Author: staceymeeker

But let us approach “progress” backwards, along lines of development and filiation, towards a half-forgotten aesthetic innovation. I begin with a twentieth-century operatic masterpiece, and end at a minor, late-eighteenth-century poem, its ancestor. There I stop, confident that my readership in Anthropoetics, at least, can manage the further leap 50,000 or so years back to an even more originary moment. I will confine myself to an attempt to assess the functionality and heritage of the poem’s rhetoric. “Without rhetoric, ethical revolutions would never take place.”(1) Undoubtedly a revolution has occurred, but the extent to which this particular poem contributed to it is beyond my ability to measure here. But perhaps we can glimpse, at least, the potential effectiveness of the strategies it seems to have pioneered.

1945

In “The Borough, A Small Fishing Town on the East Coast of England,” a boy, apprenticed to the fisherman Peter Grimes, has died. An inquest determines “accidental circumstances” but the community murmurs, and Grimes is bitter, feels victimized by their suspicions. But he has his friends, including retired skipper Balstrode and schoolmistress Ellen Orford, who help get him a new apprentice. Grimes wants to marry Ellen, but needs money and status first–he’ll “fish the sea dry” to get them. The second boy also dies, accidentally, falling from the cliff by Grimes’s hut. The townspeople form a vengeful posse and twice pursue Grimes. Eventually Balstrode tells him to take his boat out to sea, sink it, and drown himself. He does. The Borough returns to normal.

In Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, these three deaths are not represented directly on stage; “this is not what the opera is about,” a critic tells us. It is about “the individual in conflict with society,”(2)the crowd against a single man, scapegoating.

Grimes cannot leave, he is “rooted here,” and this, like his dream of marrying Ellen, is just one more normal and innocent desire both prompted and thwarted by the communal Other. If he drives his boys too hard, he does so because he is obeying the community’s demands for money, for respectability. But no, even so, he didn’t kill them, exactly. If he strikes Ellen it is in a moment of maddened frustration, provoked by the community’s implacable opposition to his desires. All such violence originates in the community and, in the moral accusation of the opera, is returned to it, indignantly and directly. “The more vicious the society,” explained the composer, “the more vicious the individual.”(3) Peter Grimes was widely received as a tragedy.

Britten seems indeed to have insisted on the purity of this vision of scapegoated man, of “vicious society,” over-ruling his librettist’s attempts to introduce other perspectives.(4) Biographical critics identify the composer’s own victimizations, as homosexual and pacifist in wartime Britain.

The music is complex, but more accessible to contemporary audiences than many twentieth-century scores, conveying sadness but also menace, alternating passages of compelling dramatic power and exquisite lyrical beauty. It was an immediate and lasting success.

It is not really a tragedy, of course. One might characterize its achievement as the dressing up of its own and its audience’s fairly straightforward resentments in a flattering fabric of modernist psychic analysis, moral seriousness and above all what we might call the lyricism of alienation–far and away, I would judge, the most effective and pervasive of modern lyricisms. What looks like a modernist penetration into the deep interior is, in fact, an exhilarating broadening of perspective, a breathtaking glimpse of a universe instinct with victimhood, an abysm of victims, of victims of victims, victims victimizing, all human life itself ostensibly victimized by a cosmos that beckons tormentingly with cruel promises of unrealizable transcendence–but that in fact, in its beauty, opens up unimaginable realms of potential, the potential for obtaining what Generative Anthropology has taught us to call centrality.

In the opera’s best-known and most-praised aria, the hitherto inarticulate Grimes turns Romantic poet and sings implausibly of “the Great Bear and Pleiades.” Daring this implausibility, this lack of realism, is an act of considerable artistic judgement. Peter’s inability to speak coherently to his community, to account for himself–again, a result of his frustration, his helpless rage at their power over his desires–is exactly correlative to the monologic eloquence of the aria, and as such is the very core of his victimhood–a point the community immediately reinforces on stage, by mocking him for it.

Now the Great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves,
are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
breathing solemnity in the deep night.

Who can decipher
in storm or starlight
the written character
of a friendly fate —
as the sky turns the world for us to change?

But if the horoscope’s
bewildering
like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring
who can turn skies back and begin again?(5)

This is the universe as modern victims see it, the very sky formed of condensed “human grief,” absorbing it all, an infinite repository of suffering. The only human action conceivable, longed for, is one which by definition can never be performed: to “turn [the] skies back and begin again.” What Peter cannot know, and in a familiar double perspective the audience does understand, is that such an aspiration is futile not because of his flaws or irretrievable actions, nor because all such returns are impossible, but because of his indestructible innocence, that the beauty of the aria shows us. How should he begin again to be more blameless than he already is? This very desire, in all its noble futility, is the final emblem of his status, of his immunity from the grubby social criteria of actions and accountability.

Indeed, in a likewise familiar modern logic, actions are subsumed into identity, and the identity of victim (even if everyone implicitly may have his or her turn) is finally imposed by others, by the victimizers. In one of the opera’s best dramatic moments, just before his final “destruction by the conformists” as one critic puts it, the pursuing villagers call out to him by name in the fog, and he roars back, in furious and bitter irony, that name: “Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes!”

He speaks for a whole world. You made me what I am, and now you accuse me! You pretend I have an identity, after you ever and again deny it to me. “I think we hate the chorus in this closing scene” mildly remarks the same critic.(6) Indeed we do.

1810

An obscure clergyman poet–England has a goodly number of them–has recently reappeared after some 20 years of silence, his name kept alive only by a few striking passages in a popular anthology. Now George Crabbe has a new poem, almost epic length, The Borough. Into an aesthetic field conditioned by the formal and thematic innovations of Coleridge and Wordsworth he obtrudes a shapeless mass of character sketches, local description and moralizing tales, all rendered in heroic couplets, the idiom of the previous century. One section, some 400 lines, is entitled “Peter Grimes.”

