘We’ Europeans collectively (with Montaigne’s readers silently co-opted into this perspective) discovered these vast, Other lands, so they are ours. That gesture of course follows ninety years of custom, but it risks subverting the tenor of the entire essay. Although he appropriates the physical land, I would argue that despite some minor condescension, he never appropriates the consciousness of the inhabitants, with my final linguistic point as partial evidence. After all, how could we presume to impose our religion, government, and manners on these prelapsarian people, if we respected them – and critiqued our own practices – as much as Montaigne suggests? His phrase ‘original naivete’ reflects the ease with which Europeans assumed their right to control a vast expanse and population whose margins they had barely touched. And ratiocination cannot surpass that reflex. In this singular instance, I think Montaigne does not know what he has said.

III

For my purposes, the core of “Of Cannibals” begins with the description of external factors that shape the Brazilians’ lives (para. 10) and concludes with the pointed presentation of their songs (para. 30, 33) – their art rather than their natural condition. The central portion ofthis core focuses on the discourse of the body: warfare thatculminates in cannibalism, pacific gender relationships based on polygamy. The details that precede these anxiety-provoking themes sustain the reader’s curiosity and establish a potent credibility. They speak for themselves for the most part; several rhetorical strategies nonethelessdeserve attention.

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The first two paragraphs of descriptive ethnography takeup quotidian themes with some piquant touches. Only to twentieth-century readers can the calm announcement of a climate so agreeable that few natives are ill or deformed beso sadly poignant. Following geography, the first point made about the Brazilians’ daily life notably concerns diet:“fish and flesh which bear no resemblance to ours.” The European man-on-horseback who provides readers with their first, famous example of Indians’ response to encountering white men, we are told, was perceived as a centaur, a monstrous being (the product of species-miscegenation?) who was killed as their absolute Other (para. 10). Bodily systems and functions suffuse this simple statement, and they are thoroughly tinged with exotica [much like the approach Edward Said would call orientalism in 1994.]

The paragraph on domestic architecture, bland at first glance, turns to a fantastic wood usable for sword and grills – the tools of warfare and eating – thus making bronze nugatory; it concludes with hammock-like beds that require marital couples to sleep separately. The life of the body, in this land, is nothing that Europeans can readily grasp. All Montaigne’s paraphernalia of classical authority, eyewitness evidence, and scientific speculation is at last justified: what sixteenth-century French gentleman could otherwise give credence to such tales?

Montaigne continues to be skittish – perhaps to pursue his intentions by appearing to undermine them – in the next several paragraphs. One announces the blameless topic of rising and breakfast, but promptly turns to drink. The nextostensibly introduces dancing as the paramount Brazilian leisure pursuit but veers off, via women’s role in preparingdrink and priests’ morning admonitions, to right conduct in war and sex, love and death (Homer and Freud) – both enunciated in a grace before the day’s main meal. This latter curiosity, to Montaigne, bears repeating so that readers cannot miss its impact.

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They have some sort of priests and prophets. . . .On their arrival there is a great feast. . . . The prophet speaks to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty; but their whole ethical science contains onlythese two articles: resoluteness in war and affection for their wives.

Montaigne has already alerted his readers to the key elements to be used in comparing civilizations: religion, government, and manners (para. 8). Here is religion, interlaced with manners. Implicitly we are asked, ‘How do these Indian compare with European versions?’

By such devious paths, Montaigne at last reaches what I take to be the central point of his essay:

They have their wars with the nations beyond the mountains,…to which they go quite naked. . . . After they have treated their prisoners well for a long time with all the hospitality they can think of, each man who has a prisoner calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. . . . [He] gives his dearest friend the other arm to hold…and these two, in the presence of the whole assembly, kill him with their swords. This done, they roast him and eat him in common and send some pieces to their absent friends.

The point of this exercise, we are told, is to establish a hegemony of courage, will, and spirit over the enemy – to educated Europeans, a noble goal that matches (though Montaigne does not pause to note it) the desecration of Hector’s body beyond the walls of Troy.

Here is the “red legend,” apparently a constant since Columbus’s men told of Carib vs. Arawak, restated in blandly

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comprehending terms. Here is the full horror of how men cantreat each other; a brief reference to head-shrinking has preceded, and a spirited rendition of quasi-sadistic mental torture follows. If such violent, consciously painful conduct isn’t barbarism, what could possibly deserve that name? But Montaigne is not simply retelling the “red legend” with the authority that he has labored to achieve. Rather, he marshals all his credibility to make a quite different point. When the Brazilians learned from the Portuguese of an evidently more vicious and painful form of revenge than cannibalism, they converted to it (para.18).

Montaigne knows just what to think of this European contribution to native society; the modest but omnipotent jeis never more forceful than in the acerbic comment that follows.

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horrorof such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive thanin eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretextof piety and religion,) than in roasting and eating him after he is dead. [See Theodore de Bry, Americae Pars Quarta, Plate 22 (1594).]

At the moral heart of “Of Cannibals,” this passage demonstrates how fast and how amply some European intellectuals came to understand that they had no effective

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stance from which to critique the Indians, hence no inherentright to subjugate them in the name of European values.

The essay veers off into justifications for anthropophagy and for Indian warfare as honorable because itdoes not lead to conquest and land-grabbing. (In fact, it sounds like adolescent boys playing ‘capture the flag.’ CanMontaigne be serious in his praise? Always a good question.) The essay’s last direct reference to cannibalismis purveyed with the full authority of Montaigne’s personal experience; as he drily notes, there is wit and sophistication in the Brazilian discourse of the body.

