Lyric Humanity from Virgil to Flaubert 1009225251, 9781009225250

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LYRIC HUMANITY FROM VIRGIL TO FLAUBERT

From the Georgics of Virgil to Flaubert’s landscapes of happiness, Ullrich Langer argues that lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity. Ranging across a vast chronology, the book investigates how such poetry and prose activate our capacities for empathy, equity, irony, and reasoning, while educating us in pleasure and helping us comprehend death. Each chapter constitutes a fresh encounter with some of the most celebrated texts of European literary history, demonstrating how the lyrical works and what it elicits in us. Through deft rhetorical and philological analysis, the study presents the value of literary studies for both ethical purposes and aesthetic ends.   is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published extensively on the European early modern period, covering subjects ranging from friendship to pleasure and virtue. He is also the author of the Cambridge Companion to Montaigne () and Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne ().

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LYRIC HUMANITY FROM VIRGIL TO FLAUBERT ULLRICH LANGER University of Wisconsin–Madison

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Ullrich Langer  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Langer, Ullrich, author. : Lyric humanity from Virgil to Flaubert / Ullrich Langer, University of Wisconsin-Madison. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : European literature–History and criticism. | Humanity in literature. | Literature–Philosophy. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. :  .   (print) |  . (ebook) |  /.–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Anne

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii 

Introduction  Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca: Three Variations on Lyric Humanity



 Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death



 Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning: Ronsard’s Mignonne, Madame de Lafayette’s Letter, and Baudelaire’s Passer-By



 Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness (L’éducation sentimentale, Un coeur simple)



 Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary: Rouaud and Echenoz



Conclusion



Notes Bibliography Index

  

vii

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Acknowledgments

In memory of William H. Matchett This book is the fruit of a long engagement with lyric as a verse form and the lyrical in prose. “Engagement” is meant both in the sense of my scholarly work and in the sense of my unmitigated reading pleasure; I hope that the following pages reflect that twofold motivation. It is also the fruit of a considerable period of confinement (as if its close readings were the appropriate response), caused by a pandemic seemingly without its own temporal or spatial confinement. The literature that will be the object of my interpretation constitutes some of the best writing that the European tradition has to offer. I have enjoyed assistance in understanding this writing, its context, the tradition, and the authors, and have benefited greatly from the advice and commentary of several colleagues and friends. I wish to thank William J. Berg, William Fitzgerald, Ernesto Livorni, Laura McClure, Jan Miernowski, and Florence Vatan for their critical and helpful reading of parts of the manuscript – remaining errors and infelicities are entirely my own responsibility. I wish to thank as well Kathryn Banks, Timothy Chesters, Laurent Ferri, Agnès Guiderdoni, Virginia Krause, Hélène Merlin-Kajman, Aline Smeesters, and Karin Westerwelle for giving me opportunities to present parts or versions of the work in progress. I have drawn as well on conversations and exchanges with François Cornilliat, Heather Dubrow, Richard Goodkin, Steven Nadler, William Paulson, Bernd Renner, and Jacob Schmutz. The Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation have generously supported research for this book at several stages. Finally, three anonymous readers have provided provocative feedback and helpful advice. Emily Hockley of Cambridge University Press has been a sure-handed guide and source of advice for this publishing project, and my thanks to George Paul Laver and Stephanie Sakson for the preparation of the manuscript. viii

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Introduction

This book traces elements of fictional texts – deemed “lyrical” in ways that I define below – that elicit certain human abilities, abilities that we seem to share across historical periods and generally find appealing. The lyric poems and lyrical sections in prose are varied and cover a long time span in the European tradition. They involve themes of love (and the loss of the beloved), mourning, distinct moments of pleasure, experiences of happiness, and warfare. They might teach us about these emotions or situations in themselves, or their history, but that is not the focus of this book. Their representations of these affects and the situations in which they arise, however, deploy specific, ascertainable means and they unlock certain abilities within us, as if they allowed us to move closer to what we are as human beings. That will be the focus of this book. My title “Lyric Humanity” suggests that as human beings we share direct experiences of the world, and experiences of representations of that world, that we readily qualify as lyrical. The predication also indicates something about humanity, that one can attribute a quality of (the genre of ) the lyric to human beings as a group. In this way, as well, one can imagine that the literary genre reveals something specific about humanity, something not revealed by, say, epic or satire. A first step for me will be to consider the historical definition and practice of the lyric genre, even if they prove to be of limited value in accounting for the wide range of our actual reading experiences. We can move away from genre, in a further sense of the juxtaposition of lyric and humanity, to understand “lyrical” in a much larger extension, including meanings foreign certainly to the historical definitions of the lyric as a mimetic form. In this sense the attribute “lyric” can be attached to objects, experiences, or sensations, and to many texts that on their own would never have been classified as belonging to the genre of lyric. I would like to work with both of these meanings, the strictly generic and the less technical, more common usage, while keeping in mind “humanity” as the 

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Introduction

ultimate horizon of the discussion. That being said, I will insist on an anchoring of the more extensive meaning in specific features of the literary texts.

The Genre of Lyric and the Lyrical in Common Usage The common modern usage of “lyric” or “lyrical” is on several counts far removed from the historical, generic one. Our current usage of the term might include love poems, poems relating intense, subjective, affective experience of attachment and loss, often containing themes of natural beauty, especially involving circumscribed objects or landscape features (a flower, a meadow, a pond, stream, or river, etc.) as opposed to “grand” vistas or expanses. Themes might include as well living beings evoked in their intimacy. In this loose, current usage, experiences of various sights and sounds can be qualified as “lyrical,” as much as the objects, situations, or representations themselves. Moreover, in the domain of literature poems are not the only form to be thought of in this way. Prose narrative can become lyrical, whether in the form of a descriptive pause or by a change in focus, by a shift away from a forward-moving manner of representing action. The adjective “lyrical” can characterize other media, as well (opera, film, video, painting, or photography) – an extension that I will not address in these pages. The vagueness and wide application of the concept of lyric and the lyrical notwithstanding, I would like to hold on to our common usage of the term, since it reflects real reading experiences and addresses real human abilities. My project in this book will imply bridging this looser but far from arbitrary understanding of the term and its more constrained and technical generic meaning in history. I will do so both on the practical, heuristic level (what do we find in texts that we perceive as lyrical?) and on the historical level, by centering my attention on the early modern period, and using it as a reference point even when considering classical and modern materials. For it is during the late medieval and early modern period that the genre of the lyric begins its recentering on the subjective-affective meanings that it has today. This shift can be understood through the following developments. They allow us to perceive both its original sense, often foreign to modern readers, and the emergence of what is more familiar to us. Although still intensely connected to musical form – many lyric poems were set to music and composed to be sung – the early modern lyric comes to be largely practiced as a written and visual form. Petrarch introduced his poems to Laura by addressing an audience that listens to his sighs (“Voi

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The Genre of Lyric and the Lyrical in Common Usage



ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / di quei sospiri . . .”). Two hundred years later, in his collection Les amours, Pierre de Ronsard invites the reader to “see” the sufferings of the poet-lover, in the first edition (). Then, in the last edition published during his lifetime (), he summons the reader to come “read” his poems, in order to “see” his suffering. The written and visual nature of lyric is encouraged by printing and the rise of the poem collection – in imitation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere – and by the concomitant popularity of shorter, fixed forms (the sonnet, the epigram, short odes, etc.) and the occasional use of images (accompanying devices, emblems). This stands in contrast to the classical origins of the lyric poet, lyrikos, a figure related to, and perhaps derivative of, the melopoios, the composer of performances in which music and speech are mixed. The increasingly autonomous written form of the lyric collection allows precisely the sort of intricate, intentional verbal construction and imaginative response on the part of the reader that I will be highlighting in the following pages. The rise of the poem collection, while traceable most immediately to Petrarch, also derives from Horace’s reorientation of lyric poetry as a book reflecting more or less the character traits of its author. Horace acknowledges the traditional epideictic themes of lyric (songs celebrating gods and their children, songs praising victorious pugilists, songs of love’s woes, and drinking or table songs) but seems to open the way for a more personcentered poetry, something the early modern period will develop in its reflection on his oeuvre, through imitation and commentary. Rather than representing a modern turn to the subjective or private, however, Horatian poetics is always aware of an audience, and the commentary tradition – whether concerning the vernacular (Petrarch) or classical authors – favors rhetorical tools in guiding the reader to understanding lyric poetry. Lyric is bound to persuasion, both in its epideictic tendency and in its frequent deliberative intent. Love lyric praises the beloved and attempts to persuade the beloved, just as much as it delivers illustrations or proofs of its “argument” to an informed reader. Elegiac poetry has similar rhetorical aims. We are far, then, from lyric as the most intimate expression of a self, replete with the fleshed-out details of a particular life. The nonsubjective origins of lyric are made clear in a famous classical and medieval division of enunciation into three modes: the dramatic or mimetic mode (the poet consistently has others speak), the narrative mode (only the poet speaks), and the common or mixed mode (sometimes the poet speaks, sometimes the poet lets others speak). Lyric is assigned to the

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

Introduction

latter mode. During the early modern period, especially amorous lyric comes to be more closely aligned with the narrative mode, in the sense that the collections feature the voice of the poet, in his or her various travails, and the commentary tradition sometimes assumes the lyric collection to be truly autobiographical. The modern notion of lyric – in the tripartite division of drama, epic, and lyric – emerges only at the end of the eighteenth century, and is the source of all that we associate with it today. It comprises private, intimate, subjective feelings reflecting a soul in its sensitivity and in its removal from or even transcendence of ordinary life, and concerns themes of love, loss, death, and beauty, both human and in the natural world. Lyric poetry can be a special kind of speech, tethered to apostrophe, and a special kind of discourse, eschewing argument or persuasion in favor of expression of a self and observation tinged with personal sentiment. In the following pages, I will move frequently from lyric as it manifests itself in a formal, generic mode (in the form of epigrams, elegies, and sonnets) to episodes within prose narrative that I call “lyric.” In doing so I will not be jettisoning the generic definition entirely. As we will see, lyric episodes retain some of the features of the history of the form, most notably its reliance on rhetoric and deliberative reasoning. Conversely, these episodes do not entirely validate our current, vague notion of lyric. They most often do not convey an interior experience of a self and its projection onto the world. Instead, they manage to evoke both intimacy and distance, allowing the reader to adopt a character’s or a subject’s point of view without sacrificing the reader’s perspective from the outside, and who is able to perceive independently, as it were, the world that so moves a particular person. This is essential to the sort of abilities that lyric can solicit and activate in the reader.

Definitions and Principles For this is a book about what the lyrical – lyric poems or lyric episodes in prose – can do. It is about how lyrical representation can realize, actualize, certain human abilities. It is about elements in lyric, in its representation of the world, that indicate and call upon the way we empathize, scrutinize particular circumstances, project a future and consider an ending to this future, deliberate about pleasure and convey happiness. In the Conclusion, I discuss these abilities in a more abstract way; in the meantime, the focus is squarely on the literary texts, not on those abilities in and of themselves. Each chapter features a set of poems or a set of lyric episodes in prose; it

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Definitions and Principles



isolates characteristics of the text that both let the reader be attentive to certain abilities and that convey a certain lyric precipitate, if not a specificity. Each chapter’s selection of texts is motivated by a different set of things that lyric can do. At the same time, this is not a theory of lyric. As the preceding paragraphs have made clear, I am not interested in any hard-and-fast distinctions between lyric and other generic forms of literature, and the definitions offered below are heuristic rather than theoretical. They derive from my reading experiences more than from any poetics, although I am not indifferent to poetics and theory. We will consider not only verse but also prose; I am interested in lyrical sections of prose as much as in poems that qualify as lyric. What an informed reader might sense is lyrical is more of a guide in these cases than a well-delineated definition of what a lyric poem is, in contrast to other genres, for example. The use of the attribute “lyrical” points to a practice and an effect of lyric that are more pertinent than the ideal form itself. In this sense, the way of proceeding will be Aristotelian rather than Platonic. I will tend to use the nouns and adjectives “lyric,” “lyrical,” “lyricism” without specifying the technical usage, aware of but not limited by the poetic form itself and the history of the genre. The following are some of the features of lyric this book will highlight. . Lyric as a cognitive power. Among the generic forms of what we call literature today, the lyrical has always seemed to be the most experimental, but also the most ritualistic, with cognitive and collectively shared sensory powers that exceed other forms. It is both a thought experiment, a reconceiving, and, for the audience or readers, a celebratory removal or suspension from a train of events and experiences, through the myriad resources of language. We can reconceive the world, or we can choose to come much closer to some elements of this world, and we can remove ourselves, however briefly, from the forward motion of events and the time they mark out. This book will elucidate some elements of these powers of the lyrical. . Lyric as recognizable representation of reality, and its imaginative expansion. Furthermore, this book is about literature as mimesis or mimetic representation, that is, about the linguistic means of rendering present a reality (circumstances, persons, actions, events) and, secondarily, the rendering of the experiences of persons in certain circumstances. Lyric always contains elements of mimetic representation; it is never purely formal (in comparison to music) unless it becomes a private language, in which case it is unintelligible or irreducibly enigmatic. It does not

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Introduction

construct experiences that are beyond recognition to other human beings. To be sure, lyric, as opposed to epic and drama (and the novel), is removed from mere narration of actions and description, by its modes of enunciation, by the ritualistic attempt at making itself an event, and by its intermittent conveying of values or truths disconnected from a story or a specific world. However, as we will see in the following pages, lyric – in verse and in episodic prose form – maintains its connection to rhetoric in its traditional, historical sense, and in a broader sense of intentional, systematic communication. Argumentative structure and dialectic, the use of specific figures, all present in classical and early modern lyric, have purchase on a reader/listener only if they are allied with proofs, and proofs are, in turn, only such if they can rely on a shared and communicable world. Truths and values are received by an audience only if they are validated by experiences that are summoned by the poem or speech, explicitly or not. All beauty is destined to vanish quickly because this rose has withered quickly. My emphasis on the mimetic aspects of lyric arises, admittedly, from my humanist, early modern perspective; I wish to emphasize how rich such a perspective can be, even when dealing with texts far removed from the times of Ronsard and Madame de Lafayette. At the same time, the grounding of lyric in mimetic representation is not a prison. It offers radical possibilities. Similar to the way in which fiction is thought of, it can present impossible things as if they were possible, in a world that we find comprehensible nevertheless. The rhetorical figure of adynaton, the invocation of an impossible thing (on the model of “I will love you even if the stars fall from the sky”), is a small example of this improbable aspect of lyric. This kind of fiction can be decidedly mimetic, close to what we recognize as reality, while holding out the possibility of the impossible. . Lyric as a doing. This book is centered on what lyrical texts, in the terms that are outlined in the previous pages, can do, in the reading experience, rather than on their respective contributions to an essence of lyric, to the history of lyric or its themes. In the classical and early modern tradition, this “doing” of lyric is often understood as persuasion (Orpheus and the gods of the underworld) or as a moving, softening of the inanimate or savage world (Orpheus, again, as singer causing beings or objects impermeable to emotion to feel). The reading experience can resemble the working of these powers. But that is not the way I am thinking of the pragmatics of lyric. I understand power not as dominating but as rendering possible, enabling. Lyric does not make stones weep but it does enable us to understand ourselves and others as human beings, and it does this not

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Definitions and Principles



because it tells us to understand ourselves and others but because its particular way of representing reality allows us to. Is this a cliché? If so, it is one that is worth recalling and coming back to. . Lyric as particularly responsive to close reading. I should add that only close reading, indeed very close reading, can disclose the means by which lyric or lyrical episodes achieve this human understanding and experience. The genre itself, especially as it gathers reflective, affective meanings in its evolution, is one of intense attention to the world. The following chapters will feature detailed analyses. They are, then, of necessity “dense,” and go counter to more narratively driven exposition. But showing how things work often entails going deeply into the little cogs of the instrument. The selection of texts that I examine in the following pages is motivated by two things: first, their relevance to a certain kind of pragmatic power that lyric possesses, and each chapter highlights a different aspect of that power. Second, the pleasure that I have derived from reading, many times, these texts is, I admit, a real motivation. My only justification for this primacy of my own reading pleasure is that I am not alone in finding these writings wonderful. Indeed, finally, with the exception of some secondary texts used as sources or contrasting material, the poetry and the prose that I will be looking at are extremely well known, from the Orpheus sections in Virgil and Ovid to the most famous funereal elegy in the Renaissance to the Princesse de Clèves, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the writings of Flaubert. Even my most recent examples, taken from two contemporary French novels, by Jean Rouaud and Jean Echenoz, are known to an English-speaking public. They can be counted, arguably, among the best living writers on the continent. We will be traversing a familiar landscape, despite the fact that beyond the Latin poetry I will be discussing only the French literary tradition. The reverse of the coin, as it were, is that it will be difficult to do justice to all of the scholarship surrounding the poetry and the prose, and that I have had to limit severely discussion of historical and social contexts. That being said, my own perspective as a twenty-first-century reader is tempered, in the classical and early modern material, by the use of medieval and humanist commentaries, just as my readings of the modern materials are informed by a humanist framework. This anchoring in the early modern period means that I share some of the ethical concerns and some of the philological reflexes we identify with that period, namely, both a concern with the manifestations of the human and a tendency to frame understanding of a literary text in rhetorical terms. One goes, as we will see, with the other.

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

Introduction

Elements of Lyric in Verse and in Prose The readings offered in this book, while not intended to provide any theoretical contribution, are assembled coherently, but not as a set of examples all repeating the same attributes of lyric. The poems and prose passages together present an aggregate of literary elements. These elements are emphasized variously, never completely, and distinct enough such that I can give a summary account of them. . Lyric as praise. The lyrical episodes or poems usually contain some elements of the discourse of praise, in keeping with the classical origins of the genre. The natural tendency of the text, to speak anthropomorphically, is not to be neutral and avoid any affective and evaluative register. If such an affective register is present, this is not in the service of a choice to mitigate, to denigrate, to vilify, or to ridicule. Instead, whether this concerns a person, another being, or a circumstance, the tendency is to praise. This epideictic impulse sometimes is explicit and rhetorically elaborated, or sometimes entirely implicit, a distinct sense we get from or about the narrator’s attitude. . Lyric and detail. The lyrical episodes or poems usually, but not always, involve the valorization of a detail, or of a small thing. This sounds at the same time trivial and vague. Whether it is the corner of a woman’s mouth, a raindrop, a hand holding the edge of a garment, a rose petal, specks of dust, even, in some cases, a word itself, these texts very often make detail important. The grand, ample, or universal is not absent, of course, but that is not what strikes us about the text. . Lyric and the suspension of time and action. Especially in cases of lyrical episodes within larger texts, we are offered a sense of suspension: suspended action, suspended time, and, parallel to this, suspension of rules and of necessity. The suspension of “normal life” entails an impression of possibility, of expansion into a different space or time, into a different kind of world. This suspension is often experienced as a slowing-down or as a drawing-back. This suspension can take place in time, explicitly or implicitly, as a change in rhythm, a syntactic change, a change in modes of narration, or in focalization. . Lyric and the movement of uplifting or rising. Sometimes this suspension comes in the form of an elevation of the spectator’s gaze, as if in a landscape, as if in a road leading upward, or the noting of a place from which we lift our eyes toward the sky or a horizon. Sometimes it is a perspective, a panorama, an enlarged space contemplated from above. This seems to conflict with the valorization of the detail, but does not, since the

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Elements of Lyric in Verse and in Prose



perspective is made palpable by a strategic use of detail. Our knowledge of the expansive is attained through the salience of a detail. . Lyric and the person. Lyrical episodes are connected with a person or with persons. There has to be someone looking, someone experiencing; a representation without the possibility of sympathetic viewing or some extent of identification is not really lyrical. The person may be a character in the representation or the narrator outside it. This personal aspect of the lyrical can also be interpersonal, a constitution of the shared intimate. Indeed, many lyrical episodes deal with intimacy and construct the circumstances that make a place intimate. . Lyric and affect and reason. The lyrical is not equivalent to the affective, in the sense that emotions such as love, longing, and sadness are both not sufficient to identify the lyrical and sometimes not even necessary. Similarly, the lyrical does not exclude the rational: Many of my examples show the crucial role of reasoning in happiness, desire, and seduction. There are, to be sure, lyrical scenarios in which the rational does not play a part, but it is also not true that these scenarios are exclusively affective. You can talk and you can do it cogently. . Lyric and irony. The lyrical is compatible with irony. All of the writers I look at in this book ironize, to some extent, the “pathetic” features of their representations, those elements that both convey affective states and wish to provoke affective states in the reader. The lyrical is not naïve, and perhaps it is more moving emotionally precisely because the distance allowed by irony underlines the importance of the affects, when and since they are combined with awareness. It is not that the affects are a product of choice (otherwise, they would not be affects), but their representation is validated by choice. . Lyric and the moment. The lyrical can involve an intense sensation of time, as I have just suggested, and an intense awareness of the present, of a moment, of the ephemeral. It is perhaps less inclined to emphasize the future, the eternal, and the past, except to use them as ways of illuminating the present, or as ways of highlighting possibilities of extending a moment or projecting it beyond the immediate circumstance. Space and movement in space are often a representational equivalent of time. . Lyric and apostrophe. The lyrical, especially in its manifestation as a verse poem, traditionally features a form of address to a person, an animal, a thing, nature, a god, and so forth. Apostrophe is often present in the examples I will be surveying. In lyrical episodes set within narrative, however, apostrophe is sometimes implied but often not present at all. The slowing-down of the representation has, perhaps, the effect that

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

Introduction

conventional apostrophe produces in poetry, the turning of attention to something else, the stepping-out of the subject to think about other things. Two traditional attributes of lyric are barely present in the texts I am reading; indeed, they are at times entirely absent. Lyric has classical connections to song or more generally music. While, say, Ronsard’s ode is often set to music in the Renaissance, the other examples contain little musical element. Sound resemblance (alliteration, paronomasia) and rhythm are instruments in the rhetorical quiver of the poets, and sometimes of the prose writers, but they do not consistently produce the impression of sung language. As in the matter of apostrophe, one can argue that the suspension of the habitual flow of chronicle-like narrative can be the equivalent of song in relation to ordinary speech. But that is far removed from the ancient importance of musical harmony to poetry. Another of the features of lyric – this time considerably more modern – that is commonly thought to be essential is subjectivity, a lyric self. Perhaps because my approach is informed by classical and early modern poetry, this element of lyric seems largely irrelevant to the lyrical as I analyze it. To be sure, the episodes and the poems construct to some extent a subjective vision of the world, and the lyrical gives an occasion for a character’s intimate experiences, thoughts, and feelings to be made available to the reader or to other characters. In many instances, however, the subjective point of view is absent, or present only to the extent that all language manifests subjectivity by expressing intention. In any event, the distinction between the “subjective” and the “objective” is usually irrelevant to the effects of the lyrical, within the world of the poem or the novel. It is of little import to the lyrical, for example, that a character or agent within a representation be presented as deluded, a creator of a separate world of their soul. That can be the case, but it is not of the essence. It is also not the case that the lyrical depends on entering into the self of a narrator or a character. The lyrical, in my examples, is always a representation of the world and most often, above all, a connection to others. The final parameter of this book, one that I have touched on before, is primacy of the human. That is, lyric reveals aspects of what makes us human, and it trains us to realize those aspects, in the sense both of awareness of humanity and of actualization of humanity. I mean “humanity” first in the way classical and early modern culture would, grosso modo, speak about humanity. In classical antiquity, the term humanitas could, in addition to “human nature,” have the meanings of affability, good will, goodness, love of fellow human beings, culture, courtesy, and civilized behavior. Humanity, in classical and early modern times, often implied the

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From Orpheus to Joseph the Infantryman



propria hominis, the attributes thought to be specific to human beings, and to render them superior to animals. However, I also mean “humanity” in a more vague, modern way: a capacity for empathy with others, for self-consciousness, a capacity to lend meaning to past and present events and experiences, a capacity to project a future, and a capacity to communicate meanings and a future to others. This book is not at all about those attributes or their specificity, but about how lyric can relate to them, how it can represent them, how it can train us to actualize them. Each of the chapters emphasizes a certain attribute or a constellation of attributes within the discussion of the lyrical. Lyrical representation, as I will show in these chapters, respectively allows us to engage a capacity for kinesic and affective empathy with others, and a projection of choice, that is, setting the conditions for choice in our interlocutors. It permits a questioning of finality (in the form of death), not as purely imaginative musing but as an active pursuit of peace in this world. It uses our discursive capacities, rhetorical and rational, to valorize the instant or the brevity of time. It demonstrates or provides especially visual correlates to happiness. It allows a drawing-back and recovery from extreme violence, by activating not simply personal but cultural memory or embeddedness.

From Orpheus to Joseph the Infantryman The texts discussed in this book cover a very wide chronological span, from classical Antiquity to the contemporary period. This span suggests the perennial nature of the lyric, perhaps, and it suggests as well the perennial nature of certain abilities elicited through our reading of lyric. At the same time, the chronological span suggests a tradition, a culture of the lyrical, that in itself is a resource, as we will see especially in the modern material. Not all of the writers featured here knew the earlier texts discussed in this book, but even if they did not, the literary culture that these texts exemplify was well known to all. The myth of Orpheus has held a particular fascination for the Western tradition; it is the ultimate demonstration of the powers of lyric. Moving stones to tears, calming ferocious animals, and persuading the deities of the underworld to reverse death: Orpheus does this through his song. Orpheus the lover is no less an object of fascination. His exclusive love for his wife leads him to do these impossible things, and he almost succeeds in bringing her back to the world of the living. In Chapter , my discussion of the Virgilian, Ovidian, and Senecan versions of the myth, I look closely

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

Introduction

at how these episodes within the Georgics, the Metamorphoses, and the plays of Seneca are representations that induce or reinforce certain human capacities. These are above all kinesic, affective, and cognitive empathy; equity as perception of the distinctness of an individual case; respectfulness as a projection of another’s choice; and an awareness of what is not human. Chapter  is centered as well on death as the subject of lyric, this time from a Christian early modern perspective. The poetry of Clément Marot contains numerous ballads, elegies, epitaphs, and rondeaux mourning and celebrating a deceased person, in various different styles. More than anyone in the early modern French tradition, Marot is a master manipulator of words, and he uses this deftness to represent both a Christian and a political overcoming of death as finality. His wordplay and his strategic use of certain rhetorical figures (such as self-correction) present the objective, material world as malleable, permeable to human intentions, and specifically to the intention of peace. The celebration of a deceased entails, for Marot, a denial of the finality of death, not, as in Orpheus’ case, to bring back to life a dead person, but in the sense of allowing the work of peacemaking to continue. His poetry turns, as it were, the deceased back toward the human work of unmaking death here on earth. His poetry is not political speech; it is lyric, using all resources of words – their sounds, their function, their meanings, and the interplay of these – in order to advance an ethical intention. We have moved from empathy to deliberation in the full awareness of finality, as the abilities that lyric can energize. The lyrical engages representations of time – the first two chapters have dealt with death as the end point of biological time – as well as pleasure or joy. Chapter  concerns the relationship between the two, in the framework of a human capacity often thought to be inimical to pleasure: reasoning or rationality. I look at three examples of the representation of intense pleasure or joy (the distinction between the two is a subject of another book) – “intense” both in the sense as strong or sharp and in the sense of concentrated in time. I argue that the cognitive, in its (restricted) sense of the rational, discursive, logical apprehension of reality, is fundamental to this intensity. My three examples are taken from three different historical periods – the Renaissance, the late seventeenth century, and the mid-nineteenth century – and they are, respectively, a little ode of erotic seduction, an episode in a novel of the court, and a sonnet. All three writers – Ronsard, Madame de Lafayette, and Baudelaire – represent the closing-in of time as a kind of perfecting of pleasure and as a product of deliberate thought. This, too, is the lyrical. It activates the use of rational discourse, and the projection of a future, in the service of shared pleasure.

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From Orpheus to Joseph the Infantryman



From intense pleasure we move, in Chapter , to happiness. Lyrical episodes in Flaubert’s prose can convey that happiness through the features of a landscape. The movement of the characters through a landscape and the empathic movement of the reader with them create the conditions for happiness, a sense of limitlessness and possibility. This is, in a sense, antithetical to the previous hedonistic celebrations of moments and very limited times. But Flaubert’s representations are also, invariably, intimate and rely on detail to mark out spaces in which happiness can be experienced or imagined. Whereas, in L’éducation sentimentale, Frédéric’s lyrical experiences concern mostly himself, and seem not to extend reliably to Rosanette or perhaps only intermittently to Mme Arnoux, they are made elaborately available to the reader. In Un coeur simple, among all the crushing disappointments and travails, we have a brief episode of happiness, this time not limited to the point of view of one character, but as a landscape in which the entire family finds itself and that is similarly offered to the reader. Flaubert uses elaborate (lyrical) representation of landscape and movement within it to elicit a capacity – realized or not – of human well-being. Chapter  engages a subject usually reserved for vast historical novels or the classical epic. Warfare, as it is performed during the First World War in the trenches of eastern France, appears the most removed from the themes of lyric. But the lyrical can function as a means to pull away from the ghastly horrors and to recover. This pulling-away happens on the background of the traditional lament against war as an inversion of the natural order. I consider Alain Chartier’s magnificent Quadrilogue invectif, the voices of the body politic lamenting the miseries of the perennial murderous conflict between the House of France and the House of England, as a forerunner to two contemporary laments, Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur, and Jean Echenoz’s . Lyric representation affords us, in the former’s account of his great-uncle’s transport back from the front, a multilayered return to a cultural “natural.” Echenoz’s consideration of a similar scene of the trenches demonstrates limits to this sort of representation and limits to this kind of recovery. These episodes represent and elicit the capacity to find in some sense of historical civilization a return to a humane order.

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 

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca Three Variations on Lyric Humanity

The tragic, “vehemently pathetic” narrative of Eurydice’s failed return to the upper world of the living, versions of which we find in many classical authors, allows us to explore how mimetic representation can elicit an indelible sense of being human. A certain set of elements of the renderingpresent of a reality, elements that are constitutive of lyric, can solicit abilities of empathy and of projection of choice, of seeing others as choosing agents. These elements are part of a series of rhetorical and narrative devices encapsulated in one of the most moving stories offered by the classical tradition. The ascent of the poet followed by his newly retrieved wife constitutes only a part of his katabasis, and in turn this descent to the underworld is only a part of the myth and the resonance of Orpheus in the Western poetic tradition. The story of Orpheus is a commonplace example used in the praise and defense of poetry. The power of his song to stop rivers, move stones, placate wild animals, and, in the instance we will look at, persuade the infernal deities to release his dead wife is taken as a proof of the excellence and antiquity of poetry. In addition, his quasi-divine status is cited as a proof of the dignity accorded to poets in earlier, archaic times. However, the praise of Orpheus is not the subject of the following pages, and the mythic power of his poetry is only incidental to our purpose. Something about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and about the way it is represented in Latin antiquity makes us aware not of the “divine” nature of poetic song but of the ability of poetry to convey a specific quality of humanness. So I will focus less on the transcendent figure or character of Orpheus and his song and more on how Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca represent his story, the narrative that conveys actions, decisions, and emotions. It will also not be a matter of poetry’s harmony and order pacifying a violent or otherwise impervious world, but a matter of poetry setting up a scenario in which we come to realize what or who we are as human beings. 

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca



The scenario is one of failure, of course, and it would be easy to point to failure or error as that which is “human” and makes the story so effective to us. There is no guarantee, however, that the theme or the presence of failure provides for an effective mimesis. And there is no human specificity to failure. Conversely, there is no reason why success cannot be intimately human. Rather, the representation of Orpheus’s descent and return to the underworld elicits qualities of humanness – among them, affective empathy; reasoning; understanding of contingency and future possibilities; physical, kinesic, and sensory empathy; and a sense of what is truly not human – that are set in a context of necessity, death, the law, and immortal deities. All three of the authors discussed bring within their mimesis different human qualities to the fore and allow the reader or listener to constitute or perform these qualities. These three poets do not tell us what to think or what to feel, but make us think and let us feel. The representation of Orpheus’s ascent to the upper world, Eurydice walking behind him, is an imaginative springboard, a mimetic model set up by Virgil and imitated or modified to different extents by Ovid and Seneca. When we are reading Virgil’s story, certain questions come to mind and seem to reverberate in the successive versions: What is the nature of hope and the projection of future possibility (as opposed to mere survival)? What is the nature of loss (as opposed to the experience of misfortune)? What is it that allows us to make an exception to a law and, in this instance, to want to forgive a transgression? What does that indicate about us? These questions constitute a kind of speculative horizon, something we are moving toward, while looking at details of poetic representation seemingly far removed from such grand themes. In my readings, I will keep another horizon in mind: the early modern tradition and, specifically, especially in the case of Virgil and less so of Ovid and Seneca, the commentary tradition – not as an exercise in philological purity, but in order to retain some anchoring in the actual reception and understanding of this poetry in Renaissance Europe. I will be less concerned, then, with attempting to interpret the texts from a strictly ancient or classical point of view. The usual alternative – using these texts as mere occasions for ahistorical theoretical reflections and for explorations of modern avatars – is also not my intent. I am concerned with understanding what words are chosen, what they meant in Antiquity, and how readers at the beginning of their long afterlife in printing might have thought about those words and the representation they construct.

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

Virgil and Orpheus’s Return The plethora of editions (with or without commentaries) and translations of Virgil’s works in the early modern period is a manifestation of the Roman poet’s immense importance for European culture. While the Aeneid is the best-known poem of the Virgilian corpus, the Georgics do not come far behind, since they were frequently printed together with the epic and the Eclogues (and the Opuscula, that is, the poems in the Appendix virgiliana), and received considerable attention from commentators. These commentaries are not really interpretations in the modern sense of the word. They can consist of punctilious grammatical and rhetorical explanations, of occasional connection to moral sententiae, of philological notes when allusions or references are made, of parallel passages or terms in other classical writers, and of paraphrases or alternate expressions. Particularly in later periods, commentaries can be occasions to embed the text into historical and literary culture of Antiquity and to provide comparative judgments on various authors. My recourse to them will be intermittent, as the questions linking representations to human existential concerns are secondary to their general didactic or pedagogic aims. The Orpheus episode in Virgil’s fourth Georgic needs to be situated, however briefly and unsatisfactorily, in the context of the story of beekeeping that is the subject of this poem. Virgil describes in detail the ways of the bees and the landscape in which they thrive. They live in a society resembling in some parts human society: Bees have a “king,” there are inferior and superior bees, they all have functions that they carry out unquestioningly, they can wage war on each other, they can become ill, and their well-being can be influenced by human effort. When a colony dies out, it can be regenerated through the corpse of a freshly killed calf, a technique inherited from the shepherd and beekeeper Aristaeus. His own bee colony had perished, and he prays to his mother Cyrene to relieve his woes. The Nymph hears his lament and advises him to seek out the seer Proteus, to capture him and force him to give an account of what is to be done. Proteus, once bound, tells the shepherd that he is the object of miserabilis Orpheus’s vengeful anger since the poet considers Aristaeus’s pursuit of her to have been the cause of the (first) death of his wife Eurydice, bitten by a snake when fleeing him. He then tells the story of the poet’s descent to the underworld and the effects of his lamenting song on the infernal deities, of his failed attempt to lead Eurydice up to the world of the living, and of inconsolable Orpheus’s death by the hands of the Ciconian women during their Bacchic frenzies. Following Proteus’s

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Virgil and Orpheus’s Return



revelation of the cause of the bees’ misfortune, Cyrene gives some practical advice to her son to appease the poet and his wife, including the sacrifice of four bulls from whose decomposed cadavers a new bee colony arises. This ends the Aristaeus story, and Virgil ends his own poem a few lines thereafter, referring to Octavian winning battles while he, Virgil, was composing his pastoral poetry, implying, no doubt, an imminent turn to a nobler style. The setting of the tragic love story within the praise of beekeeping has provoked much critical reflection, to which I will not add new elements. The bees’ revival (or at least, the colony if not the individuals) is successful, whereas Eurydice dies a second, final time, although both Aristaeus and Orpheus perform a katabasis, a descent into a source of truths beyond human control, the shepherd into deep watery sources and caves, the poet into the underworld. The bees enact communal, nonindividual desire or reproduction, whereas Orpheus loves his wife in an exclusive, fundamentally human way (albeit without reproducing). No other wife can be substituted for her (and his refusal of other women leads to his death). Orpheus is solitary, whereas the bees are never alone. Whereas Aristaeus manages, controls nature, Orpheus moves nature through his song and seems more submitted to the natural world. The most affecting feature of Orpheus’s story is, however, his retrieval of Eurydice and his terrible, self-inflicted loss of her, just as the couple was about to emerge into the light of the world of the living. These are the lines we will consider more closely: Iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis, redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras, pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem), cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes: restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa immemor heu! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni foedera, terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis. illa “quis et me” inquit “miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, quis tantus furor? en iterum crudelia retro fata vocant conditque natantia lumina somnus. iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte invalidasque tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas.” dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenuis, fugit diversa, neque illum prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca dicere praeterea vidit; nec portitor Orci amplius obiectam passus transire paludem. quid faceret? quo se rapta bis coniuge ferret? quo fletu manis, quae numina voce moveret? illa quidem Stygia nabat iam frigida cumba.

And now, retracing his steps, he had avoided all accident, and the returned Eurydice was nearing the upper air, following behind (for Proserpina had given that law), when a sudden madness seized the imprudent lover, to be pardoned, indeed, if the shades knew how to pardon: he halted, and on the very verge of light, forgetful, alas, and his mind vanquished, he looked back at his Eurydice. In that instant all the labor was spilled and the pacts of the savage tyrant were broken, and three times a peal of thunder was heard among the pools of Avernus. She cried, “who has ruined me, woeful, and you, Orpheus, what immense frenzy? look, again the cruel fates call [me] back, and sleep seals my swimming eyes. And now farewell: I am borne away, surrounded by a vast night, and stretching my strengthless palms to you – alas, not yours.” She spoke, and straightaway from his eyes, like smoke mixed with thin air, escaped away from perception, and did not see him again, as he clutched in vain the shadows, wanting to say many things; nor did the ferryman of Orcus allow him again to pass the barrier of the marsh. What could he do? Where could he turn, his wife taken away twice? With which lament move the dead souls, which deities move with his voice? She indeed, already death-cold, was afloat in the Stygian boat.

Despite its manifest pathos, which we will look at in a moment, Virgil’s language contains subtly ironic features, concentrated in three rhetorical figures. The first is “ibi omnis / effusus labor” (now all labor spilled), referring to Orpheus’s ceaseless efforts at retrieving his wife (especially, presumably, a metaphor for his persuasive lament). The phrase recalls the famous sententia-like “labor omnia vicit / improbus” (unrelenting labor vanquished all obstacles, Georgics I.–). Here, now, labor was not sufficient to overcome all obstacles, or rather, it had been sufficient, but labor is still subject to unforeseen human error. The allusion to the “victory” of labor connects us to a synecdoche, the “invalidas . . . palmas” (strengthless palms) that the receding figure of Eurydice extends toward her husband. The palms stand for the hands, of course, but in the sense of “leaves of a palm tree” they are conventional symbols of victory, used by Virgil himself earlier (Georgics, I.). You have won, but your victories are without strength, and it is because your soul has been vanquished (“victusque animi,” ). Finally, the metaphor (or catachresis) of Eurydice’s “lumina” standing for her eyes, now surrounded by night and being sealed by sleep. The couple was on “the very verge of light,” “iam luce sub ipsa,” when Orpheus stopped and turned to look back. The dimming light of her

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Pathos and Tempered Empathy



eyes recalls the closeness of the light of the upper world, and the terrible defeat of previously victorious Orpheus’s soul. The intricate ironic echoes that pervade Virgil’s language are perhaps a distancing device, preventing this scenario from seeming overwhelming. It is possible to stand back and be critical of Orpheus, and this critical distance can be gleaned both from Eurydice’s speech itself (palmas) and from formulations chosen by the narrator (Proteus/Virgil) (labor, lumina). Several elements of the representation move us toward more existential questions. First of all, the straightforwardly “pathetic” features of the mimesis. Second, the ambivalent nature of what we might call the point of view. Third, the saturation of the scene with gestures and movement. Finally, the way in which the entire scenario solicits our asking the question “why?” provides the elements for understanding why, and then demonstrates how this understanding leads us to an examination of all the circumstances that entail pardon and distinguishes us as human beings from the natural world and the world of immortals. I will look at each of these elements in succession.

Pathos and Tempered Empathy Cristoforo Landino expresses the pathetic nature of the situation through a comparison with a sea voyage: “maxima commiseratio quia veluti navis quae multas evaserit tempestates in portu perierit: & est pathos ab eo quod est preter spem” (greatest pity is elicited because the situation is like that of a ship that would have escaped many storms only to perish once at port, and pathos is derived from what turns out contrary to hope). The hope that Landino refers to is the projection of a future in the light of the upper world, attained through intentional effort, and represented here by the couple’s upward movement. In this particular instance hope has become the possibility that death can be overcome, can be revoked, by the human voice. The specifically pathetic, affecting nature of Orpheus’s return is the proximity of that light: If the poet had turned around at the beginning of their ascent, no such pathos would have been produced, although the error and the possibility of success would have remained the same. The law had been given, and Eurydice returned, reddita. It is, no doubt, the human ability to project into the future, to make it present, and to know imminence, when something is about to happen, that makes failure or loss at that moment so terrible. Orpheus and Eurydice already were among the living, already are among the living. That moment of “almost” is the most intense seizing of time. Virgil emphasizes this through his repeated

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

use of “iam” (, ), which combines the senses of “now” and “already,” followed by “ibi” (), combining “there” and “at that moment” – temporal and spatial deictics heightening the tension whose release lets flow the labor and the pity that we feel. Pathos is also elicited through the very fact of Eurydice’s speech, direct discourse from someone whose voice, unlike her husband’s, is not notoriously powerful. It is, moreover, a lament that translates exactly and vividly the désarroi, the disarray and dismay of the uncomprehending wife: “‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, / quis tantus furor?’” (–). She begins it with what seems to be an interrogative pronoun – who? – but what turns out to be an interrogative adjective: what (fury)? Who? What? She signals their separation by separating “me” and “you” – et me . . . et te – and suspends the vocative Orpheu at the end of the line. In a succinct piece of evidentia, laying her predicament before her husband’s eyes, introduced by “en,” here, look, she describes the forces pulling her back and her futile gesture toward him. And she speaks to him, whereas he wants to say something but cannot: “multa volentem / dicere” (–). Virgil makes sure that the pathos of loss is shared by the characters and the narrative voice and, by implication, the reader/listener. The deictic iam – that expression of the dramatic moment – is repeated by Eurydice herself in her lament: “iamque vale!” (). It is as if she were intensifying the importance of that barely past moment, just as the light of her eyes recalls the light that was about to be reached. The deictics were part of the objective narration, and their reappearance in the speech itself suggests that we are ever so close to her, that she knows us, as we know her. Similarly, she voices the conventionally pathetic exclamation “heu!” () within her speech, but so has the narrator – “Immemor heu!” () – as if Proteus/ Virgil/the reader-audience were anticipating and sharing her suffering. Finally, another conventional device of pathos, what we now call the “rhetorical question,” is used by Virgil to emphasize the hopelessness of Orpheus’s plight: “quid faceret? quo se rapta bis coniuge ferret? / quo fletu manis, quae numina voce moveret?” (–) (What could he do? Where could he turn, his wife taken away twice? With which lament move the dead souls, which deities move with his voice?). It is both Orpheus and the narrative voice asking these questions. The imperfect subjunctive here is, I think, very close to the style indirect libre so famously used in nineteenth-century novels, a grammatical means of being within and without the character at the same time. We share the pathos of Orpheus’s predicament without entirely taking his subjective point of

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Pathos and Tempered Empathy



view; we are empathetic but we also know the answer to those questions, perhaps in a way that Orpheus cannot yet fully realize. This insistent use of interrogatives mirrors the ambivalent point of view expressed by the markers of pathos in the story. It is as if Virgil were training us to be properly empathetic, not too close and not too far. He is also training us to be empathetic through his use of movement. The entire scene is constructed with movement (and movement, of course, is inherent to its action). “Referens,” retracing; “evaserat,” evaded, avoided; “reddita,” given back; “sequens,” following; “cepit,” seized; and “restitit,” stopped, mark the planned movement we all want to continue, to reach its end, and its interruption. The following indications of movement involve the mutual gestures of the lovers (“tendens,” stretching, and “prensantem,” clutching) and the pulling-back and involuntary “flight” of Eurydice into the underworld (“fugit diversa,” escaped away). This is an articulated series of movements: the first part unidirectional and rehearsed (using the present participle), the second an intervention, something happening (using the preterit), the third bidirectional (using once again the present participle), and the final preterit marking the end point, the definitive separation. The repeated use of the preterit shows the correspondence between Orpheus’s stopping and looking back and the final flight of his wife back into the underworld, as if the verb tenses indicated the causeeffect relation. This kinetic model is also mimetically effective, in the sense that these movements elicit in the reader an imitative, physical empathy: We follow Orpheus as his wife follows him, within him and without him, just as we are affected by his fateful choice, within Eurydice and without her, as we have just seen. Pathos, to summarize, is induced by the use of spatial and temporal deictics, by conventional elements of Eurydice’s speech and Orpheus’s questions, and by the coordinated representation of movement. Yet it is always tempered by Virgil’s irony and by a point of view that shares the affects of the characters but also stands outside them. This kind of representation allows us to be empathetic but also accords us distance, as if our rational faculties, the logos also necessary for persuasion, were always solicited. It allows us to judge, but to judge on the basis of empathy. This double nature of Virgil’s mimesis is crucial in understanding the case that is being made for an exception to the “law” (lex) given by Proserpina or the “pact” (foedus) made with the tyrant. The narrator Proteus/Virgil does not hesitate to promote this case: Orpheus’s “dementia” is “ignoscenda,” to be pardoned. This is followed immediately by “quidem” (indeed), which, instead of confirming the pardonable nature of Orpheus’s transgression

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

and the expectation that it will be pardoned, is more akin to the English “yes, but . . .” Indeed, the shades do not pardon, do not know how to pardon. But we do. Virgil has set up his literary representation in such a way that we can exercise our imagination to feel compassion with the couple, as equals to them, in what could be called the classical, Senecan sense of mercy. But why should we pardon them the infringement of the law?

The Case for Pardon and “Humanity” We now need to step back and consider all the details in this case, as in fact early modern commentators did. The first circumstance pleading in favor of pardon is the mental state of Orpheus in the moment that he stopped to look back. Virgil uses the term dementia, and the commentators amplify: lovers (amantes) are lacking a mind or reason (mens, and they are amentes). They resemble children. Hence, they cannot be made responsible for keeping agreements or following laws, and the gods should have known better. In addition, Orpheus, as a “demented” lover, did not violate Proserpina’s law because of a vice or defect (pravitas) but because of the strength of love. A seventeenth-century commentary summarizes the various features of Virgil’s story that make Orpheus worthy of pardon: Ignoscenda quidem.] Vide quot excusationes quaerat, ut Orphei culpae ignoscendum fuisse contendat. Respexit quidem Orpheus contra mandatum Proserpinae: verum respexit non ex contemptu legis; sed cepit illum dementia & quidem subita, & cepit amantem & incautum; & respexit non alienam, sed suam Eurydicen; & non statim respexit, sed luce sub ipsa, cum iam propè lucem attigisset, & ad itineris finem pervenisset: immemor ergo legis datae, & victus animi, nec continere se valens, Eurydicen suam respexit: quae omnia excusare illum debuissent. To be pardoned indeed.] See how many justifications he seeks, so that he can contend that Orpheus’s fault should have been pardoned. He looked back indeed against the order of Proserpina: truly he looked back not out of contempt for the law; but a madness seized him and it was indeed sudden, and seized the lover and the imprudent one; and he looked back not at someone else but at his Eurydice; and he did not look back constantly but just beneath the light, as if he had already more or less attained the light, and come to the end of his path: forgetful of the law given to him, and his soul vanquished, and not able to retain himself, he looked back at his Eurydice: all these things should have excused him.

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The Case for Pardon and “Humanity”



The circumstances indicated in Virgil’s language prepare us to advance reasons for pardoning Orpheus: the poet’s intention (he did not mean to defy Proserpina’s law); his state of mind, a passion or madness that seized him, as if he were not the agent of his action, and against which he had no strength (nec . . . valens); the fact that as lover he is in a category of persons of whom it is well known that they are imprudent; the fact that he looked back not to see anyone other than Eurydice who was his (he thus believed that she truly was his, and no longer belonged to the underworld); and the fact that he had not looked back before, in any constant or deliberate way, but just below the upper world, as if he had already reached it and had come to the end of his path, forgetful of the law (since it seemingly no longer applied). Any human judge would, it is implied, have forgiven him for this fault. Most of these circumstances require us to take the place of Orpheus, not to simply observe him from the outside, turning back, and measure the trajectory to the upper world. Technically, as it were, Orpheus had not reached the end of the path, but placing ourselves within him we realize that he might have believed so, or thought himself close enough, still respectful of the law. Of course, this deliberation is in conflict with another “empathetic” reason for pardon, the excuse provided by madness. However, the commentators might not intend to provide a coherent defense, just indicate the range of possibilities, any of which would have been sufficient to sway a human judge. The deities of the underworld, of course, are not swayed, because of their lack of humanitas. The best commentary on this point is Landino’s: “Ignoscenda: nam si cognosceremus quam miserae cupiant amantes visere rem amatam: & quam vehemens sit haec perturbatio in hac re iudicaremus illis huiuscemodi erratum condonandum. Sed manes propter illorum crudelitatem nullam noverunt humanitatem” (To be pardoned: for if we knew how much miserable lovers desire to see the beloved and how vehement is this trouble, in this case we would judge that an error of this sort should be pardoned. But the shades because of their cruelty did not know any humanity). The important term here is “humanitas”; in this context it means most obviously goodness or good will, since it is opposed to the “cruelty” of the underworld gods. In other contexts it can mean culture, good manners, or human nature in general (and all of these meanings become operative, once we reflect on the case). Let us see what humanitas entails, in view of Landino’s comment and the circumstances we have enumerated. In a way the term used in the

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

commentary is redundant, if its meaning of goodness merely includes the willingness to pardon. But in view of Virgil’s fiction, Landino’s commentary links humanitas to certain abilities. First of all, it necessitates knowledge, or a cognitive ability (cognosceremus). This knowledge is not one of “objective” facts or appearances but of affects and affective states within others, and of their intensity. Second, humanitas requires the ability to judge that a particular case (in hac re) is to be considered worthy of leniency because of a certain kind (huiuscemodi) of fault. Anyone, that is, the gods and us, can judge that a fault has been committed – it is enough to look at Orpheus and ascertain that he turned around before reaching the upper world. But only humans can perceive the specific qualities of a specific case that merit pardon. Human beings can perceive these specific qualities because they are able to ask the question “why?” Why does Orpheus turn to look at his beloved? Is it because he could not do otherwise, moved by his sudden madness? Is it because he believed Eurydice to already be “his,” and no longer belonging to the underworld? Is it because he believed that he had fulfilled the conditions of the pact, since they were just below the light? Or is it because he wanted to defy the “law” that Proserpina had given, by some fault or “pravitas” in himself? Humanitas, in the sense of “human nature,” does not mean that faults will be forgiven in all cases, simply that judgments will take into account answers to the question “why?” Laws or agreements are necessary to society; indeed, Orpheus’s great achievement is to have elicited an agreement from the usually impervious gods of the underworld. But humanity consists in knowing how to apply interpretation once the law or agreement is in place, and this involves a combination of logos and pathos, the ability to discern and the ability to “feel with,” a combination that Virgil’s story trains us to do, and in so doing, demonstrates what human beings are capable of, which is so much more than what the gods are capable of. Orpheus’s song had similar powers: the natural world and the gods suspended their activities and seemed to behave contrary to their natures upon hearing his laments. Virgil’s mimesis is not intended for the natural world or for the immortals, but is intended for a human listener. His representation is constructed, then, in a way that makes us not suspend or change our nature, but to realize it, to make us precisely more human qua human beings. It does not make us enter into impossible flights of the imagination, into “fictions” in one of its modern senses, but focuses us onto our essence as human beings, here and now.

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Ovid’s Retrieval Story



Ovid’s Retrieval Story Virgil’s and Ovid’s versions of the Orpheus and Eurydice story have been compared throughout the history of the reception of the Georgics and the Metamorphoses. The intricate revision, imitation, or parody of Virgil by Ovid, composing the story some thirty years later, has been the object of repeated scrutiny. Ovid eliminates the Aristaeus-Proteus frame narrative. He features Orpheus’s lengthy speech to the infernal deities, and gives Eurydice, in contrast, only a “Vale” to say to her husband when she is pulled away from him. He has Orpheus mourn his twice-dead wife only seven days. In Metamorphoses, , he tells in quite gruesome detail the story of Orpheus’s death, after the poet had turned to the love of boys and rejected women. But he then relates the tender reunion of Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld, and thus softens the tragic nature of their separation and the bracing brutality of the poet’s dismemberment. The popularity of Ovid’s poem rivals that of Virgil’s works during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. His indispensable recounting of classical myths is a treasure trove for poetic composition. The decidedly non-Christian account of the pagan gods is a challenge to allegorization and moralization that medieval and Renaissance writers are eager to take up. My reading of the episode in Virgil’s Georgics was admittedly incomplete, and although my own perspective on Ovid’s story remains vaguely early modern, for similar reasons it cannot take into account all of the variations and understandings that the Orpheus story is subjected to in its historical reception, as part of the larger poem. Ovid’s evident knowledge of Virgil’s lines and his own poetic deftness and playfulness lead many modern scholars to seek out symptoms of Ovid’s belatedness: parody, subversion, sly allusions, and a return to the banal, the superficial, and surface effects as a reaction to the depth of the earlier tragic story. Orpheus is here less guilty, though quite disappointing, somewhat less driven by dark forces, and at the same time we can identify a little more with this character. The laws of the gods seem more malleable. I am less inclined to provide an assessment of the figure than to identify features of Ovid’s mimesis that provide us with another aspect of humanness, or give us instruments with which to realize this humanness. These features derive in large part from the foregrounding of Orpheus’s speech and its rhetorical-ethical construction, and from variations introduced by Ovid that justify the granting of pardon for the poet’s transgression, during the return. I will look once again at what elicits empathy, and from whom, and at the kinetic scenario set up. Finally, Ovid’s language reminds us of

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

the potential of (human) language as an opening of possibilities and the granting of autonomy and a future, in the face of the fates and the universal law of death. Eurydice has been bitten by the snake and falls dead. The narration cuts directly to the moment at which Orpheus has mourned her “sufficiently” in the upper world and dares to “try out” the shades with his pleas. The best-known late medieval commentator summarizes the plot in the following way: [T]antoque dolore moriens affecit maritum: ut non satis esse duxerit lugere: sed ad inferos quoque ad eam repetendam descendere nihil dubitarit. eo igitur cum pervenisset: tantum carminis suavitate effecit: ut uxorem a Plutone ea acciperet conditione: ne illam prius: quam ad superos reversus esset respiceret: sed orpheus veritus ne se uxor sequeretur: cum iam fere ad superos pervenisset: eam respixit: quae ilico ad inferos retracta orpheum in maximis cruciatibus reliquit . . . The dying wife affected her husband with so much suffering, that he judged that it was not sufficient to shed tears, rather, he hesitated in no way to descend into the underworld in order to retrieve her. Having then been able to do this, only with the sweetness of his song did he obtain that he would accept his wife from Pluto with this condition that he not look back at her before having come back to the upper world. But Orpheus was fearful that his wife was not following him and he looked back at her as he had already almost arrived at the upper world; she, having been pulled back immediately into the underworld, left Orpheus in the greatest torments.