The eponymous Peter feels the gravity of new desires. His prohibiting father brandishes the Bible.

“It is the word of life,” the parent cried;
–“This is the life itself,” the boy replied.(7) (18-19)

Of course, the life itself, as Peter experiences what René Girard characterized as the passage from external to internal mediation, has its own obstacles.

Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarr’d
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! That he could not to his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend. (34-39)

He wants an apprentice–Crabbe says in order to vent his sadistic frustrations, but clearly also because he cannot operate his fishing boat alone–and obtains one from London, where poorhouse clearing men sell them, orphan paupers, to masters in the countryside. Crabbe gives us perhaps his most famous lines, whose chilling final couplet will form the moral core–or excuse–for the opera’s attack.

Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,
The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.
Some few in town observed in Peter’s trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shiv’ring in the winter’s cold;
None put the question,–“Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? –What, man! The lad must live:
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.”
None reason’d thus–and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, “Grimes is at his exercise.” (65-78)

The re-iterated “None” designating the community and its sin of omission, is ontologically transformed in the opera into the “posse,” the mob, who are no longer calm, and who repeatedly chant the Grimes-is-at-his-exercise phrase. Crabbe’s careful wording, his qualifications disappear: “None could the ridges on his back behold”–as indeed how could they? And the interventions that the community in The Borough does eventually make are precisely the crimes the opera angrily dramatizes. Nonetheless, a bleak view of the market world’s disengagement and indifference is powerful enough in the poem. His father cannot, and his town will not, interrupt the cascading sequence of the modern man’s resentments and desires.

The boy is soon dead. Another is found. He too dies, and murmurs of alarm and indignation rise in the town. Then a third. Britten’s alienated poet is a serial murderer, although the rural justice system cannot prove or punish it. The judge at least prohibits more boys, instructs Grimes to hire a freeman, warns him of legal vengeance. But informal strictures take over–a pariah, if not a pursued scapegoat, Grimes is shunned. None will work with him, none will help launch his boat, the women berate him in the street, the children run from him. As well they might.

The relationship of the poem’s readers to this spectacle of the many against the one is much more complicated than the one induced by the opera. For one thing, where the opera will silence the voices of the boy-victims, in Crabbe they speak, are seen in poignant moments of terrified oppression, and particularized one from the other. For another thing, it is clear that the world that hears Grimes at his exercise but does not act is the world of “the life itself,” the world of individual autonomy and freedom, the world organized into private and public, free agency and law. What many concerned readers in 1810 took from the poem was the implication that the laws and regulations governing poorhouses and apprenticeships must change, that the trade in boys must stop. That the traditional informal sanction of rural opinion was fading and inadequate, that such places as the Borough must progress. Crabbe’s remote community was emphatically not cloaked in the golden Romantic glow of the past, of the marginal and authentic, the sort of glow many readers, only half accurately, took from the contemporaneous poetry of Sir Walter Scott, and would also take, with even less cause, from that author’s famous and vastly influential novels, works themselves considerably influenced by Crabbe. But nor is it innately vicious. Morally, it is sound enough–its women shun the active criminal, but pity him in his final madness and death–but it is ethically inefficient. For example, it needs an institution still a decade away as Crabbe writes, although Sir Robert Peel is making his case: a professional police. It needs a Children’s Aid Society.

Alone now, Peter languishes passively in his boat, in a memorably malign natural scene.

Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat. (171-80)

He starves in mysterious inanition, at one point strikingly imagined through the eyes of tourists from London, whose telescopes fix on a single man motionless for hours upon the water. Brought in at last to the poorhouse, he reveals something of his nightmarish inner condition, what he has seen.

“In one fierce summer-day, when my poor brain
Was burning hot and cruel was my pain,
Then came this father-foe, and there he stood
With his two boys again upon the flood;
There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee
In their pale faces when they glared at me.” (348-53)

Finally,

Then with an inward, broken voice he cried,
“Again they come,” and mutter’d as he died. (374-75)

In short, the poem investigates the implications of victimhood and violence, of desire and resentment, with remarkable subtlety. “Freedom” for the operation of his desires is what Peter seeks and obtains, and yet he dies murmuring of the invincible power of the father. But the tale is no simple sermon, from this least sermonizing of preacher-poets. Peter’s victimhood is plausible enough, even as its transit through sadistic violence is traced with the grim clarity Crabbe is known for. The passages which link the marshy landscape to his psychic state are deeply affecting, and for all that Peter’s entry into the free market of desires is recognized as a terrible moral wandering, there is an unmistakable current of sympathy for this questionable Romantic hero. His sufferings themselves are profound, and the ostracism of his society is ultimately as impersonal and commensurate as the effect of the pitiless sea, upon whose surface he goes mad. Perspectives change. Victim to victimizer to victim again, and at each stage the reader is invited into a multi-faceted and shifting engagement with him, him alone, that moves through registers of sympathy, near-envy, resentment, even to the point of loathing–or what at times feels like understanding.

One might be tempted to feel that the story Crabbe actually tells reveals the opera’s melodrama as a confused, self-indulgent hash. That Crabbe sweeps aside Romantic victimhood with a bracing Eighteenth-Century moral clarity. But this would not be quite right. True, the opera’s alterations, if seen as a tinkering with some kind of realist truth, would be indefensible. Three boys reduced to two, their causes of death fudged, their voices silenced.(8) Indeed, there might be good reason not to pardon the opera’s complicity in the evasion of individual responsibility for child abuse and murder–it sings only too solemnly the song of much twentieth-century psychological determinism, playing the Met, as it were, to Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway parody: “Officer Krupke, I’m depraved [’cause] I’m deprived!” But if the opera is condemned on such grounds, so must be Crabbe’s poem.

