What if the most radical act in literary criticism is not to pronounce, but to hesitate? What if the reviewer who writes I might be wrong has done more for the reader than the one who writes I am certain?
These questions are not ours to invent. They were asked in the 1580s, in a tower in Périgord, by a retired magistrate with bad knees and a taste for candour. Michel de Montaigne called them essais — trials, attempts, tests. And in doing so he left behind a mode of thinking that still governs the best literary criticism we write in 2026.
This essay traces that inheritance: from Renaissance humanism to the modern book page, from Of Cannibals to the culture section. Along the way, we will examine what Montaigne actually did with his genre, why his self-questioning remains the engine of honest criticism, and how a writer can practise it today — and where, tragically, critics still refuse to.
What Montaigne’s “Essays” Actually Are
Before Montaigne, the essay was not a genre in the modern sense. There were prose treatises, sermons, philosophical dialogues, letters. What Montaigne invented was something stranger: a form built to record the act of thinking itself, mid-thought, warts and all.
He revised relentlessly. He rewrote his own past conclusions. In Of Experience, the last and greatest of his essays, he writes that he has never seen a man who made a plan for living and a plan for dying, and that he does not care for people who speak well of themselves. The essay, in his hands, was a mirror held crookedly so that the reader could see both the reflection and the hand that holds it.
The Essay as Trial
The word essai carries a discipline in it. A trial is something that might fail. Montaigne knew it. He wrote in his preface that he did not claim to produce a complete work, only a sketch, and that he was content to be judged by the public as a work of art rather than a truth.
For criticism, this is a foundational insight. The reviewer is not a judge delivering sentence. The reviewer is an experimenter, offering a hypothesis about a book, knowing the experiment may be imperfect. As the great essayist and poet Charles Lamb insisted centuries later, the essay is the voice of a personality, not the verdict of an institution.
“Of Cannibals”: The Anthropology of Doubt
Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals (1580) remains one of the most discussed texts in the history of the essay, and rightly so. Its argument is deceptively simple. Reading accounts of the Tupinambá people of Brazil, Montaigne finds a culture the European world dismisses as savage. He then turns the telescope around.
Each man calls barbarous whatever is not his own practice, he writes. He does not say Europeans are right. He does not say the Tupinambá are right. He says the categories themselves are suspect — that our first instinct to judge is precisely the thing that should be examined.
The passage that haunts most modern readers comes at the end: the Cannibals, he says, weep over their captives, not because death is terrible, but because it separates them from those they love. Their grief, he concludes, is not the grief of a savage.
That last turn — the refusal to let the moral judgment stand — is the essayist’s essential move. And it is the exact move that separates literary criticism from book marketing.
Why Montaigne Essays Literary Criticism Still Matters
The claim is not that every book reviewer should cite the Essais. The claim is structural: that the habits of mind Montaigne practised — self-correction, provisionality, the willingness to be contradicted — are the same habits that distinguish good criticism from bad.
Consider what happens when criticism forgets them. The reviewer becomes a prosecutor. The book becomes a defendant. The reader becomes a juror, asked for a verdict rather than a conversation. Montaigne essays literary criticism, in the deepest sense, whenever a critic stages a trial instead of a trial balloon.
The Humility Imperative
Montaigne’s great subject was himself, and he knew it. He even wrote an essay titled Of Presumption, in which he catalogues his own failings as a judge, a rider, a musician, a man who would rather hear a good story than do a good deed.
Contemporary literary criticism has rediscovered this posture. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, once dismissed by critics as mere domestic melodrama, now sits in the canon partly because critics stopped assuming they knew what a novel should be. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl suffered a similar fate: initially labelled commercial, later recognised as a formal experiment in narrative reliability.
Meanwhile, the best contemporary criticism — whether in The Guardian’s long-form essays or the quieter pages of the unreliable narrator tradition — keeps making the same move. It admits its own limitations. It says: here is what I saw, here is what I might have missed.
The Digression as Method
Montaigne digressed constantly. In Of Experience, he begins with philosophy, wanders into his dog, his horses, his fear of death, his habit of eating too fast, and arrives finally at wisdom — by a road no straight-line thinker would ever take.
This is not laziness. It is method. The digression is how the essayist follows the material where it actually leads. Haruki Murakami’s Underground, Borges’s essays on authorship and the tigers of the Mughal emperor, Angela Carter’s reworking of fairy tales — all of them move sideways before they arrive.
For book reviews, the implication is immediate. A review that refuses to take a detour is a review that has not yet found its real subject. Read our companion piece on crafting atmosphere in short fiction and you will notice the same principle at work: mood is built in the corners, not the centre.