This bare-bones enarratio of the Orpheus story is interesting on several counts. It presents the poet as someone acting assuredly and effectively (duxerit, nihil dubitarit, pervenisset, effecit). When he turns around to look at her it is not because he is suddenly taken by the irrational passion of love; instead, the commentator affirms that it is because he fears that she is not following him, an entirely plausible worry, we will see. Neither his initial grief nor his great love for her keep him from acting with a certain degree of deliberateness. This will be key to understanding what Ovid’s representation achieves.

Orpheus the Rhetorician Let us turn to the story in Ovid’s text. The first section we will look at consists of the prelude and then the entire speech of the poet-seer; we will come to the consequences of the speech and the failed return in a second part.

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Orpheus the Rhetorician



quam satis ad superas postquam Rhodopeius auras deflevit vates, ne non temptaret et umbras ad Styga Taenaria est ausus descendere porta perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulcro Persephonen adiit inamoenaque regna tenentem umbrarum dominum pulsisque ad carmina nervis sic ait: “o positi sub terra numina mundi, in quem reccidimus, quicquid mortale creamur, si licet et falsi positis ambagibus oris vera loqui sinitis, non huc, ut opaca viderem Tartara, descendi, nec uti villosa colubria terna Medusaei vincirem guttura monstri: causa viae est coniunx, in quam calcata venenum vipera diffudit crescentesque abstulit annos. posse pati volui nec me temptasse negabo: vicit Amor. supera deus hic bene notus in ora est; an sit et hic, dubito: sed et hic tamen auguror esse, famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae, vos quoque iunxit Amor. per ego haec loca plena timoris, per Chaos hoc ingens vastique silentia regni, Eurydices, oro, properata retexit fata. omnia debemur vobis, paulumque morati serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam. tendimus huc omnes, haec est domus ultima, vosque humani generis longissima regna tenetis. haec quoque, cum iustos matura peregerit annos, iuris erit vestri: pro munere poscimus usum; quodsi fata negant veniam pro coniuge, certum est nolle redire mihi: leto gaudete duorum.” When the bard of Rhodope had shed tears for her fully in the upper world, so that he might try the shades as well he dared to go down to the Stygian world through the gate of Taenarus. And through the insubstantial crowds and the ghosts who had received burial he came to Persephone and to the master of the shades ruling the unlovely realms, and singing to the music of his lyre, he said: “O you divinities of the world placed underneath the earth, into which we all fall back who are born mortal, if it is lawful and you permit me to lay aside all false and indirect speech and speak true things, I have not come down here to see dark Tartara, nor to bind the three necks of Medusa’s monstrous offspring, rough with serpents. The cause of my journey is my wife into whom a trodden serpent diffused his poison and so took away her growing years. I have wanted to be able to endure and I do not deny that I have tried, but Love has vanquished. A god well known in the upper world; whether he is also here I doubt; and yet I surmise that he is well known here also, and if the rumor of the old-time ravishment is not a lie, Love also joined you. By these places full of fear, by this huge void and these vast and silent realms,

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

I beg of you, unravel the hastened fates of Eurydice. We owe you all things, and having stayed above for a little, slowly or quickly we hasten to one abode. We all make our way here, this is our last home, and you hold the longest rule over the human race. She also will be under your jurisdiction, when, mature, she will have gone through her appropriate years. We ask her enjoyment as a gift; but if the fates deny this favor for my wife, it is certain that I do not wish to return: enjoy the death of two.”

Two features of Ovid’s story here have troubled critics, leading them to dismiss this treatment of Orpheus as much less satisfying than Virgil’s. First, the adverb “satis” (sufficiently, fully) in line  (“quam satis ad superas postquam Rhodopeius auras / deflevit vates” [when the bard of Rhodope had shed tears for her fully in the upper world]) and, second, the rhetorical nature of the poet’s speech. Regius’s commentary seems undisturbed by the first point: Rather than condemn Orpheus’s mourning as somehow conventional, the commentator implies that the poet mourned in the upper world as much as he could, but seeing that tears did not bring back his wife, he went a step further and did not hesitate to descend into Hades. Far from dismissing the poet’s mourning, this formulation shows the insufficiency of what we can do when we mourn: We cannot bring the deceased back to life, and only Orpheus’s decision and only the immense sweetness of his song can do this. The second feature of the story is the speech itself. Regius does not appear to see a conflict between the sweetness of his song and the content of the speech. It is indeed – and I will look at it more carefully – replete with “commonplaces,” that is, both a common consolatory argument and rhetorical, persuasive arguments for pity. However, it would be entirely anachronistic to dismiss the speech as parodic or trivial, because, precisely, it relies on the “common” for its persuasive force. Contrary to modern views of rhetoric, speech in Antiquity and the early modern period was not effective because of its originality or uniqueness, but because it could move the audience to a level of shared truths and experiences. Orpheus begins his plea for the release of his wife by establishing his own ethos through his words; he is relying on his speech, not on the judges’ prior knowledge of his character. He acknowledges the authority of the deities he is addressing, and the fact that he considers himself their subject (not a foreigner from a different world). And then, before presenting the narratio of his case, without waiting for an answer, he asks permission to speak truthfully and directly: “si licet et falsi positis ambagibus oris / vera loqui sinitis” (–). His seemingly trivial beginning

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Orpheus the Rhetorician



establishes two extremely important principles. First, there is a law or lawfulness or legitimacy (“si licet”) that can be respected by him as a human being and, presumably, by the deities as well. If it is legitimate for him to do something, the deities can also recognize their own actions as legitimate (and if they do not act legitimately, they can be considered to be willful or tyrannical). Their tacit permission for him to continue and to speak the truth is an acknowledgment of a lawfulness and of their acceptance of “direct” speech, a sort of parrhesia of the poet who will forgo fictions of which he is perfectly capable. The acknowledgment of an independent lawfulness means that the deities can recognize a legitimate plea and adhere to an agreement. They don’t simply do whatever they please. In addition, the tacit permission to speak directly is a willingness to consider the speaker as an equal, for the purpose of the case and the speech that presents it. This goes for the speaker as well: He has presented himself first of all as someone who is lawful, who is just in the first sense of justice, that is, someone who follows the laws in place. The plea is characterized, then, not as an outpouring of passion and sorrow, but by a distinct awareness of the social and legal norms that are in place, or should be, and that will allow an eventual return of Eurydice. None of this is “sweet” (suavis) in our sense of the word, but it is “sweet” in the sense that it underlines poetry’s ability to recognize or create harmony. Second, the speaker is discerning; he can distinguish truthful, direct arguments from falsehoods, circumlocutions, and truths disguised in fictions. The speaker is honest; his song is not blandishment and can contain elements that will not be pleasing. All of these elements constitute the ethos of an excellent advocate that, in Ovid’s version, Orpheus has come to be. And it works. Orpheus the orator then claims not to have descended into Hades out of mere curiosity, nor in order to commit violence (like Hercules) against a subject of the deities. This prolepsis or praesumptio reinforces the ethos of the orator as a law-abiding and respectful subject of Pluto and Persephone. His admission of failure in the face of Love is not one of someone too weak to try to endure the suffering caused by his lover’s loss. His attempt to persuade the deities to release her – Ovid uses the same verb temptare to designate both the lover’s efforts to endure and his effort to persuade – is not a whim but a decision born out of struggle. Although the phrase “vicit Amor” recalls Virgil’s “victus animi,” its immediate purpose is to serve to link the interest of his cause to the praise of its judges. They, too, have known the power of Love, and if they, too, use truthful speech they would admit as much. The favor Orpheus asks of Pluto and Persephone is

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

understandable to them – they can empathize – and, above all, it does not diminish in any way the dominion they exercise over the human race. It does not impinge on their dignity and will not jeopardize the submission of human beings to their rule. The conclusion of Orpheus’s speech increases the emotional intensity of his appeal to the judges’ pity, introducing a pathos that was controlled at the beginning and reinforcing the parrhesia, the willingness to speak the truth and to stand by it, at the risk of his own life, for which Orpheus asked permission at the outset. This is a good piece of judicial rhetoric, directed toward judges who are presumed to be sensitive to “conciliatory” arguments, those that bind the interests of the supplicant to the interest or person of the judge. The praise of their dominion by the mortal and no doubt the empathy that Persephone and Pluto, joined by Love, feel with Orpheus, vanquished by Love, allow them to extend Eurydice’s time on earth. This empathy does not extend, however, to Orpheus the breaker of laws. The speaker, we have seen, presents himself as someone who respects laws and agreements; once he transgresses the “law” he accepted along with the person of his wife, he cannot hope for pardon. Ovid makes it easier for us to understand the infernal deities’ rigor once he has looked back, for, in contrast to Virgil, his motivation is his fear that she is not following him (as Regius pointed out), not his overwhelming passion. That does not mean, however, that we as human beings should refuse him that pardon, as we will now see.

Pardon, Empathy, and Physical Movement Before circling back to these lines, which we have looked at only from a rhetorical perspective, let us consider the second portion of the narrative. Talia dicentem nervosque ad verba moventem exsangues flebant animae; nec Tantalus undam captavit refugam, stupuitque Ixionis orbis, nec carpsere iecur volucres, urnisque vacarunt Belides, inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo. tunc primum lacrimis victarum carmine fama est Eumenidum maduisse genas, nec regia coniunx sustinet oranti nec, qui regit ima, negare, Eurydicenque vocant: umbras erat illa recentes inter et incessit passu de vulnere tardo. hanc simul et legem Rhodopeius accipit heros, ne flectat retro sua lumina, donec Avernas exierit valles; aut inrita dona futura. carpitur adclivis per muta silentia trames,

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Pardon, Empathy, and Physical Movement



arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca, nec procul afuerunt telluris margine summae: hic, ne deficeret, metuens avidusque videndi flexit amans oculos, et protinus illa relapsa est, bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans nil nisi cedentes infelix arripit auras. iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam questa suo (quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?) supremumque “vale,” quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. (–) The bloodless spirits shed tears for the one saying such things and moving the chords to the words; Tantalus did not catch at the fleeing wave, and Ixion’s wheel stopped in wonder, and the vultures did not pluck at the liver, the Belides rested from their urns, and you Sisyphus sat on your stone. Then first, tradition says, vanquished by the song, the cheeks of the Eumenides were wet with tears; nor could the queen nor he who rules the lower world refuse the supplicant. They called Eurydice. She was among the new shades and came with steps halting from her wound. At the same time the Thracian hero received her and the law, that he should not turn his eyes backward until he had left the valley of Avernus, or else the gift would be in vain. They took the steep path through places of utter silence, an abrupt path, indistinct and clouded in pitchy darkness. And they were not far away from the margin of the upper world, when he, fearing that she would fail, and eager to see her, the lover turned back his eyes and instantly she fell back into the depths. He stretched out his arms, struggling to be grasped or to grasp her, but, unhappy one, he clasped nothing but the yielding air. And now, dying a second time, she made no complaint against her husband (for of what could she have complained if not that she was loved?). And she spoke a last “Farewell,” which he scarcely received with his ears, and fell back to the place from which she had come.

The consequences of Orpheus’s speech are presented in a series of vivid details by Ovid. The arguments deployed by the orator are convincing, to be sure, but the wondrous effects of his speech seem to far exceed the arguments presented. Orpheus’s song, his voice, and his lyre make the difference, and this is something that a book cannot convey. The closest parallel to the effect of the voice is the image; the enargeia of the lines following the speech, showing the condemned in stupor and wonder, supplies a palpable sense of what the song must have been like. That same enargeia is not found in the speech itself, making wonder and pathos all the more a product of the ineffable music. The vividness of these lines obscures a cogent argument for a second “pity,” for an excuse of the lover’s fault. Critics have noted the detail of the newly deceased Eurydice’s slowed steps (“incessit passu de vulnere tardo,”

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

Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

), a consequence of the snake bite. It is an echo of Aeneid VI.: Dido appears still affected by her wound, as well, intensifying the emotional charge in the glimpse we get of Ovid’s Eurydice in Hades (and foreshadowing the couple’s reunion in book ). Yet more so than a literary echo, this detail is essential to Ovid’s overall implied argument for pardoning Orpheus’s transgression of the infernal deities’ law. In Virgil, the implicit plea for Orpheus is located in the dementia and furor of the poetlover, something that is “ignoscenda,” to be pardoned. In Ovid’s version, Eurydice’s still-fresh wound makes her less able to walk quickly or firmly. As opposed to Virgil, Ovid has conveyed to us the physical difficulty of the climbing path the couple must take to return: “arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca” (an abrupt [path], indistinct and clouded in pitchy darkness, ). Orpheus fears that she might “fail” (“ne deficeret, metuens,” ), fail to follow him, fail to follow the path, with justification. Hence his turning and looking. His concern for her is one grounded in a concern all of us would have, given these circumstances. Whereas Virgil’s implied argument for pardon relied on the universality of lovers’ madness, as the commentators point out, Ovid’s carefully laid-out circumstances allow us to universalize the poet’s mistake to all readers, not just to lovers. All of us as human beings should have this concern, and should look back at the wounded Eurydice. The circumstances justifying pardon concern our physical nature as human beings and as beings in the upper world: the stepped-upon snake bit Eurydice and cut short her “growing years” (“crescentes annos”), as if time corresponded to the growing of her body. Orpheus receives her as he receives the “law” of the deities (“hanc simul et legem . . . accipit”), as if the agreement already contained the body of Eurydice and its wound. This wound slows her down as she reappears, and the path of return is steep, abrupt, devoid of visual and auditory markers. As readers/listeners we are reenacting the sheer physical effort required to return, as in a dream in which all attempts at movement are slowed by a strange inertia of the muscles, and by an accumulation of obstacles in our way. It is as if looking back to see her were the only thing we could do easily, as physical beings. We are, precisely, not the insubstantial people and the ghosts who inhabit the lower world (“leves populos simulacraque”), and we are not the various tormented figures who have stopped moving. Ovid has created a mimesis allowing physical empathy with Eurydice, and made the fear that motivates her husband completely natural.

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Respectfulness, Choice, and Humanity



Orpheus, too, participates in a kinetic scenario. As in the Georgics story, the version we find in the Metamorphoses constitutes an economy of movement and stasis: the poet “moving” the strings of his lyre (“nervos . . . moventem”) moves the denizens of the underworld (in the rhetorical sense of movere), with the result that they stop all their actions, become still with wonder. Everything and everyone focus on the poet and Eurydice. Orpheus turns his eyes (“flexit . . . oculos”), his wife falls back (“relapsa est”). In an extended paronomasia/polyptoton, the poet strains with his arms to be taken by her arms and to take her arms (“bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans”), emphasizing the dream-like impotence that is the physical correlative to emotional loss. The verb certare (to combat, to strive to gain the upper hand) is usually found in military, agonistic contexts (and might be an allusion to the “palms” of victory in Virgil); here it intensifies the physical struggle that we can all reenact. This is what living mortals do, in this moment, this one time, when physical effort is not repetition and punishment, as it is for Tantalus and Sisyphus.

Respectfulness, Choice, and Humanity I would like to look at a final feature of Ovid’s story, concerning both the speech and the narrative of the failed return. It is arguably an element of the “lawful” rhetoric of Orpheus’s plea, but it has much greater resonances. I would characterize it as the hesitant, almost conjectural nature of Orpheus’s language and of moments in the following narration. This is manifest in several ways: the deferential request for permission to speak the truth, the anticipation of objections, the “refusal to deny” attempts at bearing the loss of Eurydice, the expression of doubt as to the power of love in the underworld, the concluding anticipation of the deities’ refusal, and, in the succeeding narrative, the double negative of the gods’ concession and the negatives surrounding Eurydice’s second death. Each one of these instances, I will argue, projects future possibility, choice, and autonomy in all parties involved in the communication: the speaker, the judges, and the reader/listener. This is also why, here, speech is essentially human. Orpheus’s speech is rhetorical; that is, it uses devices to construct the ethos of the speaker (as lawful and respectful) and, in praising the judges, to tie their interests to the interests of the cause he is pleading (“conciliatory” arguments). As modern readers we tend to look upon these devices as formulaic, as if they were filler material, irrelevant to the success

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

of the speech and having no other significance. But in doing so we avoid the question of why these devices do indeed construct an ethos of lawfulness and respect, and why the way in which conciliatory arguments are expressed is essential to their success. So let us return to the opening lines of the poet’s speech, first “si licet et falsi positis ambagibus oris / vera loqui sinitis” (–) (if it is lawful and you permit me to lay aside all false and indirect speech and speak true things). This opening is not only conventional – requesting permission to speak and announcing that you will go directly to the heart of the matter – but it is also redundant, in the sense that Orpheus does not wait to be granted permission, and mentioning lies and fictions simply creates the impression that he could be lying and that he could waste time. Why bother at all? The opening intends not to ensure the actual veracity of the speech and its legitimacy. Instead, we would say today that it is a (trivial) gesture of courtesy. “Courtesy” means here that Orpheus affirms the ability of his interlocutors to choose to give permission or not, and it creates alternatives of narratives, some of which are chosen by the speaker. Even in the absence of a response by the judges, the lines create the sense that a choice has been made and that deference to legitimacy and the truthful narrative offered are consequences of choices. This mutual sense of alternatives to be chosen underlines the freedom or autonomy of the interlocutors. A similar sense of free choice is conveyed by the following lines: “non huc, ut opaca viderem / Tartara, descendi, nec uti villosa colubria / terna Medusaei vincirem guttura monstri” (–) (I have not come down here to see dark Tartara, nor to bind the three necks of Medusa’s monstrous offspring, rough with serpents). I could have descended into the underworld with these intentions, but I have not; you could think that these alternative intentions were the reason for my journey (but I will show that you should not). Again, nothing has been added to the plea itself – my suffering is the same whether or not others might have chosen to descend into Hades for different reasons – but, in addition to reassuring the deities of Orpheus’s lawfulness, the praesumptio demonstrates the awareness of alternatives, on the speaker’s part and on the judges’ part, and on choice as the cause for action and for belief. Projecting yourself as speaker who chooses among alternatives and projecting, at the same time, the persons to whom you are addressing the speech as also choosing among alternatives, or in a position to do so, is respectful. It allows the interlocutors influence over the speech while presuming that they grant you a similar autonomy. It also presumes a future; that is, it presumes that the future is subject to choices that the

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Respectfulness, Choice, and Humanity

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speech will make possible or clear. In Orpheus’s case this insistence on alternatives is conveyed by negation: I have not come to do this, nor that, but to plead for the return of my wife. And, implicitly: I am asking you to have me not speak falsely and indirectly, but truthfully. Negation connects us to the next instance of respectfulness or lawfulness. “I have wanted to be able to endure and I do not deny that I have tried” (“posse pati volui nec me temptasse negabo,” ). Love vanquished him, and the result is his “trying” (temptaret) the shades to recover her. This admission of fallibility serves as a marker of the truth of his narrative and as a justification of his appearance in the underworld, not as a conqueror but as someone vanquished by a force greater than himself (and to which Pluto and Persephone have not been impervious). The formulation is strange: I will not deny that I tried to endure and Love won. Why not simply: “I have tried to endure but failed”? A simple confession that the pain was unendurable would have helped, in principle, Orpheus’s narrative, both in the sense of supporting his explanation of his intentions and in increasing the pathos of his plea. The future double negative non negabo anticipates a concession to be made to an adversary’s argument, usually in the hope (and confidence) that conceding a weaker point will make a stronger point, or the entire case, acceptable. Once again, the speaker is placing the judges in a position to respond (or of having responded) to his justification for appearing before them, anticipating a choice that they have to not hear his plea. The double negative “I will not deny” implies that he expects them to reproach him for not mourning Eurydice sufficiently, for descending to Hades too soon (hence Ovid’s “quam satis . . . deflevit vates”), and that, as a human being not capable of resisting love, he has failed. But he is, precisely, a human being, and he will not deny that he too was conquered by love. The implicit, stronger point is that the infernal deities, as well, have been conquered by love, and, as Orpheus cannot deny that he tried and failed, the deities cannot deny the plea of the poet (“nec regia coniunx / sustinet oranti nec, qui regit ima, negare,” –), since Pluto, too, was conquered by love despite his immortal nature. The human lover’s double negative foreshadows the immortals’ double negative, and their concession is by far the more significant one. By placing them into a future position of reproaching him for his failure to endure the loss of the beloved, the speaker has given himself the option of reproaching them for their succumbing to Love. Conceding the weaker point allows the speaker to gain the more important one, return of his wife. On both sides the fault of being vanquished by Love needs to be excused (and is).

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

My point, again, is less this strategic rhetorical use of the double negations but the fact that it involves the anticipation of future choices and, basically, the possibility of choice, on all parts. The expression of deference or respectfulness is not simply an expression of humility, but the demonstration of awareness of the other as an agent of choice, and of the choices being made by the respectful or lawful person. The larger, unexpressed proposition is that death, the ultimate necessity, can be imagined to be subject to reversal, can be chosen not to have happened. Another seemingly superfluous or trivial detail of Orpheus’s speech is his hesitant way of asserting the power of Love in the underworld: “supera deus hic bene notus in ora est; / an sit et hic, dubito: sed et hic tamen auguror esse, / famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae, / vos quoque iunxit Amor” (–) (A god well known in the upper world; whether he is also here I doubt and yet I surmise that he is well known here also, and if the rumor of the old-time ravishment is not a lie, Love also joined you). The expression of doubt (“dubito”) and of conjecture (“auguror”) and the posing of a condition (“famaque si . . . non est mentita”) are respectful, all the more so that they introduce a bold statement: “vos quoque iunxit Amor.” In other words, you (immortals) are like me. Their rhetorical function is to reinforce the speaker’s ethos and make the conciliatio, the linking of interests, palatable to the judges. But more importantly, in this context of confrontation between the human and the inhuman, Orpheus’s formulations demonstrate the awareness of limitations, but also of possibility, of contingencies future and past, of alternatives. I might not know everything, and not this, but this is possible, and I surmise this, but only if a story that I have heard is true, but it could be untrue, and I let you confirm. That is what makes this speech eminently human, and no less effective for being human. As in the case of Virgil’s (or Proteus’s) narrative, the Ovidian narrator takes sides, as it were. When Eurydice is falling back into the underworld, she says only a faint “Vale,” and the narrator interjects “quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?” () (for of what could she have complained if not that she was loved?). The question recalls Virgil’s “quid faceret?. . .” (What could he do?. . .) when Orpheus is left with no options once his wife has died again. In both instances these are questions the characters might ask of themselves and questions asked of the reader/listener. In Ovid’s case the question implies that we as reader-judges should excuse Eurydice’s brevity and should extend that excuse to her husband, for all he did was motivated by love – less so the dementia that made him stop, in Virgil, but the empathetic worry and care for her that love had entailed. The question

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Seneca: Conceiving the Inhuman

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itself is an invitation to empathy and represents empathy: Someone outside the character is asking a question identical to the one the character might pose to herself, while putting herself in the place of her husband. The reader empathizes with Eurydice, who empathizes with her husband. This extensive empathy connects intimately to the awareness of choices by others that is implied by Orpheus’s repeated demonstrations of lawfulness. Ovid’s story of Orpheus’s descent and failed return is entirely distinct from the Virgilian version, not so much through its literary awareness or allusiveness, but by its focus on the poet’s rhetoric. This rhetoric relies on ethical and conciliatory elements to make the concession by the infernal deities obvious – they cannot refuse the request – but it also reaffirms what is so human about these ethical positions: a projection of the interlocutor as someone who makes choices, a projection of a future in which alternatives exist and some contingencies depend on choices. Accompanying this ethic of possibility is a mimesis that enables all living human beings, that is, human beings inhabiting a physical body, not the insubstantial shades nor the immortal gods, to empathize with the failed struggle of the return of Eurydice.

Seneca: Conceiving the Inhuman Orpheus is featured or mentioned in various settings in the corpus of Seneca’s tragedies. I will consider only two: in both Hercules furens and Hercules Oetaeus, the chorus relates in a few lines the failed return of Eurydice by means of a succinct narrative. Virgil and Ovid have preceded the tragedian, and unlike them Seneca chooses not to represent direct speech from either husband or wife. Nor does he truly make a case for Orpheus’s pardon. Seneca arguably makes the poet more heroic and less a victim governed by passion, turning Orpheus’s defeat, “victus animi” (Georgics IV, ), his spirit vanquished, into Pluto admitting defeat (“vincimur,” Hercules furens, ). The mere presence of Orpheus and his song in the tragedies serves as contrast to the physical feats of Hercules. But what is left of the narrative? In both cases it is encased within the chorus, serving as part of a quasi-lyrical commentary on the action of the play. Hence a more mediated, instrumental presentation. The more elaborate one is found in Hercules furens, which we will turn to first. Immites potuit flectere cantibus umbrarum dominos et prece supplici Orpheus, Eurydicen dum repetit suam.

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca quae silvas et aves saxaque traxerat ars, quae praebuerat fluminibus moras, ad cuius sonitum constiterant ferae, mulcet non solitis vocibus inferos et surdis resonat clarius in locis. deflent Eumenides Threiciam nurum, deflent et lacrimis difficiles dei; et qui fronte nimis crimina tetrica quaerunt ac veteres excutiunt reos flentes Eurydicen iuridici sedent. tandem mortis ait “Vincimur” arbiter, “evade ad superos, lege tamen data: tu post terga tui perge viri comes, tu non ante tuam respice coniugem, quam cum clara deos obtulerit dies Spartanique aderit ianua Taenari.” odit verus amor nec patitur moras: munus dum properat cernere, perdidit. Quae vinci potuit regia carmine, haec vinci poterit regia viribus.

Orpheus could sway the pitiless rulers of the shades with songs and suppliant prayer, when he sought back his Eurydice. The art that had drawn trees, birds, and rocks, that had caused rivers to tarry, at whose sound beasts had stood still, soothes the lower world with unusual song, and rings out clearer in those soundless places. The Eumenides weep for the Thracian bride; so too weep the gods, impervious to tears. Even those who investigate crimes with sternest brows and interrogate erstwhile criminals, those seated judges weep for Eurydice. At last death’s ruler said: “We are vanquished. Go forth to the world, this law having been given: you may escort your husband, but behind him; you may not look back at your wife before bright daylight offers the skies, and the door of Spartan Taenarus is near.” True love hates and will not endure delays: in hastening to see his gift, he lost her. The kingdom that could be vanquished by song, this kingdom can be vanquished by force.

This story follows the traditional plot of the katabasis: demonstration of the power of Orpheus’s song in the underworld, conditional release of Eurydice, failure to reach the upper world. At the conclusion, just before the chorus’s voice is supplanted by Hercules’s in the following act, we have a typically Senecan distich: “Quae vinci potuit regia carmine, / haec vinci poterit regia viribus” (–) (The kingdom that could be vanquished by song, this kingdom can be vanquished by force). The parallel construction underlines the use of the Orpheus episode as proof – Orpheus’s victory is a proof of the probability of Hercules’s victory. Furthermore it

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Seneca: Conceiving the Inhuman

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is based on the polyptoton potuit-poterit (was able to, will be able to) and constitutes a rhetorical locus: If something lesser can do this, something greater can do the same thing. The enthymeme based on this locus would be: Orpheus was able to do this, with lesser means, therefore Hercules will be able to do this, with greater means. Seneca is obliged to present the poet, then, as someone who has conquered, not as someone defeated. The polyptoton potuit-poterit also neatly provides “closure” to the story, as it repeats the verb of the initial line of the story: “immites potuit flectere cantibus . . . Orpheus” (Orpheus could sway the pitiless with songs). This encapsulated narrative is also held together by a verbal web of repetition, through anaphora (“deflent . . . deflent . . .,” –; “tu . . . tu . . .,” –), paronomasia (“deflent et lacrimis difficiles dei,” ), a strung-out false figura etymologica (“flectere . . . deflent . . . flentes,” , , , ), and antitheses (“immites . . . flectere,” , “surdis resonat,” , “post . . . ante,” –, “odit . . . amor,” , “cernere perdidit,” ). There is not much breathing room. The sententia motivating Orpheus’s failure is an extreme concentration of meaning: “odit verus amor nec patitur moras” () (true love hates and will not endure delays). The line begins with an assertion of hatred followed immediately by “true,” as if hatred were the true emotion, as even love can be said to hate. Love does not “endure,” patitur, delays. But love is a passion, passio, something that endures, is passive. Not in this version. Love is an agent of hatred and refuses to submit. This ineluctable drive to destructive energy resembles Hercules’s violence; it is as if Orpheus, paradoxically, in his looking-back at Eurydice, were enacting in a lesser measure the violence that Hercules has enacted in a much vaster measure. Orpheus is not really the opposite of Hercules but a smaller version of him. The actual narration of the ascent and Orpheus’s looking back is reduced to one line: “munus dum properat cernere, perdidit” () (while he hastens to see his gift, he lost her/it). The narrative is less a succession of gestures or movements, as Virgil and Ovid present it, but is abstracted from literal action through metaphor (munus) and semi-psychological terms (properat, perdidit). The only sensation referred to is seeing, cernere, which is the most easily co-opted by cognitive meanings. In other words, Seneca has removed the narrative as much as possible from the physical scenario of gestures – struggling to climb, stopping, turning, stretching hands – that his predecessors laid out so carefully. We are deprived of any possibility of kinesic empathy. We are living this episode not through a mimetic connection with Orpheus and

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

Eurydice but through an entirely rational understanding that is always ready to be generalized into maxims. Love is hasty. Too much haste botches things. Always be deliberate. Do not let impatience make you transgress laws laid down by the deities. The lack of attention to the narrative of the lovers parallels the complete absence of the question of pardon. Virgil’s case for “equity” and Ovid’s constant projection of choice are integral to the affective charge of the episode as they represent it; in these prior versions we feel that Orpheus should be pardoned, for slightly different reasons. There is no such element of the representation in Seneca, where we seem to be in the position of the infernal deities who, according to Virgil, “do not know how to pardon” even those things that are to be pardoned. This “divine” point of view is reflected in a choice by Seneca. Whereas Virgil featured a speech by Eurydice and Ovid one by Orpheus, Seneca takes the third option: a speech by Pluto. The speech (–) is irrelevant to the value of the example as proof; the preceding lines, detailing the powers of Orpheus’s song and ending in Pluto’s admission of defeat (“vincimur”), are the salient ones. Indeed, the choice of the verb “vincere” rather than “flectere” indicates the conclusion of the argument, where the same verb is used twice. Rhetorically, then, the speech is superfluous, and the choice of direct discourse is all the more surprising. Let us recall the lines pronounced by the arbiter mortis, the master of death itself: “Vincimur . . . evade ad superos, lege tamen data: tu post terga tui perge viri comes, tu non ante tuam respice coniugem, quam cum clara deos obtulerit dies Spartanique aderit ianua Taenari.” “We are vanquished. Go forth to the world, this law having been given: you may escort your husband, but behind him; you may not look back at your wife before bright daylight offers the skies, and the door of Spartan Taenarus is near.”

Pluto demonstrates both that he is a legislator (lege tamen data) and that he is a judge, addressing Orpheus and Eurydice equally (“tu . . . tu . . .”), as equally subject to the law. Of course, death is the great source of equality, the law to which everyone is submitted. Pluto also uses the imperative repeatedly (“evade,” “perge,” “non respice”), which is a paradoxical choice of verb tense for someone who has just admitted defeat. Indeed, the ruler of the underworld speaks as a victor, not as a vanquished one. Seneca

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Seneca: Conceiving the Inhuman

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seems to suggest that this victory over the infernal deities is illusory, that death always remains the victor, and that Eurydice cannot escape this implacable law after all. The direct discourse of Pluto’s speech also allows us to take the point of view, momentarily, of the inhuman. It is a stepping-outside us not in order to empathize with another human being, or another living being, but in order to contemplate ourselves from above, sub specie aeternitatis, as it were. It is within human faculties to conceive of the inhuman, what is absolutely unlike us, and to think and speak through the inhuman. The “law” given to Orpheus and Eurydice is justice through the fact that it applies equally. It is justice to the extent that it is a law in place, laid down by the master of death. But there is no motivation behind the law, no way that we can say that it is reasonable or unreasonable; it simply is. The speech itself gives no rationale for the law. Instead, it is the wish or decision (arbitrium) of the arbiter who has no need to provide motivations or intentions for the law he gives. Even the defeated one in this unequal exchange can lay down laws and apply them, indifferently. As human beings we are able to think, imagine, this inhuman order, a truly meaningless law. The second more elaborate representation of the Orphean katabasis is found in the Hercules Oetaeus. It presents two problems of a philological nature. First, its authorship is not certain, although the material is definitely Senecan. Second, the Orpheus-Eurydice episode is the subject of some textual uncertainty, as various editors have proposed differing line sequences, and editions in the tradition present some lexical variation. This textual instability makes it difficult to consider the episode as a set-piece narrative subject to close reading, and indeed the story offers only a glimpse of what its version in the Hercules furens was able to provide. I have chosen to follow the Badius Ascensius edition: Sed cum linqueret inferos Orpheus carmina finiens Et vinci lapis improbus Et vatem potuit sequi: Consumpt[o]s iterum deae Supplent Eurydices colos. Seddum respicit immemor: Nec credens sibi redditam Orpheus Eurydicen sequi: Cantus praemia perdidit: Quae nata est iterum perit.

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Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

But as Orpheus left the underworld finishing his songs and the shameless stone could be vanquished and follow the bard, the goddesses fill again Eurydice’s spent distaff. But heedless he looks back, not believing Eurydice given back to him and following. He lost the prize of his song. She who was (re)born perished again.

The sequence is notable for its relative rhetorical looseness, in contrast to the version in Hercules furens. It contains some one-word echoes of both Seneca’s earlier lines (“vinci,” “potuit,” “perdidit”) and Virgil’s version (“respicit,” “immemor,” “redditam”). No mention is made of the “law” given by Pluto, although the term “immemor” (he who forgets) implies the forgetting of an agreement. No one is given a speech. The lines are merely an example, a proof, of the fact that the person who is born is a person who dies. Hence, Hercules, who was born, will die. This is emphasized through the repetition of “iterum” – born again, dies again – and the alliteration on “praemia/perdidit/perit.” The prize, recompense, that is life will always result in death. Although not far removed from the “message” of Seneca’s play, this mini-narrative is devoid of the elements that allowed the reader to look upon the lovers from above, from the inhuman perspective of the gods. These impoverished lines in Hercules Oetaeus remind us both of the possibilities and of the fragility of mimesis. Abstracted from its manifold representations, the story “as such” of Orpheus and Eurydice contains a minimal series of actions. In the hands of the three writers we have looked at, it acquires powerful resonances, as each writer exploits different possibilities of representation to give us access to attributes that we share as human beings. The pseudo-Senecan version feels undernourished, set on the background of the predecessors. This, also, is what can happen. What the story of the lovers tells us is not “out there” to be perceived by anyone at any time. What the story tells us is conveyed through elements of the mimesis, the rendering-present of absent actions by (in this case) writing. What have the mimeses we find in Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca been able to convey? In the three versions of the lovers’ story various aspects of human specificity have emerged: the ability to exercise judicious empathy and to pardon, the ability to project into others future choices, the ability to perform kinetic empathy and understand intentions, and the ability to see ourselves from a point of view that is entirely unlike us. All of these “abilities” are connected to poetic or rhetorical choices made by the writers – they are not somehow inherent in the story depicted – and only a very close attention to these choices allows us to draw out these powers of mimetic representation.

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

In moving to the early modern period and the funereal and elegiac poetry of Clément Marot, we are not moving that far from the representations of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, despite the lack of a thematic link. Marot, as everyone writing in that period, knew the story well, in the very versions we have analyzed. Orpheus’s unmaking of death, through his lyric and rhetorical plea to the deities of the underworld, finds its parallel in Marot’s poetic language turning death into life, or love, and thus lending lyric a power to undo what absolutely cannot be undone by human beings. It is a hypothetical power, to be sure, but one in line with Christian conceptions of death and not entirely foreign to the epideictic poetry of mourning. It demonstrates the human ability to imagine alternate scenarios, even ones that are impossible. If Marot simply left it at that, he would be confirming what has been an implicit reproach to lyric, its turning away from human action in the world, its tendency to present inconsequential musings. That, however, is not the case: through adroit manipulation of word and discourse, Marot is able to transform lament and praise in death into an irenic deliberative strategy, an imperative to work toward peace here and now in this world. What seems an unlikely subset of lyric, the elegiac lament or the epitaph, becomes a link between poetic language and, perhaps, political action. In fact, this chapter is devoted to one of the most widely read poets of the early modern period, just as Virgil and Ovid were elements of common culture. Clément Marot’s own poetic works were best sellers in the new age of printing in France, and his translations of the Psalms have contributed to the enduring appeal of the French Protestant church. Marot’s familiarity with and editorial promotion of late medieval poets are coupled with a humanist reverence of classical authors – he translated an eclogue by Virgil and two books of the Metamorphoses into French – and an ability, in his own writing, to combine classical and French poetic forms. As his father before him, he was a successful courtier. He became a friend of the 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225236.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

great: Marguerite de Navarre, sister of the king François I, counted him among her “evangelical” circle, and he was on intermittently excellent terms with the king himself. In a period known for its linguistic experimentation in the vernacular, Clément Marot is no doubt one of the greatest artisans of the French language. Unlike his near-contemporaries François Rabelais and Pierre de Ronsard, he does not make it a regular practice to invent words. Instead, he manipulates them in ways that in any other writer of the period would seem overly self-conscious and technical but under his pen exude an ease, an unprepossessing naturalness. In addition, this adroit word manipulation is performed in exiguous spaces, in highly constraining poetic forms, in a dense imitation or translation, within a few syllables. His verbal techniques have been thoroughly studied, as poetic form, as the poetic ethos of a frank and direct spirit, or as an expression of the early Reformers’ serene return to the New Testament and of the simplicity of personal faith. In the following pages, I will take all of this for granted. It seems clear to me that Marot’s poetry expresses a hybrid subjectivity, is aware of medieval traditions, and is intent on innovation; it seems equally clear to me that his poetic themes and, occasionally, techniques, are nourished by the evangelical movement represented by Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite de Navarre. More relevant to me in these pages, however, is what Marot is able to do with his poetry, not so much what he expresses. The distinction is arguably tenuous, but entertaining the distinction allows us to consider an ethical, almost deliberative side of his writing that often is drowned out by the insistence on his religion or his adherence to older or newer poetics. I mean “deliberative” in the rhetorical sense, an instilling of awareness of present and future choices to be made and the attempt to inflect those choices. In another sense, this writing is hardly rhetorical, and certainly not rhetorical in the grand way of Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif or the didactic way of Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince. It is rarely discursive: Marot only occasionally relies on rational argument and on overt proofs involving affect. Instead, Marot’s language performs, as it were, what is necessary for human beings to act well, in the knowledge of death and the presence of violence. This ethical thrust of his intricate technique manifests Christian lament (and consolation) concerning death and the afterlife while directing the living against the violence of this world. It resembles in its formal aim the irenic politics of early Erasmian humanism, through a varied and complex poetic expression. The poems that I have chosen to look at concern death directly, the subject seemingly most removed from human deliberation and

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

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manipulation, since it is the ultimate event that cannot be undone, upon which future action has no bearing. Its contemplation also makes political deliberation and the affairs of this world seem irrelevant. These poems can be classified generically as “complaints” (how can we do anything save complain about death, since we feel the loss of the deceased?). The precise forms they adopt, however – the rondeau and the ballad, the funereal complaint or “déploration,” the eclogue, the epitaph – not only are distinct from each other but have incompatible genealogies. In each of these forms, Marot succeeds in making words work against death, as it were, in a version of Orpheus’s triumph over the infernal deities. Marot’s song does not make stones cry, nor does he move the impassive gods of the underworld, but he is able to perform an essentially human victory over the indifferent finality of death, through language. In these poems, this verbal victory over death flows into an obligation for humans here and now to work for peace. The sixteenth-century edition of Marot’s works and translations that I happen to be looking at – a small, octavo book – begins with a title page that does not, strictly speaking, have a title. Instead, it features his name, and the well-known medallion-like portrait of the poet, surrounded by two circular inscriptions reading clockwise “CLEMENT MAROT” and, in the smaller circle, “L. M. N. M.” Marot’s head is turned toward the letters L. M. The four letters stand for his “device”: “La Mort N’y Mord” (literally, Death [Mort] does not bite [Mord] there, has no power). On the page following a list of the works of Marot, underneath two short poems by the author to his book and to his beloved, we find the same device again, as well as on the very last page of the book. The phrase is, most obviously, a reference to the New Testament and Paul’s expression of Christ’s victory over death (“Ubi est mors stimulus tuus?,”  Cor :). The device is a pun, a false figura etymologica, an internal rhyme in a foursyllable line and an anagram of the name of the poet, all at once. It can be interpreted as an affirmation of poetry’s “immortality” and as the evangelical message of Christ’s victory over death. The difference, indeed, between MAROT and MORT is the ‘A’ in the name of the poet, which can be made to stand for “Amour.” God’s love for humanity has enabled victory over death. Not only are these evangelical commonplaces, but in his poetry Marot insists repeatedly on the centrality of Christian love in salvation. Marot’s device demonstrates, within four syllables, not just the difference between literal and figurative language, but also what poetic and human language can perform in general. “La mort n’y mord” means, literally, something like “[Cela] ne mourra pas,” “[This] will not die.” But by virtue of its form the device is much more than that. It has a rhythm created by

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

repetition of the same sound, that is, a pattern or an order, distinguishing it from a haphazard series of sounds. The four-syllable line repeats a sound, but repeats it as a negation, which is one of the basic functions of human communication and imagination: this, not-this. We can, through a basic feature of language, imagine something not to be. We can also imagine something that is not, or no longer, to be, or to be once again. Indeed, this occurs again through negation: death (not-life) does not bite here. Not-this is not. La mort n’y mord. In other words, some thing is; life is. The repetition in Marot’s device is not quite a repetition; in fact, it is merely a homophony. The pun transforms the noun “mort” into the verb “mord,” as if the simple act of repetition of the noun made the noun capable of actions, active. By repeating a word you lend it predicates brought on by its resonance in your imagination. Death is not only an event or the principle of the end of life but an active agent (which is, indeed, the way death was conceived in the late medieval period). It can take on characteristics of an agent and be submitted to qualification. Of course, we know that it cannot, similarly to the implacable law of the infernal deities: If you are born you will die. But poetic language has made it seem as though death can be given predicates that signal human power over it. Marot’s poetry not only trains us, as it were, to imagine the being of something that is not, or the non-being of something that is, but it prepares the way for ethical or political action. Celebration of, or mourning of, a deceased human being can be transformed into a deliberation moving the world to peace, through the poetic imagination. We will look at four iterations of poetic language confronting death in Marot’s oeuvre, in the following order: a rondeau lamenting the death in duel of a nobleman at the court of François I, M. de Chissay (+), an epitaph for the first wife of the king, Claude de France (+), an eclogue and an epitaph composed to commemorate Louise de Savoie, mother of the king (+), and a “déploration” or lament upon the death of Florimond Robertet, the king’s secretary of finances (+). We will end with a ballad that concentrates the irenic deliberative strategy implied by Marot’s poetic confrontations with death, addressed to the three kings whose decisions produced war or peace in Europe, François I of France, Charles V of Spain, and Henry VIII of England.

Monsieur de Chissay’s Violent Death Marot’s rondeaux cover any number of subjects, high and low: daily life and circumstances, love, death, war, peace, exchanges with friends, and so

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Monsieur de Chissay’s Violent Death

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forth. The form itself seems not to dictate its themes, and by no means does it imply the use of a certain level of style. Our rondeau combines a brief historical account with an equally succinct elegy-like complaint. It concerns the death in early  of Jacques Bérard, seigneur de Chissay, who served in the house of Marguerite, the sister of the king, in a duel with M. de Pomperant, a nobleman in the service of the Connétable de Bourbon. Others participated in the duel: Charles de Reffuge (“Boucal”) and Jacques de Montgomery, seigneur de Lorges (“Lorge”). D’un coup d’estoc Chissay noble homme, & fort, L’an dix et sept soubz malheureux effort Tomba occis au Moys qu’on seme [l]’orge Par Pomperan: qui de Boucal, & Lorge Fut fort blessé, quoy qu’il resistast fort. Chissay beau, jeune, en credit, & support Feit son debvoir au combat, & abord, Mais par hasard fut frappé en la Gorge D’un coup d’estoc. Dont un chascun de dueil ses levres mord, Disant helas l’honneste homme est il mort? Pleust or à Dieu, & Monseigneur Sainct George, Que tout baston eust esté en la Forge Alors, qu’il fut ainsi navré à mort D’un coup d’estoc.

(pp. –)

With a thrust Chissay noble man and strong, In the year ten and seven under unfortunate effort Fell killed in the month in which one sows barley By Pomperant: who by Boucal, and Lorge Was severely wounded, even though he resisted well. Chissay handsome, young, well-placed and supported Did his duty in combat, and engagement, But by chance was struck in the neck With a thrust. About which everyone bites his lips Saying alas, is the gentleman dead? Would it have pleased God, and Lord Saint George, That all weapons would have been in the forge When he was thus wounded to death With a thrust.

According to Marot’s narrative in the first two stanzas, Chissay was killed by Pomperant, who thrust a sword into his neck. The refrain, or, in the case of this poetic form, the “rentrement,” “D’un coup d’estoc,”

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

highlights the action or gesture that caused his death. Yet the formulation disjoins the action from its author, Pomperant, as if the sword had come out of nowhere. Indeed, in Marot’s account, the duel was a melee in which not just Chissay but also Pomperant himself had been struck and wounded. All of the protagonists seem to have fought well: the adjective and adverb “fort,” derived from the virtue of fortitude or courage, is applied to both Chissay and Pomperant. Chissay did what was expected of him, as a young and well-thought-of nobleman, in the fight (“effort,” “combat”) and in his way of fighting (“abord”). And yet he was struck down by a thrust of the sword, “par hasard” (and not “par Pomperan,” as Marot could have said). You can be as strong and courageous and skilled as you like; in this circumstance chance has the final word. In the first line we find “& [et] fort” placed at the rhyme, as if the poet had wanted to place it in the foreground, and have it echo throughout the stanza. It is a “rime équivoque,” a pun, with “effort”; but in the second line, effort is preceded by “malheureux,” unfortunate, and that predicate is all that is needed for effort to be in vain. Struck by the point of a sword, Chissay fell, killed in the month in which one sows barley (“Tomba occis au Moys qu’on seme L’orge,” ). His killing is counter to the natural way of things, since January is when the seeds are planted, not when one harvests full-grown plants. The image of Chissay falling in a field recalls the image of Death with its scythe, cutting down human beings. The fact that this happened in a month of beginnings, not endings, demonstrates again the unnaturalness of death and, no doubt, of death by duel; this is not fortitude, nor is it nobility, nor the fulfillment of an “honneste homme.” This is not the nature of nobility or the nature of service in a royal house. It is simply a waste. One of the noblemen participating in the duel is the Seigneur de Lorges. His name is featured at the rhyme of the following line, and Marot’s second “rime équivoque,” l’orge and Lorge, resembles the first in its central phoneme, et fort and effort. Except that this time the gentleman has not acted as his name would have him do; instead of ensuring the peaceful beginning of the seasons, he has participated in a combat bringing a life to an abrupt and unnatural end. Words and names are not connected to each other in a fatal way; it is the poet who can draw out comparisons, connections, and contradictions, through the poet’s deft manipulation of language. This manipulation is not simple verbal virtuosity; it is submitted to an ethical end. The rondeau we are considering is both a representation and a condemnation of murderous violence. Violence is here not the product of

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Monsieur de Chissay’s Violent Death

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an intention, noble or not; it is what happens, randomly, when you engage in a duel. Death in this poem is not the apotheosis of the warrior (or the military saint). It is an abrupt, unnatural occurrence that could have ended Pomperant’s life just as much as Chissay’s. Marot has emptied the narrative of the combat of intentionality, through his manipulation of words, in order to highlight the waste and the brutally random effect of violence. This effect is made apparent through a final, though seemingly secondary technique, the sounds that make up the lines. “D’un coup d’estoc Chissay”: the hard, sharp sequence k/t/k of “coup d’estoc” and the low vowels come up against the soft name of the victim, “Chissay” (sh/s, and the high vowels). I do not think it is facile to say that this is meant as a representation of the metal hitting the soft flesh of the nobleman’s neck. Marot repeats this sound sequence in line , in the past participle “occis” (oksi), as if the verb itself of “murder” contained the hard metal and the soft flesh that it penetrates. Each refrain repeats the violence of the thrust, and after the third iteration of the thrust, there is simply silence. The final stanza comprises the lament. But what, exactly, is the nature and object of the lament? Ordinarily, mourning the death of a person entails praising their accomplishments and emphasizing the loss that the person’s qualities make evident. In this case, Chissay indeed was handsome and in favor at the court; however, his death was random, and we could just as well be mourning any of the other noblemen. Marot’s solution is to present both a specific, intimate scenario and a general complaint. Everyone bites their lips, in a small way reproducing the “bite” of death, reproducing the physical, symbolic detail within themselves, and asking, “helas l’honneste homme est il mort?” (Alas, is the gentleman dead?) (). This interior, intimate verbal scenario is typical of the poet’s representation of lament, a validation of loss within the heart, within the pectus. Chissay is designated not by his name but by the term “honneste homme,” a gentleman displaying the ethical qualities associated with nobility. This term is both minimal and no doubt includes all of the noblemen involved in the combat. There is no other praise of the combatants. Instead, Marot formulates a general wish for peace, for weapons to be left “in the forge,” that is addressed to God and to Saint George, the principal military saint: “Pleust or à Dieu, & Monseigneur Sainct George, / Que tout baston eust esté en la Forge / Alors, qu’il fut ainsi navré à mort / D’un coup d’estoc” (–). The wish that death be taken back is not uncommon in elegy, an unmaking of an event that expresses the depth of sorrow and loss. It comes immediately after the internal regret felt by “un chascun” and the

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

interrogative lament. This unmaking of what has happened seems like a consequence of lament, as if that sorrow felt by everyone were sufficient to cause an unmaking of death: “Pleust or à Dieu,” may it then please God. Our sense of loss is presumed to be sufficient to undo what cannot be undone. Our sense of loss, occasioned by a singular violent event, brutal and random, allows poetry to move, in that moment, from consideration of what in rhetoric one calls a “limited question” to an “unlimited question,” that is, from an issue that concerns a limited number of persons to one that concerns everyone. Everyone bites their lip, as death affects everyone, and this causes a plea for all weapons to remain unused, for no one to die. We have moved from a single thrust to the neck to a general call for peace. What can we cull from this little poem? Marot is able to do an extraordinary number of things in a very small space, by relying chiefly on resemblances between words, on what in rhetoric is a part of elocutio, the ornamentation of speech. These resemblances are never accidental and only provisionally playful. They reveal ethical intentions at every step. They also point to the malleability of all matter, the permeability of reality to human intention and effort. Death is the ultimate marker of the “malheur,” the always imminent misfortune, bad outcome, of human intention and effort. Yet through the intricate fashioning of speech, human beings can formulate the possibility that death and violence could be undone, could be negated.

Claude de France’s Departure The second poem I will consider is an epitaph. It relies less on concentrated wordplay and is written in a more consciously high style, as is fitting to its subject, the first wife of the king François I. She died in , at the age of twenty-four. She lived long enough to produce children for purposes of the royal house (three boys and four girls in less than eight years), and her marriage to François consolidated the attachment of the duchy of Brittany to the French crown. Her short life, however, probably did not include much pleasure or respite for herself, something that Marot alludes to in the opening lines. In the ordering of his complete works, it is part of the section entitled “Le Cymetiere” (The Cemetery): Cy gist envers Claude Royne de France, Laquelle avant que Mort luy feit oultrance Dit à son Ame (en gettant larmes d’Oeil)

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Claude de France’s Departure

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Esprit lassé de vivre en peine, & dueil, Que veulx tu plus faire en ces basses Terres? Assez y as vescu en pleurs, & Guerres, Va vivre en paix au Ciel resplendissant, Si complairas à ce corps languissant. Sur ce fina par Mort, qui tout termine, Le Lys tout blanc, la toute noire Hermine, Noire d’ennuy, & blanche d’innocence. Or vueille Dieu la mettre en haulte essence, Et tant de Paix au Ciel luy impartir, Que sur la Terre en puisse departir.

(p. )

Here rests lying down Claude Queen of France, who, before Death did her injury, said to her Soul (while shedding tears from her eyes): Spirit tired of living in pain and mourning, what more do you want to do in these low lands? You have lived there enough, in tears and wars, go live in peace in the resplendent heavens, and thus you will please your languishing body. Upon this [she] ended, by Death, who terminates everything, the all-white Lily, the all-black Ermine, black with travails, white with innocence. May God place her in high essence, and impart to her so much Peace that on earth she may distribute more.

The epitaph is divided into three parts: an inner dialogue between Claude and her soul, encouraging it to depart (–); death filling its role in ending Claude’s life as queen of France and duchess of Brittany (–); and a wish addressed to God, for both peace to her soul and peace to earth (–). The central trope is the departure or ascent of Claude to heaven, and it engages two narratives. The first is the Christian path of sorrows and toils traversed in this world, to be rewarded in heaven by peace and joy close to the divine essence. The second is the departure of a figure of Peace to the heavens, and her hoped-for return. Similarly, Astraea, the virgin incarnating justice, departs from a world full of strife, in the age of iron, lines Marot read and translated in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Claude’s departure is preceded by her speech to her soul, occupying the largest section of the epitaph. The soul’s fatigue, caused by pain, mourning, and wars, is reason enough for it to seek peace for itself and to please the languishing body, to let it be its own nature. The paronomasia paixcomplairas links rest for the soul to pleasure for the body. The peace of the soul anticipates the wish for earthly peace; the “personal” and the political naturally combine in this epitaph of a queen. Similarly, the lassitude of the soul is caused, indifferently, by pain of the body and pain of the body politic, by peines, pleurs, and guerres.