“The realist’s claim of empiricism is meant to fend off the danger of romantic subjectivism,”(9) Eric Gans has noted, and the fundamentally “real” feature in both works, their very tender of authenticity, is the violence of Grimes. That, really, is why it is there. The degree of Grimes’s bad behaviour is the measure of each work’s awareness of a very specific risk of victimary rhetoric: that it may be seen to be overplaying its hand; that the desire for centrality may betray itself, and thus lose its power. The not-entirely-sympathetic victim disarms resentment. In the instance we are tracing, anyway, this is how I would construe the “danger of romantic subjectivism.” Empiricism is the ultimate “cover” for such desires–or to be more sympathetic to their goals–the ultimate justification, or authentication. And subtler forms of empiricism, that gather evidence from multiple perspectives, for example, compensate for less subtle ones, modify, adjust, refine, as the market for them develops. Of such increments, in the distinctions of each from the previous, the knowledge we can reasonably expect to gain from realist art consists. The struggle to cover or even to escape desire produces, dialectically, that art’s “facts.” Taken as a whole process, that is surely a revolution.

But such an analysis also implies that the violence which legitimates not Grimes’s claim to centrality, but that of the two works about him, is in a sense directed outwards. The subjectivism being fended off is ultimately that of the audience, in either their mimicking of the works’ desires, or worse, in their detection and scorn of those desires. The artist must stay ahead. Crabbe’s later poetry is such “cover,” for an earlier, cruder act of defensive aggression, still further back.

1780

A naive young man from a particularly bleak stretch of Suffolk coastline, son of a salt warehouseman, throws off patriarchal restraint, ignores fatherly advice, even outright scorn of his useless learning, and sets out to London with a few pages of verse and three pounds in his pocket. He wants to be a poet. His London landlord warns him of the fate of the wonderful boy Chatterton, would-be poet, suicide. In the midst of the newcomer’s struggles to write a play, a novel, anything, before his uncomprehending eyes, an explosion of arson and mob violence, the Gordon Riots flame out around him.(10) His little rebellion, his little access of anti-patriarchal desire, has precipitated him into an exuberant, violent, rivalrous world he is utterly unprepared for. Starving, desperate, one step away from debtor’s prison, he writes to a total stranger, the greatest man of his day, Edmund Burke, asking, begging, for succor. Enclosed in the letter is a poem entitled “The Village,” an anti-pastoral.

The Village Life, and every care that reigns
O’er youthful peasants and declining swains;
What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
What form the real picture of the poor,
Demand a song–the Muse can give no more.
Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet praised his native plains. (1.1-8)

The times demand such a poem, young George Crabbe proclaims, the muses can do no more, so “shall I dare these real ills to hide?” (1.47). Indeed the ongoing history of victimary rhetoric since this date tends to make the aesthetic of “The Village” feel more inevitable and unsurprising than perhaps it ought to. It had a few precedents–the poet Charles Churchill for one–but not so many that its assault on pastoral poetry and those who took comfort from it should not register sharply and be widely remembered, with Crabbe’s name, as proclaiming the death of an ancient genre.

“The Village” is not a narrative but a survey of what seems at first the generalized reality of rural life, but quickly emerges as a particular place, a fishing town on a “frowning coast,” the unnamed original of The Borough. The poem’s argument is precisely that of Peter Grimes with his father: this is the life itself, which your book precludes. And why?

. . . the Muses sing of happy swains
Because the Muses never knew their pains (1.21-22)

Necessarily, the author of the present poem has known such pains–has been “by such examples taught” he tells us–and is thus modeling the superiority of position that suffering can provide. It is not an individual, but the collectivity that here suffers, however, a community whose environment, the same in which Grimes languished, is epitomized by Crabbe’s famous and wonderfully bleak botanical catalogue of “blighted rye” and thistles, the “blue bugloss” that “paints the sterile soil,” the “slimy mallow” and “clasping tares.” Their oppressor is explicitly the very force that the pastoral poets celebrate: nature, or “nature’s niggard hand.” Operative nonetheless is the same qualification of the victimized clients, the same “cover,” as I just called it. They may have their pains, but this is “a bold, artful, surly, savage race,” skilled only

. . . to take the finny tribe
The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe (1.113-14)

and who haunt the beaches to plunder ships wrecked along the coast, or engage in smuggling.

But this “realism,” this fundamentally literary protest against the inaccuracy of conventional representation cannot long conceal its broader accusation, its impetuous extension of the ever expanding circle of those guilty of an ever-expanding catalogue of sufferings and victimizations. There is no trace of any genuinely causal argument in the poem, however, of the sort levelled against ideology or ideological constructs in later years. In “The Village,” the accusation, the violence, is less displaced.

“The realist esthetic includes for the first time a critical model of its implied audience”(11) Gans also reminds us, and in “The Village” this audience is repeatedly and pointedly connected to the victimhood described. Admittedly, there is a context of cultural and philosophical rivalry that the poet must be understood to address. Critics have, for example, pointed to Oliver Goldsmith’s elegiac “Deserted Village” (1770) and even Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), or to a still prevalent sentimental moralism which found vice in the city and virtue in the country. And parts of “The Village” do attack other poets specifically, accusing them of writing pastoral because it is “easy” or, more ferociously and irrationally, of failing to feed and comfort the victimized poor, whom young Crabbe briefly addresses:

Can poets sooth you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtles round your ruin’d shed?
Can their light tales your weighty griefs o’erpower,
Or glad with airy mirth the toilsome hour? (1.59-62)

Not, as we shall note, that Crabbe explains how his own, more bitter poem would be able to perform these functions. But it is not rival poets or ideologues but mere readers who emerge as the true target. Here, too, there are apparent distinctions. Some modern critics have taken Crabbe at his seeming intention that the addressees of the poem are the rich or their sympathizers. But this is a screen, behind which a more general aggression hides.

