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Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and the Structure of Montaigne's Essais

In seeking to distill into a public image a consciousness that changes over time, Montaigne faced moral and rhetorical dilemmas that confront all autobiographers. Unlike most literary self-portraitists, however, he gives evidence of having consciously tailored his project to the powers and limitations of his medium, the printed word. Montaigne's solution to the problem of imagining and addressing the reader reflects his perception of a new audience for printed books in the sixteenth century. Acknowledging that his public self-image has clarified and defined his private one, he reconciles the conflicting demands of a self in process and a book in print by making successive additions that temper the lapidary finality of the text. The deepest truth of Montaigne's claim to have written a book “consubstantial with its author” lies in the dynamic equilibration of past and current consciousness manifested both in the labile self and on the printed page.