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

The direct discourse in which Claude’s exhaustion is expressed gives us another example of Marot’s intimate validation of public grief and public events. It is as if her speech to herself gave permission for death to take her, “injurious” as her death may seem. The intimate scenario is not addressed to the reader, to the passer-by, or to the nation of France. Claude frees herself from the toils of her pain-filled life, and upon this, sur ce, she ends “by death.” It is not a suicide, but a letting-go in which death ensues. Rhetorically, it involves the enthymeme confusing the prior event with the cause, and it is a fallacy, to be sure. But in the space of this poem, and in the space of memory that the epitaph constitutes, the confusion of priority with causation gives us the sense that Claude had power over death, could determine when her life had become “sufficient” (“[a]ssez y as vescu”), and had used death to ascend to peace in the luminous sky. The oultrance that death represents is only an initial impression, to us looking at the tomb of the queen. Remaking death into the instrument by which one ascends to peace means that it is a decision arrived at, not an event of which one is a victim. This allows the death of Claude to be thought of in terms of a departure, not a loss or theft. It also allows a further connection to the body politic hoping for a return, and with it the reestablishment of a reign of justice, which the myth of Astraea incarnates for the Renaissance. The goddess of justice leaves the earth as violence engulfs it and all laws and moral behavior break down among human beings; her expected return signals the return of the age of gold. Once again Marot achieves this connection between the intimate letting-go of Claude and the mythic departure of Astraea, intimating a future return of peace, through rhyme and paronomasia. Whereas the personal peace of Claude brought pleasure to her body (paix-complairas), the noun “peace” (Paix) is linked to the verbs impartir (impart, lend) and departir (distribute): “Et tant de Paix au Ciel luy impartir, / Que sur la Terre en puisse departir” (and impart to her so much Peace, that on earth she may distribute more) (–). The prefixes im- and de- connote the change from the inward and personal to the outward and universal. The understood middle term is partir, to depart: Through Claude’s départ, she is given a peace that will overflow onto the left-behind earth below her, in a Christian version of Astraea’s return. Marot enables, again, the passage from a “limited” cause to an “unlimited” cause, from Claude’s personal need for release and peace to the strife-torn world’s need for peace. The overflowing of Claude’s personal peace onto the world, the descent of peace from the heavens, engages, of course, a common trope of irenic discourse. The focus is not on the departure of an Astraea-like figure

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Claude de France’s Departure

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from a war-torn earth but on the ability of monarchs to negotiate a treaty that will entice a descent of Peace. In the later “Cantique de la Chrestienté sur la veuë de l’Empereur, & du Roy au voyage de Nice” (), Marot encourages the conciliatory negotiations between Charles V and François I, in order to “tirer la Paix tant desirée, / Du ciel tres hault, là où s’est retirée” (draw so much desired Peace from the heavens high above, to where she has withdrawn). Claude, who cannot return in person, can effect, from above, what the kingdom and Christianity long for. Fused with this version of the departure of a figure of peace we find a more straightforward Christian narrative of salvation, interlaced with political emblematic allegory. When Claude has finished addressing her soul, death ends all: “Sur ce fina par Mort, qui tout termine, / Le Lys tout blanc, la toute noire Hermine, / Noire d’ennuy, & blanche d’innocence” (Upon this [she] ended, by Death, who terminates everything, the all-white Lily, the all-black Ermine, black with travails, white with innocence) (–). These lines are syntactically ambiguous. Claude could be the subject of “fina” (she ended, she died), in an intransitive use of the verb, or she could be the subject of “fina” in a transitive use of the verb: She ended, by death, the lily and the ermine. I think the second option is the most satisfying, since line  refers back to her. On the grammatical level, “black with travails, white with innocence” are predicates of Claude, not of the lily and the ermine, since they are both feminine. Claude, through her instrument that is death, “ends” the queen of France (white lily) and the duchess of Brittany (black ermine). Claude is the agent of her departure, although death terminates everything. This is also what the Christian narrative of salvation promises: Dark suffering is a sign of pure innocence, and a harbinger of the peace of the soul that is to come. This is the subject of Marot’s “Chant royal chrestien” (composed before ), in which the poet uses the colors black and white to illustrate the incompatibility of wish for physical pleasure and wish for salvation: Ces deux soubhaictz [santé au corps, paradis à l’âme] contraires on peult dire, Comme la Blanche, et la Noire couleur: Car Jesuchrist ne promect par son Dire Ça bas aux siens, qu’Ennuy, Peine, et Douleur. Et d’aultre part (respondez moy) qui est ce, Qui sans mourir aux Cieulx aura liesse? One can consider these two wishes to be contraries, just as the colors white and black: For Jesus Christ promises, through his word, to his followers here below only travails, suffering, and pain. And on the other hand, answer me, who is it who without dying will have joy in the heavens?

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

Suffering of the body becomes, in this poem, a necessary condition for the joy that Christ promises, and the contrary colors of black and white are an illustration of the link between suffering and joy, just as the meek will triumph after death. In the epitaph devoted to the queen’s death, the “haulte essence” that God lends to Claude is a consequence of her earthly travails, as Marot uses another version of the enthymeme that makes the prior event a cause of the later. The poem articulates this Christian enthymeme as if it were a commentary on the coats of arms of France and Brittany, as if this were the meaning of the lily and the ermine. Of course it is not, but in the case of Claude, for this suffering mother of seven children in ceaselessly demanding political circumstances, this is what the attributes of the lily and the ermine mean. This is also what the lily and the ermine should mean not just for Claude but for us, as a corollary and incitement to the rewarding of earthly sorrows by earthly peace. The plea to God to give peace to Claude is also a plea to let her departure be followed by her return, in another enthymeme: She has left this violent earth so that she may bring back peace, on the model of Astraea’s return. Let the monarchs of the world prepare her way. Marot’s epitaph for Claude de France conflates the intimacy of her wish to be released from suffering and the wish of the earth for peace to return. This is achieved both on the level of rhetorical argument and on the level of certain words themselves, in particular through the associations, phonetic and semantic, between them. The paronomasia paix-complaire associates peace of the soul with pleasure of the body, and then extends to the verb partir, in its two derivatives impartir and departir, and to peace for the world in general. The colors black and white are predicates of Brittany and France, but predicates as well of suffering and innocence (meriting the joy of salvation). The departure (and peaceful return) of Claude demonstrates what Brittany and France should be doing, namely ensuring the passage from suffering to joy. Marot makes political and physical reality permeable to the slightest words.

Pastoral Mourning of Louise de Savoie Instead of moving chronologically, I will consider next the eclogue and epitaph that Marot composed on the occasion of the death in  of François I’s mother, Louise de Savoie. Then we will circle back to the chef d’oeuvre of the French Renaissance’s funereal poetry, the “Déploration de messire Florimond Robertet.” The eclogue to Louise de Savoie is decidedly classicizing, whereas the previous déploration is more obviously Christian,

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Pastoral Mourning of Louise de Savoie

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inspired by the vogue of Petrarchan triumphs, by late medieval procession descriptions – allegorical or not – and by evangelical religious thought, as transmitted through the circle of Marguerite de Navarre. Some have considered the eclogue to be a parody of the funereal elegy, almost frivolous, since the tone is so different from the somber, theologically charged lament. The epitaph concluding the eclogue helps us understand this pastoral poem, however, as an extended expression of the peace that Louis de Savoie has brought about, for which she should be remembered, and which imposes obligations on those living who remember her. In a sense, Marot’s epitaph for Louise de Savoie prolongs the epitaph for Claude de France, as its fulfillment. This is what I will begin with: Celle, qui travailla pour le repos de maintz, Repose maintenant: pourquoy criez Humains? Gardez bien le repos, qu’elle vous a donné, Sans luy rompre le sien, puis qu’il est ordonné. (p. )

The one who worked for the repose of many, reposes now: Why are you lamenting, humans? Preserve the repose that she gave you, without disturbing hers, since it is ordained.

Marot enjoins humans not to cry, lament, the one who reposes now, that is, not to disturb the sleep that God has granted her. The idea is, to be sure, typical of funereal inscriptions. Marot, however, makes much more of this, using the same language. The first line refers to the “work” Louise de Savoie did to ensure the peace of Cambrai in  (and he refers to this treaty in line  of the preceding eclogue, and to Louise as the “Bergere de Paix”). The “repos de maintz” is peace of the kingdom. Indeed, in sixteenth-century political writing the aim of royal authority is always “repos et tranquillité du royaume,” repose and tranquility of the realm. Louise’s “repose” has followed the “repose” of the kingdom. As in the case of the weary Claude de France, Louise’s life was characterized by “travails,” less in the sense of suffering than in the contemporary sense of “work.” She worked for the peace of many, “maintz.” The word at the rhyme becomes a springboard for paronomastic variations that continue through the second line: “Celle, qui travailla pour le repos de maintz, Repose maintenant: pourquoy criez Humains?” Main is present in maintenant, now, and in humain, human. The word that Marot could have used, and one that would have been coherent with her “work,” travail, is “main,” hand. She did what human beings who work do, with their hands, and the only work worth doing, as a princess, namely work for peace.

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

The epitaph contains further references to this “manual” labor when we look at the elements making up the words, as Marot seemingly trains us to do: the temporal adverb maintenant, when taken apart, means “holding a hand,” and includes a form of the verb “tenir” and the noun “tenure,” all of which refer to peasant life. The verb rompre (break, disturb) in line  comprises the meaning of “breaking the earth,” in the sense of tilling, and the designation “roture” and “roturier” (nonnoble) derives from the Latin equivalent “ruptura,” which in turn gives the French “rupture,” “rompre.” None of this is explicit; Marot’s wordplay allows the reader to linger on these meanings. Louise does something “for everyone,” for all humans, which is to work like them and achieve what she can achieve. The peace that we share as human beings is what her life has left us; no need for us to “cry” but instead, we need indeed to keep the peace that we have been given. The mourning of her death is integral to a deliberative intention that is aimed at us here and now, nobles or peasants. Marot emphasizes this aim by directing the epitaph not to Louise, not to God, but to all living humans, in a question and an imperative. The epitaph opens with “Celle, qui travailla pour le repos de maintz,” in place of the usual “Ci-gît Louise de Savoie” (Here lies Louise de Savoie). The person is identified primarily not by her name and status but by her activity, and by the goal she gave to that activity. The demonstrative pronoun is specific, designating only one person, but can also be filled in, as it were, by any number of people. Working for the peace of many is not unique to Louise de Savoie, and could, should be done by any and many others, just as we should all keep the peace she has given to us. The demonstrative pronoun serves to link the particular case, again, to the universal one. This is also true of the goal of her activity, the “repose” of many. The same word is used to refer to the peace of Cambrai, the peace that we should keep, and the personal peace of Louise, resting in the afterlife. This is, finally, true as well of the act of conferring peace: Louise has given humans that peace (“qu’elle vous a donné”), and now she is at peace, as it is “ordered” (“ordonné”) – implicitly – by God. God has given her the peace that she worked for in life, and the rhyme emphasizes the agreement with divine will that working for peace on earth represents. Faith in that divine will does not preclude working to achieve peace, which, in turn, is a manifestation of that faith. Louise de Savoie’s epitaph, no less than Claude de France’s commemoration, is integral to an irenic deliberative strategy, concentrated within the multiple meanings of a few words, which we are led to understand through Marot’s deft writing.

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Pastoral Mourning of Louise de Savoie

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The eclogue preceding the epitaph – an imitation of Virgil’s fifth eclogue – serves multiple purposes. It demonstrates the benefits of peace (brought about by Louise) to the kingdom, praises the person of Louise, laments her loss, evokes the paradise in which she now finds herself, presents her an homage in the form of various flowers, and celebrates the song itself that the death of Louise has inspired. Pastoral poetry itself is a measure of peace, of what should be preserved; it is predicated on natural abundance and human ordering of this abundance. Instead of providing a commentary on the entire poem, I will concentrate on a particular passage of the shepherd Colin’s lament of Louise de Savoie’s death. In a sense, Marot’s lapidary word manipulations that work so well in smaller poetic forms seem out of place in the more expansive song, as if they were continually driving meaning to concentrate, to interrupt the narrative. Here is where the funereal eclogue shifts from praise of the person of Louise de Savoie to an evocation of the kingdom in mourning: Rien n’est çà bas, qui ceste mort ignore: Coignac s’en coigne en sa poictrine blesme: Rommorantin la perte rememore: Anjou faict jou: Angolesme est de mesme. Amboyse en boyt une amertume extrême: Le Meine en maine ung lamentable bruyt: La pauvre Touvre arrousant Angolesme A son pavé de Truites tout destruict. Et sur son eaue chantant de jour, & nuyct Les cignes blancs, dont toute elle est couverte, Pronostiquans en leur chant, qui leur nuyt, Que Mort par mort leur tient sa porte ouverte. Que faictes vous en ceste forest verte Faunes, Silvains? je croy que dormez là: Veillez veillez, pour plorer ceste perte: Ou si dormez, en dormant songez la. Songez la Mort, songez le tort, qu’elle a: Ne dormez point sans songer la meschante: Puis au resveil comptez moy tout cela Qu’avez songé, affin que je le chante. D’où vient cela qu’on veoit l’herbe sechante Retourner vive, alors que l’Esté vient? Et la personne au Tombeau trebuchante, Tant grande soit, jamais plus ne revient?

(pp. –, lines –)

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

Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

Nothing is down here that does not know of this death: Cognac hits its pale chest: Romorantin remembers the loss: Anjou bows its neck: Angoulême as well. Amboise drinks a great bitterness: Maine [province] expresses a loud lament: the sad Touvre watering Angoulême has destroyed its road of trout. And on its water day and night white swans, covering her completely, foretelling in their song that pains them, that Death by death holds his gate open. What are you doing in this green forest, fauns, sylvan deities? I think that you are sleeping there: Wake, wake, to cry over this loss: or if you are sleeping, while sleeping think of it. Think of Death, think of the wrong that she has done: do not sleep without thinking of the evil one: then, upon waking recount to me all that you have thought about, so that I can sing it. Why is it that one sees the drying grass return alive, when summer comes? And the person who stumbles into the grave, as great as she may be, never comes back?

On the level of theme, none of this is particularly inventive, as Martineau-Génieys points out. Death is “wrong” to have taken Louise, and yet all, as great as they may be, are subject to the same law, must go through the same “door” that death represents. The kingdom’s geography participates in mourning Louise, and it is the poet’s calling to express its sadness through the names that make up its contours. This confers a kind of naturalness and a humanity to the named geography – part of what makes a name is that it harbors meanings that can be activated to ensure memory of events affecting it. These meanings are derived from the place names, such as Coignac-coigne, Rommorantin-rememore, and Anjou-faict jou. Not only do the names themselves spawn manifestations of mourning, but their mourning ties them together in one geography of lament. Marot – and the kingdom – do this through alliteration and paronomasia: poictrine-perte; Rommorantin-Anjou-Angolesme-Amboyse-amertume; mesme-extrême-Meine-maine; pauvre Touvre-pavé de Truites tout destruict. This network of phonetic similitudes, extending over the lines devoted to the kingdom’s geography, emphasizes the harmony of lament, and as such represents the peace that Louise de Savoie has brought to the realm. The poet’s anthropomorphic vocation justifies both the allegory of the body politic and the consequent importance of the loss of its princess, the mother of its head. Moreover, it is in the nature of the geography to be in harmony. Peace, as the poet’s onomastic adroitness makes evident and phonetically palpable, is the natural condition of the realm. The subject of the poet’s complaint, however, is curiously evanescent, and Marot spends many lines asking others to come up with a subject for him: Que faictes vous en ceste forest verte Faunes, Silvains? je croy que dormez là: Veillez veillez, pour plorer ceste perte: Ou si dormez, en dormant songez la.

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The “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”

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Songez la Mort, songez le tort, qu’elle a: Ne dormez point sans songer la meschante: Puis au resveil comptez moy tout cela Qu’avez songé, affin que je le chante. (–)

Tell me what to sing of, Marot asks of the sylvan deities, and when you do, I will sing of this. These lines are replete with repetition: veillez-veillez, dormez-dormez-dormant-dormez, songez-songez-songez-songer-songé. The effect is properly monotony, homoeideia, a fault of style inducing taedium, the boredom all good orators, and especially all good poets intent on variety of expression, want to avoid. The subject of all of this repetition is “le tort, qu’elle a” (), the wrong that she (Death) has (done). Marot often leaves verbs dangling at the end of the line, even auxiliary verbs, so this expression is less shocking than it would be to post-seventeenth-century ears and eyes. But the combination of the weak rhyme with its rhyming and anodyne “tout cela” () seems to reinforce the repetitive flatness of the lines. It is as if Marot were giving up his poetic powers, pausing, before reengaging and preparing the poetic offerings upon Louise de Savoie’s tomb. Perhaps this willful monotony is linked to the specific subject of Death’s “wrong,” her “tort.” Perhaps, in the end, Death is not wrong, and there is no “tort” to accuse her of. Another way of looking at the lines is through the figure of gradation: Terms are placed in a chain-like enunciation, amplifying until they reach an apex. Veiller-dormir-songer-conter. Even if these terms operated as a continual amplification, the result – “tout cela / Qu’avez songé” – is a disappointment, as the proverbial mountain gives birth to a mouse. Perhaps, then, there is nothing to give birth to, nothing, really, to constitute an argument against Death. On the contrary: As the swans were singing, Death has opened its gate to Louise, and she ascends. She is, as the following lines will confirm, in a heaven in which the abundance that is only seasonal on earth is everlasting, where no one weeps the loss of friends. Even in a classical setting, accusing Death of a crime makes no sense. What makes sense, rather, is to be able to “sing,” to compose and perform pastoral poetry, which means to work to preserve the return of peaceful abundance on earth, brought about by the travails of Louise.

Correcting Death: The “Déploration sur le trespas de Messire Florimond Robertet” The substantial poem “Déploration sur le trespas de Messire Florimond Robertet” commemorates the death in  of François I’s treasurer and

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

secretary of finances, whose career included service to the preceding monarchs Charles VIII and Louis XII and whose humanist and artistic relations included Guillaume Budé, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and numerous poets, including Clément Marot’s father Jean. Of the poems that I am looking at in this chapter, the lament on the death of Florimond Robertet is no doubt the best known, as indicated by the abundant scholarship devoted to it. The lament begins with a long prologue by the mourning poet, describing his sorrow. He then retraces his steps and recounts witnessing the funeral procession on its way from Paris to Blois. Leading it is Death whose figure he describes, followed by two “Dames,” the Roman Catholic Church and the “Françoyse Republique,” and a male figure representing the peasantry. These allegorical figures are followed by a funeral wagon carrying the casket of Florimond Robertet, whom the poet identifies through his coat of arms. When the poet expresses his dismay, Death turns to him threateningly, but turns away when the “Françoyse Republique” begins its harangue against Death. This harangue ends with an apostrophe to Robertet’s children, Françoys and Claude, exhorting them to compose praises of their father, and then to accuse Death of fraud, and to prove by “dictz Philosophaux” that Death’s arrow and scythe are “useless” (“inutile,” ). It is at this point that, as the “Auteur” explains, Death becomes angry and answers with her own, long speech defending her presence as necessary to salvation. It is a canonical set-piece of evangelical thought, inspired in some measure by Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite de Navarre. At the end of her defense, Death claims that its arrow, instead of being called “aigre” or “rigoreux,” bitter or severe, should be called “amoureux,” loving, since only by Death is true happiness available to Christians. The Church prelates (“Ceulx qui avoient les plus grandes Oreilles,” ) do not wish to listen to her (since they make money on expensive funerals) and Death becomes silent and has the procession continue. The countryside through which Death passes exhibits its fear, but the citizens of Blois, where the procession ends, love Robertet more than they fear death, and pour out of their houses and witness his burial. The poem is inspired most obviously by the opening section of Petrarch’s Trionfo della morte but overall owes much to the late medieval aesthetic of processional description and to prosopopeia of the body politic. It is also, and this will be my focus, Marot’s most salient demonstration of poetry’s ability to imagine the impossible, much like Orpheus’s power to undo what has been done.

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The “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”

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This “undoing” is conveyed on several levels of Death’s speech, in its presentation by the poet-“auteur,” and in the prologue to the lament. It is conveyed most importantly through a rhetorical figure of thought, which I will understand in a broad sense, called variously correctio, epanorthosis, or metanoia. These terms designate a moment in a speech in which the speaker corrects herself, offering a more apt term to characterize something, or a more remarkable, distinct term, or, in an extreme version, contradicting herself, changing her mind. In this latter sense, a selfcorrection can be a small version of the palinode, palinodia, a song retracting an earlier song, from palin, “back” or “backward.” In Marot’s poetry, we find several versions of this self-correction. It can take the form of one or more statements of what a thing is not, followed by a statement of what it is. A variant is a statement refusing what could be done, by the poet or by the person addressed, and then presenting what should be done. An example is the beginning of Psalm , translated by Marot: “Non point à nous, non point à nous, Seigneur, / Mais à ton Nom donne gloyre” (Not to us, not to us, Lord, but to your name give glory). Or it can take the form of a pause in the argumentation, often in form of a question – what am I saying? – followed by the more apt expression. In both cases, the self-correction takes the logical form of non x sed y, not x but y. In rhetoric, the figure is sometimes thought of as a form of amplification or attenuation, since the more apt term can either amplify the importance of a thing or diminish it, for the sake of the argument. The figure also enhances the impression of sincerity and spontaneity of the speaker, willing to go back and make things right, in her own argument. In other words, it enhances the ethos of the speaker and makes her more believable when, at another point in the speech, she might correct not herself but the adversary’s position. The figure of correctio presents several opportunities to the speaker or to the writer. It is the linguistic correlate to specific physical gestures: “what?” (stopping in one’s tracks), “not this, but rather that!” (let me turn back and retrace my steps). It lets the speaker undo what has been done, or at least suspend its validity, and replace it with something better. It emphasizes this ability to redo the past, to improve, to choose something closer to truth. It allows the audience or reader to follow in the steps of the speaker or writer. It allows us a glimpse behind the curtain, as it were, into an intimacy that appears closer to a truth. Truth is something validated by internal judgment. But at the same time the figure is about making this procedure of internal judgment apparent to all, something we too can enact or at least adhere to.

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

The exordium of the “Déploration de Florimond Robertet” is an extended meditation of what sorrow means, and it is organized through the figure of self-correction. I will reproduce this entire section and comment on its successive moments: Jadis ma Plume on veit son vol estendre Au gré d’Amour, & d’ung bas stile, & tendre Distiller dictz, que soulois mettre en chant: Mais ung regret de tous costez trenchant Luy fait laisser ceste doulce coustume, Pour la tremper en ancre d’amertume. Ainsi le fault, & quand ne le fauldroit, Mon cueur (helas) encores le vouldroit: Et quand mon cueur ne le vouldroit encores, Oultre son vueil contrainct y seroit ores Par l’aiguillon d’une mort, qui le poinct: Que dis-je mort? D’une mort n’est ce point: Ains d’une amour: car quand chascun mourroit Sans vraye Amour, plaindre on ne le pourroit: Mais quand la Mort a faict son malefice, Amour adonc use de son office, Faisant porter aux vrays Amys le dueil, Non point ung deuil de fainctes larmes d’oeil, Non point un deuil de drap noir annuel: Non point ung deuil tainct d’ennuy perpetuel: Non point ung deuil, qui dehors apparoist, Mais qui au cueur (sans apparence) croist. Voylà le dueil, qui a vaincu ma joye: C’est ce qui faict, que toute rien que j’oye Me sonne ennuy: c’est ce qui me procure, Que couleur blanche à l’oeil me soit obscure, Et que jour cler me semble noire nuict: De tel façon, que ce, qui tant me nuyt, Corrompt du tout le naïf de ma Muse, Lequel de soy ne veult que je m’amuse A composer en triste Tragedie: Mais maintenant force m’est que je die Chanson mortelle en stille plein d’esmoy, Veu qu’aultre cas ne peult sortir de moy.

(pp. –, lines –)

In earlier times, one saw my pen take flight upon the wishes of Love, and in a low and tender style let flow words that I used to put into song: but a regret, in all parts searing, makes it leave behind this sweet custom, so that it may dip into the ink of bitterness. Thus it is necessary, and even if it were not necessary, my heart

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The “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”



(alas) would also wish it: and even if my heart would not also wish it, beyond its wish it would be constrained to do so by the prick of a death, which stings it. Do I say death? By a death it is not, but by a love: for if when everyone dies without true love, one could not lament them: but when Death has done its evil deed, Love uses then its good offices, having the true friends carry the mourning, not a mourning of feigned tears, not a mourning of year-long black cloth, but the mourning tarnished with perpetual sorrow: not a mourning, which appears on the exterior, but a mourning which grows, without showing, in the heart. That is the mourning that vanquished my joy: that is what effects that whatever thing I hear, sounds like sorrow to me: that is what makes the color white be dark to me, and the clear day seem black night: in such a way, that what brings me such pain, affects entirely the nature of my Muse, which itself does not want me to spend time composing a sad tragedy: but now I am forced to sing a mortal song in a style full of emotion, seeing that I can express no other subject.

Marot’s complaint begins with the turning point that news of Robertet’s death represents, in the poet’s own writing. No more low, sweet style of love elegies; instead, the “regret” that Marot feels constrains him to adopt a bitter (high) style. This turn to the high style is occasioned not by the event of Robertet’s funeral, although we learn later in the poem that the secretary’s funeral procession was its effective cause. It is the regret of the person of Robertet that occasions the poem, the sense of loss that his death has produced. Marot says “ung regret,” not his own regret, and the regret is painful “de tous costez,” on all sides, in all ways, or to all. The bitter style is occasioned, then, by the sense of loss that the kingdom experiences when Robertet dies, and the fact that this poem will concern all, is of universal value, justifies the abandoning of the low style. The poem “elevates” us by this turn from the low, amorous, to the heights of mourning. Marot is not content with this cause. Having corrected, turned his own style, he revisits the cause of his self-correction. Ainsi le fault, & quand ne le fauldroit, Mon cueur (helas) encores le vouldroit: Et quand mon cueur ne le vouldroit encores, Oultre son vueil contrainct y seroit ores Par l’aiguillon d’une mort, qui le poinct . . . (–)

He adds his own wish, the wish of his heart, to the causes for his poem and to the wish of his own heart, and if this were not the case, he adds the prick of a specific death, which stings the heart. From the general sense of loss we move to the wish of the poet’s heart to the sting of one death to one heart, from “tous costez” to “une mort, qui le poinct.” We end up with

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

“point,” which is the third-person singular indicative of “poindre,” to prick, to sting, and also the “point,” the precise spot or the moment. The “point” placed at the end of the line, as the end point of a gradation from the general to the extremely specific, is a Petrarchan device to highlight the intensity of the innamoramento. It marks the intention of the beloved’s glance, figured through the metaphor of Love’s arrow. Marot has anticipated implicitly the replacement of Death by Love, and has discreetly recalled what his pen had been doing before dipping in the ink of bitterness, writing tender love poetry. But we do not fully know this yet. It is important to Marot that we go through this process, that we consider the causes for mourning. These causes are not determined, at first, by the verifiable qualities of the person lost. They are not derived from the rhetoric of praise whose conventions speak to all, to the kingdom that he served so faithfully, just as Claude (and Louise). Before we can praise, we must do something else, that is, determine the nature of our own heart and the nature of the constraints that death places on us (and the nature, we will see, of death itself ). Poetic language can help us move through these considerations, by entertaining hypotheses: if not this, perhaps something else. We end up at the “point” that death of a loved one inflicts on us, after a series of clauses each of which is formulated in a conditional form. Even if this were not the case, this other thing would still be the case. The clauses are aligned in the order of a gradation marked by the verbs – fauldroitvouldroit-seroit contrainct – as if Marot were considering an intensifying order of causes for his mourning poem. This gradation begins with the release from a constraint (the poet chooses to write this complaint, he is not simply required to) and progresses to the acceptance of a constraint (this particular death forces him). The final “point” seems to be the terminus ad quem of the gradation, and that is that. Death has the final word. Then it happens: “Que dis-je mort? D’une mort n’est ce point: / Ains d’une amour” (–). Things are not final. Marot reverses course, after the careful build-up to the “point” of death. He introduces a dubitatio, “Que dis-je mort?,” followed by the correctio: not at all death, but love. The question – stop, why am I saying “death”? – submits what has been represented as an outside force, a constraint beyond the wish of the heart, a necessity, to a choice, to the poet’s reflection on the aptness of his language. Not only can he find a term that is more apt, greater or smaller, but he can find one that is contrary to the term he first used. He can stop the inevitable, the finality implied by the end of the gradation covering five

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The “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”

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lines, with a simple question constituting a hemistich. This time he is the one stopping things, in the middle of the line, no less. And then he is converting, turning what is a fatality into a renewed process of human choice. Let me emphasize again how the internalization of his mourning does not entail its singular nature, what it means “only” to the poet. Seeking the causes of his regret over the loss of his friend and patron leads Marot to represent and then overturn what death means for humanity in general. This is what the poet emphasizes in the following amplification, where we return to the level of “everyone,” of the kingdom, and the figure of correction is repeated over many lines: . . . car quand chascun mourroit Sans vraye Amour, plaindre on ne le pourroit: Mais quand la Mort a faict son malefice, Amour adonc use de son office, Faisant porter aux vrays Amys le dueil, Non point ung deuil de fainctes larmes d’oeil, Non point un deuil de drap noir annuel: Non point ung deuil tainct d’ennuy perpetuel: Non point ung deuil, qui dehors apparoist, Mais qui au cueur (sans apparence) croist. (–)

When Love performs its good offices (true love in true friends), the loss caused by death is not lamented by external manifestations, by mourning, but by what happens in the heart. This sort of regret “croist” in the heart (from “croître”), grows in the heart, but also, in a pun, “believes” in the heart (from “croire”). It reverses, then, the finality that death imposes on us; true love makes the friend grow in the heart, despite his absence, as if he were living a new life. The emotional correction – external mourning replaced by internal regret – is reinforced by the rhetorical figure of correctio, not that mourning (four times), but this mourning. This rhetorical correction not only internalizes mourning but negates the finality of death: non point ung deuil is another pun, on “point” in the sense of “not at all” and in the sense of “not a point, sting, end.” It recalls line : “une mort, qui le poinct.” Not only can the nature of regret be changed, but the nature of death can be corrected, making it into something that is governed by love and that is not final, the end point. “Voylà le deuil, qui a vaincu ma joye,” adds Marot: This is, here is, the mourning that vanquished my joy. The deictic “voilà” is the mark of the evident, what is beyond any further demonstration, and needs no

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Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

justification. It is validated by the heart. No need, really, to present the conventional praise of the deceased and the topoi of the funereal complaint. This is sufficient and apparent proof. We already have, in a nutshell, the critique of ecclesiastical ceremonies that the many following lines of the “Déploration” will present. We also have, in the very figure of correction that dominates this exordium, the reversal that Death itself will announce. This is what we will look at next. The figure of Death pronounces a long declamation addressed to “all humans” refuting the claim of the “Françoyse Republique” that it is “useless.” During this speech, Death will use the figure of correctio repeatedly. Let us look at these instances. She first accuses human beings of loving this world, and of loving themselves, when they profess hatred of death: En t’aymant trop, tu me hays, & deprimes. Que dis-je aymer? celluy ne s’ayme en rien, Lequel vouldroit tousjours vivre en ce Monde, Pour se frustrer du tant souverain bien, Que luy promect Verité pure, et munde . . .

(p. , lines –)

In loving yourself so much, you hate me, and suppress me. Why am I saying “love”? he does not love himself at all who wishes to always live in this world, in order to deprive himself of the supreme good that pure and clean Truth promises him . . .

Love of oneself – wishing to remain forever alive in this world – Death says, implies hatred of death and the sort of complaint voiced by the French nation. Death corrects her own expression, since depriving oneself of the greatest good cannot qualify as loving oneself. Loving oneself means not depriving oneself of the greatest good, which is what death permits. Hence loving oneself implies loving death, not hating it. The doubt introduced by Death, concerning her own choice of terms, should introduce a similar doubt in all humans concerning death. If Death can stop, reverse its course, or come to a more apt term, should not her listeners do the same? Should they not turn toward the supreme good that is the afterlife? The reversal of terms – hating death to loving death – concerns physical or earthly pleasures as well. If earthly pleasures entail damnation, then they are not pleasures, but suffering. And inversely, suffering on this earth entails salvation, which means that suffering is actually joy. These enthymemes are expressed by a choice of terms: “Je dy qu’il n’est desplaisir, que plaisance, / Veu que sa fin n’est rien que damnement. / Et dy, qu’il

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The “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”



n’est plaisir, que desplaisance, / Veu que sa fin redonde à saulvement” (I say that there is no displeasure except pleasure, since its consequence is nothing but damnation. And say, that there is no pleasure except displeasure, since its consequence is salvation) (p. , lines –). Instead of saying “pleasure,” we should say “suffering,” given what it entails. This figure – not that, but this – comes up repeatedly in Death’s long speech. Since the joys of heaven are delivered through death, “pour moy contristé ne seras, / Ains par fiance, & d’ung joyeulx courage . . . laisseras / Tresors, Amys, Maison, et Labourage” (by me you will not be saddened, but instead with confidence and a joyous heart . . . you will leave goods, friends, house and work behind) (p. , lines –). Another dubitatio marks her speech: He who sees in true faith the death of Christ heals from the wound of death and lives longer elsewhere than on this earth. “Que dis je plus? mais sans fin, je t’asseure” (Why do I say “longer”? rather, eternally, I assure you) (p. , line ). The series of corrections culminates in the peroration of her speech. Her arrow is not bitter or severe (“mon Dard n’est aigre, ou rigoreux,” p. , line ); no, instead, it is truly a loving arrow, for you (“te est ce Dard bien amoureux,” p. , line ). We, “tous humains,” all human beings, are led by the figure of Death to correct ourselves, through language. Stopping, doubting, and then correcting our choice of words is a profound figuration of conversion. It is also a way of refusing the necessity of things. Things do not have to be this way, things do not have to be final. We can choose to turn around and retrace our steps, in face of what seems to be nothing but bitter darkness. The triumph of Death can be the triumph of Love, through each individual heart, as the poet himself has demonstrated in the exordium to the poem. Death has imitated the poet, as it were, manifesting the same reversal, the same self-correction. The funeral procession of Florimond Robertet does not stop, however. That does not mean that this message has not been heard. When we arrive at the city of Blois, all of its citizens pour out into the streets. They do not try to hide from Death, “Car du defunct ont plus d’amour empraincte / Dedans leurs cueurs, que de la Mort n’ont craincte” (For they have more love for the deceased one imprinted in their hearts, than do they fear death) (p. , lines –). Marot continues by evoking the various members of the body politic, all united in their wish to witness the procession. And then, to top it off, the ringing church bells whose music is so strong that the heavens receive its echo: “Ses Cloches donc chascune Eglise esbranle / Sans carrillon, mais toutes à grand bransle / Si haultement que le Ciel entendit / La belle Echo, qui pareil son rendit” (p. , lines

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

Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

–). Death has not changed the minds of the high clergy, but in a way human beings have heard her message. The various parts of society, the priests and the monks, the officers of the law, the artisans, women, everyone, high and low, come together and witness the passage of Robertet’s body (–). The music of the bells manifests this harmony of the social body that love of Robertet produces. In other words, death can be an occasion for the poet to represent peace, in another reversal, and one that concerns all human beings here and now. We have seen that the figure of correction is expressed in the “Déploration de Florimond Robertet” by the formula non cela mais ceci – not that but rather this – and is often introduced by a pause, by a question posed to herself by the speaker: Que dis-je? (What am I saying?). Not death, but rather love; not an arrow of bitterness but an arrow of love; not suffering but joy. This correction can take on more extended forms as well, with a similar intention, and this is what I will look at in conclusion.

Not War, but Peace, the Real Victory: “De Paix, & de Victoire” In  Marot addressed a ballad to the kings of France, Spain, and England, exhorting them to make peace. This is one of the many poems the poet composed with an irenic intention, samples of which we were able to consider throughout this chapter. “De Paix, & de Victoire” is a ballad whose stanzas each conclude with the refrain “Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire” (Fortunate Peace, or triumphant Victory). The refrain seems to pose these two options as an alternative: either negotiate a peace or pursue victory with war. As the poem progresses, however, Marot trains us (and the kings to whom it is addressed) to see these options not as exclusive alternatives, but as a correction: peace, or, more aptly, victory. The true victory is peace. Each stanza represents a stage in this training: Quel hault souhait, quel bien heuré desir Feray je, las, pour mon dueil qui empire? Souhaiteray je avoir Dame à plaisir? Desireray je ung Regne, ou ung Empire? Nenny (pour vray) car celluy qui n’aspire Qu`à son seul bien, trop se peult desvoyer: Pour chascun donc à soulas convoyer, Souhaiter veulx chose plus meritoire: C’est que Dieu vueille en brief nous envoyer Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire.

(vol. , pp. –, –)

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Not War, but Peace, the Real Victory



What high wish, what fortunate desire will I pursue, alas, to relieve my worsening sorrow? Will I wish to make love to a lady? Will I wish for a kingdom, for an empire? No, not at all, for he who only looks after his own good, deviates too much. So as to convey relief to everyone, I want to wish for something worthier: namely, that God may send us quickly fortunate peace or triumphant victory.

The poet-speaker places himself into the position of the king(s), at the exact moment of deliberation. What will I do, to relieve me of this sadness? I have several options: one, to pursue erotic pleasures; two, to conquer a kingdom or an empire; three, to wish that God will send us peace. This third wish is a “worthier” wish (“plus meritoire”). Wishing for peace is worthier in that it entails action on the part of the king that is meritorious, that entails praise and reward. The third option is, then, more than a simple wish, in the sense that it implies negotiating peace and providing the king with the occasion for action (increasing his glory). All of these options are doable; that is, it is within the monarch’s power to have women at his pleasure, to engage in warfare, and to make peace. The first two are options that concern the monarch’s own good or pleasure, “son seul bien,” whereas the third option concerns the good of all. The fact that the poet-speaker can place himself in the deliberating mind of the king means that this deliberation is not a secret, one of the arcana imperii, that determine policy and that remove that policy from ordinary rationality. Things are not that difficult, and it is sufficient to step back and think. The second stanza expands the view of “chascun,” of everyone, as it surveys the effects of war among the kings on the kingdom: Famine vient Labeur aux champs saisir: Le bras au Chief soubdaine mort souspire: Soubz Terre voy Gentilz hommes gesir, Dont mainte Dame en regretant souspire: Clameurs en faict ma Bouche, qui respire: Mon triste Cueur l’Oeil en faict larmoyer: Mon floible Sens ne peult plus rimoyer, Fors en dolente, & pitoyable histoire: Mais Bon Espoir me promect pour loyer Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire. (–)

Famine comes to seize the peasant in the fields, the arm sighs in death to the head, I see noblemen rest below the earth, about which sigh many ladies; my mouth through its breath laments this, my sad heart makes my eyes shed tears, my weak mind can no longer rhyme, except in a sorrowful, pitiable story. But good hope promises me as a reward, fortunate peace or triumphant victory.

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

Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

The consequences of war, the “dueil” from which the speaker seeks relief, in line , become apparent in this vision of the body politic. “Labeur,” the “arm” of the kingdom, the peasantry, is decimated by famine; the warrior nobility is being killed off and the noblewomen left behind are in mourning. The speaker, now resolutely among the suffering kingdom, cannot exercise his craft except by composing funeral elegies and epitaphs. But there is “Bon Espoir,” good hope, that the payment for his composition will be peace or victory. Peace or victory is an object of hope, of future favorable conditions, if the “head,” the monarch, listens to the sighs of the peasants and of the widows of his own nobility. It is, then, within the monarch’s power to choose this peace, the third option presented in the first stanza. The third stanza adds to the deliberation of the first two – a weighing of options, a consideration of the present suffering of the kingdom – the prudential sense of what choosing peace will mean for the future: Ma plume alors aura cause, & loysir Pour du loyer quelque beau Lay escrire: Bon Temps adonc viendra France choisir, Labeur alors changera pleurs en rire. O que ces motz sont faciles à dire! Ne sçay si Dieu les vouldra employer: Cueurs endurciz (las) il vous fault ployer. Amende toy ô Regne transitoire, Car tes pechez pourroient bien fourvoyer Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire. (–)

My pen then will have reason, and the time, to write a pretty poem for a remuneration: Good times will then choose France, labor will then change tears into laughter. Oh these words are easy to say! I do not know if God will want to use them: Hardened hearts, alas, you need to bend. Mend yourself oh passing Reign, for your sins could very well lead astray fortunate Peace, or triumphant Victory.

Once “Bon Temps,” a time of plenty, will have returned, the poet will have reason or cause to write poetry for which he will be paid (by the king). In other words, he will have cause to write poems of praise, since he can praise the monarch’s restoring of peace. He will have the means and time to do it, meaning the return of abundance and leisure. Peasants will change their tears into laughter, for plentiful crops (and less royal taxation) are a product of peace. All this depends on the “hearts” of the kings being addressed: If they mend their sinful ways (their private pleasures and their

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Not War, but Peace, the Real Victory

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lust for war) this peace is achievable. If they do not, they can well make peace, the natural and divine intention for the world, lose its path. Peace is the real victory, and the ou, “or,” in the refrain “Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire” is not meant as an exclusive alternative, but, in the Latin sense of sive potius, in other words, to express it more exactly, better. Peace should be corrected by victory; the real victory is peace, not warfare, just as the real victory is Christ’s victory over death. These words, the poet says, are “easy to say,” “faciles à dire” (). What is harder is to act, to put this “easy” deliberation into action. The choice of the good of the world, the good of the “Règne transitoire,” is harder than the choice of erotic pleasure or of conducting another military campaign. Marot has represented that choice to the three kings, but they need to move from a deliberation that a mere twenty lines have made clear and obvious, to the difficult action that is the negotiation of peace. Not only because working for peace is laborious and tiring (see Louise de Savoie), but because this involves a change of a hardened heart. Hence the appeal to divine authority. This is, nevertheless, a matter of policy, not of abandonment of action. Knowing that the real victory is peace delivers a final cause to this action. The ballad’s conclusion, the “envoi,” reinforces this sense of the intention of Marot’s deliberative poem: Prince Françoys, fais Discorde noyer: Prince Espaignol, cesse de guerroyer: Prince aux Angloys, garde ton territoire, Prince du Ciel, vueille à France octroyer: Heureuse Paix, ou triumphant Victoire. (–)

French prince, drown discord; Spanish prince, cease warfare; English prince, keep your realm; celestial prince, may you grant France fortunate Peace or triumphant Victory.

The envoi presents three separate exhortations to the three warring kings, all of which point to peace as the option to be taken, and a prayer to God to grant France this same peace. As we have seen in all of the poems analyzed, from the rondeau composed on the death of M. de Chissay to the epitaphs to Claude de France and Louise de Savoie and to the lament on the death of Florimond Robertet, the joys of heaven, the victory over death, do not preclude the working for peace in this world. It is the poet’s calling, as it were, to present the causa pacis, the case and the plea on its behalf. Marot achieves this less through an argument, a

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

Marot’s Repeated Making and Unmaking of Death

discourse, or even a narrative than through his specific working on words, his puns, his use of negation and correction. Especially the latter, the reversal of a word to arrive at a better, more apt, even opposite term, is a power of language exploited with utmost skill. These words are easy to say, that tears will be changed to laughter and that kings should make peace, not war, as Marot reminds us. They are “faciles” in the pen of this poet, because they are natural, natural in the sense that they correspond to the “naïf” of his Muse, which eschews sad and tragic song in favor of “Amour.” This is and should be the natural, spontaneous and primary function of all language, making it obvious that death can be reversed and that peace is the good of all human beings.

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 

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning Ronsard’s Mignonne, Madame de Lafayette’s Letter, and Baudelaire’s Passer-By

Lyric representation entertains an obvious relation to the passage of time. It celebrates the moment, the point in time, by wishing that this moment become a duration. It wishes that the limit placed on an experience be extended forever: “Et voudroi bien que cette nuit encore / Durât tousjours” (And I would like this night, moreover, to last forever); “Je voudrois que cet instant durât toujours” (I would like this instant to last forever); “Verweile doch! du bist so schön” (Do stay, you are so beautiful). But these limits cannot be extended forever, of course. Lyric acknowledges this as soon as the wish is expressed or implied, and this tacit or explicit acknowledgment intensifies the pleasure of the moment, of the limited experience. That seems a commonly accepted way of thinking about lyric and time, and about one version of pleasure that lyric can convey. What is less common is the role that reasoning, that is, the communication of arguments in extended form, involving proofs and the establishment of causal connections, can have in inducing the intense pleasure of the moment. That seems counterintuitive to us: Reasoning requires the use of faculties that remove us from the senses, thought to be the principal source of pleasurable experience. Reasoning also seems to divert all involved from a focus on the present moment, especially if it engages the process of deduction, since the mechanism of deduction is timelessly true and certain elements of the deductive argument require universal statements, unanchored in specific circumstances. Lyric’s frequent concentration on time and its relation to human experience and, we will see, its reliance on rational thought as an essential instrument engage seemingly perennial human abilities. The ability to project a future and use this projection to qualify a present moment is implicit not only in what we might call deliberative thought but in experience, that is, in the awareness that we have of sensation, as opposed to the sensation itself. Similarly, our ability to formulate this awareness and to communicate what the awareness means, to others, relies on reasoning 

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

and is both implicit and explicit in rhetoric, which is most relevant to literature, especially in its historical manifestations. This chapter will focus on representing the experience of pleasure – not the sensation itself as much as its experience – in the ways I have set out. We will look, then, at writers who exemplify the alliance of lyric pleasure, that is, of this particular lyric pleasure that is the supremacy of the moment, and rhetorical and logical discourse. The early modern period offers fertile ground for our study, as the union of rhetoric and poetics dominates composition, commentary, and cultural use of lyric and “literary” fiction in general. As is the custom in the other chapters of this book, my touchstones will be poems and lyric episodes in prose fiction that are very well known: Ronsard’s little ode “Mignonne, allons voir . . .” (), Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (), and Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante” () from Les fleurs du mal. We will end with a brief contemporary example, Christian Oster’s Loin d’Odile (). Each of these lyric representations allows us an insight into a particular relationship between time, pleasure, and reasoning. Each of them, also, tends to demonstrate how, contrary to our wish for the moment to endure, it is the very ephemeral nature of experience that enhances, indeed ensures, its qualities.

Ronsard’s Persuasion of Cassandre The flourishing of lyric poetry in France in the early to mid-sixteenth century – a truly incomparable moment in the history of European lyric – is nourished by a series of influences none of which entirely crowds out the other. There is Petrarch, to be sure, and all of his fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Italian acolytes; there is a French medieval and late medieval luxuriant tradition and a realistic counterpart; there is a revival of classical lyric poetry, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, and Catullus; and there is an abundant neo-Latin lyric production in Italy and France. There is also, as John O’Brien has expertly documented, a revival of Greek “light” poetry, which comes to be designated as “Anacreontic” in the very early s. It is in the light of this turn to pleasures of the moment, as it were, that I will take a rather elaborate look at arguably the most famous short poem of the European sixteenth century. Pierre de Ronsard’s ode “À sa maistresse” is not as such Anacreontic, but most closely derives from Ausonius, a late imperial poet (d. ca. ), and reproduces commonplaces of the erotic lyric. The little ode compares a rose’s beauty to that of a young woman accompanying the poet-speaker, laments the flower’s short

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Ausonius’s Roses

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life, and exhorts the woman to “gather her youth,” since her beauty will not last longer than the rose’s. Its lack of originality is in a way its strength; it does what many such poems do, and does it in a touching and memorable way. It is also, for my purposes most importantly, a demonstration of the confluence of deliberative reasoning, affective rhetoric, and the representation of time. This confluence of reasoning and pleasure, in short, is reinforced by the contemporary alliance between dialectic, rhetoric, and poetry. Poetry is thought of less as mere subjective expression than as persuasion; it is usually addressed to an audience. It is thought of habitually as attempting to gain adherence to a proposition or thesis. It is read through the prism of the three principal genres of rhetorical speech: the judicial genre (accuse or defend), the deliberative genre (exhort toward or away from a future action), and the epideictic genre (praise or blame). Medieval and Renaissance commentary on classical and recent poetry isolates the poet’s rhetorical intent or proposition and the means by which the poet conveys that intent. Treatises of rhetoric use poetry to exemplify figures of speech and thought. Dialectic and, most famously, Petrus Ramus’s Dialectique () use fragments of poetry to illustrate forms of propositions, enthymemes, and syllogisms. Poetry is arguably less “mimetic,” less here the representation of a reality or a world, than an effective speech, a conveyer of directed thought. Even if this confluence of reasoning and poetry cannot account for all of what poetry achieves, this is the context, or the default position, in which sixteenth-century poets composed. It is strikingly different from our post-Romantic sense of the incompatibility between the rational and the poetic.

Ausonius’s Roses Before looking closely at Ronsard’s poem, I will briefly consider what is commonly accepted as its main source, Ausonius’s idyll XIV, now titled “De rosis nascentibus” (On roses being born). In effect, we find here the topics and some of the devices that characterize the ode “À sa maistresse.” Its fifty lines contain an extensive description of the flowers themselves; the poem appears to be addressed to a young woman, but only implies this after more than a dozen lines. However, the exhortation to gather flowers and the comparison between their beauty and the woman’s are present in its conclusion. The most relevant lines are those leading up to this conclusion; the poet has just witnessed the quick falling of the rose’s fire-red petals:

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Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning Mirabar celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam, Et dum nascuntur consenuisse rosas. Ecce & defluxit rutili coma punica floris, Dum loquor & tellus tecta rubore micat. Tot species, tantósque ortus, variósque novatus Una dies aperit: conficit una dies. Conquerimur, Natura, brevis quod gratia florum est. Ostentata oculis illico dona rapis. Quam longa una dies, aetas tam longa rosarum. Quas pubescent eis iuncta senecta premit. Quam modo nascentem rutilus conspexit Eous, Hanc rediens sero vespere vidit anum. Sed bene, quod paucis licet interitura diebus, Succedens aevum prorogat ipsa suum. Collige virgo rosas, dum flos novus, & nova pubes. Et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.

I was astonished at the rapid theft in the fleeing age and that, as they are born, the roses become old. See there! Not only has the purple hair of the red flower flown down as I speak, but the surface of the earth sparkles with red. So many appearances and so many things generated and various new things a single day brings forth and that single day destroys. We lament, Nature, that the grace of flowers is short-lived; you steal immediately the gifts you show the eyes. As long as a single day, so long is the age of roses; old age presses, linked, those ripening. The rose that the red morning star saw being born, that rose he saw, coming back in the late evening an old woman. But it is good that, even if in a few days she will be dead, she prolongs with a succession her own life. Gather, virgin, the roses, as long as the flower is new and the growth is fresh, and be mindful that life hurries forth in this way – yours.

Ausonius’s lines develop evidence for a complaint, a conquestio, against Nature (“conquerimur,” we complain, lament, reproach) “that the grace of flowers is short-lived” (). Lines – are a series of variations on the same evidence that flowers, as so many natural things, die as soon as they are born, which forms the basis for the complaint. These formulations cover one or two lines, and repeat the same eyewitness testimony (“mirabar,” I saw with wonderment). The final four lines mitigate, somewhat, the accusatory tone. The flower that dies is succeeded by others (presumably, by other roses in a bush blooming in succession), thus prolonging its existence. Having softened the harshness of his observations, the speaker turns to a virgin and addresses the final two lines to her. He has anticipated this apostrophe by describing the withered rose as an “anus” (an old woman, ), implying the comparison rose-woman on which the final exhortation relies. In this sense, also, the prolonging of life that the aging

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Dialectic and Rhetoric in Ronsard’s “À sa maistresse”

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rose herself is able to ensure might be a reference to bearing children. The virgin gathering flowers, remembering that life is short, should be intent on having children. The concluding apostrophe to the young woman, even though it is prepared in the preceding comparison to the old woman, appears less important than the amplifications surrounding the complaint to nature. The parallel complaints do not constitute the progression of an argument, introducing elements that link together and move toward a conclusion deductively. There is a sense that we move from a rose to various natural forms (“tot species,” ), from the specific to the more general, but then the formulation of the conquestio (“the grace of flowers is short-lived,” ) returns to the flowers specifically and not to all natural beings. The following lines concern, once more, roses. So the series is not ordered inductively, either. Despite the rhetorical marker, then, of the complaint, neither does the poem seem to be addressed to a judge, nor, really, does it constitute a persuasive deliberative argument addressed to the young woman. The point of view is that of the speaker who himself notices the rapid aging of flowers, and when he uses the first-person plural “we lament” (“conquerimur”) it seems in effect to include humanity in general, not merely the speaker and another person. Rather than constituting a taut persuasive speech, Ausonius reflects on, and indulges in, natural variety. His lines are an expression of wonderment in face of so many natural forms, so many forms of red, so many red petals on the young flower and the red petals sparkling on the ground, and of the rapidity with which these forms can change.

Dialectic and Rhetoric in Ronsard’s Ode “À sa maistresse” This sense of general, wondrous complaint against Nature and its amplified, loose formal structure distinguish Ausonius’s idyll from the much tighter and directed ode “À sa maistresse” (or “À Cassandre”) by Ronsard. From the very beginning, the speaker deploys dialectical and affective rhetorical means to persuade the person who is addressed by means of the apostrophe “Mignonne” of the proposition “you must enjoy your youth now” (“Cueillez votre jeunesse,” “Gather your youth”). Contrary to Ausonius’s poem, the complaint against Nature is part of a proof, not an end in itself. The ode is a “persuasion poem,” intended to convince the young woman to take advantage of her beauty and youth, that is, to experience as much pleasure as she can, while youth and beauty are at their fullest. This means, implicitly, that the young woman should make love to the speaker, without delay. The proposition, then, to be proven or

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

made plausible, agreeable, is “You must make love to me now.” This imperative does not arise from praise of the woman’s beauty (the fact that the poet praises her beauty does not imply that she needs to make love to the speaker), nor does it arise from praise of the speaker himself (aside from the doubt it would cast on the speaker’s ethos, the speaker’s selfproclaimed beauty or other qualities do not imply a need for her to make love to him). The poem also forgoes the usual “Petrarchan” strategy, a demonstration of the speaker’s love-struck misery, implying the need for a remedy on the part of the woman who caused the suffering. Instead, the proposition is “proven” or made plausible, acceptable, by means of recourse to the evidence of beauty and the evidence of the passage of time. These pieces of evidence are encased within a logical structure, which I will look at in a moment. Ronsard’s ode is a minimal ode, a three-stanza poem, consisting of the conventional strophe, anti-strophe, and epode. It is one of the most frequently cited messages of carpe diem: Mignonne, allons voir si la rose Qui ce matin avoit desclose Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil A point perdu ceste vesprée Les plis de sa robe pourprée, Et son teint au vostre pareil. Las ! voyez comme en peu d’espace, Mignonne, elle a dessus la place Las las ses beautez laissé cheoir ! Ô vrayment marastre Nature, Puis qu’une telle fleur ne dure Que du matin jusques au soir ! Donc, si vous me croyez mignonne, Tandis que vostre âge fleuronne En sa plus verte nouveauté, Cueillez cueillez vostre jeunesse : Comme à ceste fleur la vieillesse Fera ternir vostre beauté. Darling, let us see if the rose which this morning had opened its dress of purple to the sun has not lost this evening the folds of its purple dress, and its color equal to yours. Alas! See how in a little time, darling, she has onto the ground, alas, alas, let fall its beauties. O Nature truly cruel, since such a flower only lasts from the morning to the evening!

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Dialectic and Rhetoric in Ronsard’s “À sa maistresse”



Therefore, if you believe me darling, while your age flourishes in its freshest newness, gather, gather your youth: as with this flower, old age will make your beauty fade.

The tripartite ode structure seems to imitate the sequence of a syllogism: two premises and a conclusion, indicated by the “Donc” (therefore), introducing the epode. The conclusive conjunction, however, is often used to express the ending of a poem (e.g., in a sonnet) without implying a syllogistic argument. The three strophes contain, in fact, not three propositions of an argument, but a narration, a complaint, and an exhortation that appear to coincide more with rhetorical than with logical imperatives. Nevertheless, I will initially treat the ode as an exercise in dialectic, through the lens of contemporary logic or dialectics, before returning to its rhetorical features. This dialectical analysis seems slightly silly to us modern readers, even more so than rhetorical readings. It also differs from my approach taken to interpret the other texts in this book. But it would not be foreign to the mindset of Ronsard and his contemporaries, accustomed as they were to poetry being used as illustrations of syllogisms, say, in the aforementioned Dialectique of Ramus. What we find in performing this ludic exercise in logical reduction is not that logic cannot deal with affect, that is, that somehow affect is foreign to propositions and their linkage. It is perfectly appropriate to incorporate affective urgency in the content of a proposition (e.g., “we will be sad later if we do not take pleasure in beauty now”). The problem for logic, in the case of this poem (and perhaps for the “persuasion poem” as a category), is the transformation of the injunction to take pleasure, in general, into the necessity to take pleasure with a particular person. The move from the indefinite conclusion to the singular or individual application of that conclusion is difficult to achieve in the absence of rhetoric’s resources. Ronsard’s ode is notably coy about this aspect of the argumentation. Let us see how a dialectical version of the ode, in terms derived from contemporary manuals, would look, then. It would be difficult to summarize the poem’s argument in a single syllogism. The closest might be: All animate and beautiful bodies lose their beauty quickly. You are an animate and beautiful body. Therefore, you will lose your beauty quickly.

This syllogism accounts for very little of the semantic content of the ode. It also lacks the deliberative conclusion (“Cueillez vostre jeunesse”) that seems at the core of the argument. In order, then, to account for more of the semantic content of the poem and to incorporate the deliberative

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

conclusion, we would need to recast the poem’s argument in the following syllogisms: A [Praise of the lady] The color of this rose is beautiful. (“sa robe de pourpre,” ) Your color is identical to the rose’s color. (“son teint au vostre pareil,” ; “vostre âge fleuronne,” ) Therefore, your color is beautiful.