First, they are the weak and self-indulgent readers of other poets’ criminal effusions:

Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease,
Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please; (1.172-73)

But as these are invited to observe Crabbe’s realities, they slide unmarked into his own readers:

Or will you deem them amply paid in health,
Labour’s fair child, that languishes with wealth?
Go then! And see them rising with the sun,
Through a long course of daily toil to run. . . (1.140-44; emphasis added)

There may you see the youth of slender frame
Contend with weakness, weariness and shame (1.156-57; emphasis added)

Reading his corrective, indeed, we find ourselves accused of various things. Self-interested insensitivity.

Or will you praise that homely, healthy fare,
Plenteous and plain, that happy peasants share? (1.166-67)

And worse.

. . . Trifle not with wants you cannot feel,
Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal. (1.156-69)

To such cruel mockery we, the better fed and better off, add the harm of provoking (of course helpless) resentment, as “the wealth around them makes them doubly poor” (141). (Or perhaps not so helpless. At least one modern critic has detected “hints” of the coming “class struggle.”(12) Which, as we find the rural poor designated by the poem, explicitly and rather astonishingly, as our “slaves,” we ought certainly to fear.)

All this, as the poem’s dudgeon rises, must help justify the barely veiled threat a few lines later–“How would ye bear in real pain to lie, / Despis’d, neglected, left alone to die? (1.258-59). The animus of these words is inseparable from that intuition of symmetry fundamental to all resentment, and resentful violence. (Gans, as we know, argues it is fundamental to language and the human itself–but in this context its application quite clearly seems to be not just that first shall be last, as it were, but that victimizer may easily enough become victim or, from a perspective at least provisionally outside resentment, vice-versa.) The attack here is on comfort, on gratified desire, and only secondarily–or as a pretext–on a genre, ideology, social practices or even “attitudes.” The target of such rhetoric is, Gans notes, “from the beginning . . . not the other’s utterance but his position, vulnerable through its excessive claim on the center.”(13) “The realist version of esthetic universalism,” Gans thus also observes, “has a deliberately aggressive air,” and we might add, not only in its provocative choice of “unsavory subject matter.”(14)

It is worth remarking, though, how early, in the English context, we can detect a distinctive version of this familiar game of escalating realist provocation. Samuel Johnson helped revise Crabbe’s poem, and his own Rasselas (1759) and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) also attack the desires and aesthetic comforts of their readers, albeit in a more generalized and certainly displaced mode, a neo-classical mode. And these works, like “The Village” were very well received. Burke admired the latter poem sufficiently to take the trouble, in busy times, of saving Crabbe and setting him up in a parsonage. Indeed, Crabbe’s poetic reputation, for the time, was made by the poem. This should remind us that something else is in play, certainly in The Borough but even in the earlier poem, with which we are also familiar.

To wit, we know we are being offered the chance to opt out of the readership so excoriated. We need not be such readers–in short, we are offered a model, through the mediation of the poet, of a morally superior perspective. Together we can scorn those who self-servingly idealize a rural diet. As we gratefully accept this boon, we may be only glancingly aware of the way this modeling elevates the truth-telling poet over his literary predecessors. We may hardly register, that is, the way we have been coopted into his party, or more precisely, his alliance, with the victims against his rivals. This kind of alliance too he is modeling, though, and it is much more broadly extensible. If there is a political application to be derived from a poem which, as one recent critic rightly observes, “gives no advice,”(15) it begins here.

As Gans notes, “realism is the Romanticism of the left,” and curious as it might be thus to align an old-fashioned Anglican parson and his outdated heroic couplets, it may indeed be possible to glimpse here one form of that re-circulation of resentment which GA identifies generally as the distinguishing and crucially protective mechanism of market relations. One may detect, that is, an impetus for an ethically productive left-liberal politics in the choices Crabbe eventually offers his readers. Every reader, in the society which is emergent in Crabbe’s day and dominant in ours, is vulnerable. Vulnerable to the imagined as well as the practical resentment generated by his or her position–always excessively comfortable from some perspective. Every reader or consumer of culture has need of the cover provided by the swallowing of a regular and at least putatively bitter dose of realist art, even when the rivalrous indignation generated by the pastoral is a distant memory (except for undergraduates subjected to historically oriented literature courses).(16) The sharing out of victimary centrality, that is, in the form of a tempered, “realistic” alliance of sympathizers, is one of the market world’s more effective vehicles of social progress. (Indeed, let us thus denominate the so-called “troubled conscience.”) The influential critic Francis Jeffrey, writing in 1808, speaks of men of his acquaintance who can henceforth never pass a workhouse without thinking of Crabbe’s evocation in “The Village.”(17) Workhouses would certainly last many decades yet. But a critical mass of such sentiments–and the potent modeling of attention that generates them–are essential preconditions, surely, for the practical, political alliances needed to enact such measures as the abolition of the slave trade in apprentices. Essential, at any rate, if perhaps not sufficient, as the harshly pessimistic tone of “The Village” itself implies.(18)

Can the same function be granted the opera? A re-staging of the old Romantic trope of heroic victim and oppressing collectivity in the midst of the British collectivity’s most intense historical danger can perhaps prompt either admiration or dismay. As that danger has faded and we have moved into and then possibly through another era, our perspective on the work must doubtless change. It can be expected to serve different purposes. Perhaps ultimately, one might only say it seems still that the opera provides less cover than do either of Crabbe’s poems–and that this is the source and measure of the latter’s ethical superiority. And that of an enduring realism in many arts. The opera’s lack of such realism is reflected both in the implausible persecution of an implausibly beatific victim, and in the resultant absence of any imaginable measure which could ameliorate the suffering thereof. Or, to put it another way, stripping the scapegoated Grimes of his violence transfers that violence back to us, where Crabbe’s “Village” had originally and naively vested it, and we are likely to respond to this imposition either with passive abnegation (the kind of cultured masochism common enough in arty venues in the modern world), or reciprocal resentment. Neither are much use, now. The opera posits a society which is essentially “vicious”; its non-victims are all essentially so; only its victims are saved, and only as long as they remain victims. Sympathy (except for oneself) is offered no social rewards. By contrast The Borough, the opera’s never entirely effaced, realist ancestor, is a place where there are institutions like poorhouses, that are ineffectual, but could be better. There is work to be done.

