Voluptuous Style: Lucretius, Rhetoric, and Reception in Montaigne’s “Sur des vers de Virgile”

Abstract

This essay argues that Michel de Montaigne’s study in “Sur des vers de Virgile” of poetry’s sensual pleasure (volupté) is bound up with Lucretius’s singular treatment of poetic pleasure (voluptas) in De rerum natura. Opening out from a reflection on his own pleasure from reading Lucretius, Montaigne develops voluptuousness into a stylistic benchmark for judging ancient and modern poetry, establishing an ideal of what I call voluptuous style. A poetic and rhetorical mode grounded in the production of pleasure, voluptuous style operates as an alternative to the rhetorical ideal of virile style, which an influential strand of criticism has identified as dominating “Sur des vers de Virgile.” Intervening in a long tradition that genders and sexes the best of ancient rhetoric masculine, “Sur des vers de Virgile” implies that the natural vigor of ancient language can be conceived of as fluid voluptuousness rather than masculine firmness. Instead of masculine and feminine, voluptuous style establishes an axis of inscription and reception, both of which are figured as active and pleasurable. For Montaigne, the lively pleasures of receptivity are textual as well as sexual, and Montaigne’s investment in voluptuousness in “Sur des vers de Virgile” also indexes the indirect and sexually charged reception of Lucretius in Renaissance literature and philosophy. Ultimately, voluptuousness not only offers a new way of thinking about the entanglements between style, sexuality, and gender in Montaigne’s treatment of rhetoric and the imagination, but also provides new models for literary transmission and classical reception.