B [Loss of beauty foreseen] This rose loses its beauty, in the space of one day. (“voyez comme en peu d’espace / . . . elle a . . . ses beautez laissé choir,” –) [All roses lose their beauty, in the space of one day (“Ô vraiment marâtre Nature, / Puisqu’une telle fleur ne dure / Que du matin jusques au soir,” –).] You are identical to this rose, in respect to your beauty. Therefore, you will lose your beauty (“la vieillesse / Fera ternir vostre beauté,” –).

B If some rose loses its beauty quickly, all bodies that are animate (corpus animatum) and beautiful lose their beauty quickly. This rose loses its beauty in the space of one day. Therefore, all animate and beautiful bodies lose their beauty quickly.

B All animate and beautiful bodies lose their beauty quickly. You are an animate and beautiful body. Therefore, you will lose your beauty quickly.

C [Possessing beauty implies its enjoyment] All persons possessing beauty should enjoy it quickly, before it disappears. You are a person possessing beauty. Therefore, you should enjoy your beauty quickly, before it disappears. (“Cueillez vostre jeunesse,” )

D [Definition or substitution of “cueillir sa jeunesse”] Enjoying one’s beauty means making love as quickly as possible. (“Cueillez vostre jeunesse,” ) You should enjoy your beauty. Therefore, you should make love as quickly as possible.

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Dialectic and Rhetoric in Ronsard’s “À sa maistresse”



E [Choice of a partner] If you make love with me [who am speaking to you and am next to you] (“Mignonne, allons voir,” ), you will do so as quickly as possible. You should make love as quickly as possible. Therefore, you should make love with me.

The dialectical analysis, as impoverished as it seems to us affectively, does isolate the fallacy at the center of the poem, the syllogism B. The evident fact that a rose and, presumably, all roses lose their beauty quickly does not mean that members of a different species in the same genus, human beings, also lose their beauty quickly. In order to palliate this fallacy, the speaker needs to link as much as possible the human being concerned, the young woman, to the rose itself. Ronsard does this by describing the rose with language evoking human attributes and the young woman with language evoking attributes of the flower, as François Rigolot has pointed out. But on the whole the argument does not seem unreasonable. It is not illogical to wish to make use of one’s beauty as quickly as possible. Indeed, it is logical, if one accepts the generalization of the rose to the genus of all animate bodies, and the popular wisdom, the sententia, that one should enjoy things while one is able to. It is certainly not paradoxical, either; it is in agreement with plausible and widely held beliefs about life and time. It might at most be felt to be imprudent and to us at least, in addition, to set off affective resistance on the part of the addressee, that is, shame or embarrassment. The logical problem, however, as I have noted, is the application of the conclusion “you must take advantage of your youth” to the particular circumstance that is making love to this particular poet. Hence the need for a panoply of rhetorical devices that facilitate this application. In a next step, we can see how Ronsard deploys these rhetorical resources. Rhetorical composition of this poem shares with dialectics the concluding proposition, “you should make love to me.” In the case of dialectics, the proposition is proven by means of deductive or inductive arguments; in the case of rhetoric, the standard of proof is perhaps less rigorous, but the result might be more efficacious. As a result of the speech (or poem) the final proposition is adhered to, made worthy of the audience’s faith or trust (fides). The speaker says as much: “si vous me croyez mignonne” (). The young woman has no reason not to believe the speaker, since she has just witnessed the rose’s loss of petals in the space of a day. Indeed, the apostrophe to her, commencing the poem and reiterated in each stanza,

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

together with the first-person plural, make her role as validator of visual, experiential evidence explicit. The speaker’s praise of the woman’s beauty is a subtle way of eliciting her affective attention to the fate of the rose; what happens to the rose is more intensely affecting because of her prior comparison to the flower. This comparison flows into a proof, an enthymeme ex similibus (of which the syllogism B is the long version). Since we can similarly attribute to the rose and to the young woman the quality of beauty, and the beauty of the rose is ephemeral, we can also attribute to the young woman a beauty that is short-lived. The first two reasons are given by visual evidence (hence the expressions “allons voir” and “voyez”). This is also recommended by Aristotle: The premises of enthymemes should be known by those whom the speech concerns. Cassandre knows that her skin resembles the rose’s petals (it has been pointed out to her, and it is commonplace praise) and she also knows from having seen it that the rose has let its petals fall. The first two stanzas are thus the rationes of the conclusio situated in the epode. This probabilistic rhetorical reasoning seems insufficient, however, within the genre of erotic poetry, which is inherently “pathetic” (i.e., privileges passion or more generally affects). From our modern point of view, at least, the pathos produced by the subjects or things and the words, res and verba, appears to be much more important in the persuasive effect of the poem. This is also, surely, the case with Ronsard’s ode. The last three syllogisms (C, D, E) are only persuasive if the two “maximal” premises (beauty needs to be enjoyed, and enjoyed as quickly as possible) and the periphrasis of “gather your youth” (make love now, with me) correspond in some way with the affective state of the young woman. The speaker seeks to influence that state by praise and by his lament, the comparison of the woman to the rose and the complaint against Nature. From an “ethical” point of view, the poet praising and lamenting shows himself to be keenly sensitive to the beauty of the woman and prudent in the face of a hostile Nature. The apostrophe to the woman and the firstperson plural express an intimacy and a complicity of the two, confronted with the cruelty of the ravages of time. Hence the woman will more easily grant this particular poet her confidence, her fides. On the other hand, the very fact that dialectical reasoning and the probable rhetorical proof are both smoothly in the service of hedonism means that the affective investment is much easier to come by. Because the poet makes it appear logical to have fun makes it less of an affective effort,

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The Pressure of Time



for the young woman, to overcome her resistance and, once that pleasure is being taken, less charged with emotion. Hedonism is natural as reasoning is natural. That being said, and this will be true of many examples of lyric episodes, rhetoric can incorporate dialectical reasoning into an affective plea; logic is not incompatible with pleasure and the senses. The fact that it appears overtly logical to adhere to the final proposition does not detract from the emotional persuasiveness of the poem. Seen from the framework of time and our place in it as ethical actors, however, and contrary to what my analysis has been suggesting thus far, this poem is startling. It succeeds in rendering the ephemeral pleasure of sex both absolute – untethered to any considerations other than the possibility of having it – and of utmost urgency: now or never. The suggestion, also, is that this is the greatest pleasure because it is ephemeral, because it cannot be stretched into a duration. It is both rational (the conclusion of dialectical reasoning and rhetorical argument) and unconcerned with prudential reasoning in any traditional sense. At least Ausonius implied that roses both die quickly and somehow ensure successive appearances, presumably, in the case of the young woman, in the form of children. None of this is found in Ronsard: There is no “afterlife” for the beauty of the woman, no children whose beauty can continue hers.

The Pressure of Time The sense of urgency and absoluteness of sexual pleasure arises out of the pressure of time. The representation of time in this ode is not straightforward. We need to distinguish the narratio of the speech – the circumstances, the actions and events represented, as part of the rhetorical argument – from the temporal situation of each element of the narration in relation to the speaker’s enunciation. The bare-bones narratio is the blooming of the rose in the morning and its subsequent loss of petals in the evening, all of which could have been narrated in an identical past tense, and thus asynchronously in respect to the speaker’s enunciation. However, the narration of these events is in part asynchronous, in part almost synchronous in respect to the enunciation. The morning bloom is in the past, in relation to the beginning moment of the narration (“remember what happened earlier”), whereas the discovery of the loss of petals is very close to the present of the narration: Look what has just happened! This closing-in on the present is signaled by a shift from the past perfect (“avoit

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

desclose,” ) to the perfect – passé composé – (“a . . . laissé cheoir,” –) to the present (“une telle fleur ne dure,” ), which expresses both what we know now and what is eternally true. What is most in view and transmitted by the speaker’s voice is the loss of beauty, hence the sense that its prior flourishing is only a matter of an instant. The voice making all of this “real” shifts in tone, from a joyous praise of the young woman, pretty as a rose, in the first stanza, to the lament against Nature in the second. The informal entreaty “allons voir” is like an invitation to an excursion, perhaps another occasion to enjoy the charm of the young woman surrounded by beautiful flowers resembling her, although the following lines foreshadow the coming discovery of loss. The repeated exclamation “las!” marks, of course, the disappointment shared by both the speaker and the young woman, as if he were in her place, not wiser, had not known this from prior experience. The speaker’s second apostrophe, this time to Nature, is of the opposite tone, the opposition itself reinforcing the abrupt rush to the present, this time on the affective level. Had the entire poem simply consisted of a lament this change of events would have been much less manifest. As the flower blooms and dies, so the speaker goes from hope to disappointment and lament. And the young woman is there with him, undergoing the same experiential change. It is, then, as if the possibility of enjoyment, of experiencing the blooming of beauty, were limited to the space of a poem, as if the speech were instantiating the brevity of youth. The speaker, of course, also presents the remedy, what can be done immediately to counter Nature. If pleasure were allowed to endure, to be part of a future, to be progressive or evolve in its nature, carpe diem would not make any sense, and the poet-speaker-lover would lose out. But right now it does make sense – see all those syllogisms and enthymemes – and it makes urgent sense. This ephemeral pleasure, concentrated and absolved of all consequences and developments that its duration would imply, is, as we have seen, closely allied to reason. It is thought, made effective by lyric, that allows for a kind of, for lack of better terms, radical experience. Ronsard’s “odelette,” that little ode to immediate sexual pleasure and the hedonistic tradition it represents defy our rational privilege given to what is lasting, by means of the rational itself.

Madame de Clèves and Monsieur de Nemours: The Letter Episode Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves () is arguably the most famous novel of early modern France, and representative both of the

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The Letter Episode



aesthetics of the European court and of the thoroughly pessimistic Augustinian strain of Catholicism that flourished among portions of the aristocracy in the seventeenth century. Its writing is steeped in psychological analysis and long verbal exchanges centering for the most part on the casuistry of love, leaving little room for copious description or vivid narration of actions. While there are episodes in the novel requiring, and using with great effect, the physical environment (an encounter at a ball, a fall from a horse during a tourney, the setting of a pavilion), they are infrequent and the environment is represented in a minimal, almost entirely functional way. The possibilities for lyric representation seem reduced to very little by this analytic single-mindedness. But the novel does, at moments, convey an unadulterated pleasure of love, in its own incredibly economical way. As with Ronsard’s little ode, this representation of pleasure involves reasoning and time. The moment on which I will concentrate is close to the conclusion of one of the tangential stories within the main narrative. Its intricate, not to say confusing, plot requires some recalling. Mme de Clèves and M de Nemours have already met and are in love, although they have not expressed their feelings to each other, and they are in very different affective circumstances (she is married and is determined not to let her love for Nemours manifest itself; he is unattached and determined to pursue her). During a tennis match a letter falls from the garments of the Vidame de Chartres, a good friend of Nemours and the uncle of Mme de Clèves. It is retrieved by Chastelart, a gentleman in the service of the Reine Dauphine (Mary Stuart, the wife of the king’s eldest son François). It is a letter written by Mme de Thémines, a woman with whom the Vidame has had a liaison and who accuses the Vidame of infidelity, and has decided to show him indifference in return. The letter is not addressed or signed. Chastelart, however, believes the letter to have fallen from the pocket of Nemours, and says so to the Reine Dauphine when he hands her the letter. She, in turn, gives it to Mme de Clèves for safekeeping and asks her to return it that very evening. The Reine Dauphine also mentions that the letter is addressed to Nemours. Mme de Clèves reads the letter, understanding it to be a letter from a lover of Nemours, accusing him of infidelity. Her opinion of Nemours is, of course, drastically altered, and she experiences all the pains of jealousy. Gripped by her anguish, she fails to return the letter to the Reine Dauphine that evening. In the meantime, the Vidame, to whom the letter was actually addressed and from whose pocket it had dropped, is extremely anxious to retrieve it. He entertained a liaison not only with Mme de Thémines, the author of the letter, but with

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

another (unnamed) woman, to whom, presumably, the letter refers when it accuses him of infidelity. In addition, and most importantly, he has become the intimate confidant of the Queen (Catherine de’ Medici) who demanded of him, in exchange, that he have no other intimate relations at all. The letter, for this reason, would seriously compromise him. To top it all off, he has recently fallen truly in love with Mme de Martigues, from whom he also wishes to conceal his various liaisons. The Vidame finds out that the letter is missing when he wants to quote from it at a dinner (!), and, reaching for it, realizes it is not in his pocket. Through Chastelart he finds out that the Reine Dauphine received the letter. In desperation, he goes to see his friend Nemours to ask him to persuade the Reine Dauphine that the letter is actually addressed to Nemours, not to himself, the Vidame. Nemours is dismayed, knowing the damage this can cause for him in the eyes of Mme de Clèves, and will do so only after the Vidame provides him with proof that the letter was addressed to himself. He then goes to see Mme de Clèves, thinking that she would have been told first by the Reine Dauphine about the letter, with proof in hand that the letter was in fact addressed to the Vidame. Mme de Clèves is persuaded by the proof (a note by Mme d’Amboise asking for the letter), but says that she has given it to her husband, whom Nemours then promptly sees. M de Clèves hands the letter to Nemours, who returns it to a relieved Vidame. The Vidame, in turn, gives it to Mme d’Amboise. In the meantime, the Reine Dauphine is anxious to have the letter back from Mme de Clèves, since the queen has asked to see it, believing the letter to have fallen out of the pocket of the Vidame. Mme de Clèves says she has given it to her husband. The Reine Dauphine then asks her to write a new version of the letter, in a handwriting the queen would not be able to identify. Mme de Clèves has no choice but to ask Nemours, who, she thinks, still has it in his possession, to return it to her so that she can copy it and return the copy to the Reine Dauphine. Nemours, we have seen, has already given it to his friend the Vidame. When Nemours is summoned, Mme de Clèves and her spouse and Nemours agree that the best would be to rewrite it from memory, and Nemours and Mme de Clèves sit down together, without any other company, to do so. This is an extremely complicated buildup to the brief scene during which Nemours and Mme de Clèves compose (badly, it turns out) the missive on which the Vidame’s and the Reine Dauphine’s well-being at the court depend. The letter, to summarize it, has passed from Mme de Thémines, who wrote it, to the Vidame to Chastelart to the Reine Dauphine to Mme de Clèves to M de Clèves to Nemours to the Vidame

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Joy Pure and without Mixture



and then to Mme d’Amboise. Its trajectory encompasses a large number of the most important members of the court. The rapidity of its travels, and the consequences it provokes – jealousy on the part of the queen, curiosity and anxiety on the part of the Reine Dauphine, despair and joy on the part of Mme de Clèves and M de Nemours, anguish on the part of the Vidame – reflect the febrile, agitated nature of court relations and the accelerated nature of change. Within a day or so, everything can go from good to awful (and it often goes to awful). Indeed, Mme de Clèves is astonished at how quickly she has moved from the dreadful pangs of jealousy to the joy of knowing the letter to be addressed to someone other than Nemours. The letter episode, covering many pages of the novel, gives the reader the impression of a maze in which there is no visible exit, just an unpredictable series of turns. But in a maze you make choices between alternatives without reasonably knowing if they will lead you to the exit. The labyrinthine movement of the letter, on the other hand, is entirely motivated by reasonable or motivated choices made at every turn. The different characters all have interests that help them decide what is best in the particular circumstance: The letter’s movement is not haphazard, just very complicated. The letter’s complicated trajectory also reveals that everyone has particular interests and that even the smallest event within the court activates a web of coinciding or conflicting interests.

Joy Pure and without Mixture It is within this rational, complicated, accelerated, and pressured narrative that we have a brief lyrical moment, which I will turn to now. The following lines, as I mentioned, come after the Reine Dauphine’s request to have the letter returned to her, so that she can give it to the queen, and Mme de Clèves’s discovery that the letter is in possession of neither her husband nor Nemours: Mme de Clèves se retrouva dans un nouvel embarras; et enfin, après avoir bien consulté, ils résolurent de faire la lettre de mémoire. Ils s’enfermèrent pour y travailler; on donna ordre à la porte de ne laisser entrer personne et on renvoya tous les gens de M. de Nemours. Cet air de mystère et de confidence n’était pas d’un médiocre charme pour ce prince et même pour Mme de Clèves. Elle ne sentait que le plaisir de voir M. de Nemours, elle en avait une joie pure et sans mélange qu’elle n’avait jamais sentie: cette joie lui donnait une liberté et un enjouement dans l’esprit que M. de Nemours ne lui avait jamais vus et qui redoublaient son amour. Comme il n’avait point

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning eu encore de si agréables moments, sa vivacité en était augmentée; et quand Mme de Clèves voulut commencer à se souvenir de la lettre et à l’écrire, ce prince, au lieu de lui aider sérieusement, ne faisait que l’interrompre et lui dire des choses plaisantes. Mme de Clèves entra dans le même esprit de gaieté, de sorte qu’il y avait déjà longtemps qu’ils étaient enfermés, et on était déjà venu deux fois de la part de la Reine Dauphine pour dire à Mme de Clèves de se dépêcher, qu’ils n’avaient pas encore fait la moitié de la lettre. Mme de Clèves found herself in a new difficulty; and finally, after having deliberated well, they resolved to write the letter from memory. They locked themselves in to work on it; order was given not to let anyone enter and all of M de Nemours’s men were sent home. This air of mystery and confidentiality was not of little charm for this prince and even for Mme de Clèves. She only felt the pleasure of seeing M de Nemours, she derived from this a pure and unadulterated joy [une joie pure et sans mélange] that she had never felt before: this joy gave her a freedom and a playfulness in her wit that M de Nemours had never seen and that redoubled his love. Since he had never before had such pleasant moments, his vivacity was increased; and when Mme de Clèves wanted to begin to remember the letter and to write it, this prince, instead of helping her seriously, did nothing but interrupt her and tell her amusing things. Mme de Clèves entered into the same spirit of gayety, such that they had already been confined for a long time, and already twice one had come on the part of the Reine Dauphine to tell Mme de Clèves to hurry up, and they still had not finished half of the letter.

Madame de Lafayette’s narration is perhaps surprisingly sober, despite the hyperboles (“une joie . . . qu’elle n’avait jamais sentie,” “une liberté et un enjouement dans l’esprit que M. de Nemours ne lui avait jamais vus,” “il n’avait point eu encore de si agréables moments”). The litotes “n’était pas d’un médiocre charme” complements these hyperboles. But the novel is replete with hyperboles of this sort; they do not distinguish this episode from many other evocations of magnificent persons, the court and its trappings, or lovers’ feelings. Similarly, the vocabulary is as restrained and monotonous here as elsewhere: “sentir,” “esprit,” “joie,” “agréable,” “plaisir,” “choses plaisantes,” “esprit de gaieté.” In this passage, the words “enfermer,” “sentir,” and “voir” are even used twice. As many others in her generation writing in certain genres, Madame de Lafayette refuses the resources of copia and variety. In stark contrast to the later realist novel, and Flaubert, whom I look at in Chapter , she entirely forgoes the lyrical power of description. We do not know what the characters look like, in their joy and playfulness; we do not know what the room looks like in

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Joy Pure and without Mixture



which they experience this joy; we have no concrete details as to the people coming to ask them to finish. We have no physical correlates whatsoever to their emotions. We also do not know what the lovers say to each other, whereas the surrounding episodes are replete with dialogue: the exchanges between the Reine Dauphine and Mme de Clèves, and between the Vidame and Nemours, most notably, are recorded in extenso, intimately. We have even been allowed to read the letter itself when Mme de Clèves does so, and can sympathize with her vivid reaction. However, during its recomposition, and despite the fact that its delayed and poor rewriting has disastrous consequences for the Vidame and the Reine Dauphine, we get no glimpse of the new version. Madame de Lafayette passes on all of these occasions to fill out those moments of joy, as if writing about it somehow adulterates their content. It is as if it were a living thing, immensely vulnerable and fragile. The less it is touched, the better. That is, nevertheless, only an initial impression, and her writing here is more than sufficient, in other ways. Despite this mimetic reticence, this brief scene is one of the most intensely effective of the novel. It relates one of the rare instances of mutual pleasure. The famous scene in the pavilion, during which Mme de Clèves, believing herself to be alone, gazes at a painting featuring Nemours, and ties a ribbon around a canne des Indes while being observed by a hidden Nemours, features two solitary characters. Both are taken by their passion, and the setting is lyrical, but the scene is not one of consciously mutual pleasure. The rewriting of the letter is, on the other hand, this intense moment of shared pleasure. Several features of the representation contribute to conveying this pleasure, some of which seem inimical to pleasure itself but are not, as we have seen in Ronsard’s ode: first, the deliberative construction of the entire episode (including the affective elements); second, the minimal staging of the space; third, the contrast between the agents in the scene; finally, the representation of the pressure of time. I will consider all of these in order. The scene in which the lovers experience a “pure” sort of joy is written as a series of causes and effects. The meeting itself is a result of deliberation and resolution, of pondering of alternatives and choosing the best option: “après avoir bien consulté, ils résolurent de faire la lettre de mémoire. Ils s’enfermèrent pour y travailler” (my italics). Madame de Lafayette emphasizes this deliberate setup, with its temporal sequence and rational finality.

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

The emotions produced by the meeting itself are similarly represented as a series of causes and effects: Elle ne sentait que le plaisir de voir M. de Nemours, elle en avait une joie pure et sans mélange qu’elle n’avait jamais sentie: cette joie lui donnait une liberté et un enjouement dans l’esprit que M. de Nemours ne lui avait jamais vus et qui redoublaient son amour. Comme il n’avait point eu encore de si agréables moments, sa vivacité en était augmentée. [my italics] She only felt the pleasure of seeing M de Nemours, she derived from this a pure and unadulterated joy [une joie pure et sans mélange] that she had never felt before: this joy gave her a freedom and a playfulness in her wit that M de Nemours had never seen and that redoubled his love. Since he had never before had such pleasant moments, his vivacity was increased.

Madame de Lafayette is careful to establish a chain of causes and effects: The original pleasure of seeing Nemours causes a pure and unadulterated joy, which causes, in turn, a freedom and a playfulness that, in turn, caused Nemours’s love to increase. In addition, the absence of previous such moments causes Nemours’s vivacity to increase. The narrator could have said that the lovers’ joy at being together undisturbed was similar to the headiness of wine drunk on a warm summer afternoon, to the inadvertent and lingering touch of hands, and so on. The narrator could have quoted a part of the teasing and joyous conversation into which the lovers immersed themselves. None of these choices, perhaps more proximate (for us) to the realm of affect, is made. Instead, the narrator highlights causality and consequence. The chain of cause and effect is made apparent twice through use of the adverbial pronoun “en,” recalling the cause of the phenomenon; once through the demonstrative “cette,” referring back to a prior element of the sentence; once through the verb “donner” (in the sense of “to lend,” “to cause to appear”); and twice through verbs expressing amplification (“redoublaient,” “augmentée”). In the midst of this chain of affective causality we have the joy itself, “une joie pure et sans mélange.” The expression is minimal. “Pure” in the sense, perhaps, of untouched by regret, remorse, guilt (since the meeting was authorized by the husband); “sans mélange,” without “mixture” in the sense, perhaps, of unadulterated by personal or political interests, by the need for certain appearances or conventions, by the foreseeing of consequences. The heavy analytic armature under which this little phrase occurs poses an interpretive problem to us. Who is able to say that the pleasure of the lovers’ meeting can be analyzed in the way that it is here? Is it the lovers themselves or the narrator? If this overt presence of causality translates an

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Joy Pure and without Mixture



awareness of how, why, and what sort of emotions are experienced, then the narrator is aware of something of which the characters might not be aware. The narrator can better explain their affective state to us than they would be able to explain to themselves. Rationality induces a marked split between the narrator and the characters, when it is a question of representing affect. This view might, then, emphasize the insufficiency of (discursive) language to convey a sort of supreme pleasure in terms that derive from inside the experience, that it always remains heterogeneous to affect. That, I would submit, is the common modern view. On other occasions, and in the episode of the letter itself, though, Mme de Clèves has been able to achieve great awareness of what is happening to her affectively, to the point that she can “no longer recognize herself” (“elle ne se reconnaissait plus elle-même,” p. ), showing in fact how keenly she can observe the changes she undergoes. Her lucidity is not always synchronous to her experiences, but these are not ever out of her lucidity’s reach. As in the case of Ronsard’s little ode, perhaps the presence of rationality simply is not incompatible with the pureness of an emotion, indeed that it heightens that pureness. It is because we can explain it so well that is perfect and that it will be only a moment. In this view, we need not introduce a durable split between the awareness of the narrator and the awareness of the characters of themselves and each other; the various agents of the representation operate more or less as a whole. I would submit, in distinction to the common modern view, that this hybrid or expansive subjectivity is what can occur in early modern lyric episodes, as it can be said to occur here. The efficacy of discursive language, of the chain of causation, allows the experience to be shared by the reader. Similarly to the sensory empathy induced by the mimetic representation in Virgil and Ovid, and by the euphoric scenes in Flaubert, the experience is conveyed to us as something we can reenact if we use our rationality. Reason is there as a common key to affective experiences by others: We know what it means to have pleasure when seeing someone we love, and we understand that this pleasurable sight can cause a certain kind of joy, which in turn causes a kind of comportment that causes the beloved to react in certain ways. In seventeenth-century terms, this is no doubt another way of saying that Madame de Lafayette makes this pure and unadulterated joy “plausible” (“vraisemblable”), but it is also what poetry does through its appeal to a kind of universal, unlimited experience. It is a radical sort of power of lyrical representation: making something that has never been felt before by

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

Mme de Clèves or by M de Nemours, by these particular characters, available to all readers, and here a part of rationality. The causal constructions in which the singular (and not-so-singular) joy of the lovers is embedded are not the only factor allowing this scene to be so economically effective. The second factor is the reduced but essential indication of space: “Ils s’enfermèrent pour y travailler; on donna ordre à la porte de ne laisser entrer personne et on renvoya tous les gens de M. de Nemours” (They locked themselves in to work on it; order was given not to let anyone enter and all of M de Nemours’s men were sent home). The verb “s’enfermèrent” and the locution “à la porte” are the only indications of the space that will enclose their meeting. In addition, sending Nemours’s men home indicates that the present space is not his house. The verb “s’enfermèrent” is in the plural and reflexive, meaning that the lovers have reached a consensus that does not involve the husband. The active verb denotes a gesture, closing the door, by them. The closed-off space is also an intentionally locked space, not simply a space that happens to contain only the two of them. The servants at the door, with orders not to let anyone in, reinforce this sense of voluntary exclusion of the outside. The lovers cannot be interrupted in their intimacy, and of course are “free” in this self-imposed imprisonment. When the Reine Dauphine sends her servants to inquire about the letter, twice, presumably they are not allowed to enter the room. Its impermeability is underlined by this repeated attempt to get them to hurry up. The space that is theirs is the circumstance corresponding to the “sans mélange,” the absence of interference, characterizing Mme de Clèves’s joy that amplifies Nemours’s love. The third element of the representation constituting this joy is the distinction between the proper names designating the lovers and the anonymous group of servants, designated by the pronoun “on” (“one”). “One” has given orders not to let the couple be disturbed, “one” has sent Nemours’s men home. Even when the anxious Reine Dauphine repeatedly requests the letter for which the queen is waiting, the formulation is “on était déjà venu deux fois de la part de la Reine Dauphine” (literally, “one had already come twice, on the part of the Reine Dauphine”). The formulation is not “la Reine Dauphine, excédée d’impatience, avait déjà envoyé deux fois ses gens.” There is, as it were, a buffer between the lovers, their joy that only they possess, on the one hand, and the outside world, on the other. This corresponds, of course, to the actual life of the high aristocracy, who were almost never alone, but surrounded by servants and usually acted through their intermediary. But the use of proper nouns and pronouns underlines the border between the joyous space of the

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Joy Pure and without Mixture



writing room and the compromised and anxious space of the outside. The “air de mystère et de confidence” created by the circumstances reflects the difference between the indistinct designation of agency around them and the absolute distinctness of the proper names, designating only Mme de Clèves and Nemours. Hence the “confidence,” this trust and intimacy that occasion the “pure” joy of the protagonist. The final element of the lyric representation is time. While the outside world is waiting, notably the Reine Dauphine and the queen, and the Vidame’s future depends on the (false) letter’s return and persuasiveness, the couple enter, as it were, into a suspension of time. They enter into an “esprit de gaieté” that annuls obligations (they no longer serve others’ interests) and disregards “deadlines.” The sentences following Mme de Lafayette’s analysis of their pure and unadulterated joy are punctuated by mentions of time: [Q]uand Mme de Clèves voulut commencer à se souvenir de la lettre et à l’écrire, ce prince, au lieu de lui aider sérieusement, ne faisait que l’interrompre et lui dire des choses plaisantes. Mme de Clèves entra dans le même esprit de gaieté, de sorte qu’il y avait déjà longtemps qu’ils étaient enfermés, et on était déjà venu deux fois de la part de la Reine Dauphine pour dire à Mme de Clèves de se dépêcher, qu’ils n’avaient pas encore fait la moitié de la lettre. (my italics) [W]hen Mme de Clèves wanted to begin to remember the letter and to write it, this prince, instead of helping her seriously, did nothing but interrupt her and tell her amusing things. Mme de Clèves entered into the same spirit of gaiety, such that they had already been confined for a long time, and already twice one had come on the part of the Reine Dauphine to tell Mme de Clèves to hurry up, and they still had not finished half of the letter.

Mme de Clèves intends to begin to remember the letter and to write it, implying a trajectory and an end point, but she is constantly interrupted, given reasons not to proceed to the end point. The end point is still there, but it is as if they had all the time in the world to get there. Of course they don’t, and the “longtemps,” the long time, that they had already spent recalls the fact that time is not theirs, that it is taken by others, or simply that there is time, that there is no stepping out of it. The repeated calls by the Reine Dauphine’s men, the exhortation to “hurry,” are manifestations of time itself (two knocks, a marking of duration, hurrying in the anticipation of a third). In contrast, as a sort of resistance, the shared gaiety of the letter writers celebrates the moment, the absolute present, in the midst

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

of all of these signals of the insistence of time. It is, precisely, the carpe diem of a certain kind of lyric hedonism, in the presence of an awareness of the passing of time that pervades the passage, as it does any carpe diem argumentation. To praise the moment means, precisely, that its passing is assured. If there were not this pressure, the narration seems to be suggesting, there would not be this pureness of joy. When the narrator, perhaps irritated, perhaps eager to show the consequences of love’s egotistic disregard for others’ well-being, indicates that they “n’avaient pas encore fait la moitié de la lettre” (had not yet done half of the letter), she is recalling a paradox involving motion, which is a correlate to time. We get the sense that maybe they will never finish the entire letter, so much do they find pleasure in delaying its writing, in getting to something before getting to writing more. If there were no end point, though, there would be no delaying. A delay has meaning only in relation to the deadline. Before moving on, let us do this first, and then another thing, before. The paradox is roughly Zeno’s: In order to complete a distance, one must complete half of it, but before completing half, one must complete a quarter, and before completing a quarter, one must complete half of a quarter, and so on, to infinity. The conclusion is that motion itself is incomprehensible, thus an illusion, and that everything is always at rest. Here the uninterrupted, indivisible motion toward the end point is above all undesirable, not impossible. Nemours’s interruptions, which Mme de Clèves entertains willingly and with joy, are the equivalent of a mental slowing down, of a repeated halving of the distance, and a reductio ad absurdum of motion and time. It is the (wished-for) absolute supremacy of the moment. To be sure, as I have said, this supremacy appears all the greater because of – indeed it depends on – the pressure of time. It is only because a finish line is there, because the passage of time has such dire consequences for everyone surrounding the oblivious couple, that the insistent enjoyment of the moment becomes so dramatic. Making love to the poet now is the best, in Ronsard’s ode, since Nature will very soon take everything away. If Nature did not, if the future held the same possibilities as the present, making love now would not be the best from a prudential point of view, and it would not be the best from an experiential point of view. For Mme de Clèves and M de Nemours, there is no future, either. When the Reine Dauphine and the Queen (and the Vidame de Chartres) are pressuring them to finish, they are pressuring them to return to a world in which they cannot take unadulterated pleasure in each other’s love, in which they will be too old.

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Innamoramento on the Sidewalk



Baudelaire’s “À une passante” My third stop in this trajectory of lyric representation of the instant is a fraught one. Few poets have gained as much critical and theoretical attention as Charles Baudelaire, and among his most written-about poems is the one I will consider as a successor to my two previous examples. His poetry is poised on many thresholds, as it works within an immense tradition, plays with revolt against tradition, hints at but does not embrace the experimentation of the next generation – a Rimbaud, let alone Mallarmé –, displays supreme consciousness of the resources of irony yet indulges blithely in the headiness of beauty and escapism while pushing sensualism to the extremes of disgust and cruelty. Ever since the advent of structuralist literary theory, his poems have been used as theoretical toys to an extent that hobbles literary interpretation. This confluence of varied traditions, intentions, and interpretations makes Baudelaire’s poetry seem far removed from the works of Ronsard and Madame de Lafayette. The very fact, however, that the poet is so aware of what has come before allows me to consider him as part of this short series. The following pages will concern only one poem, “À une passante,” published in the  edition of Les fleurs du mal, in the section entitled “Tableaux parisiens,” assembling poems concerning urban life. The poem has been the object of an inordinate amount of commentary, inspired in some measure by Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the urban aesthetics of Baudelaire’s poetry. This sonnet combines the conventional fixed form – although its syntax is unusual, and the meter is at moments disruptive and jarring – with an unconventional setting, while reproducing conventional, especially Petrarchan lyric themes. These generic choices make the poem somewhat easier to look at in isolation from the collection and in relation to the series of lyric episodes that constitute this chapter. The reading I will offer, in addition, is particular: I come to the poem from the point of view of the literary tradition, not from the point of view of nineteenth-century philosophy and not from a modern or theoretical point of view, and the fact of its modernity is less relevant than its participation in the tradition of what the lyrical can perform.

Innamoramento on the Sidewalk Baudelaire’s poem concerns a very brief encounter between the poet, walking in a busy city street, and a woman in mourning, presumably

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

coming toward him from the opposite direction. They exchange glances and then go on their different ways, never to meet again. La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue. Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! The deafening street around me shouted. Tall, slim, in full mourning, majestic sorrow, a woman passed, with a sumptuous hand lifting, swinging her festoon and hem; Agile and noble, her leg like that of a statue. Me, I drank, tensed up like a madman, in her eye, blackish sky where the storm is spawned, the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills. A lightning flash . . . then night! – Fleeing beauty whose glance suddenly made me reborn, will I not see you again, except in eternity? Elsewhere, very far from here! Too late! Never perhaps! For I do not know where you are fleeing to, you do not know where I am going, o you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!

In comparison to Ronsard’s ode and Madame de Lafayette’s lyric scenario, Baudelaire’s narration reduces the actual contact between the two potential lovers to one instant, to the strike of lightning. They come close enough for the poet to catch the woman’s eye, but nothing is said (whereas the street is “screaming,” “shouting” or “roaring”) and no physical contact is made. The scene is rich with mimetic detail, however, much more so than the texts we considered thus far. The woman is described as a striking appearance, in a compressed series of adjectives and adverbial locutions; the poet, too, somewhat unsparingly toward himself, evokes the tension of his body as he looks into the eye of the woman. I will return to the elements of this representation. First, some remarks on the connections to the lyrical tradition. The most obvious is the

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Innamoramento on the Sidewalk



radical importance of the (first) glance of the (future) beloved, from whose eyes shoot arrows that inflame the lover, or whose look has the power of lightning. Baudelaire, as amorous lyric poets before him, uses the singular “oeil” instead of “eyes,” focusing the intensity of the visual exchange. Everything changes after that glance: The poet is “reborn.” The look can convey incredible sweetness (“douceur”) and a pleasure that is linked to intense suffering (“le plaisir qui tue”). Only antitheses can express the strange, alien condition that is being in love. The poet’s comparison to an “extravagant” (from extra-vagans, someone who is erring, wandering away) is apt: The lover is one who has lost his way, or strayed away from the path that virtue and faith prescribe. The description of the lady combines nobility with a quasi-fetishistic focus on her hand, and then on her leg; the former is squarely in the lyric tradition, the latter not, but redeemed by the addition of “de statue,” statuesque. Non-Petrarchan motifs are present as well: Baudelaire alludes to the urgency of the moment in his formulation “fugitive beauté”; in addition to the topos of the unavailable beloved, we have the theme of “tempus fugit.” The woman’s flight is time’s flight. The fact that she is in mourning has made this flight of time all the more evident: She has just experienced life’s brevity. Similar to the lyric tradition, as well, is the overall structure of the poem. We begin with the narratio, the meeting of the couple in the street and the exchanged glances (–). We proceed to an apostrophe to the woman (“Fugitive beauté,” ) in the form of a question (“Ne te verraije,” ), an answer to the question that is a conclusio (“jamais peut-être!,” ), supported by the ratio justifying the conclusion (“Car j’ignore,” ). The final line (“O toi que j’eusse aimé”) reprises the apostrophe, introducing the element of regret at not having enjoyed the moment that presented itself. Baudelaire eliminates, then, the possibility and the deliberate choice to enjoy the moment that concluded Ronsard’s persuasion poem. Baudelaire’s sonnet is not, however, a mere variation on the late medieval and early modern lyric tradition. Three features of the poem hint at an ironic stance toward Petrarch and his acolytes. The concluding line of the quatrains, “La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue” (the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills), has an erotic subtext when read within Baudelaire’s corpus. It is written as a general statement: not your sweetness that fascinates me, but the kind of sweetness that fascinates, in general. The line is written in the present, a sort of eternal present, whereas the rest of the narration is in the past. By all appearances, it is a commonplace inherited from the lyric tradition.

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

But there is something particular about this pleasure. The sweetness fascinates, as would, in other contexts within Baudelaire’s sensory imagination, jewels on the body of a dancer. This fascination is anticipated alliteratively in the poet’s focus on the “main fastueuse” that plays with a “feston”: Not only do ornamental artifices enhance the body’s charm, but the “sumptuous” hand itself, and the body for which it stands, become a seductive, mesmerizing ornament. It is a sexual charm distinct from the only very discreetly and intermittently erotic charm of Laura’s beauty. Similarly, within Baudelaire’s world of urban encounters, the “pleasure that kills” can easily stand as a reference to sexual pleasure and its frequent physical consequence, syphilis. To be sure, the woman approaching the poet is “agile and noble” and in mourning, statuesque and tall, but the defiling of this distant beauty is tempting. The second ironic detail of the Petrarchan imitation is the final hemistich, “ô toi qui le savais!” (O you who knew so!). The pointe-like phrase runs counter to Petrarchan lyric’s habitual one-sidedness. While the beloved might give signs of her good favors to the suffering lover, the latter never presumes knowledge of her knowledge of his love, since his existence is devoted to delivering repeated proofs of his devotion. Admittedly, the lyric tradition allows for a quasi-feudal amorous “service” that assumes knowledge of mutual love by both lovers. But the brazen, provocative “you knew so” (and did not stop, on your way to unknown parts) seems designed to step out of the conventions. The third ironic detail concerns the meaning of the innamoramento, the coup de foudre, the fatal exchange of glances in the lyric tradition. The eyes directed suddenly to the poet-lover contain the weapons of Love, and the beauty, sweetness, and pleasure cause the poet to fall in love immediately, irremediably. In contrast, Baudelaire’s tensed-up narrator “drinks” this sweetness and pleasure, but their effect remains disjoined from love itself. The pleasure of the encounter is distinct from love, which would have ensued (“O toi que j’eusse aimée”) but was not caused by the fatal glance. The enjoyment of all the trappings of violent, stormy, abrupt desire is not the same as falling in love, although it could be. Baudelaire, ever the aesthete, keeps those apart initially, contrary to the Petrarchan amorous lyric tradition.

The Pressure of Time, Again “À une passante” conveys, despite all of this literary allusiveness and awareness, an intense sensation of the pressure of time. Three elements of the representation are especially important in this respect. First of all,

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

The Pressure of Time, Again

the surprising first line transmitting the sound of the street. Second, the shifts in rhythm throughout the sonnet. Third, the meaning and the tenses of the last line, which we have already looked at above. I will consider these one by one. The sonnet begins with a sentence covering the first alexandrine and stopping at the line’s end, breaking up the flow of the quatrain: “La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait” (The deafening street around me shouted/screamed/howled/roared). It is an entirely non-lyric beginning: an urban, anti-pastoral or anti-natural setting, and there is no addressing of the poem. The line is dominated by sound, strangely so, since the meeting itself involves glances and visual details. But this is not entirely illogical. The street is nearly deafening, with no occasion for song, for the spoken word between two persons – all that is left is visual contact. A space that is filled by deafening sound is also one from which you need to flee, hence the eventual plea: “Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici!” (Elsewhere, very far from here!). But the deafening sound exerts moreover immense temporal pressure. In such circumstances you cannot linger, you cannot wish for the moment to last. The deafening sound of the street is produced by traffic or by machines and construction workers or by crowds. In Baudelaire’s time, the epoch of the great remaking of Paris by Haussmann, it was probably both construction and traffic. The machines and the workers are demolishing and transporting, changing the face of the street in real time; the traffic is produced by people coming and going at an ever faster pace. The crowds are moving, marching, shouting. Crushing sound, rhythmic, mechanical, anonymous, and indistinct, is here a sensory analogue to the unbearable pressure of time. The deafening pace of urban life takes the place of the decay or aging inherent to natural beings. The street “hurlait,” shouted at the top of its lungs, in anger, in exasperation, to get out of the way, to hurry up, in a constant sonorous equivalent of the imperative, of the hyperbolic. Baudelaire reproduces some of this cacophony through his own imperatives and his own hyperboles, in the second half of the sonnet. But first we slow down: Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. (–)

Tall, slim, in great mourning, majestic sorrow, a woman passed, with a sumptuous hand lifting, swinging the embroidery and the hem; Agile and noble, with her leg like that of a statue.

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

The four lines describing the woman, constituting one sentence replete with attributes, slide over the first quatrain into the beginning of the second. The languid chiasmus “en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse” functions as a melancholy centering of her character, and in the increasing syllabic length of its components as a way of slowing the pace. The funereal implies a procession. The majestic is what is sovereign, unhurried, and the gesture that follows manifests her indifference to the cacophony around her. Her hand lifts the edge of her dress, and the two presentparticiple verbs, “soulevant, balançant,” suspend her gesture in time, both in contrast to the ever-present hurriedness of the street and in distinction to the preterit “passa.” The sentence ends on the predicate “de statue,” emphasizing this slowing down, the quasi-immobility of this appearance (and anticipating the reunion in an unchanging “eternity”). But the figure is “agile,” capable of quick movement, and the slowness of the gesture and the mourning appearance are a choice, not a condition. The remaining lines of the second quatrain, the narrator “drinking” the pleasure that kills in the dark eye of the lady, maintain this calm rhythm. The imperfect “je buvais” (instead of the preterit “je bus,” which the previous verb “passa” seemed to call for) indicates that her “majestic” movement has cued the languid lover’s prostration. The storm in her eyes is “germinating,” brewing, and has not yet struck its lightning. This impossibly brief instant is suspended, then, through the reaction of the narrator, only to be reabsorbed into the hectic pace of the street. Once they have exchanged glances, the rhythm accelerates: Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! (–)

A lightning strike . . . then the night! – Fleeing beauty whose gaze suddenly made me be reborn, will I not see you again, except in eternity? Elsewhere, very far from here! Too late! never perhaps!

The ellipses followed by the exclamation condense the passage from light to darkness, and the exclamation forces a rapid diction, as if the experience were taking on the characteristics of the surrounding, shouting street. The instant of absolute pleasure occurs in the time between Un éclair and nuit, between the beginning and the end of the hemistich. The question the poet then immediately addresses to the fleeing woman, the apostrophe emphasized by the hyphen, and his immediate

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Choosing to Let the Moment Be a Moment



answer – the latter a series of quick exclamations – further impose an urgency and a hurriedness: now or never! The rhythm of these lines enact this pressure that deafens. Line  mimics the passage of a subsequent instant, distinct from the first glance. “Ailleurs, bien loi d’ici” keeps open the possibility of a prolonging of the encounter, as if she were still close enough; “trop tard!” suggests that she is no longer near, but that the narrator could find her, knowing where she is headed; “jamais peut-être” expresses the realization not only that the instant has passed but that any future possibility of finding her has vanished as well, since she will be lost to him in the vastness of the city, and she has no knowledge of the narrator’s whereabouts. The instant of pleasure has passed during the time of reading, synchronously, during the ellipses separating the lightning from the night. The style coupé that characterizes line , and the exclamation marks, record synchronously the passage of the second instant, the lost occasion of prolonging those quick glances. We have not grasped Fortune by her locks; she has escaped us. We do not appear to have the possibility of deliberative persuasion, the span of the day, or the possibility of delaying the finishing of a letter together. All the narrator has is the memory of a flash of lightning. The concluding lines of the poem, however, reconsider this lost opportunity as a choice of the potential lovers.

Choosing to Let the Moment Be a Moment The rhythm of the poem incarnates movement and time; we have already seen how verb tenses contribute to this dense succession of temporal experiences. The final element I will consider is the provocative concluding line, “O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!” (O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!). The apostrophe, here ostentatiously repeated, is one of the very conventional features of lyric and we have seen how effective it is in the rhetoric of Ronsard’s “persuasion poem.” It means “lyric” – especially by Baudelaire’s time – as if to say: “this is poetry,” “this belongs to immortality,” “this is like the statue that your leg resembles.” That generic marker makes the intimacy of address problematic (“I am speaking to you in front of the whole world, for generations to come”). And it sharpens the dissonance of what follows in the line, in each case. The narrator-lover “would have loved,” the pluperfect subjunctive expressing the pastness of a choice that was not made or an event that did not occur. The narrator could have said, “toi que je pourrais aimer” (you whom I could love) or “toi que j’aimerais” (you whom I would love),

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Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

since a future encounter is not excluded. But the pluperfect subjunctive implies that there will be no future occasion. The poet-narrator-lover alone has decided this; the haphazard nature of this particular life has not determined the future of the two. Perhaps, then, the very ephemeral and unfulfilled nature of their meeting made it perfect; its beauty and its killing pleasure are inextricably linked to the instant. Perhaps, also, the aesthetic nature of the ephemeral glimpse is preferable to the love that the lyric tradition promises. That love is also unlikely in the midst of shouting and a hurried street, a pace that, finally, the poet, precisely for these aesthetic reasons, endorses. The final bravade to the fleeing lady confirms this embrace of lost opportunities, because they are lost. She knew that he would have loved her, she saw him, and she did not stop. Baudelaire’s sonnet has allowed us to measure, in the process of our reading, several experiences of time. First, the pace of the street, then its suspension through the movement of the woman in mourning and the absorption of her glance’s sweetness, then the instant of the coup de foudre, and finally the instant of the propitious occasion and its loss. It is a vertiginous performance. He is able to draw out of the conventional topoi, carpe diem and tempus fugit, the paradoxical truth that it is because supreme pleasure lasts only an instant that it is supreme. In the meantime he has jettisoned some of the discursive rhetoric surrounding the topoi, from the deliberative-persuasive to the starkly analytic, that we have seen in Ronsard’s ode and Madame de Lafayette’s lyrical episode. Instead, time, in multiple forms, has moved to the foreground and precipitated the distillation of a sort of aesthetic instant. This distillation occurs only because the poet has reflected on the lost occasion. The urban flâneur reasons that not only does he not know where she is going, nor does she know where he is going (“Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais”). Hence there is no chance that the exchange of glances can lead to something more durable or to love. The concluding line augments the loss of the occasion, but also reiterates the lack of another chance in the future and asserts that both of them have chosen this to be the case, as we have seen. We have chosen for the possible not to become actual, but that instant of possibility is perhaps supreme because of our choice not to extend it. Lyric representation allows a confluence of pleasure and time and the rational, in many forms, and in these three cases this confluence valorizes the ephemeral. We have moved from the heavily dialectical and rhetorical tradition of neoclassical hedonism, in the guise of Ronsard’s ode, to the analytical and sublime reticence of Madame de Lafayette’s meeting of the

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A Contemporary Take on the Lyrical Encounter



lovers to Baudelaire’s intricate staging of an aesthetic moment that is steeped in the tradition of which the Renaissance poet and the seventeenth-century novelist are a part. Embracing the moment not only is pleasurable but, from several perspectives, is entirely rational.

A Contemporary Take on the Lyrical Encounter: Christian Oster’s Description of Jeanne In my final analysis, more of a coda than a conclusion to this chapter, the Petrarchan tradition, the rationalist-hedonist strain of amorous poetry, and the aestheticizing of the erotic serve as a backdrop to a contemporary set piece of lyric amorous description. As does the meeting of the Princesse de Clèves and M de Nemours, this episode participates in a larger narrative, and it operates as a kind of pause, a stepping-back, that both description and reflection afford. The writing is intricate, almost obsessively so, and at moments somewhat imprecise, as if we shared in the existential uncertainties of the narrator. It is an attempt at a portrait and an account of how the narrator, and anyone like him, can fall in love with a particular person. Christian Oster’s Loin d’Odile () centers on a middle-aged man who is also the narrator of the novel. He is somewhat at loose ends, having just broken up with his girlfriend, and meets a younger man, André, with whom he strikes up a friendship. Only after they have met on several occasions does André introduce him to his own girlfriend, named Jeanne, and they meet in cafés. The narrator falls in love with Jeanne during the course of these encounters, knowing that she is engaged to his friend. He describes her, not as a first impression but as a sort of synthesis of impressions. The following description is not, then, a representation of an innamoramento, on the model of Petrarch and Baudelaire, nor is it a poem addressed to the object of the poet’s seduction efforts, nor is it the representation of one brief period of pleasure granted to lovers. It could be all of these things, and we find suggestions of them all throughout the text. Instead, it is an account of the quality of a certain type of beauty and the reaction it evokes in the narrator, albeit tinged with many of the traditional elements of lyric, almost as a pastiche: Jeanne était brillante, comme André, elle était blonde, elle était belle, un peu moins belle, toutefois, qu’il n’avait d’abord semblé. Mais elle profitait, justement, d’être un peu moins belle que les toutes premières fois pour apaiser le regard et, sur ce fond d’apaisement, l’éveiller de nouveau par quelque éclat insoupçonné. On accédait ainsi à sa beauté par paliers, avec des intermèdes de déception ou encore de chute, mais avec le temps les

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

Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning chutes se faisaient moins fréquentes, on tombait de moins haut, également, chaque fois, et pour finir on ne désapprouvait plus rien de ce visage, de ces gestes, on ne pouvait plus redescendre, on montait toujours, accédant à cette beauté dont la caractéristique était peut-être, en effet, de croître, de se renforcer avec le temps dans le regard de qui s’en voulait bien saisir. Il en allait de même pour sa brillance, d’une certaine façon, qui ménageait chez elle des périodes parfaitement ternes, mais que l’on goûtait comme des éclipses. Au physique, c’étaient bien sûr ses yeux qui l’emportaient, des yeux clairs, souvent levés vers l’interlocuteur car Jeanne n’était pas très grande, et qui toujours dans ce mouvement ascendant semblaient piéger la lumière. Même sous celle des cafés, blafarde, où je la voyais avec André, ils trouvaient le moyen, quand nous nous levions pour partir, et pour peu que Jeanne nous regardât l’un ou l’autre, de miroiter dans le haussement des cils, éclairant en quelque façon le coeur de son visage, jusqu’à la limite inférieure des pommettes, avec le nez droit, un peu long, qui répétait irrésistiblement la saillie du regard. En vérité, j’avais tout de suite, ou presque tout de suite, aimé le visage de Jeanne, y compris dans sa partie inférieure, o[ù] de nouveau s’affirmait son aiguisement, avec l’angle de sa mâchoire, le menton presque pointu, le tout contrastant, de la même irrésistible manière, dès que le regard s’en détachait, avec l’insolente douceur de ses courbes. Je pense à celles des épaules, puis des bras, puis des seins et de leurs approches, des reins et de leur chute, sans oublier l’ensemble, du reste, car Jeanne, contrairement à ce que pourrait laisser à penser ma description lacunaire et fragmentée, offrait volontiers d’elle une vue d’ensemble. Et je l’imagine debout, notamment, quand elle arrive, puis quand elle part, ou que sous notre apostrophe elle se retourne, et donc j’aimais presque tout de suite Jeanne, son âme, en particulier, son esprit, la forme qu’il prenait dans la conversation, cette plasticité qui appelait en quelque façon la caresse. Jeanne was luminous, like André, she was blond, she was beautiful, a little less beautiful, nevertheless, than it had appeared initially. But it was to her advantage, precisely, to be a little less beautiful than the very first times, in order to calm one’s glance and, having been calmed, to awaken it again by some unexpected spark. One came, then, to her beauty by degrees, with pauses marked by disappointment or even falling, but with time these falls became less frequent, one fell from a lesser height, as well, every time, and finally one could not find fault with anything of this face, of her gestures, one could not descend again, one kept climbing, acceding to this beauty whose characteristic it was, perhaps, in effect, to grow, to reinforce itself over time in the gaze of the one willing to seize it. It was the same for her luminousness, in a certain way, which included periods that were perfectly dim, but which one appreciated like eclipses.

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A Contemporary Take on the Lyrical Encounter



In terms of her physical appearance, obviously her eyes won the prize, clear eyes, often lifted toward her interlocutor, for Jeanne was not very tall, and eyes which in this ascending movement seemed to trap the light. Even under the light of cafés, dull, where I saw her with André, her eyes found a way, when we were getting up to leave, and provided that Jeanne looked at one of us, to sparkle in the raising of her eyelids, brightening in some way the heart of her face, to the edge of her cheekbones, with her straight nose, a little long, that repeated irresistibly the sallying-forth of her glance. In truth, I had immediately, or almost immediately, liked Jeanne’s face, including its lower part, where its sharpening was again apparent, with the angle of the jaw, the almost pointed chin, everything contrasting, in the same irresistible way, as soon as one’s gaze turned away, with the insolent softness of her curves. I am thinking of those curves of the shoulders, those of the arms, then the breasts and their approaches, the loins and their extension, without forgetting the whole, by the way, since Jeanne, contrary to what my incomplete and fragmentary description might lead to believe, offered willingly of herself a complete view. And I imagine her standing, especially when she arrives and then when she leaves, or when she turns as we address her, and so I loved Jeanne almost immediately, everything about Jeanne, her soul, in particular her wit, the form it took in conversation, this plasticity that prompted, in a way, the caress in response. (my translation)

Oster’s narrator is often long-winded, entering into details, complications, and hesitations that betray a certain anxiety and on occasions a humorous self-deprecation. He is relentlessly sensual. This text is both lyrical and not at all lyrical, in the sense in which we know, and Baudelaire knew, the tradition of amorous poetry and amorous episodes in prose. I will focus on four aspects of this text: the theme of light emanating from eyes, the representation of time, certain rhetorical figures of praise, and the function of detail. All of these aspects have featured in this chapter’s previous examples of poetry and prose. The section’s first sentence begins with “Jeanne était brillante.” The predicate “brillante” applied to a person does not, at first, refer to light but to mental acuity. However, the following sentences evoke her beauty, or the way she comes to seem beautiful to the narrator (and to the readership), not her intellectual powers. The final line of the paragraph reprises the quality of “brilliance” in a way that obliges us to understand it as “luminousness”: “Il en allait de même pour sa brillance, d’une certaine façon, qui ménageait chez elle des périodes parfaitement ternes, mais que l’on goûtait comme des éclipses” (It was the same for her luminousness, in a certain way, which included periods that were perfectly dim, but which one appreciated like eclipses). Her “brilliance” is like that of the sun, which

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Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

can have periods of dimness, caused by eclipses, for example, but that do not lessen its radiance when it is not obstructed. Her progessively revealed beauty contains sudden unexpected sparks or flashes (“quelque éclat insoupçonné”). Her eyes convey this luminousness more than anything else, when she looks up, when she catches the light of the dimly lit cafés, and when these eyes “éclairent,” lighten her face. We are, then, among the commonplaces of the lyric tradition, even if the setting and the intermittent nature of the light, both her own and the café’s, temper the hyperbolic effect of the glance. This hyperbolic effect is further reduced by its lack of directionality: Jeanne does not turn to look at her (future) lover, in the Petrarchan moment. Instead, the narrator describes the effect of her glance in an almost uncommitted way: Même sous celle des cafés, blafarde, où je la voyais avec André, ils [her eyes] trouvaient le moyen, quand nous nous levions pour partir, et pour peu que Jeanne nous regardât l’un ou l’autre, de miroiter dans le haussement des cils, éclairant en quelque façon le coeur de son visage, jusqu’à la limite inférieure des pommettes, avec le nez droit, un peu long, qui répétait irrésistiblement la saillie du regard. Even under the light of cafés, dull, where I saw her with André, her eyes found a way, when we were getting up to leave, and provided that Jeanne looked at one of us, to sparkle in the raising of her eyelids, brightening in some way the heart of her face, to the edge of her cheekbones, with her straight nose, a little long, that repeated irresistibly the sallying-forth of her glance.