The opera’s manipulative plot, its single focus, smack almost of a kind of greed, by which term I mean a too-obvious desire, too openly betrayed, and too ugly–unaesthetic. And perhaps from this we can tentatively derive a way to assess kinds of victimary rhetoric: the more it does indeed “fend off” subjectivism, the more cover it provides, the more its realism permits an alliance with at least part of its audience, the more effective or productive it can be. The opera’s undeniable “high art” moments of aesthetic contemplation, of focus on the beauty of the sign, of the music, are betrayed, or at least weakened, paradoxically enough for the genre, by a lack of that realism, leaving it to partake of popular art’s fantasy of resentment, “proceeding,” as Gans puts it, “as if the market had not destroyed the ritual center.”(19) This seems exactly how the opera does proceed, at the level of its narrative. And how Crabbe’s poetry, in the details we have highlighted above, pointedly does not. Perhaps the opera therefore confirms the Gansian binary, and is of the right–if not exactly the “art for art’s sake” that Gans identifies, perhaps “beautiful victimhood for its own sake.” But concealing beneath this formula its selfishness, that is, its relative unwillingness to offer alliance to sympathy, to share its splendidly articulated victimary centrality, it implicitly forces its entire audience into the role of oppressors–it is “passive-aggressive.” Its “conservative” interest in preservation of the old social order, in other words, is entirely self-serving and elitist–that order is essential to the beauties of its unshared victimhood.

There are probably a number of ways in which what might be broadly designated “liberal” behavior is generated in a de-sacralizing world. All, I would assume, do involve a certain fending off of dangers, a generating of viable identity, of centers of self tolerable to those around them. But an evolved realism, like that of The Borough, whatever its roots in defensiveness and aggression, a realism that has reflected upon its own generation–thankfully still with us in art and thus still modeled into the arts of individual and social life–may perhaps also be described in more positive terms. From its human knowledge, ultimately its self-knowledge, not just safety individual and collective, but progress material and ethical. Britten’s Peter Grimes premiered on June 7, 1945, helping to usher in the era of high victimhood which GA has so signally defined and critiqued. But in these sixty years the achievements of a busy liberalism, a persistent, intellectually unspectacular liberalism perhaps not that different from the one supported by the esthetic of the great nineteenth-century novelists from Sir Walter Scott onwards, have also been immense. To pick just one instance, we might remember the Marshall Plan, most forgiving, most realistic and most successful of all post-war treatments of a vanquished enemy. The most grimy and violent of all national Grimeses, as it were, controlled but then succored, lifted to his feet. A trend of almost unprecedented improvement of material and social conditions launched itself and spread astonishingly across the globe, even as elite thought was almost unrelievedly tragic in tone. Now, as this supposedly post-modern period ends, we are perhaps better able to measures the relative values at least suggested in two artistic treatments–left and right, or not, as one prefers–of a representative victim-agent of modern resentment. If one Grimes sings his own sufferings into the very heavens, leaving us far below, the other in his crimes and compunction, and our response to them, teaches us, even now, of our capacities for human community, and for action in support of it.

Introduction

The Renaissance was a period with little concern for firstness. To the contrary, the writers, thinkers and artists of this era embraced their own cultural secondarity.(1) This is certainly the case in Italy, where the rediscovery of Greco-Roman ideals was held at a much higher premium than any proto-nationalistic aspirations towards originality. For a burgeoning nation such as France, this is all the more true, as the French, imitating Italy’s imitation of classical ideas, found themselves in a situation similar to that of the poet in Book X of Plato’s Republic: three times removed from the imitated ideal. In Pléiade Poetics: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Thought and Terminology, Grahame Castor goes to great lengths to reveal that, in the Renaissance, the significance of the concept of “invention” was far removed from the romantic idea of firstness it carries today. For the poets of the Renaissance, poetic creation was a combination of invention and imagination. To make this point, Castor quotes perhaps the greatest poet of the French Renaissance, Ronsard, who writes: “Le principal poinct est l’invention, laquelle vient tant de la bonne nature que par la leçon des bons et anciens autheurs” (84) [The key point is invention, which comes as much from good nature (inspiration, imagination) as from the lessons of good and ancient authors.] In the Renaissance, invention was synonymous with discovery (or, more properly, re-discovery). To repeat Thomas Greene’s vivid image from The Light of Troy, the poetic itinerary of the Renaissance was to revivify–but not necessarily renew–a tradition “lit by the dim brilliance of a vanishing city” (88). Eric Gans speaks to the same in his essay on “The Neoclassical Esthetic” in Originary Thinking: “The Renaissance was the moment of change in the relative forces of ritual and esthetic culture; it was not the origin or even the ‘rebirth’ of the latter” (150-51).(2) So, returning to my title, with our modern conception of invention so affected by the mensonge romantique, how is it possible to speak of Clément Marot’s “Invention” of the French sonnet while avoiding accusations of anachronism? The response to this question–and the justification of this study–is located in the Renaissance’s outward avowal of its secondarity, with its motto: Innovation par imitation [Innovation by/through imitation].

Marot’s invention(3) of the sonnet operates, as this study aims to demonstrate, according to these very principles of innovation par imitation, translation giving way to a sort of imitation that allows for poetic innovation to occur. The poems to be analyzed in the paragraphs to follow will be presented in such a way as to trace Marot’s poetic evolution and to reveal how his composition of typical French forms (most notably the epigram), leading to his translations of certain Petrarchan sonnets, ultimately produce a poetic effect unique to the French sonnet that I will term le couplet marotique. Even if poetic “invention” is no more than a rhetorical gesture in the Renaissance, Marot’s French imitation of the Petrarchan sonnet has most certainly presented us with one of the finest examples of lyrical innovation.

