Rewriting culture: Montaigne recounts New World ethnography

Caught between substantial domestic and local responsibilities and serious national and international crises requiring his attention, Michel de Montaigne turned to the accounts of the New World by Francisco López de Gómara, André Thevet, and Jean de Léry not only as an escape from the political and religious unrest of his time but as an instructive view of how other cultures had dealt with internal and external threats to peace and well-being. Through a careful comparison of the accounts of the New World by López de Gómara and Thevet with Montaigne's reworking of these accounts, this paper examines Todorov's assertion that Montaigne "uses the Indians to illustrate his theses concerning our own society rather than seeking to know [Indian culture]." Does the substance of the chroniclers' account of the habits and actions of Indian cultures drive Montaigne's retelling of it or does the subject matter of the Essais (". . . je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre") lead Montaigne to selectively omit what does not suit the matter of his book? In short, to what extent does the quest - Montaigne's self-portrait - limit the scope and detail of the information transmitted back from the voyages? Is it possible that the quest (self-knowledge) and the voyage (knowledge of the Other) run at cross-purposes? A comparison of "Des cannibales" (I, xxi) and "Des coches" (III, vi) with the text of the chronicles by Thevet and López de Gómara furnishes numerous examples of omissions or rewriting of New World Cosmography. In addition to his inclination to generalize to suit his own philosophical enterprise, Montaigne has a second concern which gives shape to his narration. Writing in the heyday of the short narrative tale, he knows what makes a good story. As a consequence, an aesthetic design - the formal elements of the conte - drives his account along with the philosophical design mentioned earlier. Montaigne seems to have understood the allegorical nature of ethnographic accounts. James Clifford notes the need to provide a "scientific" description of the "strange" culture and the necessity of rendering a key to understanding this culture. Thus it is through his art of storytelling that Montaigne manages to communicate his allegory to the reader. The ends of fiction (fingere - to fashion) are central to Montaigne's reworking of the cosmographers' accounts of the New World in the Essais. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.