Jeanne does not look only at the narrator, or only at her boyfriend André, but at “one or the other of us,” not directing her gaze to seduce, to “kill,” as Baudelaire and the tradition would have it. She does so in a gesture of departure, getting up from her chair in a café, not as a first encounter. And she does not always do this. The luminous effects of her glance are disconnected from any intention, seemingly, and the scenario is one anyone can witness or experience. Ordinary life has taken over the meeting of the eyes. Her love-inducing glance provokes not allegory (the arrows that pierce, the flames that burn) in the writer but a specific physical correlate, her longish nose that somehow “repeats” the direction of the glance. The attitude of the narrator is not Baudelaire’s “crispation,” his avid drinking from her sweetness, but more an attentiveness, a very close and affectionate observation. Whereas Ronsard and Baudelaire focused on the moment, and Madame de Lafayette privileged the temporal limitations placed on the lovers’ meeting, Oster represents falling in love as a gradual, open-ended process.

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A Contemporary Take on the Lyrical Encounter

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The narrator’s discovery of Jeanne’s beauty moves through phases, does not happen right away, and seems to involve a gradual ascension toward a full knowledge, as if ascending an uneven, variously leveled landscape (as Flaubert represents happiness, the subject of the next chapter). Her beauty reveals itself progressively, and this introduction of duration into the innamoramento transforms its nature. Beauty is here less a matter of a collection of physical features, perceived instantly, but more a matter of the attitude of the person who spends time in its proximity. Beauty is something you get to know rather than what you are struck by. Even when the narrator admits that he liked Jeanne’s face “immediately,” he goes slightly back on his affirmation: “En vérité, j’avais tout de suite, ou presque tout de suite, aimé le visage de Jeanne.” Not quite immediately, almost immediately, is not immediately. Introducing that moment of not liking her face, before liking it, means that something happens that allows him to then like it, that he can change his mind as he grows attentive to her appearance. Falling in love as a progression, a movement upward toward the person, means that lightning is no longer the key metaphor, despite the numerous references to light and to Jeanne’s luminousness. The refusal of hyperbole manifests itself in additional rhetorical features. In a puzzling way, Jeanne is compared to André: “Jeanne était brillante, comme André, elle était blonde.” The punctuation allows for us to compare Jeanne to her boyfriend either because she is brilliant or because she is blond, something the writer does not resolve. Lyric praise in the Petrarchan tradition does not involve comparison between ladies, let alone between the beloved and a male rival. Praise of the woman also does not involve the detailing of stages of beauty, more or less beauty: Either she is beautiful or she is not. Sickness or death can strike the beloved, but this does not mean that her beauty is affected. Finally, the first paragraph reverts to a general point of view: “on accédait,” “on tombait,” and so on. Her beauty is available to all to appreciate, and all might move through these stages of its appreciation, if they choose to (nothing about her makes this inevitable). Only later will we move to a more personal point of view, and then the subjective is accompanied by observation of detail, her angular face and the soft curves of her body. The narrator admits, as well, to the fragmentary nature of his description, and provides an alternative, his imagining of her when she turns around, and evokes her “soul.” The point of view is persistently sensual: even her conversational wit is something palpable, something the narrator wishes to caress. Oster has absorbed many of the conventions of the lyrical representations of the moment, but each element has been turned into something

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Time, Pleasure, and Reasoning

else. The supremacy of the instant has become a flattened and variable enjoyment of the encounter. The rational constitution of its perfection has become a self-aware and somewhat restless, recursive analysis of fleeting moments but whose fleetingness imposes not their perfection nor a yearning for them to last. Above all, this quasi-lyrical writing induces an attentiveness to the other person, to the circumstances, all within the confines of ordinary life.

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 

Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness (L’éducation sentimentale, Un coeur simple)

Narrative, and a fortiori the narrative of voluminous nineteenth-century novels, seems to preclude lyric. We have already seen that lyric contains narrative and relies on it, but let us step back and consider why thinking in traditional terms of genre would lead to this distinction. What counts in narrative is the forward movement of action, the logic of character motivation and development, and often a series of intervening political or other types of events. The novel, especially, aspires to the representation of a world. Lyric tends to rely much less on action, on interaction and motivation of characters, or on the rendering of a political situation, although historically all of these elements have been occasional components of lyric. Inversely, despite the momentum of narrative, even realist novels contain many episodes during which forward movement is less important, character interaction is reduced, and politics recede. These episodes can also bring to the foreground traditional features of lyric: a concentrated quality of the writing, an emphasis on the affective aspect of a scene, and a slowing-down of the movement inherent in narrative. They are also episodes, in the sense that they can be divided off and treated intensively on their own, suspending for a moment our interest in the trajectory of a plot. This chapter will work with this sense of distinction between the main narrative or plot of the novel and the lyrical as a suspension from it, and show that it allows a particular representation of human happiness. This representation involves a landscape and movement through it and, at the same time, suggestions of intimacy and proximity. It speaks to the ability to imagine a space in which we can be and act well, with others. Why Flaubert? My answer is mostly derived from his incredible virtuosity as a writer. His prose, more so than that of any other writer in the French tradition, seemingly can do everything and contains at the same time an astonishing awareness of the literary tradition and of the possibilities of mimetic representation. Lyric has a place within Flaubert’s 

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

narratives, perhaps especially so since the commonplace themes of lyric – erotic or simply sentimental longing, dreamy escapism, romantic delusion – are major subjects of Madame Bovary and L’éducation sentimentale. I am not interested in the much-studied sentimental world of the protagonists in these novels or in lyric as a representation of their emotional tribulations and illusions. My reading will not go in the traditionally alternative direction of the poetic or aesthetic – seeing lyrical moments as an occasion for the play of language, the display of its magnificence and its deceptions, and thus a reflection on writing. Instead, I intend to explore the ethical nature of lyric in Flaubert’s prose, “ethical” in the sense of the collaboration of style and mimetic representation in the service of the sort of pleasure associated with living well. Taking advantage of the technical possibility offered by lyric, its closed-off or suspended nature, I isolate several episodes in L’éducation sentimentale, and one episode in the tale Un coeur simple, in order to demonstrate that Flaubert provides us with pragmatic mimetic models of happiness. This does not mean, exclusively, the happiness of the characters, who are not always so and sometimes can only imagine what happiness would be like. It means that these episodes construct, as it were, steps or components through which it makes sense both for the characters to experience happiness and for the reader to do so, as well. These episodes render happiness available. My aim is to show how Flaubert does this, using the resources offered by lyric. This will involve representation of space, time, and movement, and it is always associated with the representation of a landscape. Intermittently it will also involve feelings both of impossibility and of unlimited possibility. These episodes are not naïve; they are replete with the writer’s celebrated irony and distance. They play with clichés inherited from the Romantics, but also from late medieval or Renaissance lyric. The presence of the commonplace, of received notions, presents a particular problem to the nineteenth-century and the contemporary reader, trained to spot the “falseness” or inauthenticity of a mimesis. Before settling into the individual readings, then, I need to deal with the status of the cliché, not the least because Flaubert himself was so persistently and openly interested in variety, avoided clichéd words and phrases, and devoted part of his literary career to skewering characters whose mental world consisted of them. The problem posed by the cliché will form part of the introduction to my consideration of L’éducation sentimentale, to which we will turn first.

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Lyrical Scenarios in a Disillusioned Setting

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Lyrical Scenarios in a Disillusioned Setting: The Infinite and the Cliché L’éducation sentimentale is indeed a novel of disenchantment. Despite its title it recounts not the formation of a whole mature human being but the loss of spiritual and affective energy in a disturbingly fluid and moneydriven society. The more the reader progresses in the novel, the more the protagonist Frédéric Moreau seems unable and unwilling to devote himself to a project or life that would lift him above the pettiness, the agitation, and the compromises of the characters surrounding him. He comes to have the material means by which to pursue such a project or such a life, and in times that are turbulent enough to allow for such projects to be conceived and for luck and initiative to favor their pursuit. But this trajectory of trials and success – one promised by the genre of the Bildungsroman – is beyond the reach of the protagonist. Frédéric does not succeed in the political sphere; he is unable to do more than live off a diminished inheritance; he remains unmarried, and, most importantly, despite his intermittent capacity to feel love and sense the happiness it can provide, is unable to achieve a satisfying affective life. The more the reader progresses in the novel, then, the more the promises offered by initial scenes, those imbued with affect and correspondingly densely written by Flaubert, are smothered and wilt in the face of what is to follow. We lose hold of what was possible and are tempted to dismiss in retrospect the romanticism of certain early passages as illusions, as terribly ironic, as traps set for us by Flaubert, as if he were pulling us through clichés to arrive at the properly disabused realism of the novel’s conclusion. I think such a dismissal would be a mistake. Scenes of affective possibility and expansiveness recur during the novel, and it does not seem as though Frédéric has lost the ability to experience them, even as something past; he has not become deadened by the disappointing world around him. The lyrical moments are only in part subject to the entropic motion of history. There is something indelible, something unlimited about these passages. We find this quality even in the language used by Flaubert to indicate Frédéric’s response to the scenes inducing intense happiness. His first meeting with Mme Arnoux produces a “joie rêveuse et infinie” (p. ), a dreamy and infinite joy. This predicate recurs as the “tendresse infinie” (p. ), an infinite tenderness, submerging Frédéric later in the novel, as the “suavité infinie” (p. ), the infinite sweetness, emanating from Mme Arnoux’s eyes, as the “béatitude indéfinie” (p. ), the undefined beatitude, caused by their conversations, and as the “bercement doux and

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

infini,” the soft and infinite cradling, he feels when they meet much later (p. ). Even his “stupéfaction infinie” (p. ) in face of her rejection of his first hesitating, indirect, and incomplete declaration of his love for her, points to something particular about the nature of these scenes. This unboundedness or immensity is weighted as a Romantic cliché and perhaps most commonly associated with Flaubert’s contemporary Victor Hugo. The vastness of the universe/ocean/world inspires a vastness of sentiment, and the cosmos is in turn suffused with an immense emotion. The poet’s mind can encompass even more than the boundless flight of birds in the azure skies. Perceiving these expressions of sentimental immensity as commonplaces somehow deprives the reader of rhetorical faith in the fiction of Flaubert, one can argue, since he seems to be distancing himself from his characters. Presumably, entirely distinct from his characters, the author himself inhabits an affective and conceptual world free from clichés. What, however, does it truly mean to point out that the notion of infinity, as an element of an affective state, is also used abundantly by the Romantics? In exploring that question – and we need to, since lyric lends itself particularly to the charge of unoriginality – we cannot avoid the technically complicated nature of Flaubert’s character representations. When Frédéric is said to experience a “joie rêveuse et infinie” it is clear that Flaubert is using a Romantic cliché to characterize his joy, and it is likely, in addition, that Flaubert is aware of its status as a cliché. Does that mean, however, that it is false that Frédéric, as a person, is experiencing an “infinite” joy, but instead is experiencing something else, unbeknownst to himself? Or is he indeed experiencing something that he would characterize, himself, as something unlimited? The status of the infinite joy as a cliché does not make it false that he might be experiencing it, just that in the s and s many other persons seem to be experiencing something they designate as “infinite joy.” Frédéric, to be sure, is not a person but a character in a novel. But Flaubert has not simply said that this character has this particular feeling. He has made that experience available to the reader, by representing in detail the circumstances in which this experience becomes plausible to the reader. We accompany Frédéric, as it were, in the actions and events and experiences that result in the “joie rêveuse et infinie” (which happens to be a cliché), and this accompaniment lends his feeling a meaning and a degree of exactness. These scenes featuring a certain unlimited quality contain the apparently objective markers, outside Frédéric’s feelings themselves, by which we can enter into and endorse those feelings. In moving through those markers we come

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The First Encounter

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to feel, then, that Frédéric’s joy coheres with reality, whether or not his joy is a cliché. But there is something more important about these scenes than providing the fertile ground for Romantic clichés. The unlimited nature of affective aspects of these scenes is also one of the ancient ways of describing poetry as opposed to history. It lifts us outside the immediate circumstances to consider a “cause” or a “question” greater than our individual selves and to link us with that cause. I do not mean this in a political, heroic sense; Frédéric is not someone who can seize the occasion offered by France of the tumultuous s – and it is perhaps unclear, within the world of Flaubert’s novel, that anyone does. Indeed the adjective “infini” never appears in those contexts. I mean this unlimitedness in an affective and in a cognitive sense: An unlimited tenderness is one resistant to events and time and calculation, and it is one that demands of all to consider the meaning of events, time, and calculation that would limit it. These effects of such moments in Flaubert’s writing – an affective charge and a cognitive purchase – do not arise from the scene’s originality, in the sense of its uniqueness. These particular passages are not somehow untouched by a long tradition of writing – to the contrary. They can be replete with seemingly endless literary and visual allusions, but that allusive abundance makes them no less powerful. Even when set in a narrative of disillusionment, even when faced with irony, and even when Flaubert himself is elsewhere so famously dismissive of commonplaces, tradition here does not play the modern role of constraint, but of a resource, as it did for Baudelaire and as it will for the contemporary writers I consider in the final chapter. This will become clear as we delve into the scenes themselves, unperturbed by the superficially ironic or clichéd nature of some elements of the representation.

The First Encounter On the riverboat carrying them on the Seine, Frédéric has already encountered Mme Arnoux, who was like an “apparition.” He has already contemplated her large straw hat, the ribbons and the mousseline dress, her face, her skin, her seductive waistline, and the elegance of her fingers. Their glances have met. Her husband has made his annoying presence clear. All the objects and clothing surrounding and touching her have taken on an extraordinary significance for the young man. Flaubert’s writing of the scene of innamoramento is detailed, ironic, very knowing – literary and pictorial allusions abound – and we sense how Frédéric’s

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

sudden attachment to the young woman changes everything, not simply in the lover himself but in the physical world that she inhabits. Another feeling emerges, after a slight delay, after the immediate visual and sensual perceptions, and this one is tied to contemplation or reflection, and brings to the fore her loss, the impossibility, in advance, of being with her, of holding her waist. It is occasioned, at least in the succession of sentences in these two paragraphs of L’éducation sentimentale, by the small-mindedness of her husband who contests the bill for a meal: Arnoux se plaignait de la cuisine: il se récria considérablement devant l’addition, et il la fit réduire. Puis il emmena le jeune homme à l’avant du bateau pour boire des grogs. Mais Frédéric s’en retourna bientôt sous la tente, où Mme Arnoux était revenue. Elle lisait un mince volume à couverture grise. Les deux coins de sa bouche se relevaient par moments, et un éclair de plaisir illuminait son front. Il jalousa celui qui avait inventé ces choses dont elle paraissait occupée. Plus il la contemplait, plus il sentait entre elle et lui se creuser des abîmes. Il songeait qu’il faudrait la quitter tout à l’heure, irrévocablement, sans en avoir arraché une parole, sans lui laisser même un souvenir! Une plaine s’étendait à droite; à gauche un herbage allait doucement rejoindre une colline, où l’on apercevait des vignobles, des noyers, un moulin dans la verdure, et des petits chemins au delà, formant des zigzags sur la roche blanche qui touchait au bord du ciel. Quel bonheur de monter côte à côte, le bras autour de sa taille, pendant que sa robe balayerait les feuilles jaunies, en écoutant sa voix, sous le rayonnement de ses yeux! Le bateau pouvait s’arrêter, ils n’avaient qu’à descendre; et cette chose bien simple n’était pas plus facile, cependant, que de remuer le soleil! Arnoux complained about the food: he became vociferous about the bill and he had it reduced. Then he took the young man to the fore of the ship to drink some grogs. But Frédéric quickly returned to be underneath the canopy, to where Mme Arnoux had come back. She was reading a slim volume with a gray cover. The two corners of her mouth turned up, at times, and a flash of pleasure illuminated her forehead. He was jealous of the person who had invented these things which seemed to occupy her. The more he contemplated her, the more he felt an abyss forming between her and him. He thought that he would have to leave her soon, irrevocably, without having wrested a word from her, without leaving her even a memory! A plain stretched out to the right; to the left a pasture softly joined a hill where one saw vineyards, walnut trees, a windmill in the green space and small paths beyond, forming zigzags on the white rock that touched the edge of the sky. What happiness it would be to climb side by side, his arm around her waist, while her dress swept the yellowed leaves, listening to her

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The First Encounter

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voice, under the rays of her eyes! The boat could stop, all they had to do was to descend; and this very simple thing was no easier, however, than to move the sun!

These extraordinarily rich paragraphs are placed in the aftermath of the very first exchange of glances, and the happiness that they adumbrate is accompanied by a realization, on the part of Frédéric, of the obstacles his love will face. Flaubert does not render these obstacles explicit. Instead, we infer their nature from the fact that the section of the narrative is introduced by Arnoux paying a bill, just as the exchange of glances between the young woman and Frédéric was followed immediately by her husband asking if “his wife” was ready. Money is the first obstacle: The husband possesses it, whereas the young man has little. Money is the indispensable instrument to realize anything in this society. Love is not impermeable to money, alas, either, and the lack of money or the possession of it frame all love scenes and stories in Flaubert’s realistic narratives, even if the affective essence of the erotic seems far removed from calculating costs. Arnoux, in addition, has no qualms about complaining about a bill and having it reduced, a man of practical action, self-confident, used to getting his way and to seeing to it that his interests are preserved. But not to such an extent that he is despicable, since he invites Frédéric to have a glass of grog. He is gregarious and people notice his physical presence – he is the first person on the boat described, brash and robust, “un gaillard” with a “taille robuste” (p. ) who hands out cigars to strangers. Frédéric despairs of getting himself noticed by Arnoux’s pretty wife, and he considers any intimacy with her as impossible as moving the path of the sun. Arnoux, on the other hand, has a bill reduced when it serves him. Flaubert’s juxtaposition of the two characters is ironic, to be sure. The presentation of the first seems to undermine the presentation of the second. That is, should we take seriously the expressions of Frédéric’s lyric longing, when we have just had a demonstration of what a confident man of means and action can accomplish? Should we not wish Frédéric had a little less sensitivity and more practical sense? However, the irony consisting of juxtaposing Arnoux’s payment of the bill and Frédéric’s contemplative desire can work in many ways. Should Arnoux not be more aware of the love that his wife can inspire? Should he not be less concerned with the amount of a bill and more concerned with the sorts of “things” that “occupy” her and make her smile? Flaubert does not decide for us. He allows Frédéric’s thoughts to develop fully, and sadly, in the shadow of Arnoux’s oblivious and loud self-confidence. Then again,

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

perhaps Arnoux gives us hope: If Arnoux can change the order of things, there is a chance that Frédéric will be able to, as well. The knowing reader can sense a proleptic irony as well: Over the course of the novel Arnoux will not remain in this position. His fortunes will decline gradually, and when he has the bill reduced for the meal on the boat, he anticipates other, much more significant debts that he will need to have reduced not because he does not like the food service but because he does not possess the funds to pay them. And this time it will be Frédéric who comes to his aid, persuading the banker Dambreuse to not insist on repayment (part , chapter ). Arnoux’s decline, we will learn, is brought about not by his insufficient attention to art and poetry but by his somewhat uninformed reluctance to forgo entirely the aesthetic aspects of the products of his factory in favor of brute moneymaking. On the other hand, if Frédéric can change what cannot be changed, will it not be through writing or poetry? The thin book Mme Arnoux is reading is not a novel – novels are voluminous – and the evident pleasure that it produces in the young woman demonstrates her sensitivity to what we presume to be literature: “Elle lisait un mince volume à couverture grise. Les deux coins de sa bouche se relevaient par moments, et un éclair de plaisir illuminait son front.” The pleasure produced by her reading is recorded in a curious way by Frédéric (or by Flaubert, since we are neither completely within the protagonist nor completely outside him). Instead of “elle souriait par moments” (she smiled at times) we find a seemingly more objective description, as if the observer did not know what a smile was, and simply described the movement of her lips. A more apt way of understanding this choice of wording is Frédéric’s intense, rapt attention to the details of her face, his taking in the minute movement of her mouth, his closeness to her. The second half of the sentence is highly metaphorical and literary – the sudden light of pleasure illuminating her forehead – as if the word “smile” would have been too easy, had given it away, and hence made the serene forehead redundant. The movement of the lips is also what allows this immediate empathy enabling Frédéric to imagine the pleasure smoothing and illuminating her forehead and then imagine wandering off with his arm around her waist. The slim volume of writing – poetry or a novella – provokes a pleasure in Mme Arnoux and jealousy in Frédéric. It is true that the young man should be jealous of her husband, not of the poet, but it is also true that the poet has done something that Frédéric is not able to do: cause the pleasure that in the literary tradition is associated with intense desire and love. Sudden light or fire, in the largely Petrarchan tradition, indicates the first,

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The “Irrevocable” in Lyric Settings

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fatal glance of love. This is what could have happened when their eyes first met, but did not seem to, since Flaubert contents himself with a sober “Leurs yeux se rencontrèrent” (p. ), the moment interrupted immediately by her husband asking if she was ready. Poetry, on the other hand, can give her the pleasure of extreme intimacy; it can move the sun, as it were. The (impossible) walk toward the sky side by side is a physical correlative to the poetry giving luminous pleasure to the young woman.

The “Irrevocable” in Lyric Settings It is starting with this moment that Frédéric feels the abyss opening up between him and her, and he senses that he would have to leave her, irrévocablement, irrevocably, unable to call her back or be called back. The adverb centers on and derives from vox, the voice but also the word or speech, what a human being can say to reverse the course of events. The term is intensely elegiac, the most poignant representation of loss. While the beloved becomes more and more distant, falling back and vanishing, the poet-lover’s voice proves incapable of stopping the inexorable. The term also implies the possibility of calling back: Irrevocable is the negation of revocable, and for it to have meaning, it must be possible, sometimes, for persons to be called back, to reappear, to resurface. Flaubert will return to this scenario of imagining (and initiating) intimacy, then only to lose that intimacy “irrevocably.” Frédéric finds Mme Arnoux in her apartment in the aptly named “rue Paradis”; he climbs the stairs; he asks for M. Arnoux hoping that he is absent; indeed he is and Frédéric finds his wife instead; they talk long enough for their feelings for each other to come to the fore; and they kiss. Just at that moment Frédéric’s mistress Rosanette enters and makes it clear to Mme Arnoux that she and Frédéric are now lovers, by addressing him with the familiar “tu.” Rosanette claims him for herself just as M. Arnoux had claimed his wife for himself, following Frédéric’s first exchange of glances with her. The moment has passed once again, and in the coach bringing them back to their apartment, a distraught Frédéric reflects: “Il éprouvait à la fois la honte d’une humiliation écrasante et le regret de sa félicité; quand il allait enfin la saisir, elle était devenue irrévocablement impossible!” (He felt at the same time the shame of crushing humiliation and the regret of his happiness; when he was finally about to seize it [her], she had become irrevocably impossible!) (p. ). His happiness has become “irrevocably” impossible: The odd redundancy underlines the ambiguity of what he was about to “seize,” something that is no longer possible, or someone he can

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

no longer call back to him. The direct object pronoun of “saisir” is feminine and can refer either to “sa félicité” or to the person of Mme Arnoux. The “irrevocably impossible” also suggests that there might be a “revocably impossible,” that is, something impossible that might be called back, be made possible, subject to the voice of the lover. In this formulation Flaubert recalls most poignantly both Orpheus’s triumph over death, through his song, and Virgil’s Eurydice being pulled away from Orpheus, no longer able to seize his wife, her palms stretched out toward her lover and husband. Frédéric, in effect, ought to have been her husband, was her true husband, in a third appearance of the “irrevocable” loss of his love. He is imagining her departure with her debt-ridden actual husband, in a train, in a riverboat, in an inn surrounded by her bags: “N’était-il pas son véritable époux? Et, en songeant qu’il ne la retrouverait jamais, que c’était bien fini, qu’elle était irrévocablement perdue, il sentait comme un déchirement de tout son être; ses larmes accumulées depuis le matin débordèrent” (Was he not her true husband? And, in considering that he would never be with her again, that it was all over, that she was irrevocably lost, he felt something like a tearing of his entire being; his tears, accumulated since the morning, overflowed) (pp. –). The adverb “irrévocablement” is now followed by “perdue,” lost, rendering more consistently the elegiac scenario; she who is now lost had been gained, and the lover’s voice or speech is no longer capable of retrieving her. In both the first encounter on the riverboat and the separation after their first kiss, Flaubert uses the verb “songer” to introduce the irrevocable loss of the beloved. “Songer” has no exact English equivalent; it stands uneasily between “to dream” (a “songe” is a dream or a daydream), “to muse,” on the one hand, and “to think,” “to reflect,” on the other. It is both dreaming, in the sense of imagining, and reasoning. In these contexts, “songer” is entertaining what is possible, or could be, what would have been possible, and reflecting or thinking that something has become impossible. It is what fiction can accomplish, for Flaubert, and this use of the verb becomes a microcosm of the world of this novel.

A Mimetic Geography of Happiness We need to return to the passage following Frédéric’s first glimpse of Mme Arnoux. His sense that she is ever more unattainable introduces a striking vision of what happiness with her could be. This vision relies on the

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A Mimetic Geography of Happiness

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description of a landscape and movement through that landscape, both a traversal of spaces and an ascension toward the sky: Une plaine s’étendait à droite; à gauche un herbage allait doucement rejoindre une colline, où l’on apercevait des vignobles, des noyers, un moulin dans la verdure, et des petits chemins au delà, formant des zigzags sur la roche blanche qui touchait au bord du ciel. Quel bonheur de monter côte à côte, le bras autour de sa taille, pendant que sa robe balayerait les feuilles jaunies, en écoutant sa voix, sous le rayonnement de ses yeux! Le bateau pouvait s’arrêter, ils n’avaient qu’à descendre; et cette chose bien simple n’était pas plus facile, cependant, que de remuer le soleil! A plain stretched out to the right; to the left a pasture softly joined a hill where one saw vineyards, walnut trees, a windmill in the green space and small paths beyond, forming zigzags on the white rock that touched the edge of the sky. What happiness it would be to climb side by side, his arm around her waist, while her dress swept the yellowed leaves, listening to her voice, under the rays of her eyes! The boat could stop, all they had to do was to descend; and this very simple thing was no easier, however, than to move the sun!

The description contained in the first sentence is both Flaubert’s and Frédéric’s point of view – we are looking at the landscape with and without the protagonist, as if we could accompany him were he to venture out and walk, or we could do so ourselves and experience the happiness that the landscape reserves for us. It is “l’on apercevait” (one saw) and not “Frédéric apercevait” (Frédéric saw). We make an initial choice: Instead of the plains on the right, we choose the pasture on the left side. We choose the space that ascends rather than stay on the flat. This landscape is pastoral: nature that is gently cultivated by human beings – pasture, vineyards, and walnut trees – without any hint of the industrialization that Paris and its surroundings are beginning to experience. The land itself is gentle and invites us to move upward in it: The pasture “allait rejoindre,” went to meet, a hill, “doucement,” softly or sweetly. When the first altitude is reached, the landscape is divided into visual sections or markers: vineyards/walnut groves/a mill (either winddriven or next to a stream). This division suggests traversal, a succession of defined spaces. Flaubert does not say “la vue s’étendait jusqu’aux roches” (one could see all the way to the cliffs) but provides the objective topographical features that permit the reader to imagine moving from one to the other and then to the small paths. Indeed, the movement is continued by the small paths “au delà,” beyond, in an irregular zigzag pattern on the white rocks climbing toward the sky. Again, the paths “form zigzags”;

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

they do not “climb,” in the same way that Flaubert describes Mme Arnoux’s mouth as moving up at the corners instead of “smiling.” It is a more immediate, intimate way of experiencing the ascension over switchbacks; it allows the reader to mimic the ascension as Frédéric imagines the walk with Mme Arnoux. In its pastoral incarnation nature invites our experience. The white rocks “touch the edge of the sky” as if they reached out to it; they are not set against the blue background. This delicate contact anticipates Mme Arnoux’s dress touching the dried leaves on her passage. This softly ascending landscape is profoundly permeable and welcoming to human movement and to human presence, and it elevates us to the boundless. It is happiness as a landscape; not Frédéric’s alone, but ours. When we seem to return to Frédéric’s point of view, in this touch of free indirect discourse, alighting in his mind – “Quel bonheur de monter côte à côte,” what happiness to climb side by side – we already have performed that happiness by our movement through the landscape. Frédéric’s walk with Mme Arnoux features the touch of his hand on her waist, the sound of her voice and the “rayonnement,” the rays of her eyes, as under the sun. In part, these details derive from love lyric (her voice and her eyes as rays of sunlight), in part they represent a couple, even a married couple (walking side by side), although the arm placed around her waist suggests, for a society hesitant about physical signs of love, romantic affection. The dress sweeping the yellowed leaves recalls, no doubt, the autumnal melancholy of Romantic lyric, but the slight contact of grass or leaves or flowers with the beloved is a Petrarchan image, imbued with erotic imagination. Laura’s feet touch the grass; when she sits down, flowers falling from a tree above circle around and touch her dress, here and there, spiraling, drawing a “realm of Love.” Let us step back for a moment and recall the characteristics of Flaubert’s representation of Frédéric’s enchantment. First of all, it is rare to find any persistent analysis or explanation of his feelings, his “interior” state. Representation of his lover’s joy is always intertwined with description – of the beloved’s body or its movement, of the objects surrounding her, and of a landscape either that contains her or that is discovered in her company. When feelings are represented as such, they are often but not always connected to three related concepts. First, the notion of the unlimited, the undetermined, the vast, the immense. Second, the notion of the irrevocable, the occasion that has been missed and cannot be retrieved. Third, the notion of the impossible, physical and logical, for example, the

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Intimacy

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displacement of the sun or an event that has taken place and that is somehow then made to not have taken place. Finally, Flaubert invites the reader to participate in this experience. He does this in two ways: The narrator is never completely within the character of Frédéric nor is he completely outside the character. That is, we never have the sense that all we are given is “subjective” – Frédéric’s thoughts, emotions, judgments, perceptions – and, consequently, it is never apparent to us that if we were to witness the same events, see the same things for ourselves, we might have an entirely different impression of them. We are always with Frédéric. Second, Flaubert uses the descriptions to mimic the feelings of the character and to mimic the process by which the character comes to have those feelings, in such a way that we can reenact, as it were, those feelings, as if they were accessible to anyone carefully following the representation. It is as if all that were necessary was to follow the same path up the hill.

Intimacy We will develop and vary this schema of happiness by looking at another brief section of the novel, one in which Frédéric and Mme Arnoux live out the possibility of an intimate emotional life, albeit with the mutual understanding of its incompleteness. Landscape, interior settings, and emotion are interlaced to let the reader accede to a boundless intimacy, despite of or parallel to Flaubert’s habitual distancing effects, his way of showing that he is acutely aware of all of the clichés. It has been a long time since the first meeting on the riverboat. Although Frédéric has become a friend to her husband, and has had several occasions to see her, many affairs and events have intervened and he has not pursued his love. Finally, after an impetuous declaration of love, she pleads with him to leave her, visibly shaken. The next day Frédéric returns to Arnoux’s house in Saint-Cloud, and finds that the family has left for a rented country house in Auteuil. There he visits her often, gains her trust, and gradually their conversations turn to love, the cruelty of their missed opportunity and the life they could have led together: Et ils s’imaginaient une vie exclusivement amoureuse, assez féconde pour remplir les plus vastes solitudes, excédant toutes joies, défiant toutes les misères, où les heures auraient disparu dans un continuel épanchement d’eux-mêmes, et qui aurait fait quelque chose de resplendissant et d’élevé comme la palpitation des étoiles.

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness Presque toujours, ils se tenaient en plein air au haut de l’escalier; des cimes d’arbres jaunies par l’automne se mamelonnaient devant eux, inégalement, jusqu’au bord du ciel pâle; ou bien ils allaient au bout de l’avenue, dans un pavillon ayant pour tout meuble un canapé de toile grise. Des points noirs tachaient la glace; les murailles exhalaient une odeur de moisi; – et ils restaient là, causant d’eux-mêmes, des autres, de n’importe quoi, avec ravissement. Quelquefois, les rayons du soleil traversant la jalousie, tendaient depuis le plafond jusque sur les dalles comme des cordes d’une lyre, des brins de poussière tourbillonnaient dans ces barres lumineuses. Elle s’amusait à les fendre, avec sa main; – Frédéric la saisissait, doucement; et il contemplait l’entrelacs de ses veines, les grains de sa peau, la forme de ses doigts. Chacun de ses doigts était, pour lui, plus qu’une chose, presque une personne. Elle lui donna ses gants, la semaine d’après son mouchoir. Elle l’appelait “Frédéric,” il l’appelait “Marie,” adorant ce nom-là, fait exprès, disait-il, pour être soupiré dans l’extase, et qui semblait contenir des nuages d’encens, des jonchées de roses. (pp. –). And they imagined a life exclusively devoted to love, fecund enough to fill the vastest solitudes, exceeding all joys, resistant to all misery, in which the hours would disappear in a continuous outpouring of themselves, and which would make something resplendent and elevated as the fluttering of the stars. Almost always they held each other on the top of the stairs, in the open air; the tops of the trees, turned yellow by the fall, spread out in little hills in front of them, unequally, up to the edge of the pale sky; or else they went to the end of the avenue, into a pavilion containing only a sofa in gray cloth. Black dots spotted the mirror; the walls exhaled an odor of mold; – and they stayed there, talking about themselves, others, anything, in a state of ravishment. Sometimes the sun rays, passing through the blinds, stretched the chords of a lyre from the ceiling to the floor tiles, specks of dust swirled in these bars of light. She delighted in splitting them with her hand; – Frédéric seized it, gently; and he contemplated the interlacing of her veins, the spots on her skin, the form of her fingers. Each finger was for him more than a thing, almost a person. She gave him her gloves, the following week her handkerchief. She called him “Frédéric” and he called her “Marie.” He adored that name, made intentionally, he said, to be sighed in a moment of ecstasy, and which seemed to contain clouds of incense, and strewn roses.

Flaubert’s irony is easy to spot here, and it would be just as easy to miss all the other elements of these splendid paragraphs. The flourishing of Frédéric and Mme Arnoux’s love is set not in spring but in the fall, when yellow, not green, is the color of the tops of the trees. Their love is

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Intimacy

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“fécond” only in outpouring of emotion, not in offspring; the sky is pale and not deep blue; the sofa’s color is gray; the old mirror has specks; and everything smells of mold. Mme Arnoux’s name is identical to the Virgin Mary’s, and Frédéric’s cult of her has all the trappings of a church mass and the apotheosis of a saint. The cult of her name has the power, in addition, to transform the smell of mold into wafting incense and the gray cloth sofa into a bed of roses. Love, in this reading, is by all appearances a delusion. The erotic elements of this descriptive narrative are also difficult not to miss. The scene is written as a love poem, accompanied explicitly (and traditionally) by the lyre that the sun rays evoke when they pass through the blinds. The lovers’ emotion reverberates in the skies, as a “palpitation” of the stars. The treetops form knolls or hillocks when illuminated by the (low) autumn light, and the verb “se mamelonner,” somewhat startling, contains a pun on “mamelon,” teat or breast. The yellow treetop landscape is like an abundance of breasts, yellow or golden as skin appears in the sunlight. The expressions “ravissement,” “extase,” and “soupirer” all derive from amorous lyric, as does the joy that exceeds all other. The gloves and handkerchief given as a lover’s token, similar to the lock of hair, are metonymies for the beloved – the gloves cover the hands that the lover touches softly, the handkerchief dries the tears of joy that the outpouring of feelings occasion. The scene takes place in a “pavillon,” the pavilion situated in parks or gardens in which lovers’ rendezvous are held. Or, most famously, it recalls the “pavillon” in Coulommiers hiding in which M de Nemours overhears his beloved confessing to her husband that she is in love with another man and later observes her tying a ribbon around a “canne des Indes” while gazing at a painting featuring Nemours himself. The pavilion in which Frédéric and Mme Arnoux keep meeting is old indeed, old enough to have been the scene of another story of unconsummated love. Flaubert fills these paragraphs, then, with winks at the knowing reader: The love between Mme Arnoux and Frédéric is already old, as it were, devoid of freshness; it merely reproduces the commonplaces of lyric in its erotic allusions and its vocabulary of swooning hearts; it already has been written before, and this is a belated, dried-up, realistic version of the heroic tales of unrequited aristocratic love in the ancien régime. However, Flaubert also sets up a powerful representation of intimacy and happiness that is not diminished by all those elements letting us recognize literary tradition. He does this in several ways, variations on the model that his representation of the first encounter between the protagonist and Mme Arnoux

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

allowed us to propose. First, the use of physical movement and gesture, in an expansive space, to render pleasure as activity. Then, through the focus on details, a slowing-down of time in the enclosed space penetrated by sunlight. Finally, through syntactic quirks of Flaubert’s prose that enhance the temporal setting. All of these elements mimic intensely a certain notion of happiness achieved by intimacy. I will look at them in order. When Frédéric first imagines his happiness with Mme Arnoux as a walk up a hill toward the sky, his arm is holding her waist. Here they are holding each other, by the waist, no doubt, as we immediately gaze upon the treetops that stretch out in front of them: Presque toujours, ils se tenaient en plein air au haut de l’escalier; des cimes d’arbres jaunies par l’automne se mamelonnaient devant eux, inégalement, jusqu’au bord du ciel pâle; ou bien ils allaient au bout de l’avenue, dans un pavillon ayant pour tout meuble un canapé de toile grise. Almost always they held each other on the top of the stairs, in the open air; the tops of the trees, turned yellow by the fall, spread out in little hills in front of them, unequally, up to the edge of the pale sky; or else they went to the end of the avenue, into a pavilion containing only a sofa in gray cloth.

The happiness they have achieved in these moments is figured as a position to which they have ascended. They are not looking out a window but are on a terrace or balcony “en plein air,” with nothing between them and the contours of the landscape before them. Flaubert does not say that they are looking at each other, but invites us to gaze with them, in this sovereign way, unimpeded, to the edge of the sky. Contrary to the pavilion in Coulommiers, whose view stretches into a garden promenade, the balcony of this house opens up to nature and sunlight, a low sunlight that emphasizes the “uneven” hill-like forms of the tree-covered land. The way to the edge of the pale sky is uneven, unlike a jardin à la française, and similar to the zigzag paths that lead to the edge of the hills bordering the Seine. The adverb inégalement emphasizes, then, the difference between this landscape and a garden, but also the contingency, the unpredictability that constitutes this kind of variety and its intense pleasure. The gaze above and over variety, unimpeded, illuminated, and opening to the sky, is a particularly potent mimesis of pleasure in its highest form. Here, as in the early scene in the riverboat, it is shared pleasure, not the immensity of the Romantic self, but elaborate representation of the activities and the sensations that form our possibility of happiness – “our” in the sense of the characters and the readers.

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Intimacy

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This happiness is activity, movement: The treetops do not stand in uneven forms, they “se mamelonnaient,” “inégalement,” forming breastlike hillocks unevenly, until they reach the edge of the sky. The lovers hold each other, having reached the top of the staircase. Flaubert does not say: On the balcony they hold each other. The “top of the staircase” implies its having been climbed. At other times, they go to the end of the avenue, like the treetops that go to the edge of the sky, where they find a pavilion in which their names will turn mold to incense and gray cloth to roses. Flaubert is extremely careful to render these semi-descriptive, contemplatively static scenarios as a movement, as activity. Then, however, the focus changes and we move from a sovereign overview of the landscape to an explicitly enclosed space – the odor of rot or mold is a consequence of a house left closed for too long. The lovers’ “selves” no longer count for much, are as if dissolved in this pure enjoyment of being together: Des points noirs tachaient la glace; les murailles exhalaient une odeur de moisi; – et ils restaient là, causant d’eux-mêmes, des autres, de n’importe quoi, avec ravissement. Quelquefois, les rayons du soleil traversant la jalousie, tendaient depuis le plafond jusque sur les dalles comme des cordes d’une lyre, des brins de poussière tourbillonnaient dans ces barres lumineuses. Elle s’amusait à les fendre, avec sa main; – Frédéric la saisissait, doucement; et il contemplait l’entrelacs de ses veines, les grains de sa peau, la forme de ses doigts. Chacun de ses doigts était, pour lui, plus qu’une chose, presque une personne. Black dots spotted the mirror; the walls exhaled an odor of mold; – and they stayed there, talking about themselves, others, anything, in a state of ravishment. Sometimes the sun rays, passing through the blinds, stretched like the chords of a lyre from the ceiling to the floor tiles, specks of dust swirled in these bars of light. She delighted in splitting them with her hand; – Frédéric seized it, gently; and he contemplated the interlacing of her veins, the spots on her skin, the form of her fingers. Each finger was for him more than a thing, almost a person.

In this enclosed space something is acceded to that no one has seen for a long time, and we concentrate on three forms constituted by the sunlight, the dust, and the movement of Mme Arnoux’s hand. First, a parallel series of bars of light dividing the entire room, from top to bottom. Then, the circular swirling of specks of dust illuminated by that light. Finally, a motion crossing the swirls and the parallel slats of light. Flaubert fills the space of the room with these basic forms – horizontal lines, circles, and diagonals – to make it palpable, replete, and dense. There is no beginning

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

and no end; we are not in a trajectory as we were when the lovers walked up the stairs or went to the end of the avenue. Instead, we in the fullness of a moment that turns endlessly on itself, as do their conversations. This is a different sort of pleasure, “infinite” in its way. Flaubert does not say, “Frédéric and Mme Arnoux experienced an endless joy”; instead, he represents a space and features of it that allow us as readers to reenact the happiness of the lovers through the denseness of the space and the persistence of the moment. The sunlight traversing the blinds and Mme Arnoux’s gesture slicing it playfully recall an earlier scene of the sunlight caressing the amber nape of her neck (p. ) and, again, all of the erotic connotations derived from the myth of Danaë. The rays of gold penetrating the tower, as the sunlight traversing the blinds of a window in the “murailles” of the pavilion, are a metaphor for sexual possession. Mme Arnoux cuts it short, as it were, since she is married and the lovers have an “agreement.” But this gesture is playful and an occasion for her lover to touch her and contemplate her hand. Flaubert then continues his exploration of the tiniest detail. After the cosmic infinity of the sky, we turn, Pascal-like, to the infinity of the small: the interlacing of veins, the spots on the skin. Each finger becomes a microcosm of the person, or another person entirely. The strangeness of these details – much like the corners of the mouth lifting in the first scene – are a proof of intimacy. They are separate from the rhetoric of praise we find so often in lyric: Flaubert abstains from expressions such as “beautiful skin,” “soft skin,” or “creamy skin.” Instead, there is an almost anatomical, “realistic” designation of the hand. The absence of lyrical and laudatory epithets renders this closeness of the lovers as knowledge of the other, and the body as a conduit to “persons,” not simply the occasion for desire of part-objects, such as the breasts or the loins, in the tradition of erotic lyric. This realism is in the service of an ethics of love as intimacy. At the same time, the contemplation of her hand does not lead to a knowledge of her soul or to a deepening mystical union of both souls. Flaubert avoids the epithets of lyric but also avoids the language of Romantic sentimentalism. Frédéric does not gaze into her eyes, discovering immense pools of emotion. He looks at her skin and sees spots, and the forms of her fingers suggest little persons to him. Of course, it is also a bit funny, almost child-like, which lets his contemplation of her hand be part of the playfulness that Mme Arnoux initiates by cutting through the whirling specks of dust. Flaubert succeeds

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Intimacy

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in turning us away from traditional lyric conventions while indulging perfectly in all of the scenic and affective elements that lyric provides. This slightly detached representation is also what we as readers need in order to empathize with the lovers. It is enough to follow the object-like markers of intimate space, time, gestures, and physical features to know what Frédéric and Mme Arnoux are experiencing. Finally, we need to add an aspect of Flaubert’s style that is not peculiar to these episodes but that is put to particular use here. The writer’s sentences manifest a quality of continuation, of slowness, thanks to a frequent refusal to insert conjunctions between the clauses or members of a clause, and a braking of a sentence’s reading or delivery through the insertion of (supernumerary) commas. Our section illustrates this well, and I will quote the French original again, this time inserting conjunctions where they would normally appear (and crossing them out), and omitting commas (signaling the omission with brackets): Des points noirs tachaient la glace; les murailles exhalaient une odeur de moisi; – et pourtant ils restaient là, causant d’eux-mêmes, des autres, ou de n’importe quoi, avec ravissement. Quelquefois, les rayons du soleil traversant la jalousie, tendaient depuis le plafond jusque sur les dalles comme des cordes d’une lyre, et des brins de poussière tourbillonnaient dans ces barres lumineuses. Elle s’amusait à les fendre [] avec sa main; – Frédéric la saisissait [] doucement; et il contemplait l’entrelacs de ses veines, les grains de sa peau, ou la forme de ses doigts. Chacun de ses doigts était, pour lui, plus qu’une chose, et plutôt, presque une personne.

A reader even only slightly familiar with Flaubert and the French language will point out the persistent presence of the imperfect, but in my view this is the least striking aspect of the writer’s slowing-down of time. His technique consists more importantly of a combination of parataxis (the absence of subordination of clauses), asyndeton (the absence of coordinating terms in a list), the use of colons, and simply a choice to add commas to focus on the adverbial construction, on the quality of the action. It is, in the realm of style, a refusal of rational argumentation and structuring often (mistakenly) associated with “emotional” lyric. But it also calls attention to each phenomenon in itself, as if each detail of the experience, both in the world of perceived objects and in the world of intimate affects, were on the same level. This equality of phenomena contributes to the slow “jouissance” that we feel along with the lovers, and it heightens the sense of closeness of the lovers to each other and to the objects surrounding them and interacting with them.

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

No Doubts about Happiness, in Fontainebleau The most extensive description of landscape as a setting for a love affair is in the pages devoted to the forest of Fontainebleau, where Frédéric and his mistress Rosanette spend several days together, in a rented coach or on foot. The forest is more populated than the landscapes accompanying the meetings with Mme Arnoux – by human beings and by various animals who are described in detail by Flaubert, anticipating the dream-like hunting scenes in his tale La légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier. The descriptive sequence contains these almost naturalist paragraphs and small vignettes of the couple walking, tired, to end up in a café or of unsettling experiences of the wild state of nature and the occasional strange behavior of human beings. The mood is not consistently pastoral, sublime, or even “realistic,” but some of all of these; during their days in Fontainebleau Frédéric begins to get to know Rosanette better, who, in turn, tells him about her childhood. And they speak, like the protagonist and Mme Arnoux, of this and that, of everything and nothing in particular. I will focus on a section in which Flaubert writes explicitly of Frédéric’s happiness, preceded by a decidedly painterly landscape description. The couple has just enjoyed a rather plain, rustic meal that nevertheless gives them the illusion that they are in Italy, on their honeymoon. Avant de repartir, ils allèrent se promener le long de la berge. Le ciel d’un bleu tendre, arrondi comme un dôme, s’appuyait à l’horizon sur la dentelure des bois. En face, au bout de la prairie, il y avait un clocher dans un village; et, plus loin, à gauche, le toit d’une maison faisait une tache rouge sur la rivière, qui semblait immobile dans toute la longueur de sa sinuosité. Des joncs se penchaient pourtant, et l’eau secouait légèrement des perches plantées au bord pour tenir les filets; une nasse d’osier, deux ou trois vieilles chaloupes étaient là. Près de l’auberge, une fille en chapeau de paille tirait des seaux d’un puits; – chaque fois qu’ils remontaient, Frédéric écoutait avec une jouissance inexprimable le grincement de la chaîne. Il ne doutait pas qu’il ne fût heureux pour jusqu’à la fin de ses jours, tant son bonheur lui paraissait naturel, inhérent à sa vie et à la personne de cette femme. Un besoin le poussait à lui dire des tendresses. Elle y répondait par de gentilles paroles, de petites tapes sur l’épaule, des douceurs dont la surprise le charmait. Il lui découvrait enfin une beauté toute nouvelle, qui n’était peut-être que le reflet des choses ambiantes, à moins que leurs virtualités secrètes ne l’eussent fait s’épanouir. Quand ils se reposaient au milieu de la campagne, il s’étendait la tête sur ses genoux, à l’abri de son ombrelle; – ou bien, couchés sur le ventre au milieu

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No Doubts about Happiness, in Fontainebleau

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de l’herbe, ils restaient l’un en face de l’autre, à se regarder, plongeant dans leurs prunelles, altérés d’eux-mêmes, s’en assouvissant toujours, puis les paupières entre-fermées, ne parlant plus. (pp. –) Before departing, they went walking on the riverbank. The sky of a tender blue color, rounded like a dome, supported itself on the horizon on the denticulation of the woods. Facing them, at the end of the prairie, there was a church steeple in a village; and, farther, to the left, the roof of a house made a red mark on the river, which seemed immobile all along its sinuous path. Rushes, however, bent over, and the water lightly shook the poles set at the river’s edge to hold the nets; a wicker trap, two or three old longboats were there. Close to the inn, a girl in a straw hat pulled up buckets from a well; – every time that they came up, Frédéric listened with an inexpressible enjoyment to the creaking of the chain. He did not doubt that he was happy until the end of his days, his happiness seemed to him so natural, inherent to his life and to the person of this woman. A need impelled him to say tender things to her. She responded by kind words, taps on his shoulder, sweet things whose surprise charmed him. He discovered in her, finally, a completely new beauty, which was perhaps only a reflection of the surrounding things, unless their secret potentialities had made it flourish. When they rested in the middle of the countryside, he stretched himself out, his head on her knees, in the shade of her parasol; – or else, laying down on their stomachs in the midst of the grass, they stayed facing each other, looking at each other, plunging into their pupils, thirsting for each other, always satisfying themselves, then their eyelids half-closed, no longer speaking.

Before the somewhat surprising account of Frédéric’s confidence in his enduring happiness, we find, as is Flaubert’s custom, the description of a landscape. We see this landscape along with the couple: Although they are walking along the river and take in the landscape, so do we, and there might be details that we see and they do not. Those details are “there,” independently of the two characters. The river bends stretch out through a prairie, or bordering a prairie, at the end of which we see a steeple, and the red roof of a house is reflected, one presumes, on the water that is still, “immobile.” The skies cover the landscape like a dome; the edge of the horizon has a crenellated shape, due to the irregular outline of the woods. “Dentelure” refers to teeth, as in the teeth of a saw, but it also evokes “dentelle,” lace, emphasizing the “tender” quality of the color of the sky. The only movement consists of rushes bending in the water whose slight current stirs the poles holding the fishing nets. The buckets going up

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

and down the well are invisible to the observer’s eye; the creaking noise of the chain is the only sign of their movement (and this noise induces intense enjoyment in Frédéric). This is not a landscape inviting our traversal or our activity. It is not broken up into successive visual planes, with a path leading us upward, and it is not the sovereign overview from a promontory or a balcony. Rather, we are gazing at a static scene, a painting, almost from a ground (or river) level, perhaps slightly higher. The reflected red roof, the only color other than the tender blue sky, makes “une tache,” a mark, a spot, on the river, just as a paintbrush would. This formulation figures the space as a surface, not as a depth. Flaubert emphasizes the lack of movement in this landscape through his use of static verbal forms (“il y avait,” “étaient là”) and through his explicit mention of the river’s immobility. The sky is not one we move toward but one that sits, like a building, over us: “Dôme” and “s’appuyer” are both architectural terms. The sound of the chain and the activity associated with it are repetitive, not progressive, something entirely ordinary. The landscape is calm, nonthreatening, enclosing. The painting – a bending river, a steeple in the background, a reflection on the surface of the water, rushes, a couple of longboats, a girl bent over a well on the river shore – seems deeply generic. The happiness corresponding to this profoundly peaceful scene is perceived as something natural, as if inhering in things: “son bonheur lui paraissait naturel, inhérent à sa vie et à la personne de cette femme.” Similarly, Rosanette’s beauty seems inherent in the surroundings and made apparent by the setting. It is not something to be achieved through activity and effort, but arises from the way things are, just as the landscape seems immobile, both an inside and an outside. It is also strangely non-erotic, at least in comparison to Flaubert’s often sly allusions or connotations elsewhere. We have reason to sense that Frédéric is deluded in his confidence in the “naturalness” of everything. He is deluded, to some extent, in the meetings with Mme Arnoux as well, but here perhaps Flaubert as narrator sets up our unease more openly: Il ne doutait pas qu’il ne fût heureux pour jusqu’à la fin de ses jours, tant son bonheur lui paraissait naturel, inhérent à sa vie et à la personne de cette femme. Un besoin le poussait à lui dire des tendresses. Elle y répondait par de gentilles paroles, de petites tapes sur l’épaule, des douceurs dont la surprise le charmait. Il lui découvrait enfin une beauté toute nouvelle, qui n’était peut-être que le reflet des choses ambiantes, à moins que leurs virtualités secrètes ne l’eussent fait s’épanouir.

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No Doubts about Happiness, in Fontainebleau

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He did not doubt that he would be happy until the end of his days, his happiness seemed to him so natural, inherent to his life and to the person of this woman. A need impelled him to say tender things to her. She responded by kind words, taps on his shoulder, sweet things whose surprise charmed him. He discovered in her, finally, a completely new beauty, which was perhaps only a reflection of the surrounding things, unless their secret potentialities had made it flourish.

Instead of writing “Il était certain d’être heureux jusqu’à la fin de ses jours” or “il savait qu’il serait heureux jusqu’à la fin de ses jours” (he knew or was certain that he would be happy until the end of his days), Flaubert uses the expression “ne pas douter que” followed by the pleonastic “ne” and the imperfect subjunctive. He did not doubt that he was and would be happy – but shouldn’t he? This construction, while expressing, in this instance, perfect confidence from Frédéric’s point of view, also lets the reader sense that perhaps doubt is justified. The following sentences, a need to show tenderness to Rosanette, her positive but coy responses – some nice words, a few taps on the shoulder – do not solidify our own faith. Frédéric is “charmed” by the “surprise” that these “douceurs” provoke in him. The formulation is ambiguous: We know nothing, really, of the intentions of Rosanette, for the point of view is entirely Frédéric’s, and to “charm,” in this context, can easily have the meaning of to “manipulate.” The hesitation concerning her “new” beauty – merely a reflection of the painting-like landscape or something this landscape has made manifest in her – reinforces our reason to doubt, unlike the protagonist, the lasting nature of his happiness. This same hesitation, however, adds to the apparent reality of her beauty, the presence of which we cannot peremptorily ascribe to the appealing surface of the landscape. All this being said, the final clause of the paragraph, “à moins que leurs virtualités secrètes ne l’eussent fait s’épanouir” (unless their secret potentialities had made it flourish), can be read as an ethics of Flaubert’s mimesis here. Just as the entire landscape description can be understood as perceived by a neutral observer, not only by Frédéric and Rosanette, we are not certain if this insight into the source of her new beauty is Frédéric’s or the narrator’s. The snaking river and the tender blue sky have the power to let Rosanette’s beauty come to the surface and flourish. She might have possessed this beauty in any event, but these surroundings have caused it to become apparent. In this sense her “new” beauty is not false, is no illusion. It is occasioned by the landscape, but precedes the landscape and persists beyond it, at least in one of the alternatives given by Flaubert. Certain kinds of spaces have the power, the “virtuality” (from the Latin virtus, strength), to induce the emergence of something like beauty or happiness within us.