Before moving on to analysis of the Marotic sonnet and an explanation of the function of the couplet marotique, it will be useful to further expose the stakes of this argument by historically grounding Clément Marot, the literary figure, in a Renaissance context, as well as to offer reasons why the Petrarchan sonnet is an ultimate form of poetic imitation, constituting a lyrical ideal. I will thus divide my study into three sections and proceed as follows: I) Clément Marot and the Lyrical Renaissance in France, II) Marot and the Petrarchian Lyrical Imperative, and III) From the Epigram to the French Sonnet: the Innovation of the couplet marotique.

I. Clément Marot and the Lyrical Renaissance in France

While many would agree to the absurdity of the historical idea of an overnight transition from the “Dark Ages” to the Renaissance, in the history of French poetry, such a radical change is traditionally accepted. With the 1549 publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, the French lyrical tradition was turned on its head, as the Angevin poet gave examples of which poets, poetic styles, and genres were worthy of imitation for the poet wishing to embellish the French vernacular and render it equal to the cultured Italian tongue and the languages of Antiquity. At the same time praising the Greeks and Romans as traditions to imitate in order to “amplify” the French language (I, 8), Du Bellay denigrates France’s national tradition and the poetic output of nearly all of his Gallic forebears (II, 2). To enrich the French tongue, he holds that their “natural” poetic style and “common” language were insufficient, appealing rather to the imitation of the epigrams of Martial, Ovidian elegies, the satires of Quintilian, Virgilian eclogues, Horatian odes, Homeric epics, and Petrarchan sonnets (II, 4-5). Oddly enough, in this treatise that would become the veritable bible for Renaissance imitation theory, formalizing the poetic doctrine of innovation par imitation, it is none other than the late Marot (who had succumbed to the plague in 1544), France’s first sonneteer (publishing his first sonnet more than a decade before La Deffence, in 1538) who would stand in as Du Bellay’s straw man example of what not to imitate.

Why single out Marot? The tradition into which Du Bellay was tapping, that of the “Defense” and the “Ars Poetica,”(4) was one in which Thomas Sébillet had found success one year earlier with his Art poétique français (1548). In many ways, Du Bellay is responding to–if not trying to subvert–Sébillet’s treatise, which sees traditional, medieval French verse forms as the natural, national products of poetic evolution since Antiquity. For achievement in what was then modern French verse, Sébillet’s model par excellence is Clément Marot.(5) Sébillet is justified in this, as Marot belongs to a group of poets that Jean Vignes labels as the derniers rhétoriqueurs (83), the sons of the Grands rhétoriqueurs, a group that included Clément’s father Jean Marot and whose poetic virtuosity was unparalleled in the French tradition, but, at the same time, whose simplistic poetic forms were derived from medieval rhyme schemes and who were more interested in playing rhetorical games than putting forward a nationalistic agenda. For his part, Clément Marot finds himself on the cusp, straddling the back end of the rhétoriqueurs, a tradition from which he never aimed to divorce himself (Vignes 87), and the front end of the poetic revival to be ushered in by Du Bellay and the Pléiade Brigade in the 1550s. In fact, Christine Scollen-Jimack has labeled Marot as follows:

[A] Janus-like figure who both looks back to the Middle Ages (his earliest works perpetuate late-medieval poetic traditions, and he edited Villon and the Roman de la Rose), and at the same time ushers in the first phase of the French Renaissance (he translated Virgil, Ovid, and Petrarch, and he may well have been the first to write sonnets in French). (502)

Needing a clean break between the Middle Ages and the new poetic revival founded in imitation in order for his manifesto in La Deffence to take root in France, Du Bellay realized he had to eradicate Marot:

Marot me plaist (dit quelqu’un) pour ce, qu’il est facile, et ne s’éloigne point de la commune manière de parler. . . . Quand à moy, telle superstition ne m’a point retiré de mon Entreprinse : pour ce, que j’ay tousjours estimé notre Poësie Françoyse estre capable de quelque plus haulte, et meilleur Style, que celuy, dont nous sommes si longuement contentez. (II, 1: 120-21, my italics)

[I find Marot pleasing (someone will say) because he is easy and is never too far removed from the common manner of speaking. . . . For me, such superstition has never caused me to withdraw from my Enterprise: for I have always esteemed our French Poetry to be capable of a higher and better Style than that with which we have for such a long time contented ourselves.(6) (my italics)]

In a document aimed at enriching and expanding the French vernacular, with the ultimate objective of rendering it equal to Classical tongues, there was simply no room for poetry that emphasized that which is facile and commonplace.

Margaret Ferguson makes an important case in favor of this explanation in her reading of Du Bellay’s Deffence as an “Offensive Defense for a New Intellectual Elite” (194, my italics):

The attacks on Marot highlight the complexity of Du Bellay’s concept of the vulgar and his ambivalent feelings about his potential readers. Most of Marot’s initial readers had been members of the court during the reign of Francis I (1515-1547), the patron of art and literature. To blame Marot’s idiom for being vulgar, capable of pleasing because it was ‘easy,’ close to ‘the common manner of speaking,’ was therefore a challenge to elite readers of the new reign of Henri II: they would betray a lack of cultivation if they failed to alter their taste. There were in fact fewer differences between du Bellay and Marot than the rhetoric of [La deffence] suggests. In addition to French medieval genres, Marot had imitated Italian and classical models with considerable versatility–not only the elegy, eclogue, and epigram, but most especially the Petrarchan sonnet, which he introduced into France. (194-95)

