Michel de Montaigne’s Essais begin with an address to the reader:
Au Lecteur
C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur.
To the Reader
This is a good faith book, reader.
Many translators render “bonne foy” as “honest.” Florio’s 1603 translation into English, the version Shakespeare likely worked from, translates the opening this way:
EADER, loe here a well-meaning Booke.
Nothing wrong with these translations, of course, but for my purposes, “good faith” with its legal and ethical connotations gets closer to the heart of the matter. Honesty can often but not always be demonstrated. I say there are five dollars there, and you could count the dollars, and there are five. Honestly. But of course the currency is backed by the full faith and credit of the government issuing it, and “full faith and credit” isn’t very far from “good faith” in its reliance on a willingness to undertake a calculated risk.
In Montaigne’s words, “good faith” is both a promise on the part of the speaker and a working assumption on the part of the reader, a working assumption that the promise aims to encourage. Good faith, then, is not so much a judgment as an ongoing commitment to relationship that results from a working assumption and works toward maintaining trust on both sides. “Process” doesn’t really get at what I mean here. “Marriage” might, or hospitality, or a willingness to know and be known even if the objects of knowledge are sometimes difficult or elusive. Difficult and elusive are one thing, but deliberately concealed is something else, especially if one hopes to gain some advantage thereby.
When I last taught the Early Modern English Literature survey at school, I decided to look at some Montaigne with my students. We spent a good deal of time on this first section, “To The Reader,” so we could explore the question of what it might mean to say a book is a “good faith book,” and likewise, what it might mean to believe a book when it says to you, “this is a good faith book, reader.”
I asked my students which of the books they had read along the way they would call “good faith books.” The question sent us into a lovely period of silent meditation. I think Montaigne would have been pleased. Or was pleased. After a few moments, students offered names of books they remembered from childhood, or books they had felt especially close to in some way–some of them books they had read in their high school and college classes, thankfully. Later, one of the most delightful students in that class did some digging to find other translations of Montaigne’s address to the reader, and came up with this pithy statement on the difference between “well-meaning” and “honest”: “Montaigne’s essay on lying makes me think that an honest promise by Montaigne to be well-meaning may very well be more honest than a well-meaning promise to be honest.” That student’s work was inspired, and thus inspired further thought on my part–a good faith exchange that’s a great delight in a sometimes frustrating vocation.
To entertain the prospect of welcome, of hospitality; to open oneself to voices that are not familiar, voices that speak of things that may be puzzling or repellent or just strange; to say, I will be here for this book, because I believe it is a good faith book, or because people I trust have told me it is a good faith book: these are the adventures of an education, the ways in which teachers open doors.
Today it can be harder to earn that trust than it was when I first began professing the study of English literature. Believing a statement like Montaigne’s can seem naive, or damaging to the cause of unmasking deception. Writers are complex. Because they are human, they are fallible, and do not always act in good faith, even when they say–or think–they do. Yet readerly hospitality is still possible, and is often extended, surprisingly so. And on that assumption of good faith, a conversation can begin. Education can commence. We can go up into the library tower, just as Montaigne did, and see a little farther than before.
Au Lecteur
C’est icy un blog de bonne foy, lecteur.