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

The beauty of this landscape derives from a description, not from an experience of the actual landscape. Flaubert has made its calm, painterly beauty available to us, both in the realistic description itself, its contents, and by the fact that he makes it clear that it is not merely a product of the deluded imagination of his protagonist. The language used to describe the scene avoids attributing to the features of the landscape any affective qualities, with the exception of the “tender blue” of the sky. In addition, Frédéric reacts emotionally not to any of its specific features with the exception of the creaking of the chain, which, of all of the details given by Flaubert, seems the least charged with affect. The sights of the steeple, the sky, the rushes, and so forth all have a greater affective valence, given the tradition of elegiac and pastoral painting, than the sound of metal chain links. Flaubert distances us, then, from Frédéric’s affective reaction to the landscape. Or rather, his description of the river is entirely available to us as readers, independently from his protagonist’s point of view. This very succinct mimesis, Flaubert suggests through the last clause of the paragraph, might have the power to induce in us the beauty or the happiness that the couple feel and will express physically in the following paragraph. And this beauty or this happiness might have something real about it, something that is not only a manipulation, a temporary illusion. It would not be giving in to clichés, to sentimentalism, but acknowledging mimetic art’s power to affect us, as smart as we think we are, as superior as we might feel toward Frédéric and his intermittent efforts at lasting love. Of the three landscapes associated with happiness that we have looked at so far, this is the most problematic to me, since it is the most static, the least inviting of activity. And it produces a most conventional representation of amorous satiety. The couple’s idyll culminates in the final paragraph of the section. Frédéric’s head rests in the lap of his lover, taking the position in Renaissance paintings of Mars vanquished by Venus, with the parasol providing the contemporary touch; other times, they lie side by side and plunge into each other’s eyes until their thirst is quenched and they speak no more. As in the earlier scene of emotional intimacy, Flaubert slows things down, through a row of clauses, ending in silence, as though the couple were mimicking the ultimate ending.

Everyone Is Happy: Vacation in Normandy, in Un coeur simple In conclusion we will consider a representation in which subjectivity is a minimal factor, but in which the protagonist is named, precisely, “felicity.”

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Everyone Is Happy: Vacation in Normandy, in Un coeur simple  Un coeur simple centers on Félicité, as if part of her “simplicity” were her onomastic destiny, and as if the possibility of happiness were an immediate manifestation of Flaubert’s irony, as he fills the tale with the grim experiences of her life as a servant. Her only salvation is, no doubt, her unawareness of her condition or, to the extent that she is aware of it, her profound resignation, even thankfulness for her fate. This unawareness stands in contrast, of course, to the skill of the narrator who, occasionally, breaks out of his “neutral” stance and who, like the other characters, is struck by the inability of his protagonist to comprehend what is obvious to others. For all its sobering realism, however, Un coeur simple contains surprisingly lyrical scenes of happiness. Some are tied to the point of view of Félicité – her walk with her new friend Théodore among the fields, Virginie’s first communion, her quasi-intimacy with the parrot – whereas in others the narration pulls back and seems to make these scenes more available to the reader, in a complicity that she does not partake of. In the following scene, the family – Mme Aubain, the two children, and Félicité – is staying for several days in Trouville, on the Normandy coast. This peaceful episode follows the frightful encounter with the bull and the servant’s heroic actions to save the family. The little girl Virginie is affected by the scare, and, in typically nineteenth-century fashion, develops a vague “nervous” condition, which, according to the family doctor, is best treated by the seawater baths in the coastal town. The family settles into a languid summer routine. L’après-midi, on s’en allait avec l’âne au-delà des roches noires, du côté d’Hennequeville. Le sentier, d’abord, montait entre des terrains vallonnés comme la pelouse d’un parc, puis arrivait sur un plateau où alternaient des pâturages et des champs en labour. À la lisière du chemin, dans le fouillis des ronces, des houx se dressaient; çà et là, un grand arbre mort faisait sur l’air bleu des zigzags avec ses branches. Presque toujours on se reposait dans un pré, ayant Deauville à gauche, Le Havre à droite et en face la pleine mer. Elle était brillante de soleil, lisse comme un miroir, tellement douce qu’on entendait à peine son murmure; des moineaux cachés pépiaient, et la voûte immense du ciel couvrait tout cela. Mme Aubain, assise, travaillait à son ouvrage de couture; Virginie près d’elle tressait des joncs; Félicité sarclait des fleurs de lavande; Paul, qui s’ennuyait, voulait partir. (p. ) In the afternoon, they left with the donkey beyond the black cliffs, on the side of Hennequeville. The path, at first, climbed among terrains, hilly like the lawn of a park, then it arrived on a plateau where pastures and plowed

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness fields alternated. At the border of the way, in the jumble of the brambles, hollies rose up; here and there, a large dead tree made zigzags on the blue air with its branches. Almost always they stayed in a meadow, with Deauville at their left, Le Havre to the right, and facing the full sea. It shone in the sun, smooth as a mirror, so soft that one barely heard its murmur; hidden sparrows were chirping, and the immense vaulted ceiling of the sky covered all of that. Mme Aubain, seated, worked on her knitting; Virginie, close to her, braided rushes; Félicité cut lavender flowers; Paul, who was bored, wanted to leave.

Flaubert begins his evocation of the family’s afternoon idylls with his customary landscape backdrop. These few sentences act like a prescription and an enactment of happiness. They are resolutely in the pastoral genre. Nature is pacified and opens its goods to the efforts and sensations of human beings. The comparison to a park and the alternation between pastures and fields in cultivation demonstrate its twin sources of aesthetic pleasure and physical nourishment. The indications of slight disorder – the jumble of the brambles, the irregular pattern of the dry branches, the suggestion of death, in the form of the dead tree – all furnish hints of wilderness distinguishing it from a purely human construct. It is accessible through paths. And yet it is not civilization, especially in its modern, industrial form. Movement through it is by donkey, not by train or even coach, imposing a slowness on progress up toward the blue air. The point of view is not Félicité’s alone, but the family’s. Flaubert does not say “ils allaient” or “la famille allait” but “on s’en allait.” The “on” is literally “one,” as in “this is what one does in the afternoon”; however, as in modern French usage, the “on” is more like “we,” as in “in the afternoon we usually went.” But it also is not “nous,” “we,” which would imply that one of the family members is speaking to the exclusion of the reader or a neutral observer. The experience of ascending to the garden-like plateau above the cliffs is only minimally tied to a point of view, implying an availability, once again, of this landscape to the reader. And yet it definitely is landscape being moved through by the characters and the reader, not a mere description of the surroundings devoid of any human being experiencing them. As I noted, Flaubert wrote “on s’en allait,” we/they/one “left.” Presumably, the group leaves Trouville and the baths to wander up from the shores through the cliffs. The formulation emphasizes the trajectory chosen, starting close to the waves and the cliffs and ending on a plateau that draws the gaze upward to the sky. In walking slowly, alongside a

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Everyone Is Happy: Vacation in Normandy, in Un coeur simple  donkey (carrying the day’s provisions), up away from the shore, the family also gradually leaves behind the sounds of the waves and the seabirds, magnified by the cliffs, and enters into a different, more silent, calm landscape. In contrast to the river scene in Fontainebleau, this description is visual, to be sure, but it is not of a painting. Flaubert emphasizes movement and depth to the detriment of surface. The hilly, lawn-like lush terrain – Normandy is wet and very green – is being traversed: Paths are mentioned twice. There is a temporal progression doubling the spatial progress: The path first climbs, then arrives on a plateau, and finally, as the human observer focuses on details next to the path, the movement is continued by the hollies and by the tree branches that reach up to draw zigzag designs on the sky. In addition, this movement is constituted by the succession of visual forms. Terrains (plural) succeed each other, and on the plateau we do not have a flat homogeneous expanse but the “alternation” of pastures and fields. This is variety that is accompanied by activity, in the very way the description sets up the landscape. Variety is also produced by the “çà et là,” the “here and there” of the hollies rising up, and the “zigzag” designs of the tree branches. This device – logical equivalents to this descriptive detail are the frequent “peut-être” (maybe) or the posing of alternatives by Flaubert – allows the sense that space is being filled up, that features of this space are discoverable by an observer, any observer, since the landscape contains contingency. Things could be like this or like that; they are not predetermined by a god-like author – which means that they are really there. It is an “effet de réel,” a detail inducing the illusion of realism, if one will, but it also serves to reinforce the intense happiness that the description provokes and conveys. The end point of our elevation is the sky – what more conventional representation of a sovereign serenity is there? – but the important part is the movement through the peaceful land and through variety and alternatives or contingency. Having perceived the zigzag patterns made by branches on the sky, we turn around and face the sea. Let us look at this passage again: Presque toujours on se reposait dans un pré, ayant Deauville à gauche, Le Havre à droite et en face la pleine mer. Elle était brillante de soleil, lisse comme un miroir, tellement douce qu’on entendait à peine son murmure; des moineaux cachés pépiaient, et la voûte immense du ciel couvrait tout cela. Mme Aubain, assise, travaillait à son ouvrage de couture; Virginie près d’elle tressait des joncs; Félicité sarclait des fleurs de lavande; Paul, qui s’ennuyait, voulait partir. (p. )

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness Almost always they stayed in a meadow, with Deauville at their left, Le Havre to the right, and facing the full sea. It shone in the sun, smooth as a mirror, so soft that one barely heard its murmur; hidden sparrows were chirping, and the immense vaulted ceiling of the sky covered all of that. Mme Aubain, seated, worked on her knitting; Virginie, close to her, braided rushes; Félicité cut lavender flowers; Paul, who was bored, wanted to leave.

The geographical indications follow someone looking, occupying the position in which the family now finds itself, first to the left, then to the right, and ahead to the expanse of the sea. The sea is what matters, a source of light, as if the sun came from it, and both smooth and soft, at this distance, away from the cliffs. The “vault” of the sky recalls, most directly, the vaulted ceiling of a church nave, and the towns become the collateral chapels. It is the sea that is source of (reflected) light and sweetness, like the transept of the church opening up around the altar in its center. But this ecclesiastical allegory does not impose itself; it is a mere suggestion. Flaubert spends no time representing the feelings of the characters within this scene, with the exception of Paul, at the very end, who was bored. The others are characterized by their activities: knitting, braiding, and gathering. They are solitary activities, not, say, games played together, but they take place in close proximity to each other and to the natural surroundings, in the case of Virginie and Félicité, involving plants they have taken from the landscape. Mme Aubain, who is knitting, is “seated,” presumably on the meadow grass itself. The activities are all “ouvrages,” in the sense of “works,” producing something – a scarf, a braided basket, or a bouquet of flowers. They are women’s activities, nonindustrial, slow but deliberate, in tune with the softness and the warmth of the setting. In a sense, also, it is not the product that matters, and certainly not the time it takes to produce it, but the process itself, the attention it requires and the languid, restful occupation it affords. The only one who is not willing to engage in activity is Paul, who is bored. He wants to leave. His boy-like impatience and his boredom are confirmations of the slowness and the calm that pervade the scene, and allow Flaubert to move to the alternative afternoon occupation, gathering seashells. As we have observed in the Auteuil encounter between Frédéric and Mme Arnoux, Flaubert resorts to paratactic presentation of the family’s activities in the meadow: “Mme Aubain, assise, travaillait à son ouvrage de couture; Virginie près d’elle tressait des joncs; Félicité sarclait des fleurs de lavande; Paul, qui s’ennuyait, voulait partir” (Mme Aubain, seated, worked on her knitting; Virginie, close to her, braided rushes; Félicité cut lavender

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Everyone Is Happy: Vacation in Normandy, in Un coeur simple  flowers; Paul, who was bored, wanted to leave). Each clause is introduced by the name of the character, and they are all aligned on an equal level. With the exception of mere order of mention, no character is given a privileged position over the others. Their calm proximity to each other equalizes them, just as the later embrace between Félicité and Mme Aubain, and makes this a natural state of affairs. Flaubert’s parataxis also emphasizes the lack of a privileged point of view in the entire episode: This happiness is shared and is not tied to the imagination or the affective state of a single subject. We as readers can reenact this experience. I need to insist on this deliberate severing from a single point of view. The happiness produced by the landscapes is not simply part of the mental makeup of one of the characters. The lyric experience is not the augmentation of a self, the spiritual deepening of a single soul. This mimesis becomes available in unlimited form, to everyone capable of following the steps of the representation, in its cognitive and sensory progression, through the detailed writing of Flaubert. The landscapes and the activities associated with them constitute a kind of propaedeutic, a pragmatics of pleasure-happiness. This chapter followed a trajectory begun with the innamoramento, the falling in love of Frédéric with a Mme Arnoux who scarcely notices him, and ended with a scene in the tale Un coeur simple completely disconnected from erotic love and entirely devoted to familial intimacy and harmony. In all of the lyric scenarios I selected, the movement through a landscape is key to representation of the happiness – deluded or not, ephemeral or not – that the character or characters experience. In each of these scenarios Flaubert enables, through objective elements of the mimesis, a general participation in, or production of, happiness, without requiring the specific identification with a character, with his erotic longing, with his experience of intimacy, or, in the last scenario, with the restful, languid calm of a family outing. These objective elements vary somewhat from scenario to scenario, but they include the representation of ascension through defined spaces, a set of landscape features that emphasize contingency and variety, the manipulation of the passage of time through focus on details and detailed gestures, and the slowing-down of the prose through punctuation and parataxis. None of these techniques precludes the richness of allusions and the acerbic presence of irony and foreshadowing. Our happiness is not affected by knowledge of past misfortunes, the foreboding of future disasters, or even the hollowed-out existence that the protagonists must face. We are not cut off from a larger perspective by an exclusive empathy for a single character, while being offered perfect

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Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness

understanding of the characters’ motivations and feelings. Flaubert’s lyric prose lets us be God, knowing yet distant, feeling immense pleasure at Creation, and human, making us read as an activity that both elevates us and immerses us in things and persons that could be or not be. This representation of happiness elicits perhaps in the most complete way a set of human abilities that we have seen highlighted in the previous chapters: a kinesic reenactment of activity of another, an empathy that is not disconnected from rationality and irony, the presence of a sedimented culture or tradition, the passage of time and the projection of a future. Lyrical passages in Flaubert’s prose open up the possibility of perceiving human well-being.

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 

Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary Rouaud and Echenoz

This chapter of this book on the powers of lyric seems the furthest removed from poetry (in the sense of verse). It is concerned, once again, with “lyric episodes” rather than with lyric in any formal sense, similarly to the euphoric passages of Flaubert’s prose. My main examples are situated very close to our times, while partaking of the great French narrative tradition. They draw on the power of mimetic representation in novels that signaled the return of quasi-classical narrative starting in the late s, after a period of theoretical experimentation centered on the nouveau roman in France. This return to narrative is by no means naïve: Its tone is often tinged with irony and awareness of technique, and it delights in fragmented presentation. But these novels’ impulse is to retrieve the pleasure of storytelling. Occasionally, too, their narratives touch on grand themes, despite their valorization of ordinary life, and I will consider one such grand theme, the First World War and its mass killing fields. The subject itself appears inimical to any pleasure of narrative, similarly to other horrors the twentieth century has visited upon us, and its panoramic evil is simply too vast to be consistently and exhaustively represented. And it raises the question of how and whether such abject slaughter should be represented. This question, indeed, is not absent from the texts I will be considering. What does this have to do with the lyrical? In both novels, Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur () and Jean Echenoz’s  (), the narrative at a point steps back from following a particular protagonist, to consider what is happening all around. This enlarging perspective comes close to traditional lamentation, the plaintive representation that takes as its subject not the individual but the nation, the malheurs du temps (or du siècle, in the early modern formulation), the misfortunes befalling a people. In both instances the writers fall back on a topos inherited from the tradition, the debasing of a prior natural order or condition. Rouaud uses lyric means to recuperate that natural order, to provide some sort of 

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

recovery from the desolation and dehumanization of war. Echenoz, on the other hand, points to but then eschews the resources of lyric, in order to present this desolation as something one cannot deal with; the return to the natural is a return to ordinary life, an embrace of the banal, a willing obliviousness, or the knowledge of the absence of anything better. Both of these examples engage with what one could call cultural memory and with a sense, that we share, of something like a natural order of things. By themselves, these are topics taking us potentially far away from our original set of features of lyric and the human abilities they entail. In consequence, I will not deal with them in any detail, except to the extent that they connect to these features of lyric. Memory, here the awareness of precipitates of past events or culture, is of course a part of any representation of time, and any representation of deliberation that relies on past circumstances to evaluate present and future ones. In the passages I will look at, this awareness of the past is the narrator’s, probably not the protagonist’s. It is only effective in providing return to a “natural” state of affairs by signaling a common cultural ground that we readers are assumed to share with the characters. It is a kind of “being-at-home” the protagonists might feel but are not able to articulate, in contrast to the narrator and possibly the readers. The closest in the historical tradition would be the concept of societas, a feeling of human kinship or association with another. This feeling of kinship can be general – extended to the whole of humanity – or it can be grounded in commonalities of tradition and cultural memory specific to a nation or group. In their varied ways, all of the writers we have considered rely in some measure on kinship with a tradition. Often, this kinship is expressed by the sententia, the general truth used in conjunction with specific proofs or cases. Laments about the harshness of death are filled with such truths (indeed, the necessity of death is one of them). Often, this kinship is expressed through allusion to prior events, circumstances, myths, and imagination of a perennial social order. Usually, these topics are more associated with epic or, in rhetoric, with political exhortations. They are a feature of lamentation on a grand scale, as well. Lyric does not appear to have a place here. But lyric can play a surprisingly effective role in eliciting the feeling of kinship with a culture or nation, despite its apparently built-in resistance to the heroic narrative or, for that matter, the anti-heroic narrative. This is what we will see particularly in Rouaud’s narrative, but before we can gauge its allusiveness and its tone, we need to look at a lamentation on the “grand scale,” one that constitutes a veritable set piece for the tradition.

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Unnatural War: The People’s Lament in 

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Unnatural War: The People’s Lament in  As with previous modern material, my approach is then again resolutely humanistic, as if I were coming to these texts from an earlier historical period. Indeed, before discussing Les champs d’honneur, I will look at one of the well-known late medieval lamentations (and exhortations) on the ravages of war and civil discord, Alain Chartier’s Le quadrilogue invectif (composed ). The text is a “quadrilogue,” in the sense that four allegorical characters – France, the People, the Knight, and the Clergy – give successive speeches deploring the current state of the kingdom or of their own estate, accusing each other of being responsible for the misery, and responding to the others’ complaints (the main conflict opposing, however, the People and the Knight). We are at a low point in the kingdom of France during what we now call the “Hundred Years’ War.” Charles VI has given up rights to the throne (in ) and his son Charles has to deal not only with the English but with a civil war opposing the house of Burgundy and the house of Armagnac, the latter allied with the king. The text is hardly specific, however. Instead, it is an example of the high style of rhetoric portraying grand causes (the state of the kingdom), lamenting the miseries of war and exhorting the members of the social body to unity. I will look at the People’s speech and at a section representing especially the peasantry. The speaker responds to a remonstrance by France, exhorting the three estates to work together for the common good, and much of his speech is an emotional lament: Je suis le bersault contre qui chascun tire sajettes de tribulacion. Haa, chetif douloureux, dont vient ceste usance qui a si bestourné l’ordre de justice que chascun a sur moy tant de droit comme sa force lui en donne? Le labour de mes mains nourrist les lasches et les oyseux et ilz me persecutent de fain et de glaive. Je soustien leur vie a la sueur et travail de mon corps et ilz guerroient la moye par leurs outraiges dont je suis en mendicité. Ilz vivent de moy et je meur pour eulx. Ilz me deussent garder des ennemis, helas, helas, et ilz me gardent bien de menger mon pain en sceurté! Comment auroit homme en ce party pacience parfaite, quant a ma persecution ne peut on riens adjouster que la mort? Je meurs et transiz par default et necessité des biens que j’ay gaignez; Labeur a perdu son esperance, Marchandise ne treuve chemin qui la puisse sauvement adrecier. Tout est proye ce que le glaive ou l’espee ne defend, ne je n’ay autre esperance en ma vie si non par desespoir laissier mon estat pour faire comme ceulx que ma despoille enrichit, qui mieulx ayment la proye que l’onneur de la guerre adrecier. Que appelle je guerre? Ce n’est pas guerre qui en ce royaume se mayne, c’est une privee roberie, ung larrecin habandonné, force publique soubz umbre

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

Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary d’armes et violente rapine que faulte de justice et de bonne ordonnance fait estre loisibles. Les armes sont criees et les estendars levez contre les ennemis, mais les esploiz sont contre moy a la destruction de ma povre substance et de ma miserable vie. Les ennemis sont combatuz de parolle et je le suis de fait. Regarde, mere [France], regarde, et advise bien ma treslangoureuse affliction; et tu cognoistras que tous refuges me defaillent: les champs n’ont plus de franchise pour administrer sceure demeure et je n’ay de quoy les cultiver ne fournir pour y recueillir le fruit de nourreture. Tout est en autres mains acquis ce que force de murs et de fossez n’environne et encores en meilleures gardes a il souvent de grans pertes que chascun voit. Or couvendra il les champs demourer desers, inhabitez et habandonnez aux bestes sauvaiges, et ceulx qui par travail de loial marchandise ont les aucuns en leur necessitez secouruz demourer despourveuz et esgarez et perdre par courroux la vie aprés les biens. Le soc est tourné en glaive mortel et mes mains, qui ont porté le faiz dont les autres recueillent les aises en habondance, sont souvent estraintes jusques au sang espandre pource que je n’ay baillié ce que j’ay et ce que je n’ay mie. Si fault que le corps decline en default des biens et que en languour soubz seigneurie dissipée et chargé de famille mendie. Je vif [vis] en mourant, voiant la mort de ma povre femme et de mes petis enfans et desirant la mienne qui tant me tarde que je la regrete chascun jour, comme cellui que courroux, fain et defiance de confort mainent douloureusement a son derrenier jour. I am the target against which everyone is shooting the arrows of tribulation. Ah, poor suffering one, where does this custom come from that has perverted the order of justice, such that everyone has as much right over me as his power gives him? The labor of my hands feeds the cowardly and the idle and they persecute me with hunger and the sword. I sustain their life with the sweat and the pain of my body and they conduct warfare against my life with their outrages that have reduced me to a beggar. They live off me and I die for them. They were supposed to keep me from the enemies, alas, alas, and they keep me from eating my bread in safety. How can a human being have perfect patience in this situation, when nothing can be added to my persecution except death? I die and disappear because I lack and need the goods that I myself have gained; Labor has lost its hope, Merchandise cannot find a safe road to take in order to reach its destination. Everything that the lance or the sword does not defend is prey, and I have no other hope in my life except by despair to leave my condition and to do as those whom my remains enrich, preferring to seek spoils rather than the honor of war. What am I calling war? It is not war that is conducted in this kingdom, it is private theft, robbery left to itself, public force in the shadow of weapons and violent pillage that the absence of justice and of good order renders legitimate. Arms are cried out and banners are lifted against the enemies, but the exploits are against me, by the destruction of my poor sustenance

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Unnatural War: The People’s Lament in 

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and of my miserable life. The enemies are fought with words and I am fought with deeds. See, mother [France], see and perceive well my languishing affliction; and you will know that all places of safety are gone: the fields no longer offer the freedom of a safe home and I do not have what is needed to cultivate nor to provide the means of harvesting crops. Everything is taken by other hands that is not surrounded by the strength of walls and moats and often even the best-kept stores are lost, as everyone can see. So now fields must remain deserted, uninhabited and abandoned to the wild beasts, and those who through their work as loyal merchants have helped people in their necessity remain despoiled and chased away and lose by violence their life after they lose their possessions. The plowshare is turned into a deadly sword and my hands that have carried the weight of which others have gathered the abundant pleasures are often tied until blood flows because I have not given what I have and what I do not have at all. The body, then, is forced to be decimated in the absence of food and, languishing under a dissipated order and burdened with a family, to beg. I live while dying, witnessing the death of my poor wife and of my small children, and wishing for my own death which I cannot wait for, so much I regret it every day, as someone whom wrath, hunger and no hope for help conduct painfully to his last day.

The topics of the People’s lament all derive from the natural function of peasants and, to a lesser extent, merchants in medieval society: They provide the nourishment for themselves and the other members of the social body. The peasants, however, are being prevented from doing so by famine and violence. The latter is a consequence of the arms of war being redirected toward them, rather than toward the enemy. The former is produced by the insecurity of the countryside, by the subsequent inability to produce crops, and by the marauding soldiers depriving the peasants of all other subsistence. The other members of the Third Estate, the merchants who deliver goods to others, cannot do so safely and are despoiled of everything. The lament accuses the nobility of not doing their part, which is to protect the people. That is the natural function of their arms, and that is “justice.” War as such is not an evil; it is war that becomes anarchic killing and pillaging, the use of the noble sword that is not ordered according to the form of justice that ensures the natural distribution of goods and activities among members of the social body. Chartier’s version of the Third Estate’s complaint is heavily rhetorical. It deploys the grand gestures of language in its aim of moving the audience, that is, France and all the actors and victims of the devastation that is the result of the perennial conflict. The style is ample, the Ciceronian period and balanced sentences are the norm. Many of these rely on antithesis, for example, “Le labour de mes mains nourrist les lasches et les oyseux et ilz

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

me persecutent de fain et de glaive” (Labor is opposed to idleness, feeding to persecution and hunger, hands are opposed to swords). Or “Ilz vivent de moy et je meur pour eulx” (They live off me and I die for them), a chiasmus enclosing a similar antithesis. Or again “Les ennemis sont combatuz de parolle et je le suis de fait” (The enemies are fought with words and I am fought with deeds), a perfect parallel construction including the antitheses enemies-[friend] and words-deeds. Antithesis here is unrelenting and repetitive: There is no relief for the peasant or the merchant. It also underscores the real point of lamentation of this sort of war: What should be one thing is actually another, its opposite. The natural order is replaced with an unnatural one. The substantive terms are not highly specific: labor, hands, hunger, swords, possessions, force, family, fields, and food. They are common attributes or symbols of the members of the social body and they are ensconced in a theological conception of society, of what God wishes human beings to do when they are together. Except that none of these things is used in the way they are destined to be used, and instead of producing harmony, they produce terrible suffering. Antithesis also is at the heart of one of the concrete but commonplace formulations of the text, “Le soc est tourné en glaive mortel” (The plowshare is turned into a deadly sword). Of course, it is not specific at all to the situation of the peasantry in , but a symbol of the abundance of peace and a symbol of the terrors of war, nourishing agriculture turned into the violence of war. It is another variant of the inversion or perversion of a natural order, the iron that should till the earth and bring forth its fruit to allow humans to live, utilized to kill those same human beings. It is, in this context, the instrument of the peasantry being taken to form the instrument of the soldier. Several other rhetorical devices are in the service of this demonstration of a natural world inverted. At the center of the section I have chosen is a correctio: “Que appelle je guerre? Ce n’est pas guerre qui en ce royaume se mayne, c’est une privee roberie” (What am I calling war? It is not war that is conducted in this kingdom, it is private theft). Even war itself is denatured; it is naturally fought to defend honor and fought for the sake of the kingdom’s good. Instead, it is used in the interest of private causes and consists in theft, not in justice. The self-correction amplifies the cause and involves everyone, not just the peasantry; the unnatural effects of this war are also contrary to the ethos of the nobility who is fighting it. Selfcorrection is a way of summoning the nobility to correct itself. The nobility’s unnatural violence is illustrated through a zeugma (or a pun)

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Joseph’s Return from the Trenches

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on the meanings of “garder” (to protect or to keep [from]): “Ilz me deussent garder des ennemis, helas, helas, et ilz me gardent bien de menger mon pain en sceurté!” (They were supposed to guard me from the enemies, alas, alas, and they keep me from eating my bread in safety). Just as “war” should now just be called “murderous theft,” the noble vocation of “garde,” of protection, should now be understood as keeping everyone else from being able to survive. The apostrophe to France is the plea of a child to its mother: “Regarde, mere [France], regarde, et advise bien ma treslangoureuse affliction” (Look, mother [France], look and see my languishing affliction). The mother ought to be able to protect her child, and she cannot, similar to the speaker himself whose wife and small children die before him. This type of war is less the mere fact of suffering and pain than an inversion of all that is a natural order, not violence per se but the replacement of a maternal and divine harmony with something jarringly skewed.

Joseph’s Return from the Trenches Chartier’s grand lamentation has no place for the lyrical, at least in the ways that I have characterized it. It lacks the element that is common to all of the literature I have looked at in this book, the presence of a distinct individual, the presence of the personal. I cite it because its topoi serve as a background, a thematic reserve that can be drawn on in the set pieces of lamentation in narration, when the slowing-down and rising above of the lament invite the introduction of lyric devices. Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur () is a novel about the author’s family, the first of a series centered on the deaths of his father Joseph, his great aunt, and her two brothers, Joseph and Émile. Both the elder Joseph and Émile died in the First World War, and they constitute the central events of this first novel, although the narrative is not organized chronologically and includes many episodes from the narrator-author’s own childhood. The tone is persistently affectionate and sometimes whimsical; the tragic deaths of the two great uncles are surrounded by anecdotes that concern everything from the weather in the rain-soaked countryside around Saint-Nazaire to driving in a Citroën CV. Nevertheless, the account especially of Joseph’s death is a sort of discourse of praise, which Rouaud will make more explicit in the title of his second novel, Des hommes illustres, in which he recounts the adventures and death of his father (the younger Joseph).

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

The elder Joseph dies from exposure to poison gas, not immediately at the front but after having been transported to Tours in a military hospital vehicle. At the end of the section evoking the trenches and the gas cloud descending into them, Rouaud pauses, seemingly, to consider the horrific landscape of the front and then the trajectory of the ambulance carrying Joseph, in one paragraph consisting of a single sentence. His writing is allusive and dense; this is not truly a sentence, since there is no principal verb, simply a string of nouns that are qualified by a series of clauses beginning with “avec”: a landscape with the wind, with the night, with the day, and finally with the rain. Paysage de lamentation, terre nue ensemencée de ces corps laboureurs, souches noires hérissées en souvenir d’un bosquet frais, peuple de boue, argile informe de l’oeuvre rendue à la matière avec ses vanités, fange nauséeuse mêlée de l’odeur âcre de poudre brûlée et de charnier qui rend sa propre macération (des semaines sans se dévêtir) presque supportable, avec le vent, quand le vacarme s’éteint qui transmet en silence les râles des agonisants, les grave comme des messages prophétiques dans la chair des vivants prostrés muets à l’écoute de ces vies amputées, les dissout dans un souffle ultime, avec la nuit qui n’est pas cette halte au coeur, cette paix d’indicible volupté, mais le lieu de l’attente, de la mort en suspens et des faces noircies, des sentinelles retrouvées au petit matin égorgées et du sommeil coupable, avec le jour qui s’annonce à l’artillerie lourde, prélude à l’assaut, dont on redoute qu’il se couche avant l’heure, avec la pluie interminable qui lave et relave la tache originelle, transforme la terre en cloaque, inonde les trous d’obus où le soldat lourdement harnaché se noie, la pluie qui ruisselle dans les tranchées, effondre les barrières de sable, s’infiltre par le col et les souliers, alourdit le drap du costume, liquéfie les os, pénètre jusqu’au centre de la terre, comme si le monde n’était plus qu’une éponge, un marécage infernal pour les âmes en souffrance, la pluie enfin sur le convoi qui martèle doucement la capote de l’ambulance, apaisante soudain, presque familière, enluminée sous les phares en de myriades de petites lucioles, perles de lune qui rebondissent en cadence sur la chaussée, traversent les villes sombres et, à l’approche de Tours, comme le jour se lève, se glissent dans le lit du fleuve au pied des parterres royaux de la vieille France. Landscape of lamentation, bare ground sown and enriched by these plowman’s bodies, bristling black stumps commemorating a shady grove, nation of mud, shapeless clay of a human creation given back to matter with its vanities, putrid muck mingled with the acrid smell of burned powder and slaughtered flesh that makes one’s own stench (weeks without undressing) almost bearable. With the wind that, when the din dies down, transmits the groans of the dying in silence, engraves them like prophetic messages in the flesh of the mute, prostrate survivors listening to those amputated lives.

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Joseph’s Return from the Trenches

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With the night, which is not a pause of the heart, not that ineffably sensuous peace, but a place of expectancy, of suspended death and blackened faces, of sentries found at dawn with their throats cut, of guilty sleep. With day, announced by artillery fire, prelude to an offensive, and, there is reason to fear, destined to end before its time. With interminable rain that washes the original taint again and again, transforms the earth into a swamp, floods shell holes, drowning the heavily encumbered soldiers, the rain that streams through the trenches, weighs down uniforms, liquefies bones, penetrates to the center of the earth, as though the world were reduced to a sponge, an infernal swamp for souls in pain. And finally the rain on the convoy, gently tapping on the roof of the ambulance, suddenly grown soothing, almost friendly, transformed by headlight beams into thousands of fireflies, beads of moonlight that bounce rhythmically on the road, traverse dark cities, and, approaching Tours at daybreak, glide into the riverbed at the foot of the royal flower gardens of old France.

The sentence begins with “paysage de lamentation” and then unfolds, in successive coordinated syntagms, with the different components of the “paysage” and focuses on the objects and causes of lamentation. It moves from the naked earth (denuded by the shelling) and its burned tree stumps to the people within it and their existence in mud and stench, the earth’s and their own. Then comes the wind, carrying the death rattles of the soldiers and the reactions of the survivors, the dissolving of those voices in the air. The wind is followed by the night, which brings not peace but anguished waiting and the death of the sentinels protecting the remaining living. The day delivers not a rebirth but a renewed occasion to die, either during the artillery fire or in climbing over the edge of the trench to attack. Finally, there is the rain that fills the shell craters and turns the earth into a great sponge and an infernal swamp but also lets its drops fall onto the roof of the vehicle driving the dying Joseph back to safety along the Loire, to the city of Tours where he can be hospitalized. I will take some time distinguishing the various cultural allusions woven into this paragraph, before discussing its principal lyric effects. Allusion functions here as a kind of drawing-back, of gaining historical depth, that promises but also ironizes the recuperation of a tradition of lamentation. Three kinds of allusive networks operate in Rouaud’s paragraph: a mythological, a biblical, and a historical. There is a mythical component: the earth sown with bodies in a version of the story of Deucalion; the soldiers compared to a Promethean people made of clay (“peuple de boue, argile informe de l’oeuvre rendue à la matière” [nation of mud, shapeless clay of a human creation given back to matter]); the spirit, infused as souls, is blown away in the wind; the

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

Deucalian flood that penetrates to the center of the earth; and the “infernal” swamps recalling the rivers of Hades and the Inferno of Dante. Above all, Rouaud injects biblical elements: the “lamentations” of Jeremiah, the “vanities” rendered to the earth; the “vent Paraclet,” the spirit conveying the souls of the dying; the “prophetic” messages of the agonizing; the guilt of sleep; the rain washing away the original stain (of sin); the suffering souls of hell, and of course the flood and the ambulance carrying Joseph as would the ark of Noah. But the ark does not save him from his death. The people made of clay represent not a creation myth but what the soldiers are being reduced to, the material that they end up as. The voices of the dying are “engraved” as “prophetic messages” on the prostrate living, recalling, however, not the Bible but Kafka’s Penal Colony, in which the sentence of the prisoners is engraved on their backs. The prophecies, of course, concern not the coming of Christ but the fates of the living: soon they, too, will be victims of the next assault and the next shelling. The flood comes after the sowing of the earth with bodies, not before. The rain washes away original sin but turns the earth into a cloaca. It is a mythological and divine order transmuted into a secular hell. Another set of cultural allusions concerns medieval and ancien régime society. The Loire is the river along which royal and noble châteaux flourished; it is the river “au pied des parterres royaux de la vieille France.” Its position asks us to look upward, over a series of flower beds, beyond which are architectural incarnations of the history of monarchy. The Loire has brought Joseph from another part of the kingdom, the “paysage de lamentation,” the landscape that laments and that is lamented, in a humanization of what would in conventional usage be a “paysage de désolation” (a devastated landscape). This is a landscape that becomes a lamenting, dying body. It is sown with “ces corps laboureurs, souches noires hérissées en souvenir d’un bosquet frais” (these plowman’s bodies, bristling black stumps commemorating a shady grove). The term “laboureur” recalls the peasantry of feudal society and Chartier’s lament of the People. The plow is indeed turned into the deadly sword: The word “laboureur” is followed immediately, in apposition, by “souches noires,” the blackened stumps of blasted trees. But is this an apposition of terms designating two different things, or does “souche” define, explain the “corps laboureurs,” as would a simile? The latter case puts the horrible image in front of us of blackened half-bodies, anticipating the “faces noircies” (blackened faces) a few lines further. No, the trunks are those of trees, as they recall the “bosquet frais” (shady grove) of medieval and Renaissance pastoral, the locus amoenus in the shade of which shepherds

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sing love songs. We waver between one and the other, between reminiscences of the old social body and the old poetry, and a horrific new reality of charred and stinking bodies of mud. The final allusion to the stately culture of a “vieille France” is found in the description of the drowning soldier caught in a flooded shell crater; the rain “inonde les trous d’obus où le soldat lourdement harnaché se noie” (floods shell holes, drowning the heavily encumbered soldiers). The soldier who is “lourdement harnaché” is also a knight, with his “harnois,” harness, and his heavy armor, sinking into the mud. The allusion is to the French chevalerie, weighed down and caught in the deadly fire of the English longbows in the battle of Agincourt, seven years before the composition of Chartier’s lament on the miseries of the kingdom. The longbow has been replaced by artillery and the soldier is drowning, in an inversion of the knight’s naturally swift movement over the battleground. A final, ironic feature of this web of cultural allusions is less apparent but no less powerful. It is the presence of smell, or rather stench, along with sound, as the primary sensory vehicles for the representation of the experience of the battlefield: “fange nauséeuse mêlée de l’odeur âcre de poudre brûlée et de charnier qui rend sa propre macération (des semaines sans se dévêtir) presque supportable” (putrid muck mingled with the acrid smell of burned powder and slaughtered flesh that makes one’s own stench [weeks without undressing] almost bearable). The odor of vomit-inducing mud, the bitter smell of burnt powder and decaying flesh, and the stinking absorption of one’s own bodily effluences are sensations that precede the voices of dying soldiers. Conventional medieval and early modern battle descriptions evoke above all the sights and the sounds, in a perspective within or slightly above the fighting. Here we have extreme closeness to the own body in its stink, to other bodies and decaying matter in their stench, as an equivalent of the drowning of the soldier; there is no perspective from above, no redemption. It is an abject perversion of the sensory cultural representation of a “natural” war. Rouaud’s paragraph is also lyrical, in a strange way. It effects both a cyclical return and a linear trajectory. From “paysage de lamentation,” the prosopopeia, the lamenting land that recalls the prosopopeia of Chartier’s peasant representing all those working the earth with their hands, to the “vieille France” that concludes the sentence and this section, we gather a sense of historical reintegration. This is one more avatar of the suffering of France, of the suffering of its people and its lands, under the onslaught of human violence and killing machines. The cyclical structure of the

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

sentence is weirdly reassuring, despite its horrific parts, and almost contemplative in its rhythm and series of ample coordinated clauses. Within this cyclical integrative mode of the paragraph, we find a trajectory that is not cyclical. The rain falling on the trenches will follow the course of the ambulance carrying Joseph to Tours, just as the Loire river flows into the ocean. The rain changes its nature as we focus on that ambulance: la pluie enfin sur le convoi qui martèle doucement la capote de l’ambulance, apaisante soudain, presque familière, enluminées sous les phares en de myriades de petites lucioles, perles de lune qui rebondissent en cadence sur la chaussée, traversent les villes sombres et, à l’approche de Tours, comme le jour se lève, se glissent dans le lit du fleuve au pied des parterres royaux de la vieille France. (p. ) And finally the rain on the convoy, gently tapping on the roof of the ambulance, suddenly grown soothing, almost friendly, transformed [illuminated] by headlight beams into thousands of fireflies, beads of moonlight that bounce rhythmically on the road, traverse dark cities, and, approaching Tours at daybreak, glide into the riverbed at the foot of the royal flower gardens of old France. (p. )

The final form of rain, after the flooding that turns the earth into a giant cloaca, suddenly becomes gentle, peaceful, and “familiar.” The raindrops make soft sounds and are illuminated by the headlights of the car. We return to the regime of the small, the details that fill the space with intimate, delicate sensations. The vocabulary is pastoral and “lyric”: “myriades,” “petites lucioles,” “perles de lune.” From the pitter-patter of the drops on the roof of the car, we move to the “cadence” of the raindrops on the road, a return to music from the deafening sounds of artillery shells. This soft sound is heard from inside the car, and the firefly-like raindrops are seen as well from the safety of the interior of the ambulance. The lyrical here is the recovery of safety in intimacy, in the marvelous detail and the return of music and sight. It is, moreover, movement, through space and into the rising of the sun, away from the deadly immobility of the trench and the shell crater. Rouaud’s vocabulary also associates the historical and the familial. The rain is “enluminée,” illuminated, as in a medieval manuscript illumination, by the strings of pearl-like drops. The rain that slides into the riverbed is already a historical artifact, as are the terraces of the royal châteaux of the Loire. The expression “se glissent dans le lit” ordinarily refers to sliding into bed, to slipping under the covers and retrieving the warmth of a

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Joseph’s Return from the Trenches

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familiar bed, with all its memories of childhood and slipping into the maternal bed. The trajectory to the past is historical and familial. The turn to the wondrous detail presents, then, the capacity of lyric to offer recovery, a retrieval of warmth and comfort, from the horrors of modernity. Joseph does not die at the end of the ambulance’s trajectory, but he also does not recover fully and will die not long afterward, when spring rains have swollen the Loire. The elegiac return to the ancient terraces of the kingdom was not a funeral elegy, but Rouaud’s representation might have led us to believe that it was. It is, nevertheless, still a praise of Joseph, a focusing in on his sacrifice, his wounded body being carried away from the general slaughter of the war. The conclusion of the sentence associates the soothing detail of the raindrops with the light of the moonlit sky in a perfectly lyrical double paronomasia: enluminée – petites lucioles – perles de lune. It is as if the luminous soul of Joseph were already being lifted away from the landscape of lamentation and into the heavens. The description of the rain floods becoming pearls of the moon is a correlate to the recuperation of individual lives extinguished by the clouds of poison gas in the trenches. In this sense, the lyrical – and the elegiac that for my purposes serves as its equivalent – can signal recovery, a return to smallness, the ordinary and its pleasures, while constituting an epideictic discourse, on the background of the nation and its history. The lyrical as it functions here as recuperation is very close to nostalgia. And the combination of Rouaud’s affectionate tone and allusions to a premodern tradition makes it tempting for the reader to just take his representation as that. I understand it less as nostalgia, a desire to return to a better, more innocent (and illusory) past, than the transposition of the lament against war into modern circumstances. Chartier’s peasant decrying the inversion of the natural order is transposed into a world where war is no less the inversion of a natural order, indeed hyperbolically so. The “natural” that allows us to decry the unnatural is not “nature” in any modern sense, but tradition – cultural, historical, mythological, biblical. All of this is presented with more or less explicit irony, even, in many other parts of the novel, playfulness. Lyric representation provides us with a connection to that tradition as a recuperation – in the double sense of “recuperating from” and “retrieving.” Let me emphasize the difference between this recuperation and a nationalistic or heroic discourse of praise. Joseph’s wounding and his death are a consequence not of heroic action but of passive ingestion of poison. His death, and that of the fellow charred and asphyxiated soldiers in the

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

trenches, is closer to the discourse of the martyr, except that Joseph is not given the chance to exemplify his faith. His martyrdom resembles the massacre of the innocents, a subtext that is reinforced by the child-like slipping into the bed of the old France. His sacrifice, contrary to heroic martyrdom or heroic action, is not made available to a nation, is not augmented, and does not inspire others to imitation, to continue the struggle. His recuperation is a retrieval of intimacy, of the small, all within the layers of meaning that a landscape and cultural memory can provide. In conclusion: Rouaud’s representation constructs levels of “naturalness” – mythological, biblical, and historical – while insisting on the slaughter of the trenches as an inversion of that natural order, similarly to Chartier’s lament. Then the representation narrows into the detail that is both wondrous and that functions as the correlate of praise – the raindrop that is the light reflecting the sky – and permits us to return to the natural order, to recover.

War as Boring Opera: Limits of the Lyrical Jean Echenoz’s  was published twenty-two years after Rouaud’s account of his grand-uncle’s death, and although Echenoz is actually a few years older than Rouaud, I cannot help but read his novel as a commentary on the earlier work. It is entirely constructed around the First World War, starting with the mobilization, and then following the experiences of five men from the Vendée region of France, only some of whom survive the front, and a woman whom they know, who spends the war years tending to her family’s business at home. The tone differs from Rouaud’s quizzical familial affection, although it is hardly unsympathetic to the protagonists. In the section we will look at, the narrator follows the soldiers Anthime and Bossis as they escape poison gas by coming out of their tunnel in the open only to be subjected to artillery bombardment. In the final two paragraphs of the section, the narrative draws back and, just as in Rouaud’s novel, considers the scene in a larger perspective. Echenoz first details the sounds produced by all of this murderous weaponry, then other sensations associated with trench warfare: Et dès le lendemain matin ça n’a plus eu de cesse encore, dans le perpétuel tonnerre polyphonique sous le grand froid confirmé. Canon tonnant en basse continue, obus fusants et percutants de tous calibres, balles qui sifflent, claquent, soupirent ou miaulent selon leur trajectoire, mitrailleuses, grenades et lance-flammes, la menace est partout: d’en haut sous les avions et les tirs d’obusiers, d’en face avec l’artillerie adverse et même d’en bas

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War as Boring Opera: Limits of the Lyrical

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quand, croyant profiter d’un moment d’accalmie au fond de la tranchée où l’on tente de dormir, on entend l’ennemi piocher sourdement au-dessous de cette tranchée même, au-dessous de soi-même, creusant des tunnels où il va disposer des mines afin de l’anéantir, et soi-même avec. On s’accroche à son fusil, à son couteau dont le métal oxydé, terni, bruni par les gaz ne luit plus qu’à peine sous l’éclat gelé des fusées éclairantes, dans l’air empesté par les chevaux décomposés, la putréfaction des hommes tombés puis, du côté de ceux qui tiennent encore à peu près droit dans la boue, l’odeur de leur pisse et de leur merde et de leur sueur, de leur crasse et de leur vomi, sans parler de cet effluve envahissant de rance, de moisi, de vieux, alors qu’on est en principe à l’air libre sur le front. Mais non: cela sent le renfermé jusque sur sa personne et en elle-même, à l’intérieur de soi, derrière les réseaux de barbelés crochés de cadavres pourrissants et désarticulés qui servent parfois aux sapeurs à fixer les fils du téléphone – cela n’étant pas une tâche facile, les sapeurs transpirent de fatigue et de peur, ôtent leur capote pour travailler plus aisément, la suspendent à un bras qui, saillant du sol retourné, leur tient lieu de portemanteau. Tout cela ayant été décrit mille fois, peut-être n’est-il pas la peine de s’attarder encore sur cet opéra sordide et puant. Peut-être n’est-il d’ailleurs pas bien utile non plus, ni très pertinent, de comparer la guerre à un opéra, d’autant moins quand on n’aime pas tellement l’opéra, même si comme lui c’est grandiose, emphatique, excessif, plein de longueurs pénibles, comme lui cela fait beaucoup de bruit et souvent, à la longue, c’est assez ennuyeux. And from the next morning on it went on and on some more, in that perpetual polyphonic thunder beneath the vast entrenched cold. Big guns pounding out their basso continuo, time shells and percussion-fuse shells of all calibers, bullets that whistle, bang, sigh, or whine [meow] depending on their trajectory, machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers: danger is everywhere, overhead from the planes and incoming shells, facing you from the enemy artillery, and even from below when, thinking to take advantage of a quiet moment down in the trench, you try to sleep but hear the enemy digging secretly away beneath that very trench, underneath you, carving out tunnels in which to blow the trench to bits, and you with it. You cling to your rifle, to your knife with its blade rusted, tarnished, darkened by poison gases, barely shining at all in the chilly brightness of the flares, in the air reeking of rotting horses, the putrefaction of fallen men and, from those still more or less on their feet in the mud, the stench of their sweat and piss and shit, of their filth and vomit, not to mention that pervasive stink of dank, rancid mustiness, when in theory you’re out in the open air at the front. But no: you even smell of mold yourself, outside and in, inside yourself, you, dug in behind those networks of barbed wire littered with putrefying and disintegrating cadavers to which sappers sometimes attach telephone cables, because sappers don’t have it easy. They

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary sweat from fatigue and fear, take off their greatcoats to work more freely, and might hang them on an arm sticking out of the tumbled soil, using it as a coat tree. All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it’s not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid, stinking opera. And perhaps there’s not much point either in comparing war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs [long stretches], makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

Echenoz’s narrative following the characters Anthime and Bossis pauses, similarly to Rouaud’s general lament, to consider the horrors of the trenches, for all involved (“on”). His representation is much less culturally allusive than his predecessor’s, more precise and technical, and missing from this piece is the elegiac tone that accompanies Joseph’s return to old France. Instead, we can isolate several strands in the representation: at the thematic level, a comparison to the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the opera, and a recalling, despite the apparent disabused and weary attitude of the narrator, of the grand traditional lament of the inverted natural order, and its specific illustration (using a gruesome detail). The style of the representation is both close to conversational, in a choppy sort of way, and yet unafraid of the ample developments of a long sentence. Finally, Echenoz displays awareness of the tradition and his own self-consciousness as a writer, in an attempt, it seems, to undercut any possibility of lyric recuperation. I will go through each of these elements. The comparison to opera, made explicit in the final paragraph quoted above, is prepared by a musical vocabulary (“tonnerre polyphonique,” “basse continue”) that contrasts with the murderous objects producing the sounds. It is not the human hand or voice that produces differences in musical register, but the differing trajectories of the projectiles designed to tear apart the hand and extinguish that voice (“balles qui sifflent, claquent, soupirent ou miaulent selon leur trajectoire” [bullets that whistle, bang, sigh, or whine [meow] depending on their trajectory]). The term “soupirent” recalls, of course, the sighs of amorous longing, and the final “miaulent” the childlike sounds of the kitten – in complete antithesis to the deadly instruments producing them. Sound itself is not the only link to opera: The trenches are like a stage, limited from above, from the sides, and from below, and they entail visual experiences (the no longer shiny metal) and, in a perversion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, odors, indeed stench. The antithesis Echenoz develops is not the one we find in Chartier’s and Rouaud’s laments. It is not the antithesis between the natural order of the

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War as Boring Opera: Limits of the Lyrical

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landscape as fertile earth (and the ancien régime social body) and the indifferent devastation of war, medieval or modern. Instead, it is the antithesis between the sounds and stage of opera and the material objects and subjects of which these sounds and this stage are attributes: bullets and shells, soldiers dying. The antithesis also concerns the aims of opera and the aims of warfare: Opera aims to delight and warfare aims to terrorize. Echenoz’s mundus inversus is not the landscape of the peasant who tills, becoming the landscape of the trenches that kill, but the trenches that kill, evoking something they should not, a performance of a “complete” work of art on a stage. On another level, however – and this will become clear toward the end of the section – instead of the inversion of the natural order (the body politic and historical culture), we have the inversion, in Echenoz’s representation, of everyday life. It is not so much that war is a perversion of the opera, but that the opera is a part of the fabric of ordinary life that is horribly rent by war’s random and vast violence. When we come back to the “natural,” from the horrors of war, we come back to the ordinary. Just as Rouaud’s description features the stench of decomposing flesh, gunpowder, and the body’s dirt and sweat, Echenoz elaborates on the stink of the trenches: dans l’air empesté par les chevaux décomposés, la putréfaction des hommes tombés puis, du côté de ceux qui tiennent encore à peu près droit dans la boue, l’odeur de leur pisse et de leur merde et de leur sueur, de leur crasse et de leur vomi, sans parler de cet effluve envahissant de rance, de moisi, de vieux, alors qu’on est en principe à l’air libre sur le front. Mais non: cela sent le renfermé jusque sur sa personne et en elle-même, à l’intérieur de soi, derrière les réseaux de barbelés crochés de cadavres pourrissants et désarticulés qui servent parfois aux sapeurs à fixer les fils du téléphone – cela n’étant pas une tâche facile, les sapeurs transpirent de fatigue et de peur, ôtent leur capote pour travailler plus aisément, la suspendent à un bras qui, saillant du sol retourné, leur tient lieu de portemanteau. in the air reeking of rotting horses, the putrefaction of fallen men and, from those still more or less on their feet in the mud, the stench of their sweat and piss and shit, of their filth and vomit, not to mention that pervasive stink of dank, rancid mustiness, when in theory you’re out in the open air at the front. But no: you even smell of mold yourself, outside and in, inside yourself, you, dug in behind those networks of barbed wire littered with putrefying and disintegrating cadavers to which sappers sometimes attach telephone cables, because sappers don’t have it easy. They sweat from fatigue and fear, take off their greatcoats to work more freely, and might hang them on an arm sticking out of the tumbled soil, using it as a coat tree.

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Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

Echenoz provides even greater detail than his predecessor, punctuating his description initially with vulgar, everyday terms rather than Rouaud’s more literary “macération” and his discreet “des semaines sans se dévêtir” (weeks without changing clothes): “pisse,” “merde,” “sueur,” “crasse,” and “vomi” (piss, shit, sweat, filth, and vomit). The stench descends into the body itself, like Rouaud’s rain descending into the center of the earth. The paragraph ends on a frightful detail: the sappers hanging their coat on the extended arm of a dead soldier, next to the barbed wire. There are several ways of understanding this detail. Within the narrative, it anticipates the protagonist Anthime’s loss of his own arm and his subsequent return home from the front to Blanche, with whom he fathers a child, which gives the novel its hopeful conclusion. It can be read, in addition, as a parody of the traditional “plowshares into swords” inversion topos: In the skewed world of war, cadavers are turned into household items of ordinary life. This resembles Rouaud’s ambiguous blackened “souches” (tree trunks): Bodies of toiling peasants are turned into the torn-apart bodies of soldiers. The positioning of this detail at the conclusion of the pulled-back description of the front holds it forth as a symbolic detail, something summarizing all that has been taking place and making it available to memory. Indeed, the arm extending from the “sol retourné,” as if from the tilled earth, recalls Chartier’s peasant complaining of his hand being pressed until it is bleeding (and unable to work the fields). But Echenoz’s arm and “portemanteau” are not really symbols in the way plowshares and swords are symbols. They do not stand for peace and for war. Instead, they are details of war and of ordinary life. The dead arm, as are dead soldiers, is a part of the mass of elements making up what warfare is about, and the “portemanteau” is a feature of most ordinary homes. The only home in which a coat tree is not next to the door is one in which a servant takes your coat or an establishment in which you leave your coat in a vestiaire. It is ordinary life that is perverted here, made into something abhorrently grotesque. We are in the realm not of the symbolic but of life here and now, where things do not symbolize but are used. Echenoz’s style conveys well, in this instance, the undercurrent that is ordinary life, the natural world to which we should be able to return. It is at the same time observationally keen, ironic, deftly organizing long descriptive sentences, and abruptly conversational, mixing the two registers as if not to let one or the other take over. The informal elements draw us back to the ordinary. Some examples: “ça n’a plus eu de cesse encore” (on it went on and on some more), with the banal and short-hand, impatient “ça,” “encore,” and the passé composé of “avoir,” just before it changes

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War as Boring Opera: Limits of the Lyrical



registers with the “polyphonic thunder” and the intricate description of the sounds made by projectiles. The sentence concerning the sounds of the enemy burrowing underneath, conveyed by complex syntax, ends in a similarly abrupt, conversational way: “on entend l’ennemi piocher sourdement au-dessous de cette tranchée même, au-dessous de soi-même, creusant des tunnels où il va disposer des mines afin de l’anéantir, et soi-même avec” ([you] hear the enemy digging secretly away beneath that very trench, underneath you, carving out tunnels in which to blow the trench to bits, and you with it). Concluding the sentence with the preposition “avec” is a common feature of conversational style, emphasizing the noun preceding, not succeeding, the preposition. But it is definitely not something you end a paragraph with in literary prose. “En principe” and “Mais non” are equivalent markers of ordinary speech. These are features of Echenoz’s style in general, not simply in this novel, and they transmit the aware playfulness of his narrative and, in juxtaposition to the more writerly portions of his prose, showcase his technical virtuosity. Here, however, they contribute to the sense that war is a terrible inversion of the ordinary (which is the “natural”) and that the ordinary is that to which we desperately want to come back. The final paragraph appears a strange conclusion to this panoramic view of suffering and violence. It is difficult to find a greater contrast to Rouaud’s lyrical vision of a return to the safety of old France. Perhaps unbeknownst to Echenoz, we find in his conclusion an echo of the People’s correctio (“Que appelle je guerre?” [What am I calling a war?]), the emotional center of the peasant’s lament in the Quadrilogue. The terms I have been using cannot account for this. Tout cela ayant été décrit mille fois, peut-être n’est-il pas la peine de s’attarder encore sur cet opéra sordide et puant. Peut-être n’est-il d’ailleurs pas bien utile non plus, ni très pertinent, de comparer la guerre à un opéra, d’autant moins quand on n’aime pas tellement l’opéra, même si comme lui c’est grandiose, emphatique, excessif, plein de longueurs pénibles, comme lui cela fait beaucoup de bruit et souvent, à la longue, c’est assez ennuyeux. All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it’s not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid, stinking opera. And perhaps there’s not much point either in comparing war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs [long stretches], makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

This relatively long, tired interjection by the narrator circles back to the initial part of his description, war as the staging of a multisonant musical work. Maybe, Echenoz seems to be saying, we should not linger over this.