In another, more sinister interpretation than the nationalistic explanation presented above, Du Bellay and Ronsard effectively kill off and displace their œdipal father in order to succeed to the poetic throne of 16^th-century France. This is the thesis of William J. Kennedy’s chapter on Du Bellay and Marot “Totems for Defense” from The Site of Petrarchism, where the situation is defined as “illustrat[ing] the social psychology sketched by Freud in Totem and Taboo” (94), for which, ironically, “The result would be nothing less than a struggle for supremacy in the French canon and a potential setback to developing a national culture” (94). Claude Thiry couches this dismissal in the following terms: “On bâtit sur l’œuvre des prédécesseurs, on innove éventuellement à partir d’elle, mais on ne la répudie pas, et ce jusqu’à la génération de Clément Marot: le rejet du père, en poésie française, n’apparaît qu’avec la Pléiade” (2). [We build on the works of our predecessors. We eventually innovate from them, but we do not repudiate them. This remains true through the generation of Clément Marot: the rejection of the father in French poetry does not appear until the Pléiade.] Marot, a poet so celebrated, was the only one–the phallic father–Du Bellay needed to mention, in that he was the most recent, the most difficult to surpass, and all other “medieval” poets fell far within the reach of his great poetic wingspan. To do away with all potential competition, Du Bellay simply had to eliminate this central figure. Marot thus becomes a straw man for Du Bellay, who effectively singles out his predecessor in an ad hominem assault that would radiate negatively on this great, nodal poet in the French tradition. Marot biographer Pauline Smith laments this same reticence on the part of the Pléiade–and the French cultural memory, by connection–to recognize the role of Marot in Renaissance poetics:

However great or understandable their reluctance to admit it, the poets of the Pléiade received a considerable legacy from Marot. His innovations went far to realize the poetic ‘reforms’ which Ronsard was later to claim as his own. Far from being the first to break with the traditions of the Rhétoriqueurs and with everything that was medieval in the poetry of their predecessors, the Pléiade poets were themselves denied this role by one of these same predecessors. They recommended the cultivation in French poetry of the genres of Classical Antiquity and of Italy when Marot had already written the first French elegies, had introduced the epithalamium, the eclogue and the sonnet, had established the epigram and composed in his chansons and cantiques which differed only in name from those which Ronsard was later to callOdes. […] And long before the Pléiade’s Petrarchist and Anacreonic phases, Marot’s poetry introduced into French the conceits of the Italian love poets […]. (273, her italics)

More succinct and evocative in his imagery, Gérard Defaux, in his “Introduction” to the Garnier Classiques edition of Marot’s Œuvres complètes, seconds this opinion of the Pléiade’s indebtedness to Marot, pointing to many of the same contributions as Smith did above and claiming that Marot “avait en somme fait le lit dans lequel Du Bellay et Ronsard n’eurent plus qu’à se coucher” (I: clxviii). [(Marot) had, essentially, already made the bed in which Du Bellay and Ronsard would have to do nothing more than lie down.] Regardless of which interpretation, if either, one decides to accept, it is difficult to overstate the long-obscured importance of Marot to the Pléiade poetics. While it is still premature to proclaim him the “inventor” of the French sonnet, it is impossible overlook his contributions to the poetic reforms that the Pléiade claims for itself and to recognize, as did Jean Balsamo, that, in all actuality, “Marot inventait le pétrarquisme français” (50). [Marot invented French Petrarchism.]

Moving from general poetics to the great Petrarchan verse form that is the central interest of this study, the sonnet, it is of note that in the 1550 edition of his own volume of sonnets, L’Olive (the first collection in the French tradition composed entirely of sonnets), Du Bellay–whether deliberately or not–takes the distinction of introducing the sonnet to the French tradition from Marot, attributing it to his more innocuous contemporary Mellin de Saint-Gelais: “(L)e sonnet italien [est] devenu français, comme je croy, par Mellin de Sainct Gellais” (Ed. Caldarini 230) [The Italian sonnet became French, I believe, with Mellin de Saint-Gelais.] Both adopting and providing evidence of the virtual effacement of Marot in the sonnet tradition over the centuries, Max Jasinski, in his 1903 L’histoire du sonnet en France, suggests that: “Comme du Bellay le premier en avait donné la sensation nette, avec talent, et dans des conditions favorables, on fit de lui le premier sonnettiste français, l’inventeur même du genre” (58)! [Since Du Bellay was the first to have clearly rendered its sensations, with talent, and under favorable circumstances, we call him the first French sonneteer, even the inventor of the genre.] Displaying a distinctly romantic conception of invention, Jasinski fails to account for the “re-discovery,” imitation and innovation that were paramount to the Petrarchan sonnet’s entry into the French tradition. This is especially true when we consider that Du Bellay, himself, employed the couplet marotique (a concept I will soon explain) in his own sonnets. More than anything else, Marot’s contributions to the Petrarchan verse form enabled it to become recognizably French.

II. Marot and the Petrarchian Lyrical Imperative

With the aim of building to an explanation of Marot’s invention of the French sonnet, an examination of the “lyrical” as a concept and Petrarch’s codification of the 14-verse structure as the ideal lyrical form is prerequisite. In so doing I will make explicit what is at stake in the current study and respond to the over-arching questions it poses: What is it about the sonnet that makes it such an important and universally-imitated verse form? Why does it remain the most–and perhaps the lone–recognizable fixed poetic form(7) amongst the educated public? Why for centuries up to the present, when a poet has wished to articulate his anguish relating to, while immortalizing the image of, his inaccessible dearly beloved, is the logic of the constrained Petrarchan form his preferred choice? The response is found in the fact that–both structurally and thematically–Petrarch’s sonnet gets to the very heart of lyricism, rendering the imitation of this form an imperative for the aspiring poet.