I have a song composed by a prisoner which contains this challenge, that they should all come boldly and gather to dine off him,for they will be eating at the same time their own fathers and grandfathers, who have served to feed and nourish his body. “These muscles,” he says, “thisflesh and these veins are your own, poor fools that you are. You do not recognize that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is still contained in them. Savor them well; you will find in them the taste of your own flesh.” An idea that certainly does not smack of barbarity.

From this sophistication Montaigne turns almost immediately to the far less transgressive, almost ludic theme of polygamy. Ostensibly he treats this strange customfar more briefly, as if dismissing its importance. This matter, after all is not very religious in significance; it is more like manners. But the laughter verges on the nervous, and – I want to argue – the topic carries more weight than the two brief paragraphs (31, 32) on the cross-cultural vagaries of female sexual pride. The “red legend” here appears to concern the heart in its romantic guise. A

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binary, gendered metaphorical structure has pervaded the entire essay. In a dichotomy familiar to moderns, nature – with food-producing fecundity as its paramount quality – hasa feminine character: “our great and powerful mother Nature”(puissante mere nature) with the beauty, richness, and purity ofher works (para. 8). Culture, meanwhile, in the form of inventions from physics to warfare, is masculine in character.

Sexuality is initially glanced at in the report of sleeping arrangements, which posits a whole separate female culture (para. 11). Gender distinctions are made apparent in the announcement of primary functions: men hunt, women warm drink (i.e. cook.) The male culture has a clearly defined set of values – valor in war, devotion (l’amitie) to their wives – but female culture requires no “ethical science” except perhaps willing servitude. The preachers and priests in this culture are, so far as we know, all male. All the participants in battle and stylized torture are men and their dearest friends. In the rudimentary kinship system that Montaigne retails, not only do no nuclear families appear but all the relationship-names are masculine: brothers (freres), fathers (viellards/peres.) This isa man’s new world.

The key issue I want to raise for this aspect of the “red legend,” however, is not male dominance nor permitted male promiscuity – how could they surprise us? – but the connection between sexual generation and property. Inhabitants of this culture, Montaigne has assured us, do not prize ownership like those on the banks of the Dordogne;in this paradise of abundance, the Brazilians have no wish to conquer others’ lands for expansion of their own boundaries. And yet, and yet…the “fathers to all the others…leave to their heirs in common the full possession oftheir property, without division or any other title at all than just the one that Nature gives to her creatures in bringing them into the world” (para. 23). Property may be

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held communally, and entitlement to it may arise by being born of woman, but inheritance is patrilineal.

It is no surprise, then, to learn that sexual gratification is accorded as a reward for victory in war, with honored status as a surrogate for wealth in establishing social standing, and women’s favors (a sign of that standing) acting as a form of property. A senior wife has “property rights” in her husband’s honor, so it is to her advantage that he have many wives (para. 31). Despite his urbane chuckle at the miraculous, Montaigne understands this political economy very well; he closes the passage on polygamy with his last validating citation of European authority.

Stratonice, the wife of King Deiotarus, not only lent her husband for his use a very beautiful young chambermaid in her service,but carefully brought up her children, and backed them up to succeed to their father’s estate.

Gender and possession, old and new, east and west are intertwined.

Apart from the (political) estate of marriage and the importance of generation, Montaigne can still twinkle at thethought of unconstrained sexuality. Witness the final sentence of the essay: “They don’t wear breeches” translatesne portent pas de haut-de-chausses, and hauts-de-chausses literally means not ‘breeches’ but ‘what’s above the stockings.’ Hereis freedom in paradise, indeed.

IV

‘Indeterminacy’ as a category of critical analysis mighthave been invented to construe the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. By their very pattern of production, they

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present their themes through the prism of moments in the writer’s mind. Nor is any topic ever wholly finished. For Montaigne’s subsequent, less ambivalent thoughts on the New World, we have “Of Coaches,” with its embodiment of the black legend. Montaigne’s epistemology demands that no judgment can ever be fixed, that the je can claim no permanence, that another viewpoint is always available not over the horizon but next door. It is almost impossible forhim to subvert his own opinions (I have noted the single case I find in “Of Cannibals,”) for self-questioning is his very purpose. The endlessly ambivalent end of this essay, then, invites our exploration. Montaigne exits as he entered, stepping through multiple frames to reach his theme: the visiting Indians’ observations on European government and economics. Two-out-of-three ain’t bad.

What does it all mean? I have asserted, perhaps simplistically, that cannibalism and polygamy are the major measures by which Montaigne holds up native America against Europe and finds the culture of the former at minimum comprehensible, the civilization of the latter at minimum open to question. What we eat and what we own may not so sharply separate us after all; sex and death may make brothers of all mankind, whatever becomes of the women. I also hold that, with typical deviousness, Montaigne has inscribed his deepest thoughts in the digressions that framethese themes: the tendency of travelers – or claimants to any unique knowledge – to report their observations through the optic of their own theories; the attractions of sauvage but uncorrupted nature as against vain attempts at human creation (although this notion is undermined by Montaigne’s claims for Indian poetry); above all, the true nature of valor as cerebral, not corporal. “The worth and value of a man is in his heart and his will; there lies his real honor”(para. 26).

But when I draw on what I know of the Montaignean context of skeptical humanism, I fall back on the sententiae that most reveal this thinking subject in his times.

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We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.

So we may call these people barbarians, in respectto the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

They lack neither anything necessary nor that great thing, the knowledge of how to enjoy their condition happily and be content with it.

[I wish, as I did two decades ago, I’d had time to deal with the Brazilian love song, the occluded revelation of the visiting Indians’ views on European government, and their war-leader’s explanation to Montaigne of the end result ofwar.]

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