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

Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

The comparison to opera is not useful, not relevant or appropriate, aside from its formal properties. People don’t even like opera that much. Echenoz’s hesitation refers, in an off-handed manner, to the question of whether literature should try to represent, through its particular means of comparison, the horrors of twentieth-century mass violence (and the Holocaust seems a likely subtext here). This can also seem like the lament of a weary writer. Everything worthwhile has been done; everything good has been written; how can I add anything; and then why bother? It is also a gesture, a throwing-up of hands in the face of an impossible task or an impatience to go on to something else, not to have to insist. It resembles in an unsettling way the gesture of the sappers, hanging their coats on the dead man’s arm, trying just to get the job done, not wanting to linger and weigh the significance of the situation. But the sappers are sweating from fatigue and fright, whereas the narrator is writing from the vast comfort of the ordinary. His weariness is not the same as theirs; his weariness is part of the natural order that in  the war had inverted. The comparison between war and opera veers into strange directions. Why is it inappropriate? Because people (and the narrator) do not like opera that much – but do they like war? The narrator insists on the comparison: War is grandiose, excessive, long-winded, loud, and, worse, it is boring. The latter adjective is predicated not of opera but of war. War is boring. This adjective strikes us as misplaced, since war is a cause for lamentation not because it is boring but because it causes terrible suffering. Moreover, the chapters of Echenoz’s own novel have shown that, if anything, boredom is the antithesis of a deserter’s execution, the slaughter of horses and men, and the burning alive of airmen. That, perhaps, is the point. It is due to the ordinary life of the narrator and his readers, in , that war can be deemed boring. Boredom is the most ordinary of the features of ordinary life. So there is no lyrical trajectory away from the trenches to the parterres of royal châteaux, as in Rouaud; recovery from that slaughter is merely distance that the passage of time has given us. That distance has allowed the slaughter to be written about a thousand times, and it has allowed us to feel boredom with opera as with descriptions of war. This unafraid resignation to the palliative effects of temporal distance and the embracing of ordinary life lend Echenoz’s representation a certain kind of charm, produce a certain kind of pleasure of the reading experience. It is not necessarily that of entering fully into the fictional world of his protagonists, something lyric episodes seem to encourage. His ordinary

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War as Boring Opera: Limits of the Lyrical



life stance enables us to sympathize with him, the narrator-author, perhaps more so than with the protagonists of his fiction. Echenoz’s narration is “cooler” than lyric sympathy, and the pleasure we derive from it is close to the privilege of cynicism, seeing the misfortunes of others, in other times, from the shore. This does not preclude the conveying of intense horror at war and the suffering and injustice it causes. It does not mean, then, that war is somehow lent a glory and its protagonists a misplaced heroism, all the more facile since we do not have to be part of it. Rather, we can both condemn the horrific absurdity of war and somehow enjoy Echenoz’s virtuoso light touch, very much in tune with the position we occupy as ordinary people in ordinary lives, who hang our coats on a banal coat tree next to a door. Thus Echenoz has demonstrated limits to lyric empathy, to kinesic reenactment, and to intimacy of the detail, all of which work within his predecessor’s prose. Rouaud’s affection and cultural reverence, even if it is flavored with irony, invite a sympathy on the part of the (especially French) reader, just as lyric furnishes the elements of identification or reenactment, with the protagonist himself, in his position in the trenches and inside the ambulance. Rouaud’s rhetoric of praise and the presence, in the background, of grand cultural narratives that are shared throughout time provide the comfort of repetition and access to universal experiences, whatever ordinary life might represent to the individual. This combination allows recovery, not just appreciation at a distance, in a continuous historical representation.

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Conclusion

My survey of select and largely well-known poems and lyric passages in prose contains implicit and explicit claims that necessitate some recapitulation. My uncomfortable sense is that while the strength of this book lies in the pragmatic work with poems and passages we know very well, by means of its isolation of the workings of lyric soliciting the human, its more general perspective is both commonplace and contested. I have taken a perspective all throughout this study that assumes a natural connection between the lyrical and traditional, historical features of the “human.” The classical material is viewed in part through the lens of humanist commentary, while the early modern material is understood in the context of rhetoric in particular, and the modern material is read through a literary and an ethical tradition harking back to the late Middle Ages. I would like to return to specific features of this humanity, features that would not be foreign to classical Antiquity, that were often foregrounded or at least implied in the early modern period and that are the object of more recent historiography. They are more problematic during our own times, as we seem obsessed with showing that these features are neither specific to our species nor even specific to organic life. Contrary to their normative status in the early modern period, however, these human features need to be understood not as privileges, as marks of superiority, nor as instruments of group exclusion, but as abilities. As modern readers, we are in a position of dissociating these abilities and the social use to which they have been put. The fact that human beings are capable of rational deliberation, for example, can be considered as separate from the political or generally ideological aims that deliberation has served. We can take advantage both of their availability, their currency, throughout history and of our historical and critical distance as modern-day readers.



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Human Abilities and the “Person”

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Human Abilities and the “Person” All of the following features of the human arise, in the literature I have chosen, from a faith in mimetic representation, and more precisely in linguistic representation. Language not only can communicate intentions and express a speaker’s experiences but can render present a world that is accessible, shareable with others, with a reader, with readers, independently of the time and circumstances in which the words are uttered or written. The features of the “human” are the following, in order of their connection to the sequence of texts: • Empathy, the ability to reenact or relive in some measure experiences that we perceive others as undergoing or having undergone • Equity or fairness, the ability to understand individual circumstances as presenting grounds for making exceptions to a general rule • The projection of a future and an end to life, and the consequences this projection may have on those living in the present • The use of reason and the sense that other beings share this use; specifically, in this case, to understand our position in time and the pleasure we can derive from that position • The imagination of happiness and its sharing through representation of the world • The retrieval of intimacy and well-being not simply through individual means of physical comfort but through connection to a common cultural tradition. As I mentioned above, these features are not “privileges” in the sense that they might render human beings superior to members of other species or closer to God, although some of them might have been thought to be such in history. They might have been used, or are used, to justify social practices of exclusion or inclusion. This is not my concern in this book. Instead, I think of these abilities as elements of human beings living well, and living well as human beings. Another way of understanding these abilities is to note that they are implied by and associated with what it means to be a person. I have generally avoided the use of this term, in favor of “human being,” because of the latter’s resonances with notions of humanity, the humane, humanism, and the abilities associated in current and past usage with human beings. I have avoided the term “person” also because the Latin persona and its vernacular derivatives are determined, in classical and early modern times, by a variety of technical usages, in the fields of drama, rhetoric, law,

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Conclusion

moral thought, and theology. Especially rhetoric and moral thought elaborate manifestations of the persona that are useful to our literary analysis, and I will summarize the sort of human abilities entailed by rhetoric as a practice in the next section. The fundamental discussion of what a person is can be found in medieval and early modern philosophy. As defined by Boethius, the “person” designates, minimally, an individual substance endowed with a rational nature, and refers to the human being. Medieval theologians offer many elaborations of this definition, attaching notions of moral freedom, dignity, incommunicability (i.e., a person is not part of another entity), and self-awareness. The most consequential revision of Boethius’s definition remains that of Thomas Aquinas, who articulates the rational nature of a person, that is, a being capable of rational thought (which implies self-reflection and awareness of identity over time, through memory and recall), by adding the capacity of acting on its own, possessing a certain mastery over its actions. Acting requires intellect (the source of judgment and knowledge) and will (the “appetitive,” the drive toward something). This ontological concept of the person, in its emphasis on a type of action, ties in well with the moral culture of early modern Europe and is coherent with this culture’s foundation in rhetoric. It is preferable to the notion of the individual, which modern historiography has privileged. The individual, as it is used loosely in expressions such as “the emergence of the individual,” refers either to a kind of heroic or illustrious human being, say, the condottiero or the intrepid merchant, or simply to someone’s private life, filled with its quirks and accidental, singular features. Neither of these aspects of the notion of the individual addresses the question of human abilities as an element of living well. According to (Aristotelian) early modern moral philosophy, acting in a way that realizes our fullest abilities as a human person means to act virtuously. It is not the virtues themselves that interest me – a set whose core is stable but whose total membership is variable and subject to many different historical interpretations – but what all virtuous action seems to entail, in the action itself. In order for an action to count as a virtuous action, certain criteria have to be met, independently of the object and goal of the action. A common formulation of these criteria is found in Alessandro Piccolomini’s Institutione della vita morale, a treatise in the Tuscan vernacular paraphrasing some arguments of the Nicomachean Ethics, emphasizing virtue as an activity (and not mere speculation), to be learned and then exercised with pleasure. Piccolomini lists the four criteria for a virtuous action to count as such: “che una operation nostra

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Human Abilities and Rhetoric



proceda da virtù, sia necessario, ch’ella habbia quattro conditioni; coiè, ch’ella sia spontanea, consultata, eletta, & voluta” (for an action of ours to proceed from virtue, it is necessary that it have four conditions; that is, that it be voluntary, deliberate, chosen, and desired). All virtuous action, for it to count as virtuous, must be voluntary and not forced upon the agent. It must involve some degree of rational deliberation on the part of the agent and not done “blindly” or by chance. It must have been an option chosen by the agent and not the only option available. It must have been wished for by the agent, and not done regretfully. This kind of action, for much of the Western historical tradition, is the expression of a kind of excellence of the human being, realizing its abilities to the fullest extent. These conditions, and the notion of the person, are linked to the abilities I have listed above. All of the texts I have discussed in this book presume them. The notion of the person as a distinct substance and capable of both rational thought and action in the way I have described is implied by the abilities addressed in my chapters. It is tempting to englobe this link between abilities and the person, aware of their actions, under the rubric of subjectivity, and understand (again) the lyric as the reign of subjectivity. However, my analyses have never concluded with the emergence of mere self-reflection and self-awareness, what we might now call a “self.” A self in the sense of a mind merely aware of itself need not act and does not, some would argue, even require the presence of others. Instead, the lyric texts I have analyzed in this book center on our relation to others and on our awareness of others who are similar to us. In this sense, the abilities they activate provide the elements of those virtues that connect us with others and that in the early modern period would have been deemed necessary to an ethical (and a good) life. Perhaps most of all, they are connected to rhetoric.

Human Abilities and Rhetoric Although these features of the human person – empathy, equity, projection of a future, rational deliberation, imagination of happiness, and intimacy in a common tradition – are evident to most of us, indeed border on the cliché, they are in need of further articulation. Certain uses of language require or imply certain abilities and, most relevantly, uses of language that are the domain of rhetoric, which in history has entertained a close link to concepts of humanity. The first two, empathy and fairness, are implied by rhetoric’s insistence on the inclusion of pathos, of affective means of persuasion, in the composition and delivery of effective speech. If

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Conclusion

we were unable to reenact or understand the affective situation of others, this means of persuasion would be ineffective. If we cannot be made to relive, as it were, the affective situation of other persons, then arguments concerning their well-being or generally their condition cannot have much purchase on us. Rhetoric assumes that an audience can be moved to act or to adopt a position on the basis of affective empathy with others. Similarly, if the speaker cannot have any understanding of the affective state of their audience, then the speaker cannot hope to elicit their good will and cannot select proofs that will influence this affective state. The speaker cannot adapt the speech to the circumstances, one of the essential features of successful rhetoric. The next two features, projection of a future and reasoning, are inherent to deliberative and judicial rhetoric (and reflect the logos of classical rhetoric). We must be able to conceive of future circumstances in which we might find ourselves, in order to decide on options to be taken in the present. Similarly, we must be able to avail ourselves of causation and implication if we are to understand sequences of events and the connections between propositions about the world in order to determine, let alone evaluate, past behavior. Just as in the case of pathos, these abilities of projection and of reasoning are shared by audience and speaker; an audience unable to follow and to accept the conclusions of a rational argument deprives the speaker of an essential tool of rhetoric. The speaker, too, of a successful speech must be able to compose a rational argument in support of the speech’s proposition. The final two features, representation of happiness and retrieval of intimacy through connection to a common tradition, are less a part of public rhetoric and more an element of “familiar” rhetoric: that of letters and conversation. It is less a matter of persuading an interlocutor, although that too can be an intention, and more a matter of ensuring the continuation and reinforcement of affective and social bonds, the integration into a “home,” through speech or writing. Familiar rhetoric allows human beings to recognize or be reminded of their resemblances, of constituting a society. Pleasure and happiness are an indelible element of this well-being in society and are the matter of rhetoric. Arguably, a decisive development of Aristotle’s theory of pleasure is found in his Rhetoric (I.x.–xi.), and it is inseparable from his conception of human happiness (Nicomachean Ethics, VII.xi.–xiv.). It is simply a given that well-being is a product of management of the affects, pleasure an activity that manifests well-being at its highest level, and that both constitute an integral part of the rhetoric that accommodates what human beings are.

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Human Abilities and History

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In other words, all of the features of the human listed above have been inherent to theories of effective communication at least since classical times. They strike us as uncontroversial, even today, despite our professional reflex to historicize universal statements about a human nature and to criticize its social and cultural use. My claims about rhetoric can also be made about what we call literature, whether it is lyric or follows any other generic option. One may argue much more broadly, moreover, that all linguistic representation involves these features (and others as well). It is impossible, for someone reading, say, a novel, not to activate one of these abilities at some moment during the reading experience, even in the most trivial parts of a narration. When we read an account of a person stepping onto a bus, we activate multiple capacities. We feel the physical movement required to do so. We understand that there is a temporal sequence, a moment before being on the steps of the bus and one after. We understand this as a deliberate action (movement is made in order for the person to be on the bus). We project a future for this person (they will be somewhere else thanks to the bus, and will get off at a future stop). We do not wish for this person to slip and fall under the bus. We understand, or are invited to understand, what a bus is, what collective transportation is, and what sort of a space is implied by bus transportation. And so forth. Through all of these features of the reading experience, we activate multiple abilities that we share with other readers.

Human Abilities and History The abilities I have listed are connected to history, but they do not seem to be radically determined by history. Once we tie these abilities to affects and lend them a certain name, for example, “pity,” “compassion,” “equity,” “deliberation,” “intimacy,” “pleasure,” we can argue that there is a history of the ability or affect being designated. That is, the term “pleasure,” to take an obvious case, can know many lexical variations in the Western context and in time, from placitum, its origin, to voluptas and volupté and voluptuous, to joy and gaudium and many others. Each of these terms has a specific sense in a certain historical context, and it is not necessarily a sense that is stable across time. In addition, each of these terms has a specific sense in different cultural or intellectual areas at any particular point in time, and may differ in meaning according to its appearance as a vernacular or Latin word. Moreover, one can argue that persons in history are affected differently by the same circumstance or that similar affects are provoked by different

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Conclusion

circumstances. For example, violence and suffering do not elicit precisely the same reactions across historical periods. Public executions and their violence were once a spectacle to be taken in by an amused crowd, as were gory gladiatorial contests. In the case of suffering, the emotion of pity, largely limited to human beings as its object in times before our own, might come to be extended more frequently to other species today. Moreover, moving from the affective realm, one can argue that rational speech has had differing powers during history, even if it has not had a significantly different formal structure. The nature and frequency of human interaction have evolved during the last , years, and as humans are biological beings, it is not at all surprising that we find important variations in the uses of thought and the manifestations and nature of affect. But does this mean that a Roman living under Augustus is incapable of feeling pleasure the way a nineteenth-century bourgeois in Paris can? Is a Renaissance poet unable to sense joy the way that we are able to? Or, more importantly, is a Roman living under Augustus unable to exercise empathy with another human being, although we can? My immediate answer would be no. In order to clarify that answer, we might further distinguish, as I have suggested, between an ability that is present in human beings throughout history and the various uses and limitations of that ability in history. Empathy might be shared by human beings living now and living  years ago, but empathy might also be exercised in highly distinct ways by persons living now and living then. While the various circumstances and manifestations of empathy are surely determined by social strictures and relations, the ability itself does not seem to be socially constructed. My self-assurance on this last point arises from my readings of literature.

Literature and Human Abilities Literature can be key to understanding trenchant differences in how we use abilities according to historical and social determinations, since it is the most complex imagining and recording of an inhabited historical and social world. But literature can do the opposite, as well. Literary representations can reflect a continuity over time in what we consider to be human. Their historical situation does not render them impermeable to our understanding, at least in relation to various abilities that being human appears to imply. The analysis of a given literary text cannot determine precisely what its reading experience consisted of for a Roman living under

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Literature and Human Abilities

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Augustus, for example, but it can reveal ascertainable elements that speak to certain abilities (which we share). My argument will strike many as tautological – we can identify and understand human abilities through literature because we have those same abilities – and it is. It is analogous to Aristotle’s way of proceeding in moral philosophy: Ethical knowledge is gained not deductively, from a priori propositions about the good, but through the culling of the ways in which we actually practice what we consider to be moral judgment and behavior. The argument is descriptive, not prescriptive: We can and do perceive elements in texts that strike us as speaking to features of humanity, and we can define them. These elements are present as words on a page and can be identified by readers with an awareness of what the language making up those texts meant in the historical time during which they were composed. Moreover, lyric, in particular, and lyrical episodes within texts that are not as such considered to be poetry can heighten our sense of these abilities defining our humanity. This is a point crucial to this book. Lyric and the lyrical claim our attention in these areas more so than does a chronicle of events, many descriptions, much dialogue, or other types of literary writing. In this book, I have shown the various means by which this happens. These means, once again, are not exclusive to lyric, but when they are used well (and the examples I have chosen are by common consensus excellent writing) they can solicit this sense of humanity. The means range from the resources of pathos to the manipulation of words to the imagining of landscape. They often involve a use of praise, of detail or smallness, of slowing down or suspending, of a measure of irony, of reasoning, of variations in time, of focus on a person or persons, and of address or apostrophe. These elements are admittedly heterogeneous, are not always present in all cases, or are present to a differing extent, but they form a sort of reserve on which lyric draws. Culling the elements that connect the texts to these human abilities means understanding the representations they offer in detail. “Close reading,” a practice of attentiveness to the articulation of the text, and a reluctance to jump to themes and intentions and to the cultural context of the text seem the best options in considering the lyrical in its power to solicit human abilities. This can strike us as paradoxical: Only the repeated consideration of the detail will allow us to envisage the general whole. The breezier a reading is, unconcerned with detail, or the more it subsumes the text into a set of examples adduced to demonstrate a thesis concerning society, culture, and history, the less it can elicit that particular power of literature. This by no means implies that these types of readings have less

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Conclusion

value and are not instructive, but that is not what this book and its approach have been about.

Lyric Humanity, through Five Series of Texts Orpheus has long held a particular fascination for the Western lyric tradition, in part thanks to his incarnation as the poet-singer, in part as the lover, as the epic companion, and in part as the tragic figure who failed to retrieve his wife from the dead. It is the success of this last part as a representation, a narrative, and an intricate construction of words that interests me. The major versions celebrated by the Western tradition are integrated into Virgil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and two tragedies by Seneca. These versions constitute lyric episodes, not separate works, and each relies on different means to highlight an aspect of the powers of lyric representation. Virgil and Ovid both provide us with reasons to pardon Orpheus’s transgression of Proserpina’s law. Virgil works simultaneously with pathos and careful appeal to our judgment. Ovid forsakes pathos in favor of forensic rhetoric and kinesic empathy. Seneca, for his part, eliminates empathy entirely in order to highlight the inhumanity that consists in the inability to pardon. In all these cases, varying features of our humanity are solicited by the means of the representation themselves. Death radically resists the power of words; it is, as Orpheus ultimately reminds us, and as Seneca confirms, what cannot be undone by speech. But death is also the subject of much lyric writing, of lament and complaint. Clément Marot is one of the great early modern wordsmiths, and the subject of death is a current running through his abundant and formally varied poetry. Words are key, gestures involving replacing or molding them, repeating them, teasing meanings from them. This lyric power is not simply a game, an amusement, but is aimed at imagining death to not be the ultimate end. Lamenting the deceased is turned into a power to induce peace in the world; the poetic overturning of death is a guide to the political overturning of the death we cause. Another use of finality in lyric is the representation of pleasure. Chapter  traced, through three examples, the power of lyric to combine reasoning, an intense awareness of the pressure of time, and the perfection of pleasure. Lyric is not necessarily sentimental, flooded by emotion to the detriment of reason. To the contrary, lyric can exploit the powers of dialectical and rhetorical reasoning to its advantage, as it were. From Ronsard’s persuasion poem to Madame de Lafayette’s scene of lovers’ mutual bliss to Baudelaire’s evocation of a sublime urban encounter,

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Lyric Humanity, through Five Series of Texts



reasoning and awareness of the constraints of time conspire to perfect the pleasure of the moment. The ephemeral pleasure is best precisely because we are aware of its imminent ending. Lyric can also prepare a sense of progressive, durative happiness. Flaubert, not known for his joyous outlook on the world, provides the reader with intricate representations of this sort of happiness, through description of landscapes. These “objective correlates” of happiness are mostly situated as imaginings of happiness, but do not rely entirely on the subjective point of view, and sometimes are not subjective at all. Despite their disabused tone, L’éducation sentimentale and his tale Un coeur simple contain many such lyrical episodes that perform a kind of educative function for the reader, a guide to what sort of activity happiness is. Finally, lyric can provide reminders of a common tradition as a recovery from catastrophic violence and abjection. In this, it partakes of but is not equivalent to a tradition of national lamentation. My examples, this time, are contemporary: Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur and, as a counterpoint, Jean Echenoz’s . Both are representations of French soldiers’ experience of trench warfare in the First World War. Rouaud presents us with a lyrical escape from the trenches, although it is not a healing or salvation but a mere return to a sense of familial and cultural intimacy. His means hark back to the traditions with which we have become familiar. Echenoz, on the other hand, plays with the lyrical in his representations of the horror but offers no recovery, just distance acquired through the now pervasive presence of ordinary life.

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Notes

Introduction  Canzoniere, rev. ed., ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, ), , – (“You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs . . .,” trans. Robert Durling [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ]).  Les amours et les folastries (–), ed. André Gendre (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, “Livre de poche classique,” ), , ; for the  variant, Oeuvres complètes, vol. , ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, ), p.: “[Qu’il] [m]e vienne lire: il voirra la douleur . . .” (, ) (Let him come read me: he will see the pain . . . [my italics and trans.]). Of course, the verb “voir” also has the sense of “register, record” and more generally “understand.”  For a good historical account of the definition and emergence of lyric, see Gustavo Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique: Essai sur la formation d’un genre, trans. Anne-Joelle Stéphan (Paris: Seuil, ).  For the presence of Horace in Italian poetics of the Renaissance, see the classic by Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), vol. , pp. –; the most recent study of Horace’s importance for an ethic of the “person,” both in the sense of the person of the author and the representation of persons, in Renaissance poetic practice and theory is Nathalie Dauvois, Pour une autre poétique: Horace renaissant (Geneva: Droz, ).  Ars poetica, – (the Muse grants the “players of the lyre,” fidibus, these themes).  See my Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, for an analysis of Petrarch’s lyric as both reponsive and impermeable to the rhetorical tradition.  For a good summary and somewhat more modernist account of the relation between lyric and subjectivity in the early modern period, see Roland Greene, “The Lyric,” in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. : The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. The critical literature on the “self” and early modern literature is copious. I have attempted to present a brief synthesis in “Is There 

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Notes to pages –

 





 





a Self in Renaissance Lyric?,” in Véronique Ferrer, Luc Vaillancourt, Eugenio Refini (eds.), Représentations de soi à la Renaissance (Paris: Hermann, forthcoming). The distinction, derived from Plato’s Republic (III.d–a), is taken up by Diomedes (Ars grammatica, III), and in Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, VIII..II). The most egregious example is Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, in which the commentator does the poet one step better, by realigning the poems to conform to his vision of the poet’s life. The edition I am using includes in its preliminary material a biography of Petrarch, a description of Vaucluse, a biography of Laura, the privilegio for Petrarch’s coronation, and his testament (Il Petrarca con l’espositione di M. Alessandro Velutello [Venice: Giovanni Antonio Bertano, ]). See the classic studies of Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, rd ed. (Stuttgart: Klett, ), pp. –, and Karl Pestalozzi, Die Entstehung des lyrischen Ich: Studien zum Motiv der Erhebung in der Lyrik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ). For a recent comprehensive attempt, see Jonathan Culler, Theory of Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); for my purposes the most valuable aspect of this study is its emphasis on apostrophe as a mode of address particular to lyric, and its various consequences for the speaker’s relation to the world, including a tendency to emphasize a relation to the present moment (pp. –). See Culler, Theory of Lyric, pp. –, for a summary of these nonmimetic features of lyric, developed throughout his study. The more modern the examples become, indeed the less mimetic they appear. Although the propria hominis vary among authors, the most common ones are the qualities of being erect, bipedal, laughter, speech, and reason. See MarieLuce Demonet, “Les propres de l’homme chez Montaigne et Charron,” in Marie-Luce Demonet (ed.), Montaigne et la question de l’homme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), pp. –. “Kinesic”in the sense of the intelligence of, the perception of, physical movement as conveying another intelligence (as opposed to mere “kinetic,” the fact of movement). See Guillemette Bolens, Le style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, ); on the conveying of emotion and empathic reaction in literature, see Patrick Colm Hogan, “What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion: Synthesizing Affective Science and Literary Study,” in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.

Chapter   “[O]ratio vehementer pathetica,” as commentator Cristoforo Landino characterizes Proteus’s narration of the story of Orpheus’s failed retrieval of Eurydice, in the fourth Georgic (Opera Vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita:

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

Notes to page 

docte quidem Bucolica & Georgica a Servio, Donato, Mancinello: & Probo nuper addito: cum adnotationibus Beroaldinis. Aeneis vero ab iisdem praeter Mancinellum & Probum: & ab Augustino Datho in eius principio: Opusculorum praeterea quaedam ab Domitio Calderino: Familiariter vero omnia tam opera quam opuscula ab Iodoco Badio Ascensio . . . [Paris: Jehan Petit, ], fol. r). For modern readers, however, when set against the Ovidian version of the story, the pathetic nature of Virgil’s version can seem “overwrought and melodramatic” (Richard Tarrant, “Ovid and Ancient Literary History,” in Philip Hardie [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Ovid [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ], pp. –, see p. ).  On Orpheus’s powerful song, inspired by the Platonic “divino furore,” see Landino, “Proemio al commento dantesco” (), in Scritti critici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini (Rome: Bulzoni, ), vol. , pp.  and especially ; Orpheus was revered as an immortal god, p. . For an assessment of the importance of Orpheus as a myth in Antiquity, see Emmet Robbins, “Famous Orpheus,” in John Warden (ed.), Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), pp. –. On the Renaissance afterlife of Orpheus as a figure of poetry’s powers, see Françoise Joukovsky, Orphée et ses disciples dans la poésie française et néo-latine du XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, ), and on the multiple meanings Orpheus acquired in this period, Gabriele Bräkling-Gersuny, Orpheus, der Logos-Träger: Eine Untersuchung zum Nachleben des antiken Mythos in der französischen Literatur des . Jahrhunderts (Munich: W. Fink, ). Thorough accounts of how the early modern period received classical poetics are Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (eds.), Poétiques de la Renaissance: Le modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, ), and the canonical Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance,  vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  According to Boccaccio (Genealogie deorum gentilium, XIV, ), Orpheus (and Musaeus and Linus) were enlisted to provide language to praise the gods during ritual sacrifices; they were moved in some way by the divine spirit and composed new verses that conveyed the divine mysteries. Hence they were considered to be the first theologians. On Boccaccio’s various uses of the Orpheus story, see Sergio Ferrarese, Sulle trace di Orfeo: storia di un mito (Pisa: ETS, ), pp. –.  On the myth of Orpheus in its various versions and historical resonance, see Warden, Orpheus, and the anthology and commentary by Marina Di Simone, Amore e morte in uno sguardo: Il mito di Orfeo e Euridice tra passato e presente (Florence: Libri Liberi, ). Modern literary and theoretical appropriations of Orpheus (Rilke, Blanchot) are too far removed from the actual classical texts, and constitute insufficiently elaborated mimeses, for my purposes: see, for a wide-ranging discussion (especially in French and German literature), Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).

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Notes to pages –



 In Virgil’s fourth Georgic the eminently “empathetic” quality of the Orpheus section – the term is Brooke Otis’s – is a quality well noted by critics; Orpheus is “the fully human figure” in difference to Aristaeus and in stark contrast to the bees and their functional reproductive society, according to Charles Segal (Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ], p. ).  On the book and commentary reception of Virgil in the Renaissance, see the numerous bibliographical studies by Craig Kallendorf, and most recently Printing Virgil: The Transformation of the Classics in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, ); on the reception of the Georgics, see David Scott WilsonOkamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.  In Virgil’s case, the commentary of Juan Luis de la Cerda (published –) is a good example of this expansive later form. See Kallendorf, Printing Virgil, p. .  These contrasts are pointed out by Segal, Orpheus, pp. –. Further similarities and contrasts can be noted between Proteus captured by Aristaeus, and Orpheus: The former represents timeless, natural truths, whereas the latter incarnates human, historical, and limited truths. See David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), pp. – and especially pp. –. According to W. S. Anderson, Aristaeus represents for Virgil the guilty but “energetically purposive” model of action that we need to embrace, in opposition to the passionate but flawed Orpheus (“The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid,” in Warden, Orpheus, pp. –, see p. ).  Georgics, IV.–, rev. ed., ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). I have modified the translation to make it more literal. In portions of the following analysis, I draw on my “Turning toward the Beloved (Virgil, Petrarch, Scève),” in Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters (eds.), Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –, especially pp. –.  In the rhetorical sense of soliciting the emotions, of “moving” as opposed to “instructing” the audience.  In Opera vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita, fol. r. A sixteenth-century commentator, Filippo Venuti, elaborates: “è gran perturbatione d’animo, che havendola quasi rihavuta, l’habbia poi persa: & è gran pietà, non altrimenti che di una nave, la quale havendo scappate molte fortune, arrivata poi, sia pericolata in porto” (it is extremely disturbing for the soul that, having almost had her back, he lost her afterward, and a great pity, not unlike that of a ship, having escaped many misfortunes, and then arrived, sinking in the harbor) (L’Opere di Virgilio Mantoano coiè la Bucolica, la Georgica, e l’Eneide. Commentate in lingua volgare toscana, da Giovanni Fabrini da Fighine, da

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









Notes to page 

Carlo Malatesta da Rimene, & da Filippo Venuti da Cortona . . . [Venice: Heredi di Marchiò Sessa, ], fol. r). As opposed to a monarchical clemency or mercy, between an all-good or allpowerful king or God and his inferior subjects. See on this distinction the illuminating essay by Martha C. Nussbaum, “‘If you could see this heart’: Mozart’s Mercy,” in Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster (eds.), Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. I am thankful to William Fitzgerald for this reference. Jodocus Badius Ascensius repeats the commonplace: “Sunt enim amantes caeci & amentes fere” (For lovers are blind and mad beasts) (Opera Vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita, fol. v). Venuti: “incautum è l’epiteto de l’innamorato, perche non è cosa alcuna tanto propria a gl’innamorati quanto essere poco accorti, & imprudenti: dice dementia, pazzia l’esser fuor di sentimento, perche la forza d’amore non è altro che pazzia” (careless is the epithet of the person in love, because there is nothing as proper to lovers than being heedless and imprudent: he calls dementia, madness being deprived of understanding, because the force of love is nothing other than madness) (L’Opere di Virgilio Mantoano, fol. r). Dementia can be a cause for “excuse” (excusatio) of a past fault or of outright pardon (venia) in legal proceedings (see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VII..–). Landino: “Incautum: nihil tam proprium amanti: unde pueris equiparantur & propterea Proper[tius] [Elegies .–]. Quicunque ille fuit puerum qui pinxit amorem. Nonne putas miras hunc habuisse manus? Is primum videt sine sensu vivere amantes. Et levibus curis magna perire bona” (Incautum: nothing more appropriate to a lover: by which they are compared to boys and hence Propertius: “Whoever he was who painted Love as a boy, think you not that he had wondrous skill? He was the first to see that lovers behave childishly and that great blessings are lost through their petty passions” [trans. G. P. Goold]) (Opera Vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita, fol. r). Guillaume Michel dit de Tours adds this point to his amplified translation: “mais touteffois les dieux / Estre debvoient misericordieux / Deu et congneu quon ne doibt point donner / Sus les amans decret ou ordonner” (however the gods should have been full of pity, since it is known that one must not impose on lovers decrees or command them) (Les Georgicques de Virgile Maron: translatees de Latin en francoys: et Moralisees [(Paris): Durand Gerlier, ], Riir). The dementia of lovers would render them incapable of entering into contracts or of leaving valid testaments, according to Roman law (Institutes .. and .., respectively) – since a furiosus (a person outside him- or herself, demented) lacks the necessary reason or mind (“furiosi . . . mente carent,” .., “demented people are bereft of mind”). This is, perhaps, precisely (and perversely) the reason why the law was laid down in the first place: Prohibiting the look back at the beloved is demanding of lovers something they are incapable of fulfilling. It is a way of making sure that Eurydice remains in Hades, and making sure that this pathetic fable renders immemorial the implacable law of death.

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Notes to pages –



 Ascensius: “Dementia dico ignoscenda: id est ut dicunt condonanda & remittenda quidem: id est certa quia non per pravitatem sed per vim amoris legem transgressus est” (Dementia dico ignoscenda: that is, as they say, to be forgiven and remitted, indeed: for not by a malicious intent but by the strength of love he violated the law) (Opera Vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita, fol. v).  Pub. Virgilii Maronis Opera omnia. Cum Notis selectissimis Variorum Servii, Donati, Pontani, Farnabii, &cc et Indice Locupletissimo Rerum ac Verborum Opera ac studio Cornelii Schrevelii (Lyon: Offic. Bourgeatiano, ), p. .  Landino, in Opera Vergiliana docte et familiariter exposita, fol. r. Venuti reproduces and translates the same comment: “vuol dir questo: che se conoscessimo quanto ardentemente, & miserabilmente desiderano gl’innamorati di vedere cosa amata, & quanto sia vehemente questa perturbatione in tal cosa, giudicariamo quelli meritare ogni perdono in tale errore: ma l’ombre infernali per la loro crudeltà, non hanno mai conosciuta alcuna humanità” (L’Opere di Virgilio Mantoano, fol. r).  This sense of attention to a particular case would be called “epieikeia,” “aequitas” (equity, fairness) in a classical context. It is not identical to lawfulness or legal justice, but an innate fairness that is solicited when we feel that a law is too general or harsh, and that a specific case deserves an exception from that law. The equitable judge will examine the circumstances of the case and imagine what the legislators of the law intended when they proposed the law. If the specific case does not seem to fall into that intention, then application of the law can be suspended. See Aristotle (Rhetoric I., a–b, Nicomachean Ethics, V., a–a), and the opening of the Institutes (I., “De iustitia et iure”). Orpheus’s case is not entirely comparable to the legal setting of equity, since the agreement with Proserpina is not a law covering an indeterminate number of cases, but only the poet. However, both Virgil and the commentaries use the term lex (law) to refer to this agreement, as if it were a law covering the case of the poet, and potentially other such cases.  See Giuseppe Pavano, “La discesa di Orfeo,” Il Mondo Classico  (): –; Anderson, “The Orpheus”; Segal, Orpheus, pp. –.  See, among the numerous studies, for samples of the reception of Ovid’s myths and a good bibliography, Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (eds.), Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Publications of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, ); on the rhetorical reconfiguration of mythology in late medieval and early modern France, see Hervé Campangne, Mythologie et rhétorique aux XVe et XVIe siècles, en France (Paris: Champion, ).  Regius [Rafaele Regio], in Accipe Studiose Lector P. Ovidii Metamorphosin cum luculentissimis Raphaelis Regii enarrationibus . . . (Venice: Leonardo Lauredano ), fol. v.  Metamorphoses IX–XV, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), X.–. I have modified the translation slightly, to render it more literal, at the price of some awkwardness in English.

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

Notes to pages –

 On “sufficient” mourning of Eurydice, Pavano, “La discesa,” p. , and Anderson, “The Orpheus,” p. ; on the “commonplace” nature of the speech, Pavano, p. , and Anderson, pp. –.  Essentially, “we are all destined to die, so death is not something to be afraid of or to mourn excessively in others” (see Seneca, Epistles to Lucilius, XXX, and Plutarch, Letter of Condolence to Apollonius, , in his Moralia). Of course, Orpheus turns this around: If we are all destined to die anyway, it will not be a burden or loss for the infernal gods to wait a little longer in an individual case.  The revival of studies of rhetoric has shown this repeatedly; see, for the most incisive treatment of this question, Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “lieu commun”: L’invention rhétorique dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, ).  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.., a; the distinction is between ho nomimos (the law-abiding man) and ho isos (the fair man). The underworld’s laws might not be fair, but following them is a form of justice. Orpheus intends first to demonstrate his virtue of justice in this (accommodating) sense, which makes it all the easier for the deities to accept his argument concerning the lack of fairness of Eurydice’s death (her fates were properata, hastened, cut short too quickly).  See the summary in the (later) Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX..–. Possible objections to the speech’s content or the speaker’s intentions can be mentioned at the outset, in order to defuse their importance in the eyes of the judge.  “Iudicem conciliabimus nobis non tantum laudando eum . . . sed si laudem eius ad utilitatem causae nostrae coniunxerimus” (We should ensure the judge’s goodwill not only by praising him . . . but by linking his praise to the needs of our own cause [trans. Donald A. Russell]), Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IV... This conciliatio is part of the prooemium of the speech, designed to gain a favorable attitude of the judge.  “. . . in ingressu parcius et modestius praetemptanda sit iudicis misericordia, in epilogo vero liceat totus effundere adfectus” (. . . in our opening remarks, we need to go about making our first appeal to the judge’s pity more sparingly and with more restraint, whereas in the Epilogue we can give rein to every emotion), Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IV...  The fifteenth-century Ovide moralisé en prose will develop this plea for empathy on the part of Orpheus, showing not only that Love is a motivation for both couples but that Pluto was driven to a madness that caused him to commit a great crime (the rape of Proserpina). Orpheus wishes not to reproach him for this, but to make him understand the poet’s unwillingness to let go of his wife: “Il n’est besoing de vous aprendre, / Sire Pluto, comme amours lye / Ceulx qui en mellencolye / S’en boutent trop soudainement, / Car quant veïstes premierement / De Proserpine le hault pris, / Vous fustes de s’amor espris / Par si aigre forsennerie / Que pour en faire vostre amye / Violentement la ravistes / Et couscher o vous la feïstes. / Et cecy ne vous dis pas / Pour reproucher, mes pour mon cas / Vous demoustrer piteusement, /

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Notes to pages –

  



 







Affin que aussi semblablement / Que vous ne vouldriez jamais / Qu’on vous ostast le vostre . . .” (There is no need to inform you, lord Pluto, how love binds those who fall suddenly into melancholy, for when you first saw how desirable was Proserpina, you were taken with love for her with such bitter madness that in order to make her your lover you ravished her violently and made her bed with you. And this I do not say as a reproach but to demonstrate for my case for pity that similarly you would never want anyone to take yours away . . .) (ed. C. de Boer, in Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, AFD, Letterkunde, NR LXI,  [Amsterdam: North Holland, ], pp. –). For this observation, see especially Segal, Orpheus, pp. –. Pluto and Persephone are not the usual judges of the underworld (Rhadamanthus, Minos, Aeacus), but are in the rhetorical position of judges for the purposes of Orpheus’s plea. Choice proairesis in Aristotle is essential to establishing the habitus of virtue; it combines desire and intellect, is always directed to the future (one cannot choose for Troy not to have fallen), cannot concern the impossible, and is characteristic of human beings (as opposed to the irrational animals). See Nicomachean Ethics, III. and VI.. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion is connected intimately with virtue ethics (as doing well what a human being can do well). The ultimate – and final – projection of choice is contained in the conclusion: if you choose not to return her, I will stay as well. If you choose to return her, I will leave. The emphasis, despite the speaker’s “pathetic” willingness to die, is on the choice of the judges, and amplifies the series of such projections during the rest of the speech. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX... In Medea, Hercules furens and Hercules Oetaeus; Orpheus is by turns an Argonaut, a poet with a powerful song, the victim of a horrific death. For the purposes of this discussion I will consider Hercules Oetaeus as a play by Seneca (it is at least “Senecan”). A point made by Giannina Solimano, “Il mito di Orfeo-Ippolito in Seneca,” Sandalion  (): – (see pp. –); Solimano’s article is valuable also in summarizing extensively the scholarship on the Orpheus myth. Segal, Orpheus, pp. –, uses the various allusions to and representations of Orpheus in Seneca’s plays as a way of discussing the violent cosmology – and psychology – of the playwright. Scholars have pointed out the autonomy of the chorus within the action of Seneca’s plays, in relation to Greek choruses that interact to various degrees with the characters. It is not quite clear how Senecan choruses were performed in the Roman theater: By one actor or several? By pantomime? The early modern tradition assumes that they are an integral part of the play, whose declamatory nature was appreciated by humanist audiences; on salient instances of the reception of Seneca’s tragedy in early modern Europe, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s

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

  







Notes to pages –

Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). For my purposes the choral segments concerning Orpheus are a narrative representation, similar to the Georgics or the Metamorphoses. The fact that within the drama they seem less involved in the action means that they can be objects of scrutiny as lyrical fragments or episodes, while serving as commentary. On pantomime, solo performance, and Senecan chorus, see Helen Slaney, “Seneca’s Chorus of One,” in Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona MacIntosh (eds.), Choruses, Ancient and Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. I am thankful to Laura McClure for this reference and her comments on this chapter. Hercules furens, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. I have modified the translation slightly. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.xxiii., b. Indeed, Badius Ascensius understands this section of the chorus rhetorically, to be an “example” allowing the conclusion that Hercules can defeat the underworld by his strength; he comments on the final enthymeme: “quidem argumentum est verosimile sed non necessarium, si de viribus corporis loquaris” (it is true that this argument is plausible but not necessary, if you are speaking about physical strength) (L. Annei Senecae Tragoediae pristinae integritati restitutae . . . Explanatae diligentissime tribus Commentariis. G. Bernardino Marmita Parmensi. Daniele Gaietano Cremonensi. Iodoco Badio Ascensio [(Paris): Badius Ascensius, ], fol. v). This point again relies on the way Senecan tragedy was received through the early modern printed tradition, more than on how it might have been performed in Roman times. As mentioned, the chorus might have included segments of pantomime that acted out the vocal text, in which case kinesic reception by the audience was a given. However, the lines representing the failed return of Eurydice are particularly emptied of suggestion of movement. Which, within Seneca’s imperial context, reflects the concentration of power in one person, source of the law and superior to it. Pluto’s perspective is Nero’s. The suggestion that the chorus in Seneca’s tragedies might often be performed by one person, possibly in pantomime, is a manifestation both of the aestheticizing of power in the imperial court context and of the lack of any collective authority, in contrast to the performance and function of Greek choruses. See Slaney, “Seneca’s Chorus of One,” p.. L. Annei Senecae Tragoediae, fol. v. In the modern edition by Fitch, these are lines –; however, – (“Et vinci lapis improbus / Et vatem potuit sequi”) have been removed and placed several lines earlier, following a suggestion by Peiper (see ed. Fitch, p. ). Lines – read “sic cum blanda per infernos / Orpheus carmina funderet.” Instead of “Orpheus carmina finiens” ( Ascensius edition), we read “Orpheus carmina fundens” in Tragedie Senece cum duobus commentariis. Bernardinus Marmita. Daniel Gaietanus (Venice: Philippus Pincius Mantuanus, ), fol. r.

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Notes to pages –



Chapter   Especially by Robert Griffin, Clément Marot and the Inflections of Poetic Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), who helpfully links many details of Marot’s poetic composition to Renaissance and classical rhetoric and poetics. Griffin astutely observes that Marot’s “humor, wryness and irony always enact themselves in a way that serves to open the human condition to the cognitive capacities of the mind” (p. ). François Rigolot’s fine analysis of Marot’s epigram on the death of Semblançay applies modern linguistic categories to the poet’s play on the names of its protagonists (Poétique et onomastique: L’exemple de la Renaissance [Geneva: Droz, ], pp. –). The visual and semantic density of Marot’s rondeau is the focus of a virtuoso commentary by Tom Conley, in The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.  For the connection between Marot’s “simple” or “humble” style and his poetic ethos, see Corinne Noirot-Maguire, “Entre deux airs”: Style simple et ethos poétique chez Clément Marot et Joachim Du Bellay (–) (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, ), pp. –. Noirot-Maguire provides an extensive classical rhetorical prehistory of this style.  Examples of this religious perspective are the work of Christine MartineauGénieys, Le thème de la mort dans la poésie française de  à  (Paris: Champion, ), pp. –; Gérard Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: l’écriture comme présence (Paris: Champion, ), pp. –, who links Marot’s formal techniques to his evangelical sense of freedom from poetic and ecclesiastical constraints.  My optimistic view of poetic language, as intended and practiced by Marot, is not the only one. For another, more ambivalent view of Marot’s human poetic language facing the necessity of expressing divine truths, see Jan Miernowski, “Le pas chancelant de la fiction marotique,” in Gérard Defaux and Michel Simonin (eds.), Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois” – (Paris: Champion, ), pp. – (see especially pp. –, on the “Ballade de Paix, & de Victoire,” which I consider below).  Published in Lyon by Jean de Tournes,  (the first Jean de Tournes edition dates from ; this image of Marot appears starting in ). On the importance of this portrait of Marot, see Florian Preisig, Clément Marot et les métamorphoses de l’auteur à l’aube de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, ), p. . The numerous printed editions of Marot’s works vary widely in presentation and contents; see C. A. Mayer, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Clément Marot (Geneva: Droz, ),  vols. On the intimations of poetic immortality in this device and on Marot’s cultivation of his status as “author,” see also François Rigolot, Poésie et Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, ), “Une nouvelle conscience d’auteur: Clément Marot,” pp. –. The magisterial study by Guillaume Berthon, L’intention du poète: Clément Marot “autheur” (Paris: Garnier, ), shows how Marot’s life, his ordering of his works, and

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







  





Notes to pages –

the poems themselves interrelate to form an “author” in a more modern sense. On Marot’s exploiting of print to construct various personae of the author, see Scott Francis, Advertising the Self in Renaissance France: Lemaire, Marot and Rabelais (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), pp. –. Recent scholarship appears in large agreement here; this theological principle accompanies the rejection of the classical figure of Eros/Cupid; see Gérard Defaux, “Marot et ‘Ferme Amour’: Essai de mise au point,” in Ullrich Langer, Jan Miernowski (eds.), Anteros (Orléans: Paradigme, ), pp. –. The scholarship on this point is abundant. See, among many important works, Claude Blum, La représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance,  vols. (Paris: Champion, ); for a history of rituals and reactions to death, see Philippe Ariès, L’homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, ); for a vast anthropological perspective, Edgar Morin, L’homme et la mort (Paris: Seuil, ), especially pt. , “Les cristallisations historiques de la mort,” pp. –. See Clément Marot, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ), p. . All texts by Marot are taken from this edition. All translations are mine, and are extremely literal; I have not attempted to reproduce Marot’s wordplay and syntax, which, while inventive and graceful in French, are impossible to render exactly in English. January  ( old style). I have opted for “neck” (“gorge” can cover a wider area of the body, including the base of the neck and the top of the chest). “Baston” (literally, wooden stick) I take to be a metonymy for weapons of personal combat in general, in accordance with late medieval usage; in juxtaposition to “forge” and following the allusion to Saint George, it takes on the shape of a pike or a lance. I am thankful to Jan Miernowski and Maciej Talaga for elucidation of this point. “D’estoc” is distinguished from “de taille” or “de tranchant” in being a thrust, not a blow with the cutting edge of a sword. An “estoc” can also refer to a thin sword used to penetrate, rather than cut or chop. Hence the reference in the third stanza to the “baston,” a wooden lance or a pike that is also used to thrust, and the allusion to Saint George’s killing of the dragon, often depicted as a lance penetrating the neck or mouth of the beast. On the importance of poetic speech in Marot as a reflection of the “heart,” an interior voice of authority, and its New Testament filiations, see Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne, pp. –. Defaux’s valuable analysis insists on the expressive aspect of poetry, in which Marot as poet, in his proximity to prose, is able to “free” himself from the constraints of rhetoric and poetic forms, similarly to the freeing effects of the Spirit. This spiritual liberty leads Marot, according to Defaux, to attempt to leave language beyond entirely, as always inadequate to convey the presence of the Spirit. My own approach emphasizes what Marot does with language, in his poetry, rather than how he succeeds in expressing himself or freeing himself from the strictures of this world.

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Notes to pages –



 Marot would not have been in a position to compose an epitaph for her in , since he was still in the service of Marguerite d’Angoulême and not yet in the service of the king. The poem is not published in his Adolescence clémentine, his first collection of poetry before . Claude de France’s body was inhumed in the cathedral of Saint Denis in October , after long delays caused by war and the king’s confinement in Madrid. Composition of the poem might date from that period. See his Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Defaux, vol. , p. , and Philippe Hamon, “Claude de France,” in Arlette Jouanna, Philippe Hamon, Dominique Biloghi, and Guy Le Thiec (eds.), La France de la Renaissance: Histoire et dictionnaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, ), pp. –.  Translating “envers,” which is a pun on “en vers”: here, that is, in these verses, lies Claude de France.  “[V]icta iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit” (“Piety lay vanquished, and the maiden Astraea, last of the immortals, abandoned the blood-soaked earth,” trans. Frank Justus Miller) (I, lines –). In Marot’s translation we find: “Dame pitié gist vaincue, & oultrée: / Justice aussi la noble vierge Astrée, / Seulle, & derniere apres touts Dieux sublimes, / Terre laissa taincte de sang, & de crimes,” Premier livre de la Metamorphose, lines –, in his Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Defaux, vol.  (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ), p. .  Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.xxiv., b.  The conveying of agency to the departed over their own death (and the continuous irenic influence they have in this world) is parallel to the strategic use of verb tenses to express the presence beyond death of the dead among us, as Neil Kenny has studied with great finesse in Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). An example is, fortuitously, the epitaph to Claude de France by Marguerite de Navarre (see pp. –). Marot elsewhere uses tenses to express “sealed-off past time” and sometimes to “assert” the survival of the dead (see pp. –).  Astraea’s return as the return of the peaceful golden age (under a world monarchy) is based on the interpretation by the late empire and medieval political thought of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, , “iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna” (“Now the Virgin returns; now the reign of Saturn returns,” trans. H. Rushton Fairclough). On its use in the Renaissance, especially in Elizabethan England, and on the imperial theme in the French monarchy, see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, ).  One might observe, as well, the transition from “en paix” to “Paix,” from lowercase to uppercase “P,” in sixteenth-century editions of Marot (as well as in Defaux’s critical edition). While capitalization is not a certain interpretative guide, since it is often determined by the printer and not by the author, it is tempting to view this change as supporting the move from the personal to the universal.