Specificity and the Concrete Detail
Montaigne is never abstract for long. He quotes Plutarch, then quotes himself, then quotes his cook. He describes the exact texture of an apple. He tells us his own kidney stones, in clinical detail, because the detail is the argument.
Modern criticism has absorbed this at its best. Tana French’s work is examined not as “mood” but through the precise architecture of her police procedurals. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is discussed through the house’s geometry, not its reputation. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic is praised for what it does with a mouldering mansion, not for what it represents.
Precision is humility in technical form. It says: I looked closely. I did not merely assert.
Common Pitfalls: When Criticism Forgets Montaigne
Every discipline has its anathemas. Here are three habits that undo the essayistic spirit in criticism, each the precise inverse of what Montaigne practised.
The Verdict-First Review
When the reviewer’s conclusion arrives before the reading, everything that follows becomes evidence for a case already closed. Montaigne’s method is the opposite: he writes to discover what he thinks. The book review, at its essayistic best, should do the same. Let the reader feel the reviewer arriving somewhere, not standing there waiting for applause.
The Universal Pronouncement
Montaigne wrote for the private reader first, the public second. He never pretended that his conclusions were final. A critic who declares that a novel is a masterpiece “forever” or a failure “in the eyes of history” has forgotten the essay’s essential modesty.
The Erased Self
For a century, the academy trained critics to hide themselves behind the text. Montaigne did the reverse. His self was the instrument, and his imperfections were the calibration. Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition made a version of this argument for poetry analysis: the critic should reconstruct the making, not merely receive the finished thing.
A reviewer with no presence is not objective. He is merely anonymous. The reader trusts a named, located voice far more than an absent one — and trust, finally, is what criticism is for.
Writing Criticism in the Essayistic Mode
So how does one practise Montaigne’s method in 2026, at the pace of contemporary publishing? The answer is not to slow down. It is to think differently about what speed is for.
Begin in the middle. Drop the reader into a scene, a sentence, a paragraph that unsettled you. Montaigne opens Of Cannibals with a report from travellers, not a thesis. Start where the friction is.
Argue against yourself at least once. Every strong essay contains a paragraph that turns the blade toward the writer. This is not weakness. It is the reader’s guarantee that the writer was paying attention.
Use the specific to open the general. Montaigne moves from his own digestion to the nature of mortality without a seam. Learn to write from the grain of wood to the whole forest.
End provisionally. A great essay leaves a question standing. A great review leaves the book ringing in the reader’s mind, not the reviewer’s verdict.
For those working inside the darker registers of narrative, the same principles apply with particular force. See how the architecture of fear in gothic literature rewards the critic who follows the structure rather than the reputation.
A Case Study: The Critic’s Confession
The following short story demonstrates, in miniature, the essayistic mode in action: the delayed verdict, the self-correction, the turn from certainty toward doubt.
The review had run on a Thursday, and by Friday the bookshop windows were full of it. I remember standing outside with my coat collar up and thinking, finally, that the world had listened to me.
I had called it inert. A novel that mistook its own furniture for a soul. The phrase, I now admit with a kind of weary pride, had done very well.
It was the woman in the second-hand shop on the high street who undid me. She had the book face-up on the counter beside a jar of paperclips, and she turned it over the way one turns over a photograph of someone one has lost.
You’re the one, she said, without looking up. I said I was. And then, because she was the kind of person who does not hurry, she said: I wonder what you’d make of the page where the mother takes the ferry back.
I could not have told her which page she meant. I told her, instead, that a review is an argument, not a door. She said: yes. But some arguments you should be careful with, because people carry them around.
I bought the copy. I read the ferry scene on the tram, standing, and something in me came loose. The book was not inert at all. It was the wrong temperature, measured by a man in a hurry.
That night I wrote nothing. I understood then what Montaigne must have understood at fifty, in his tower, with his papers around him like snow: that an essay is not a verdict on the world. It is an attempt to stay alive to it — and an attempt, as all attempts do, will fail. Failure, it turns out, is where the reading begins.
What the Essay Demands of Us
Montaigne died in 1592, having spent three decades learning how to be uncertain in public. The modern critic inherits that inheritance whether she knows it or not: the slow revision, the self-correction, the willingness to be changed by a book rather than merely confirmed by it.
The best literary criticism of 2026 is essayistic in this deeper sense, even when it appears in three hundred words. It begins in the middle. It argues against itself. It trusts the reader to finish the sentence. And it never confuses its own certainty for a book’s meaning.
If this work has a single charge, it is this: to keep the mirror moving. Not because we have no opinions — Montaigne had plenty — but because the opinions of a living mind deserve the dignity of revision.
And so the question returns, as all essayistic questions must, to the reader who stands before a book and asks, honestly, with the candle burning low: what do I truly know — and what, if anything, am I prepared to be wrong about?