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

Notes to pages –

 See, for this figuration of peace, elsewhere in Marot’s collection, Francis Goyet, “Sur l’ordre de l’Adolescence clementine,” in Defaux and Simonin (eds.), Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois,” pp. –, and especially pp. –.  Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –; see also p. , lines –: “Si maintenant faictes ce, que povez, / Paix descendra, portant en main l’Olive, / Laurier en teste, en face couleur vifve” (If now you do what you are able to, Peace will descend, carrying in its hand the olive branch, the laurel on its head, its face full of color). See James Hutton, Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –, for the descent from heaven and Astraea as a companion of Peace.  Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –.  For the relation between the medievalizing “Déploration” and the classicizing eclogue, see the perceptive comments by Berthon, L’Intention du poète, pp. –.  Martineau-Génieys calls it a “divertissement littéraire”; see La mort, pp. –. She also considers the solemn epitaph to be in contradiction with the preceding eclogue. I see the eclogue as a consequence of Louise de Savoie’s working for peace, commemorated in the epitaph. The connection between the pastoral eclogue, the refusal of the epic genre, and peace is noted as well by Noirot-Maguire, Entre deux airs, p. ; on Marot’s irenic strategy as court poet, see pp. –.  Marot wrote a rondeau celebrating this peace (“De la Paix traictée à Cambray par trois Princesses,” LIX, p. ). The three princesses are Louise de Savoie, her daughter Marguerite, and Marguerite d’Autriche, who “avec paix, & accord / Rompent de Mars les cruelles rudesses” (with peace and agreement, break the cruelty of Mars) (–). Louise was regent of France during her son’s defeat and capture by the forces of Charles V in . She had to negotiate his release and, eventually, peace with the emperor as a representative of François I.  The “tenure” refers to the contract binding tenant farmers to the landowner, or to the land itself that the tenant farmers cultivate.  Although we touch here on issues central to the early French Reformation – the relation between faith and salvation, and good works and salvation, Marot’s allusion is discreet; the important thing is human deliberation, consonant with divine will, not resignation.  She goes even further: Marot intended these lines to be understood as an “éternel rabâchage” (La mort, p. ). Defaux cites Jean Lemaire de Belges as a source for Marot’s play on toponyms (Marot, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p.  n ).  As we know from the “Déploration sur le trespas de messire Florimond Robertet,” this “porte” is a great benefit to humanity. Death says of herself: “Et plus ne suis qu’une porte, ou entrée, / Qu’on doibt passer voulentiers, pour courir / De ce vil Monde en celest[e] Contrée” (And I am no longer anything but a door or entry through which one must pass freely, in order to

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Notes to pages –

 









go from this vile world into the celestial country) (Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –). See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII... Defaux’s edition includes a bibliography, pp. –. An intricate and informed recent reading of the poem is Ellen Delvallée, “Les plaintes de la ‘Déploration de Florimond Robertet’ ou les apories de la poésie funèbre chez Marot,” L’esprit créateur , no.  (): –. Delvallée argues that Marot explores the limits of the lament and the consolation as genres, but, as court poet, does not subvert them entirely. For an excellent synthesis of the rhetoric of funeral orations, focusing, however, on the seventeenth century, see Anne Régent-Susini, “La ‘douleur publique’ des oraisons funèbres, une douleur sans plainte?,” L’esprit créateur , no.  (): –. Régent-Susini explores the paradoxes entailed by the Christian view of death as an occasion for joy, not sorrow, for the deceased. Her article includes, as well, valuable bibliographical references. Claude Thiry, in La plainte funèbre (Turnhout: Brepols, ), provides a good overview of the genre of the planctus in the Middle Ages, its specificity, the view of death and the deceased it conveys, and the ethicalpolitical use of lament of the deceased. See Martineau-Génieys, La mort, pp. –, for an in-depth analysis of the speech of Death in Marot’s poem, in view of the correspondence between Briçonnet and Marguerite de Navarre; she distinguishes usefully between “protestant” and “evangelical” thought. See also Blum, La représentation de la mort, vol. , pp. –, who argues that we find here a shift to a “mort intériorisée.” In the satirical tradition, judges and clergy are depicted as having large ears or donkey ears. See Marot, “L’enfer”: “Rhadamantus . . . les oreilles bien grandes,” and his “Coq en l’asne à L. Jamet” (Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –, and p. , lines –, respectively). I am thankful to Bernd Renner, who also pointed out that Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Nef des fous) includes relevant references to large or donkey ears. On this point, I disagree with Martineau-Génieys (La mort, pp. –) and Defaux (Oeuvres poétiques, p.  n ), who insist that everyone is deaf to Death’s self-defense. The love that the people of Blois carry in their hearts is greater than their fear of Death, as we will see. “Correction retracts what has been said and replaces it with what seems more suitable [magis idoneum].. . . This figure makes an impression upon the hearer [commovetur . . . animus auditoris].. . . ‘Then would it not be preferable,’ someone will say, ‘especially in writing, to resort to the best and choicest word at the beginning?’ Sometimes this is not preferable, when, as the change of word will serve to show, that thought is such that in rendering it by an ordinary word you seem to have expressed it rather feebly [levius], but having come to a choicer [electius] word you make the thought more striking [insigniorem rem],” [Ps.-Cicero], Ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), IV.xxvi.. The striking nature of a word is related to the action of choosing it. See also Quintilian,

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

 

 

 





 

Notes to pages –

Institutio oratoria, IX..–, where correctio follows dubitatio, a hesitation (that can be introduced by a question). The correct term is given after doubt is expressed by the speaker. Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –. Marot translates “Non nobis Domine non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam.” Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, VIII..) cites Cicero: “non enim furem, sed ereptorem, non adulterum sed expugnatorem pudicitiae . . .” (In Verrem, .) (not a thief but a plunderer, not an adulterer but a stormer of women’s virtue . . .). Amplification is more effective here because of the contrast between the initial word and the word used to replace it. Introducing questions to oneself, almost like a repentance, can make the speech seem simpler and less prepared, which attracts sympathy (commendatio) and gives pleasure (see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX..–). In this sense it is part of the “simple” style that offers a more direct access to the intentions of the speaker. I take the figure to be an element of the recusatio, the refusal of grand eloquence, that Noirot-Maguire identifies as the essence of Marot’s version of the simple style (see Entre deux airs, pp. –; see also her pertinent remarks on the “Déploration de Florimond Robertet,” pp. –). The expression also recalls Daniel :, “Angustiae sunt mihi undique” (Susanna’s lament, being confronted by the elders). The intimate, personal sense of mourning, compelled by love, and the connection between personal regret and public regret of the deceased are not particular to the exordium of the “Déploration de Florimond Robertet”; see Marot’s “Complaincte du Baron de Malleville” (Oeuvres poétiques, vol. , p. , lines –) and “Complaincte d’une Niepce, sur la Mort de sa Tante” (ibid., p. , lines –). “Benedetto sia ‘l giorno e ‘l mese et l’anno / e la stagione e ‘l tempo et l’ora e ‘l punto / e ‘l bel paese e ‘l loco ov’ io fui giunto / da’ duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno” (Canzoniere, rev. ed. Marco Santagata [Milan: Mondadori, ], , lines –). On the importance of the punctum, the wound, and the instant in the Rime sparse, see my Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Griffin is one of the few scholars of Marot to hint at the structural and ethical importance of this figure; see his Clément Marot and the Inflections of Poetic Voice, p. . However, he does not develop his observation in relation to the “Déploration de Florimond Robertet.” For in-depth analyses of this speech, see Martineau-Génieys, La mort, pp. –; Blum, La représentation de la mort, vol. , pp. –. The vision of social harmony generated by the funeral procession when it enters Blois seems to counter the negative reading of the poem by Delvallée; it is true, however, that “la plainte seule ne suffit pas à faire le consensus autour de ses valeurs” (“Les plaintes,” p. ). Robertet as a figure of the flourishing of the social body becomes, as Claude and Louise, a cause for the promotion of peace.

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Notes to pages –



 On this point that involves the distinction between the king and the tyrant, see my “L’éthique de la louange chez Marot: La ballade ‘De Paix, & de Victoire,’” in Defaux and Simonin (eds.), Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois,” pp. –. For a more pessimistic reading of this ballad, see Jan Miernowski in the same volume, “Le pas chancelant de la fiction marotique,” pp. – (see pp. –).  And the first two options – love and warfare – have become less operative, since the women are in mourning and the noblemen who constitute the king’s armies are lying beneath the earth.  Which is the way Marot, we have seen, characterizes the “nature” of his own poetic inspiration: “le naïf de ma Muse, / Lequel de soy ne veult que je m’y amuse / A composer en triste Tragedie” (“Déploration de Florimond Robertet,” pp. , lines –). And in the sense of “familiar,” the style of communication that smooths out its own asperities and equalizes human beings (and that monarchs, in particular, should listen to).

Chapter   Pierre de Ronsard, Les amours (version of ), , lines –, in Les amours et les folastries (–), ed. André Gendre (Paris: Livre de poche classique, ), p. .  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, e Promenade (comp. ), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. , ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. .  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (Tu¨bingen: Cotta, ), p. , line , https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Faust_I_(Goethe) _.jpg (accessed April , ).  On the relationship between lyric and time, see the insightful synthetic essay by David Baker, “Lyric Poetry and the Problem of Time,” Literary Imagination , no.  (): –. Baker argues that lyric is always about time, even though its overt subject may be something else, and that in face of the passage of time, lyric creates a “parallel” temporal world: “Poetry wishes to defray the damages of the inexorable, or at least to clarify them; to accomplish this, poetry proposes its own alternate methods of making and keeping time. Much of a poem’s style is designed to delay, to defer, to remind – to create a companion world where the reader may linger before the inevitable ending” (p. ).  John O’Brien, Anacreon Redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in MidSixteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ).  To these three classic genres is sometimes added the “familiar” genre, the discourse intended to maintain close relationships, with family or friends, especially in correspondence and conversation.  The scholarship on the relationship between rhetoric and poetry in the early modern period is simply too abundant to be given justice here; for a useful

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

 







  

Notes to pages –

early rhetorical study of Ronsard that focuses, however, too much on particular rhetorical figures to the detriment of arguments and genres, see Alex L. Gordon, Ronsard et la rhétorique (Geneva: Droz, ). See the discussion of its sources in Ronsard’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, vol.  (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . D. Magni Ausonii Burdig. Viri Consularis Opera. A Josepho Scaligero, & Elia Vineto denuò recognita . . . ([Geneva]: Jacob Stoer, ), p. , lines –. See also the modern edition by Paul Dräger (ed. and trans.), Sämtliche Werke, vol.  (Trier: Kliomedia, ), p. . Translation is my own. For an extensive exploration of the uses and expressions of variety (of which these lines are an instantiation) in the Latin and early modern vernacular tradition, see William Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). A felicitous term I borrow from Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. , . Another term is “erotic invitation poem”; see Wendy Beth Hyman, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p.  (and passim). On the embodiment of time – often in the form of the female body and changes it undergoes – in the Renaissance, see Cathy Yandell, Carpe corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), especially pp. –. The study by Hyman, Impossible Desire, is a valuable analysis of the cognitive challenges of carpe diem poetry, as they are played out in English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric. Hyman demonstrates how audacious – materialist, atheist – this poetry really is, and how little it actually seems to “seduce,” focusing more on death and decay than on erotic pleasure. Ronsard’s ode is definitely more classical, more praising of the young woman, and more affectively insinuating than the English poetry that is Hyman’s object of study. Oeuvres complètes, p. . Unless noted otherwise, all translations, as literal as possible, are my own. In the sixteenth century, “pourpre” was a dark, intense red associated with luxury and royalty. According to the terms of Petrus Ramus, this would be a simple syllogism, of the third manner, “troisième manière” (“affermée partout, et généralle de la seule proposition,” affirmative throughout and general in the proposition; the first premise, only, the minor premise, “l’assomption,” being “propre,” applied to one person). See his Dialectique (), ed. Michel Dassonville (Geneva: Droz, ), II, p.  (the pages indicated are those of the  edition). This accords with the first figure (third mode) of the syllogism in the scholastic tradition (ex universali affirmativa et particulari affirmativa) in Peter of Spain, Summulae logicales, IV., ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .

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Notes to pages –



 Simple syllogism of the “fifth manner” (“partout affermée et propre”), Ramus, Dialectique II, p. .  The argument B seems to require the following syllogisms B and B, for the fact that a rose, or all roses, lose their beauty quickly does not imply that a being of another species loses its beauty quickly. The syllogism B (“composé” and “conditionnel”) is fallacious, for the relation between the antecedent and the consequent of the major premise is not necessary. In contemporary scholastic vocabulary, this is a propositio ypotetica conditionalis, and for it to be true, it needs to be the case that the antecedent cannot be true without the consequent also being true (Peter of Spain, Summulae, I.–, p. ). Moving from the “special,” that which concerns species, to the “general” arises from induction and not deduction.  According to the tree of Porphyry (the scholastic hierarchy of categories of beings), the woman and the rose both belong to the genus of animate bodies, and the general proposition according to which Nature makes all flowers (a corporeal substance animate and not sensitive) lose their beauty can be applied to the woman (a corporeal substance animate, sensitive, rational, and mortal) as an individual belonging to the same genus as the rose (see Peter of Spain, Summulae, II., p. ).  This general injunction is what Ramus would call a human “tesmoignage,” or observation, an apparent truth, “sentence illustre,” or “proverbe” (Dialectique I, p. ) that is situated in the domain of ethics and, according to Aristotle, would have at most a value of probability, but no logical or “scientific” validity.  It is a matter here of a definition not in the logical-scholastic sense (for making love is not identical with making use of one’s beauty – the term to be defined and its definition are not reversible) but in the sense of a complement or supplement, in the sense one finds in philological commentary, where “sup” or “sp” or “supple” (and often “id est”) have the meaning of “that is,” introducing the explanation of an intention, the literal meaning of a metaphor, a definition, or a paraphrase. When the poet says “cueillez votre jeunesse” in this context of amorous poetry, he clearly intends a sexual meaning.  The need for this syllogism is to ensure that the recipient of the woman’s favors will be the speaker, not any given person. In dialectical terms, it is important to move from an “énonciation simple” “spéciale” (you should make love to “some” person) to an “énonciation propre” (you should make love with Pierre de Ronsard). See Ramus, Dialectique I, p. . This syllogism is of the “quatrième manière conditionnelle” (ibid., p. ). The scholastic terms would be “propositio indefinita” and “propositio singularis” (Peter of Spain, Summulae, I., p. ).  Poésie et Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, ), p. .  See Aristotle, Rhetoric, II..; for the Latin term, Aristotelis Stagiritae rhetoricum artisque poeticae libri . . . (Lyon: Jacques Berjon, ), p.  (trans. Georgius Trapezuntius). For the “comparaison en qualité” of “semblables” or by “similitude,” see also Ramus, Dialectique I, p. . Ramus quotes, as an example, Virgil, Bucolica, II, lines –; the poet warns the pretty boy that

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

 





Notes to pages –

he should not rely too much on the color of his skin, since white flowers fade and black ones are picked. For the scholastic equivalent, locus a simili, see Peter of Spain, Summulae, V., p. . Rhetoric, II.. and following. A correlate to the carpe diem argumentation, which Ronsard uses elsewhere, is the “immortality” that poetry can confer to the objects of the poet’s praise. The rhetorical aim of seduction seems independent of, indeed perhaps incompatible with, the persuasive power of a promise of immortality, since a woman’s refusal can be just as much a guarantee of immortality (see Petrarch’s Laura) as the praise by the poet of a woman who has ceded to his entreaties. On the poetic immortality topos, see Stephen Murphy, The Gift of Immortality: Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ), and especially François Cornilliat, Sujet caduc, noble sujet: La poésie de la Renaissance et le choix de ses “arguments” (Geneva: Droz, ), particularly chapter , “Le contrat épidictique,” pp. –, concerning praise of historical figures and accomplishments in comparison to praise of the beloved. Logical structure, the passage of time, and pleasure feature in other poems, similarly famous: “Le tems s’en va, le tems s’en va, ma Dame, / Las! le tems non, mais nous nous en allons, / Et tost serons estendus sous la lame: / Et des amours, desquelles nous parlons, / Quand serons morts, n’en sera plus nouvelle: / Pour-ce aimez moy, ce pendant qu’estes belle” () (Time passes, time passes, my lady, alas! Not time, rather we are passing and soon will be laid out under a tomb, and the loves of which we speak, when we are dead, will no longer be known: therefore love me while you are beautiful), Oeuvres complètes, vol. , p. , [VI], –. The concluding link between the sententia of tempus fugit and the urgency of making love follows, as in the case of the ode, a comparison between the fading flower and the woman’s vanishing beauty. And the deductive structure is emphasized by the “pour-ce” (because of that, therefore). Not because you feel like it, but because you have been persuaded by logical argument. On this poem, see Yandell, Carpe corpus, pp. –, who points out that while time affects both poet and the young woman, only the young woman’s body ages. See as well sonnet VIII (“Ce jour de May . . .” []) of the Amours diverses (): “Le temps s’enfuit . . . Baisez-moy donc . . .” (Time is fleeing . . . therefore kiss me . . .) (ibid., p. , lines , ). The example given as proof are birds that do not hesitate to take advantage of the beautiful day. On the theme of the day and its passing in Ronsard, see Yvonne Bellenger, Le jour dans la poésie française au temps de la Renaissance (Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr, ), pp. –. On the paucity of visual description in the novel, see Jeffrey N. Peters, The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ), pp. –. Peters devotes his attention primarily to the scene in the pavilion and the painting of the siege of Metz (pp. –).

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Notes to pages –



 For a detailed discussion of this episode, and the function of the letter itself in summarizing and anticipating events, themes, and language of the novel, see Joyce O. Lowrie, Sightings: Mirrors in Texts, Texts in Mirrors (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –. Lowrie also considers the history of interpretation of the significance of Mme de Thémines’s epistle.  Dalia Judovitz remarks that the letter to the Vidame “catalyzes . . . all the emotions of the characters” (“The Aesthetics of Implausibility: La Princesse de Clèves,” MLN , no.  []: –, quote p. ). Emotions are usually tied to interests, in this world. I am thankful to Richard Goodkin for this reference.  Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, ed. Bernard Pingaud (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” ), pp. –. Translations are my own.  In translating “une liberté et un enjouement dans l’esprit,” “esprit” here is more than just wittiness but an air, a demeanor, an alertness in speech, without the quasi-religious connotations of “spirit.”  And even, treating different topics, the seventeenth-century “realist” novel (Scarron, Sorel, Furetière).  And contrasts with the scenes of “miscompassion,” in the word coined by Katherine Ibbett, in which pity or empathy do not lead to mutuality (Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ], pp. –).  Another mark of the story’s insistence on time and the attempt of the couple to step outside it might be the difference between the imperfect (“ne sentait que le plaisir,” “en avait une joie pure,” “cette joie lui donnait une liberté,” etc.) and the passé simple used in the surrounding narration, introducing a fatal perspective of History. I take Anne-Lise François to be making this point in her analysis of this scene (Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ], pp. –). However, the passé simple also conveys the joy of the moment (“elle entra dans le même esprit de gayeté”), and the couple’s bliss is activity inevitably measured by time.  Transmitted through Aristotle’s Physics VI,  (b).  In Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ); Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, ). These are stages of an uncompleted project. On “À une passante,” see, in the translation, pp. – and –.  A fine, brief reading of this poem by Jonathan Culler (Theory of the Lyric [Cambridge, MA:, Harvard University Press, ], pp. –) mentions the reprise of the innamoramento convention and emphasizes the drawing of this past event into a lyric present, celebrating the unexpected excitements of urban life. The poem has figured in many studies of the transformation of literature by the urban setting. A recent reading of the poem from the perspective of modernity’s reappraisal of the ephemeral and the eternal, with a thorough consideration of previous interpretations, can be found in Milan

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

 





Notes to page 

Herold, Der lyrische Augenblick als Paradigma des modernen Bewusstseins (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, ), pp. –. For an interpretation of the poem emphasizing its sublime rendering possible of the impossible, and its relation to Leopardi, Machado, and Campana, see Antonio Prete, “La poésie dans les rues: Lecture d’‘À une passante,’” L’Année Baudelaire  (): –. In an intricate and informed essay, Karin Westerwelle reads this poem as representing the passing woman as dead (relying on a connotation of “passer”); she analyzes persuasively the rhythmic structure of the poem (“Die Transgression von Gegenwart im allegorischen Verfahren Baudelaires ‘À une passante,’” Romanische Forschungen  []: –). Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ), pp. –. The fine translation by James MacGowan prefers “roar” to “scream” or “shout” (). This is a difficult term to render precisely in English; “hurler” has no exact equivalent, but “roar” to me connotes immediately the roar of lions, which “hurler” does not include. An alternative is “howl,” which has the advantage of etymological proximity to the French verb, but is again closely associated with animal sounds (“hurler” can also be said of animals in great pain). “Hurler” is more violent and aggressive than “crier.” “Shout” admittedly does not transmit this greater intensity and the more continuous nature of the sound, and “scream” is also more punctual. MacGowan takes “extravagant” () to be an “addict” (which is plausible, given the verb “buvais” and the context of Baudelaire’s life and poetry, but “crispé” does not have the sense of “shake”); I have also tried to make the final tercet as literal as possible, sacrificing some poetic qualities of MacGowan’s version: “Far from this place! too late! never perhaps! / Neither one knowing where the other goes, / O you I might have loved, as well you know!,” – (The Flowers of Evil [Oxford: Oxford University Press, ], p. ). These connections have been noted by many critics. Most recently, see Karin Westerwelle, Baudelaire und Paris: Flu¨chtige Gegenwart und Phantasmagorie (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, ), pp. –, who provides a synthesis of lyrical topoi from Dante, Petrarch, and Ronsard that are backgrounds to the poem; and Julia Caterina Hartley, “The Medieval and the Modern in Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante,’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies  (–): –, who reads the poem on the background of two poems by Dante and Cavalcanti and provides a valuable account of the various interpretations of Baudelaire’s sonnet. She emphasizes the singularity of the encounter in the modern poet in contrast to the medieval versions of the innamoramento; my own sense is that this singularity, both in the glance and in its effect, is already present in Petrarch’s lyric. Mystifying to me is the absence of any consideration of the lyric tradition among some critics, for example, Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise (New York: Fordham University Press, ), pp. –. The theme of “una rivolta d’occhi” (, lines –), one turning of the eyes, is at the heart of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ed. Marco Santagata [Milan:

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Notes to pages –

  

 





 



Mondadori, ]). The glance changes everything: “Chi nol sa di ch’io vivo, et vissi sempre, / dal dì che ‘n prima que’ belli occhi vidi, / che mi fecer cangiar vita et costume” (p. , lines –) (Who does not know on what I live and have always lived since the day when I first saw those lovely eyes that made me change my life and my ways?, trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ]). See Ronsard, Amours (ed. Gendre), p. , lines –: “Oeil, qui portrait dedans les miens reposes / Comme un Soleil, le dieu de ma clarté” (Eye, who mirrored in mine are present like a sun, the god of my light). The repeated and unvarying use of “sweetness” to describe the effects of love is a feature of Petrarch’s and Petrarchan lyric; see Canzoniere, p. , lines –, and many imitations. “Dous fut le trait, qu’Amour hors de sa trousse, / Pour me tuer, me tira doucement” (Ronsard, Amours, ed. Gendre, p. , lines –). (Sweet was the arrow that Love took from its quiver to kill me and shot sweetly at me). Another feature of love lyric is the figure of the “basilisk” whose glance can kill (see Maurice Scève, Delie, object de plus haulte vertu, ed. Eugène Parturier [Paris, Nizet, ], dizains I, CLXXXVI and preceding emblem). See also Lance K. Donaldson-Evans, Love’s Fatal Glance: A Study of Eye Imagery in the Poets of the École Lyonnaise (University, MI: Romance Monographs, ). The ambiguity of the “errore” – error or wandering – is a commonplace. See Petrarch, Canzoniere, p. , lines –; also Westerwelle, Baudelaire und Paris, p. . The fragmented description of the beloved is a frequent feature of love lyric, deriving in part from the conventions of epideictic rhetoric (the person is a summation of qualities to be praised one by one). For a more critical view, see Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry , no.  (): –. The agility of the statue-like leg recalls, however, the myth of Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own sculpture. Far from coming alive, the statue here is the source of the pleasure that kills. The pun “sta-tue”/“tue” and the possible exhortation “tue-moi” connecting to the following line (kill / Me) have been noted by critics (see Westerwelle, “Die Transgression,” p. ; Herold, Der lyrische Augenblick, p. ). Recalling Ronsard’s lines, “Le tems s’en va, le tems s’en va, ma Dame, / Las! le tems non, mais nous nous en allons” () (Time passes, time passes, my Lady, alas, not time, rather we pass away), Oeuvres complètes, vol. , ed. Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, p. , [VI], –. On this point, see also Hartley, “The Medieval and the Modern,” pp. –. Parallel to the Petrarchan tradition we find, of course, a much more voluntarist tradition (see Ronsard’s own Continuation des amours [] and Malherbe’s lyric) that refuses the coincidence of exclusive, fatal love and desire. Baudelaire’s formulations in this poem, though, recall explicitly the latter, while discreetly introducing his habitual distance.

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

Notes to pages –

 However, it has been pointed out that encounters in the street inducing lyric are also a feature of Dante’s Florence (see Hartley, “The Medieval and the Modern,” p. ). The urban experience designated by a mid-nineteenthcentury use of the word “rue” in Paris is, however, fundamentally different from the street in medieval Florence, as crowded as both might be.  On these changes in rhythm and the space this allows for fetishization of the woman, see Beryl Schlossman, “The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street,” MLN , no.  (December ): –, and especially p. .  Susan Blood (as does Beryl Schlossman before her) sees in this line the representation of the new technology of photography, and in the following lines the reassuring presence of telecommunications: “The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante,’” NineteenthCentury French Studies , nos. – (Spring–Summer ): –.  See Culler, Theory of Lyric, p. : “In foregrounding the lyric as an act of address, lifting it out of ordinary communicational contexts, apostrophes give us a ritualistic, hortatory act, a special sort of linguistic event in a lyric present.” Also Chambers: “The poem in these lines is a miming in words of solitary thought, to which the reader is admitted through the operation of an age-old lyric convention” (“The Storm in the Eye of the Poem: Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante,’” in Mary Ann Caws [ed.], Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading [New York: Modern Language Association of America, ], pp. –, quotation p. ). Chambers emphasizes the “empathetic understanding for each other” that the apostrophe will retroactively enable, of the woman (p. ).  In Benjamin’s oft-repeated formulation, it is “love at last sight” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. , ).  In this I disagree with critics who see the poem as conveying melancholy and loss, a sustained mourning for something that could not come about, for reasons beyond the potential lovers’ control. For an example of this view, see Richard Stamelman, “The Shroud of Allegory: Death, Mourning and Melancholy in Baudelaire’s Work,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language  (): –.  Loin d’Odile (Paris: Minuit, ), pp. –.  Oster’s description of Jeanne as “brillante” and emanating “brillance” recalls the youngest of the Graces, Aglaia (Splendor, Brilliance). The praise of her glance is a development of Hesiod’s lines “From their eyes [those of the three Graces] desire, the limb-melter, trickles down when they look; and they look beautifully from under their eyebrows” (Theogony, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ], lines –). Jeanne’s eyes are often raised upward toward the interlocutor, from below, not because this is intended to incite desire but because she happens to not be very tall. It is in this “mouvement ascendant” that her eyes catch the light.  In classical erotic poetry, however, comparison between two girls is not uncommon; for a French version, see Ronsard, see his “Premiere folastrie” in the Livret de folastries (), in Les amours et les folastries, ed. Gendre, pp. –.

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Notes to pages –



Chapter   I am avoiding the – to my sense at least – overused term of “flourishing”; its botanical etymology precludes certain meanings of happiness, and it only partly renders the senses given to living well in the ethical tradition. If pressed, I would prefer a paraphrase such as “doing freely what we do best, as human beings,” inspired by Aristotelian notions of the highest pleasure.  This is the case despite Flaubert’s personal contempt for “le bonheur,” happiness, which one gleans from his correspondence; he associates it with stupidity and egotism, as a sort of bourgeois complacency, and thinks it a nefarious illusion: “L’idée de bonheur . . . est la cause presque exclusive de toutes les infortunes humaines” (The idea of happiness is the almost exclusive cause of all human misfortune) (letter to Louise Colet, August , , cited in Juliette Azoulai, “ ‘Le bonheur peut y tenir’: Conceptions du bonheur dans L’éducation sentimentale,” in Pierre Glaudes and Éléonore Reverzy (eds.), Relire L’éducation sentimentale (Paris: Garnier, ), pp. – [p. ]). The pessimism of his novels leads many to assume that his writing must provoke sadness in the reader and can never adequately represent pleasure and happiness. One must distinguish between what the writer says about his works, their themes, and what the writing itself achieves. My interest lies completely in the latter.  See the excellent discussion in William Paulson, Sentimental Education: The Complexity of Disenchantment (New York: Twayne Publishers, ), especially pp. –, on the disappointing character of Frédéric Moreau. Paulson points out the extreme difficulty individuals experienced adapting to rapid successions of economic conditions and social expectations in France of the early nineteenth century, since past models of individual action and success quickly become obsolete.  Juliette Azoulai (in “‘Le bonheur peut y tenir’”) offers a reading countering this narrative of decline, on the condition of distinguishing types of happiness, the best of which involves Epicurean limitation and the dismissal of false notions of happiness.  References are to Gustave Flaubert, L’éducation sentimentale (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” ). Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.  For samples of these commonplaces, see especially Hugo’s Les contemplations: “L’infini tout entier d’extase se soulève” (all of infinity rises up with ectasy) (Livre , IV, , ed. Léon Cellier [Paris: Garnier, ], p. ); “Et les oiseaux ont moins d’ailes / Que les esprits” (And the birds have fewer wings than minds) (“N’envions rien,” , XIX, pp. –); “Le vaste azur n’est rien, je te l’atteste; / Le ciel que j’ai dans l’âme est plus céleste” (The vast azur is nothing, I attest to you; the sky that I have within my soul is more heavenly) (“Un soir que je regardais le ciel,” , XXVIII, –). The sixth book of Hugo’s Contemplations is entitled “Au bord de l’infini.” Baudelaire will pick up on these commonplaces in “Élévation” (in Les fleurs du mal []), and in his “Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?”: “Qui dit romantisme dit art

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









Notes to pages –

moderne, – c’est-à-dire intimité, spiritualité, couleur, aspiration vers l’infini, exprimées par tous les moyens que contiennent les arts” (Romanticism means modern art, that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration toward infinity, expressed by all the means contained in the arts) (Salon de  in Curiosités esthétiques: L’art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri Lemaitre [Paris: Garnier, ], p. , my italics). Unlimitedness as elevation (in the senses of ascension and uplifting) is often thought to be the essence of the lyric “I” culminating in Romantic lyric; see Karl Pestalozzi, Die Entstehung des lyrischen Ich: Studien zum Motiv der Erhebung in der Lyrik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ). My own approach deemphasizes the connection between subjectivity and representation of movement: The sensations made available in lyric scenarios do not deepen the self but are represented as activity and connection to others and to the world. The most common source for this idea is Aristotle, Poetics, a–b, but in fact classical rhetoricians often praise poetry’s universal appeal (e.g., Cicero, Pro Archia, vii.). Another approach is the distinction between the quaestio finita (or the hypothesis) in deliberative rhetoric and the quaestio infinita (the thesis) which is outside a particular case and can, as does poetry, appeal to universality ; see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III..–III... The closest we get is the republican enthusiasm Frédéric feels during the upheavals in Paris in the third part of the novel: “Le magnétisme des foules enthousiastes l’avait pris. Il humait voluptueusement l’air orageux, pleins des senteurs de la poudre; et cependant il frissonnait sous les effluves d’un immense amour, d’un attendrissement suprême et universel, comme si le coeur de l’humanité tout entière avait battu dans sa poitrine” (The magnetism of the enthusiastic crowds had seized him. He breathed in voluptuously the stormy air, full of the smell of gunpowder; and yet he trembled in the outflowing of an immense love, of a supreme and universal compassion, as if the heart of the entire humanity had beaten in his chest) (p. , my italics). His political exuberance is described in distinctly sensual and affective terms, as if this were a version of his amorous epiphanies. L’éducation sentimentale, p. . Roger Barny, Études textuelles , Centre de Recherches Jacques-Petit, vol.  (Paris: Diffusion Belles Lettres, ), pp. –, sees these paragraphs as reflecting Frédéric’s relatively spiritual, non-erotic attachment to Mme Arnoux, and the landscape as inspired by Rousseau. The last sentence, according to Barny, may be a sarcastic commentary by Flaubert. The closest to my own reading of the second paragraph is Jean-Pierre Richard, Stendhal et Flaubert: Littérature et sensation (Paris: Seuil,  []), pp. –. When Frédéric visits his china factory, guided by Mme Arnoux, the narrator observes: “Il fabriquait maintenant des lettres d’enseigne, des étiquettes à vin; mais son intelligence n’était pas assez haute pour atteindre jusqu’à l’Art, ni assez bourgeoise non plus pour viser exclusivement au profit, si bien que, sans contenter personne, il se ruinait” (He now produced characters for signs, wine labels; but his intelligence was not high enough to attain the level of Art, nor

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Notes to pages –

 



 





bourgeois enough to be only interested in profit, such that, without satisfying anyone, he ruined himself financially) (p. ). The terms “éclair” and “front” recall Renaissance amorous poetry, as does the imagery of light (see Maurice Scève, Délie, XXIV), as well as Romantic lyric. On the numerous variations of this phrase and scenario, see Jean Rousset, Leurs yeux se rencontrèrent: La scène de première vue dans le roman (Paris: Corti, ); for his commentary on Frédéric’s first meeting with Mme Arnoux, pp. –. Rousset emphasizes the one-sidedness of the encounter, the exploration of the protagonist’s interiority and, in contrast, Flaubert’s reticence in letting us know Mme Arnoux’s reactions to seeing him. Rousset’s text selection culminates with Mme Arnoux’s (neutral) word of thanks, their visual encounter, and ends with her husband’s question. I have chosen deliberately the later fragment, to highlight the possibility of happiness that seeing her has come to afford. Hence the “déchirement” of his being, recalling the tragic final letter written by the Présidente de Tourvel after receiving Valmont’s cruel letter of rupture, in the Liaisons dangereuses: “Le voile est déchiré, Madame, sur lequel était peinte l’illusion de mon bonheur” (The veil is torn, Madame, on which was painted the illusion of my happiness) (Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ], Letter CXLIII, p. ). Contrary to Mme de Tourvel, who is no longer able to cry, Frédéric weeps uncontrollably. One of the most laden words in amorous lyric; the most remarkable example is Petrarch, “Dolci ire, dolci sdegni et dolci paci” (Canzoniere, sonnet ) (Sweet angers, sweet disdains and sweet returns to peace). While the zigzag pattern introduces a slight sense of disorder, this is not a sublime landscape suggesting primeval chaos and inspiring terror. The pleasure of its perception is connected to its inviting nature: We can imagine ourselves walking up those paths, enjoying every step of the way, and we would not get lost. It is a landscape that invites human well-being. On the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful landscape, and the resonances of the Kantian sublime that Flaubert would have had available to him, see the useful summary by Florence Vatan, “Le sublime et le grotesque dans Bouvard et Pécuchet,” in Jan Miernowski (ed.), Le sublime et le grotesque (Geneva: Droz, ), pp. –, and especially pp. –. See his Canzoniere, , lines –; the contact between the girl’s body and grass, leaves, or flowers is an erotically charged, if discreet, moment (see , lines –; , lines –, –). The most obviously Petrarchan of Frédéric’s perceptions of Mme Arnoux is this encounter with her, surrounded by her children (thus both unavailable to him and in its maternal ambience recalling the Virgin Mary): “La chambre avait un aspect tranquille. Un beau soleil passait par les carreaux, les angles des meubles reluisaient et, comme Mme Arnoux était assise auprès de la fenêtre, un grand rayon, frappant les accroche-coeurs de sa nuque, pénétrait d’un fluide d’or sa peau ambrée.. . . Ses beaux yeux brillaient, se mouvaient doucement sous leurs paupières un peu

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









Notes to pages –

lourdes, et il y avait dans la profondeur de ses prunelles une bonté infinie. Il fut saisi par un amour plus fort que jamais, immense” (The room had a tranquil appearance. A beautiful sunlight passed through the windowpanes, the corners of the furniture shown and, as Mme Arnoux was seated next to the window, a large ray, glancing the locks on the nape of her neck, penetrated her amber skin with a golden liquid.. . . Her beautiful eyes shone, moved softly underneath their slightly heavy lids, and there was in the depth of her pupils an infinite goodness. He was seized by a love stronger than ever, immense) (p. ). The golden sunlight is an allusion to Danaë’s rape by Jupiter, transformed into a shower of gold, which, however, Mme Arnoux seems to invite – her skin has an amber color close to the golden sun ray, in a prolepsis of its union with the god. The locks of hair are seductive “accroche-coeurs,” as if inviting the “penetration” of her skin. All of this is famously reworked by Petrarch in his image of sweetness raining, “dolcezza piove” (Canzoniere, ; see also ). For the image of the effect of Laura’s black eyes, see  (and others). Flaubert’s precision – “dont la sclérotique brillait” – is a technical flourish, as if to indicate both his awareness of the tradition and the objective nature of Mme Arnoux’s startlingly beautiful eyes. In rhetorical theory, these descriptions are commonly understood as belonging to the rubric of evidentia or enargeia (a process by which what is being told is told as if it were “in front of one’s eyes”). While this is doubtless the case in the examples we are examining in this chapter – the language is predominantly visual and Flaubert uses spatial indicators – I prefer to understand them as models or outlines (one of the meanings of hypotyposis, an alternate rhetorical term for evidentia) – outline in the sense of visual guideposts to the activity that is happiness and pleasure. Their coupling with paragraphs detailing the characters’ affective states emphasizes their intentional, directed nature – they are not just “there.” Indeed, knowing that nothing could come of it gave a release to their feelings: “Il était bien entendu qu’ils ne devaient pas s’appartenir. Cette convention qui les garantissait du péril facilitait leurs épanchements” (It was well understood that they should not belong to each other. This agreement that kept them out of danger enabled the outpouring of their feelings) (p. ). “Convention” is both in the sense of a consensual agreement and in the sense of (Mme Arnoux’s) marriage. At the conclusion of the (later) Un coeur simple, Félicité agonizes while clouds of incense are penetrating her mansard room. Her stuffed parrot (whom she had taught to say “Je vous salue, Marie”) is visible to the procession, underneath roses on the altar. In the moment of her ecstatic death she sees him in the skies. Flaubert’s representation is ironic, distancing, and absolutely sympathetic to the protagonist. We will consider this tale in the final pages. In Mme de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves (), third and fourth parts, respectively. In the nocturnal pavilion scene featuring Mme de Clèves and the painting of M de Nemours, she is seated on her “lit de repos” (Frédéric and Mme Arnoux can sit on a gray sofa); whereas the princess can gaze at a heroic

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Notes to pages –











painting of Nemours during the siege of Metz, the modern lovers have only a speckled, old mirror reflecting realistically, one assumes, themselves. Similarly to the exalted imagination of Flaubert’s lovers, in the seventeenth-century novel the scene gives rise to feelings in M de Nemours unimagined by any other lover: “c’est ce qui n’a jamais été goûté ni imaginé par nul autre amant” (ed. Bernard Pingaud [Paris: Gallimard, ], p. ). As opposed to “murs” (walls); “murailles” is closer to ramparts, fortifications, just as the bronze tower or chamber in which Danaë is placed by her father is meant to protect her from intrusion by the outside world (and all suitors). It is surprising to see a pavilion – usually a light, almost ephemeral construction – consisting of thick walls. When she asks Bourais to show her the house in Havana in which her nephew Victor was staying, on a world map, he cannot keep himself from bursting out laughing: “Bourais leva les bras, rit énormément; une candeur pareille excitait sa joie; et Félicité n’en comprenait pas le motif, – elle qui s’attendait peut-être à voir jusqu’au portrait de son neveu, tant son intelligence était bornée!” (Bourais lifted his arms, laughed loudly; such ingenuousness set off his pleasure; and Félicité did not understand why, – she who expected, perhaps, to see the portrait itself of her nephew, so limited was her intelligence!) (Un coeur simple, in Trois contes, ed. Samuel S. de Sacy [Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,”  ()], p. , my italics). In the final clause the focus has shifted back to Félicité, and it appears that Flaubert is explaining her inability to understand the working of a map, but the clause is also an exclamation, as if Flaubert himself were imitating the laughter of Bourais. No one among the other characters in the tale escapes the somewhat satiric perspective of the narrator; despite repeated references to the limited nature of her intelligence, however, the portrait of Félicité always avoids condescension. The famous concluding vision of the parrot in the skies above the dying woman is profoundly ambiguous – the apotheosis of a saint or the delusions in death of a “simple” servant? The zigzag patterns of the tree branches, dead, without leaves (which allows us to see the branches and their designs), can be understood as a metaphor for writing, its necessary abstraction, its aspiration to the timeless, and so on. A certain kind of literary criticism would then have insisted on the artificiality of the pastoral mimesis, its self-awareness, its status as “rhetoric.” I emphasize how effective it is in conveying pleasure and an ethics of activity in this world of contingency. Months after her death, they sort through the clothes of Virginie, and, no doubt encouraged by the “warm and blue air” and the twittering of a blackbird, they look at each other: “Leurs yeux se fixèrent l’une sur l’autre, s’emplirent de larmes; enfin la maîtresse ouvrit ses bras, la servante d’y jeta; et elles s’étreignirent, satisfaisant leur douleur dans un baiser qui les égalisaient” (Their eyes focused on each other, filled with tears; finally the mistress opened her arms, the servant threw herself in them; and they hugged each other, satisfying their pain in a kiss that rendered them equal) (p. ).

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

Notes to pages –

Chapter   On the concept of societas and its different levels of associations, see Cicero, De officiis, I, xvii, –.  Chartier’s works were published throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, and his Quadrilogue was well known to mid-century poets in France (including Pierre de Ronsard). For a good survey of the genre of lamentation on the misfortunes of the times in the early modern period, see Natalia Wawrzyniak, Lamentation et polémique au temps de guerres de religion (Paris: Garnier, ), and pp. – on Chartier.  Alain Chartier, Le quadrilogue invectif, ed. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Champion, ), pp. –. My translation.  A common reversal of the biblical topos of swords turned into plowshares (see Isaiah :–).  A good account of the mixed tone of Rouaud can be found in Jean-Yves Debreuille, “L’héroïcomique,” in Hélène Baty-Delalande and Jean-Yves Debreuille (eds.), Lire Rouaud (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, ), pp. –. The preface of this volume situates the rather singular Rouaud within his literary context.  Jean Rouaud, Les champs d’honneur (Paris: Minuit, ), pp. –.  Fields of Glory, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Arcade Publishing, ), pp. –. Manheim ‘s commendable translation reads very well; several choices remove the text somewhat from the original, however. He has decided to segment the paragraph into several sentences, instead of retaining the vertiginous effect of Rouaud’s one-sentence description. He has translated “cloaque” by “swamp” instead of the more exact (and disgusting) “cloaca”; the soldier is “encumbered” for “harnaché” (the French keeps the connection to “harnois,” harness); and the rain is “transformed” by the headlights, in place of “illuminated” (“enluminée”), which allows the connection to manuscript illumination and anticipates the return to the kingdom of France.  Rouaud reprises his descriptions of the horrors of the First World War, in his more recent Éclats de  (Paris: Éditions Dialogues, ) On the rain falling on the trenches and turning the earth into a cloaca, see p. .  Rouaud returns to the theme of the “laboureur” and the bountiful earth as provider of harvests, in Éclats de : “on nous propose toujours d’imaginer un champ de blé dans la lumière du mois d’août, autant dire de rêver à la moisson prochaine, aux bras à faucilles et au repos sous les grands arbres, aux mains de femmes liant les gerbes, aux soirées à chanter et à boire sous les étoiles, à un grenier garni jusqu’à l’année prochaine, à la promesse enfin tenue du pain quotidien. Une image de paix depuis que les hommes ont appris à composer avec la terre, à attendre d’elle à date fixe un ventre plein” (“We are always asked to imagine a field of wheat in the August light, that is, dream of the next harvest, of arms wielding scythes and of rest under the large trees, of the hands of women tying the bundles, of the evenings spent singing and drinking beneath the stars, of a grain shed filled until the following year, finally of

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Notes to pages –

 

 





the promise held of daily bread. An image of peace ever since human beings have learned to deal with the earth, expecting from her at a fixed date a full belly,” my translation) (Paris: Éditions Dialogues, ), p. . This topos is a cliché and partly propaganda, as the “on nous propose toujours” opening suggests. The initially brightly colored uniforms of the French soldiers are like the poppies of the fields, visible and easily killed by the enemy, and provide a “grande et stérile moisson d’hommes” in an inversion of the natural harvest (p. ). The topos of mother earth returns, unironically, at the end of his chapter: “Notre soeur, notre mère, la terre, offrant à nos yeux effarés la vision d’un bac à sable dévastés par ses enfants tragiques” (“Our sister, our mother, the earth, offering to our frightened eyes the vision of a sandbox devastated by its tragic children”) (p. ). The fighting children of a common mother is a theme deriving from Agrippa d’Aubigné ‘s Les tragiques (): “Je veux peindre la France une mère affligée, / Qui est entre ses bras de deux enfants chargée” (“I wish to represent France as an afflicted mother, whose arms are weighed down by two children”) (ed. Frank Lestringant [Paris: Gallimard, ], “Misères,” lines –). The children (representing the Catholics and the Protestants) deliver each other a battle whose site is the mother herself, “dont le champ est la mère” (line ). Rouaud once again integrates history and a slightly but not entirely ironized agricultural imaginary. An explicit allusion to Agincourt, comparing the heavily armed French cavalry to the first tanks of the First World War, also in Rouaud, Éclats de , p. . Jean-Pierre Richard has devoted several pages to the recurrence of rain, in its various Breton forms (mist, drizzle, showers, storm, etc.) in the first two novels of Rouaud, and his brief commentary on this scene in Les champs d’honneur grants rain a “remission” from its generally aggressive soaking of the earth (Terrains de lecture [Paris: Gallimard, ], pp. –, and especially pp. –). On the rain falling on the trenches and turning the earth into a cloaca, see also Rouaud, Éclats de , p. . Jean Echenoz,  (Paris: Minuit, ), pp. –. Jean Echenoz, , trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: New Press, ), pp. –. Coverdale ‘s excellent version translates Echenoz’s impersonal “on” (“one” but also “we” or in this case a general “you”) as “you”; she has captured also the informal, almost flippant tone of some of Echenoz’s prose here. “[M]es mains, qui ont porté le faiz dont les autres recueillent les aises en habondance, sont souvent estraintes jusques au sang espandre pource que je n’ay baillié ce que j’ay et ce que je n’ay mie” (Quadrilogue, p. ).

Chapter   In this respect my position is close to Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities” approach to the flourishing of members of different species (“Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’: Justice for Nonhuman Animals,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current

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



 



Notes to pages –

Debates and New Directions [Oxford, Oxford University Press, ]). See also the publications associated with the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities (dirs. Dominik Perler and Barbara Vetter): www.human-abilities.de/the_centre/index.html. A persona is first of all a mask, as in the theater, and in fictional narratives the subject of prosopopeia or ethiopea (see Blandine Perona, Prosopopée et persona à la Renaissance [Paris, Garnier, ]). In rhetoric, the person can be an object of (a certain kind of ) praise, as a person with a famous name, family, or other characteristic, and/or praised by reason of their actions (see Cicero, De inventione, I.xxiv.–I.xxviii.; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, V..–; Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, .–., Staseis, .–.). In moral thought, the individual possesses four personae that constitute their identity, ranging from a member of humanity to someone possessing a distinct personality (see Cicero, De officiis, I.xxx.–I.xxxiii.). In the law, the person is a full participant in legal obligations, rights, and so on. In theology, the persona is a way of characterizing the distinctness of the members of the divine trinity and ties in with the metaphysical definition of the human person. See, for a summary of these notions, Alain Le Gallo (ed.), La Personne, fortunes d’une antique singularité juridique (Paris: Garnier, ), and the lucid definitions of persona in Joannes Altenstaig and Joannes Tytz, Lexicon theologicum complectens . . . (st ed. ; Hildesheim: Olms,  [facs. repr. of the  edn.]), pp. –. My treatment also differs from the person/thing (or machine) distinction we find in modern ethical thought (e.g., Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something,” trans. Oliver O’Donovan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, ], who draws, however, on the medieval theological tradition). See Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium,  (in Die Theologischen Traktate, ed. and trans. Michael Elsässer [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, ], p. ). For a review of the different ancient and medieval theological definitions of the person, see Manfred Fuhrmann and Brigitte Kible, “Person,” in Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gru¨nder (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol.  (Basel: Schwabe, ), cols. –. A more elaborate history of the theological notion of person is Theo Kobusch, Die Entdecking der Person: Metaphysik der Freiheit und modernes Menschenbild (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ); see also Emmanuel Housset, La vocation de la personne: L’histoire du concept de personne de sa naissance augustinienne à sa redécouverte phénoménologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), pp. –. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I q  art , resp.: “Sed adhuc quodam specialiori et perfectiori modo invenitur particulare et individuum in substantiis rationalibus, quae habent dominium sui actus, et non solum aguntur, sicut alia, sed per se agunt: actiones autem in singularibus sunt. Et ideo etiam inter ceteras substantias quoddam speciale nomen habent singularis rationalis naturae. Et hoc nomen est persona” (“Further still, in a more special and perfect way, the particular and the individual are found in the rational

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Notes to pages –



substances which have dominion over their own actions; and which are not only made to act, like others; but which can act of themselves; for actions belong to singulars. Therefore also the individuals of the rational nature have a special name even among other substances; and this name is person”) (trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote, OP, Works of St. Thomas Aquinas [Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute], ). See the discussion in Dominik Perler, Eine Person sein: Philosophische Debatten im Spätmittelalter (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, ), pp. , –, and passim.  Della institutione morale di M. Alessandro Piccolomini. Libri XII (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, ), Book , Chap. XII, p. . Piccolomini’s treatise is based on lectures given on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and was first published in ; it is explicitly designed as a moral pedagogical text.  One subset of this problematic is the field of “affect studies,” or the history of emotions. For an excellent recent example of the critical historicizing of empathy, for example, and its variations and representations, see Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Another current tendency in literary research appears to run in the opposite direction: cognitive literary studies, bracketing history in its analysis of the way texts elicit certain brain functions (such as kinesic empathy, through “mirror neurons”). See Guillemette Bolens, Le style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, ), and Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  “Literature” is itself a term with a fairly recent history and cannot be used without anachronism to speak about early modern poems, novels, or other work.; “fiction” is perhaps more extensive historically, and certain modes of mimetic representation more accurate overall. That being said, our broad understanding of “literature” is adequate for my purposes here and accompanies a broader sense of the lyric that I have relied on all throughout this book.

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Index

Altenstaig, Joannes,  Anacreon,  Anderson, W. S., , – antithesis, – apostrophe,  Ariès, Philippe,  Aristotle, , , , , –, , , , – Ascensius, Jodocus Badius, , ,  Astraea, return of, –,  Aubigné, Agrippa d’,  Ausonius, , ,  Idyll “De rosis nascentibus”, – Azoulai, Juliette,  Baker, David,  Barny, Roger,  Baudelaire, Charles, , , , –, , ,  “À une passante”, – Bellenger, Yvonne,  Benjamin, Walter, ,  Berthon, Guillaume, ,  Bible  Cor :,  Daniel :,  Isaiah :-,  Noah,  Psalm   Blanchot, Maurice,  Blood, Susan,  Blum, Claude, , – Boccaccio, Giovanni,  Boethius,  Bolens, Guillemette, ,  Braden, Gordon,  Bräkling-Gersuny, Gabriele,  Brant, Sebastian,  Briçonnet, Guillaume, , 

Campangne, Hervé,  carpe diem, , , , ,  Catullus,  Cavalcanti,  Cave, Terence,  Cerda, Juan Luis de la,  Chambers, Ross, ,  Chartier, Alain, , , –, –, , – Quadrilogue invectif, –,  Cicero, –, ,  cliché, in Flaubert, – concessio,  conciliatio, , ,  conclusio, ,  Conley, Tom,  conquestio, – Cornilliat, François,  correctio, , –, –,  courtesy, ,  Coverdale, Linda,  Culler, Jonathan, , ,  Danaë, myth of, ,  Dante, , ,  Dauvois, Nathalie,  Debreuille, Jean-Yves,  Defaux, Gérard, –, – deictic, – Delvallée, Ellen, – Demonet, Marie-Luce,  Deucalion, myth of,  Di Simone, Marina,  dialectic, and the persuasion poem, – Diomedes,  Donaldson-Evans, Lance K.,  dubitatio, ,  Dubrow, Heather, 



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

Index

Echenoz, Jean, , ,  , – empathy, –, –,  enargeia. See evidentia, hypotyposis enthymeme, , , , ,  epanorthōsis. See correctio equity,  Erasmus, Desiderius,  ethos, –, , , , , , ,  Eurydice, , ,  evidentia, , , 

Ibbett, Katherine, ,  inhuman, the,  innamoramento in Baudelaire, – in Flaubert,  in Oster, as pastiche, – Institutes (Justinian), – irony in Flaubert, –, – in Virgil, – Isidore of Seville, 

Ferrarese, Sergio,  fides, – Fitzgerald, William,  Flaubert, Gustave, , , , , , , ,  L’éducation sentimentale, – Un coeur simple, – Francis, Scott,  François, Anne-Lise,  Fuhrmann, Manfred,  Furetière, Antoine, 

Joukovsky, Françoise,  Judovitz, Dalia,  justice, as legitimacy, 

Galand-Hallyn, Perrine,  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang,  Gordon, Alex L.,  Goyet, Francis, ,  Greene, Roland,  Griffin, Robert, ,  Guerrero, Gustavo, 

Lafayette, Madame de , , , –, , ,  Princesse de Clèves,  Princesse de Clèves, letter episode, – Landino, Cristoforo, , , ,  Langer, Ullrich, , , – Le Gallo, Alain,  logos, , ,  Lowrie, Joyce O.,  lyric and affect and reason, – and apostrophe, – and close reading, , – cognitive powers of, – and cultural memory, –, – definition, – and detail, – as a doing, – features of, – history, – and human abilities, –, See also human abilities and irony,  lyric episodes in narrative,  and mimetic representation, –,  and the moment,  and music,  and person,  and pleasure of the moment, – as praise, – and reason, – and rising movement, –

Hallyn, Fernand,  Hamburger, Käte,  Hamon, Philippe,  happiness,  and intimacy, – and the irrevocable, – and landscape, –, – and the unlimited, infinite, – Hartley, Julia Caterina, – Hermogenes,  Herold, Milan, – Hesiod,  Hogan, Patrick Colm,  Horace, ,  Housset, Emmanuel,  Hugo, Victor,  human abilities, , , – and history,  humanity, – as ability to pardon, – and person, – Hutton, James,  Hyman, Wendy Beth,  hypotyposis, 

Kafka, Franz,  Kallendorf, Craig,  Keith, Alison,  Kenny, Neil,  Kible, Brigitte,  Kobusch, Theo, 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225236.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index and subjectivity,  and suspension of time,  and time, – and war, –, – MacGowan, James,  Malherbe, François,  Mallarmé, Stéphane,  Manheim, Ralph,  Marguerite de Navarre, , ,  Marot, Clément, ,  “Chant royal chrestien”, – “De Paix, & de Victoire”, – “Deploration sur le trespas de Messire Florimond Robertet”, – device of, – “Eclogue sur le trespas de Ma Dame Loyse de Savoye”, – epitaph “De la Royne Claude”, – epitaph for Louise de Savoie, – rondeau “De la mort de Monsieur de Chissay”, – Martineau-Génieys, Christine, , , – Mayer, C. A.,  mercy,  metanoia. See correctio Michel, Guillaume, dit de Tours,  Miernowski, Jan, ,  Morin, Edgar,  movement, , – mundus inversus, ,  Murphy, Stephen,  narratio, , ,  negation,  Noirot-Maguire, Corinne, , ,  Nussbaum, Martha C., ,  O’Brien, John,  opera, –,  ordinary life (in Echenoz), – Orpheus, –, –, –, , , , , ,  Orpheus and Eurydice, story of, – Oster, Christian Loin d’Odile, – Otis, Brooke,  Ovid, , , –, , –, –, , ,  Metamorphoses X.–, –, – Metamorphoses X.–, – Orpheus story, – Ovide moralisé, 



palinodia,  pardon, of Orpheus, –, –,  parrhesia, – Pascal, Blaise,  pathos, , –,  Paulson, William,  Pavano, Giuseppe, – peace, as goal of deliberative rhetoric,  Perler, Dominik, – Perona, Blandine,  persona, , See also humanity Pestalozzi, Karl, ,  Peter of Spain, – Peters, Jeffrey N.,  Petrarch, –, , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , –,  Piccolomini, Alessandro,  Plato, – pleasure, –,  Plutarch,  Porphyry,  praesumptio, ,  Preisig, Florian,  Prete, Antonio,  prolepsis,  Propertius, ,  question, unlimited, ,  Quint, David,  Quintilian, , –, –, ,  Ramus, Petrus, , , – ratio,  Régent-Susini, Anne,  Regius (Rafaele Regio), , ,  rhetoric grand style in Chartier, – and human abilities, – Orpheus’ speech in Ovid, – and the persuasion poem, – Richard, Jean-Pierre, ,  Rigolot, François, ,  Rilke, Rainer Maria,  Rimbaud, Arthur,  Robbins, Emmet,  Ronsard, , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , –,  ode “À sa maistresse”, – Rouaud, Jean, , , , , , –,  Les champs d’honneur, – Éclats de , –

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 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ,  Rousset, Jean,  Rupp, Stephen,  Scarron, Paul,  Scève, Maurice, ,  Schlossman, Beryl,  Segal, Charles, , ,  Seneca, , –, , , ,  Hercules furens, – Hercules Oetaeus, – Slaney, Helen,  Solimano, Giannina,  Sorel, Charles,  Spaemann, Robert,  Stamelman, Richard,  Strauss, Walter A.,  style indirect libre,  syllogism, , –,  taedium,  Tarrant, Richard,  tempus fugit, , 

Index Thiry, Claude,  Thomas Aquinas,  Tibullus,  Tytz, Joannes,  Vatan, Florence,  Vellutello, Alessandro,  Venuti, Filippo, – Vetter, Barbara,  Vickers, Nancy J.,  Virgil, , , –, , –, –, –, –, –, , , , , , , ,  Georgics IV.–, – Warden, John,  Wawrzyniak, Natalia,  Weinberg, Bernard, ,  Westerwelle, Karin, – Wilson-Okamura, David Scott,  Yandell, Cathy, ,  Yates, Frances A., 

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