I have entitled the poetic tendency to imitate Petrarch and his sonnet “The Petrarchian Lyrical Imperative,”(8) referring at a secondary level to the fact that the Petrarchan sonnet, as a lyrical form, operates linguistically and poetically as an imperative plea or command. I shall demonstrate this by, first, establishing a working definition of what is “lyrical,” followed by a explanation of how lyrical poetry operates linguistically as an imperative speech act, in order to ultimately reveal how the Petrarchan sonnet is logically germane to the lyrical pose of the poet.

In the title of a recent PMLA article (Jan. 2008), Jonathan Culler poses a very poignant question: “Why Lyric?” Lamenting the abandonment of the study of poetry in academia, where “narrative has become the norm of literature” (201), Culler calls for a rehabilitation of verse and an expropriation of the constitutive parts that separate the lyric from the more diegetic narrative forms of discourse. Following a diagnostic evaluation of the problem and before offering an antidote, Culler continues by defining the terms of this question and suggesting a series of answers to another important question: What is the Lyric? To this question, he offers at least four categories that characterize the lyric, which are as follows: 1) Direct Address, as “The classical lyric was generally addressed to someone [and] treats the poem as an event addressed to an audience, performed for an audience, even if it idealizes situations of social ritual” (204); 2) Rhetorical Transaction, or a “characteristically extravagant, perform[ative] speech act” (205); 3) Linguistic Event, where subjectivity is founded through the peculiar “givenness, the untranscendability, of a particular language” (206), which is the lyrical experience (as opposed to the translatable nature of narrative structures); and, finally, 4) Memorable Language–“made memorable [and, thus, repeatable] by its rhythmical shaping and phonological patterning” (206). Constituting the lyric as a clearly defined category of poetic creation, Culler ultimately prepares to prescribe the remedy for this critical malaise: a return to the study of the lyric.

Timely in its publication, perhaps even overdue, Culler’s article raises questions crucial to understanding what separates the lyric from discursive forms of literary creation while also resurrecting domains of genre theory that have lain dormant for some decades. Examined perhaps most famously by Northrop Frye in his canonical essay “Theory of Genres” (from Anatomy of Criticism, 1957), where he divides literature into four categories: Epos, Fiction, Drama and Lyric (248-49), the determining difference between genres depends upon what he terms the radical of presentation, the crucial divider in the relationship of the author (subject) to the audience (object). According to Frye, unlike ostensive or discursive forms of expression, “The lyric is the genre in which the poet . . . turns his back on his audience” (271). In other words, the lyric depends upon a separation between the desiring subject and the desired object–expressed linguistically as the imperative.(9)

In an article on Sappho and the origins of the Greek lyric, “Naissance du Moi lyrique” [Birth of the Lyrical Self/Ego], Eric Gans speaks of the separation between the subject-poet and the divinized, desired object that results in the creation of the lyrical genre:

(Ce qui) […] donne naissance à la poésie lyrique est sans doute une prière ou invocation adressée à une divinité qui d’une manière ou d’une autre la somme d’être présente. La prière proprement dite prend une forme impérative; on demande quelque chose à la divinité, et en premier lieu sa présence, ne serait-ce que pour l’écouter. (129, his italics)

[That which engenders lyrical poetry is undoubtedly a prayer or an invocation addressed to a divinity, which in one way or another beckons its presence. True prayer takes the form of an imperative; one asks something of the divinity, first of all its presence, if only for it to hear the prayer.]

Operating as a prayer, the lyric aims to make present the non-present–for a present subject to evoke a non-present object through language. Returning to Frye, the lyric is, rhetorically, as analogous to prayer as the epos is to a sermon (249): “The radical of presentation in the lyric is the hypothetical form of what in religion is called the ‘I-Thou’ relationship” (248-49). Tylor defines prayer as “the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed” (364, my italics). What J. L. Austin or John Searle would, in their philosophical theories of language, refer to as an illocutionary act, the imperative aims to accomplish something with words: to make present the non-present through linguistic evocation. “Imperatives intend an action on the part of their addressee. This intention goes in the word -> world direction [of Searle]; yet, its action is clearly less direct than that of the designative ostensive” (Gans, Originary Thinking 70).(10) Continuing to elucidate the connection between lyrical origin and the originary scene, Gans offers a phenomenological explanation for the lyrical:

Les éléments de base d’une phénoménologie de la situation lyrico-rituelle sont donc les suivants: la communauté se rassemble dans la présence de tous ses membres . . . ; mais, cette présence [sacrée] est en même temps un lieu d’absence, du manque non d’un être réel dont l’avènement pourrait le combler, mais d’un être transcendantal qui ne saurait être présent que par la re-présentation. (“Naissance” 129)

[The fundamental elements of a phenomenology of the lyrico-ritual situation are as follows: the community gathers in the presence of all its members . . . ; however, this [sacred] presence is at the same time an area of absence, of lack–not necessarily of a real being whose coming would be capable of satisfying the lack, but rather of a transcendental being who could not be present except through re-presentation.]

Even when this sacred center is invoked verbally through the imperative form, the actual presence of the invoked deity (in this primitive case communally-evoked) remains an impossibility; but, it is still in the ritual act of invoking that the sacred center retains its sacrality in the communal imaginary. Lyrical poetry is, therefore, perpetually virginal in that it is a desire that is never physically satisfied, only esthetically deferred (through representation). Gans speaks to this feature in noting that “[…] cependant l’être qui garantit le succès de l’opération n’existe […] qu’en imagination. Le lyrique rituel est une tentative pour stimuler cette imagination qui risque d’être défaillante” (129). [(N)onetheless, the being that guarantees the success of the operation exists only in the imagination. The ritual lyric is an attempt to stimulate this imagination which could otherwise prove ineffective.] As a primitive, sacred model, the lyrique rituel would exist as a guarantor of the primacy of the sacred center, which is evoked but never appropriated, desired but never attained.

From this sacred, anthropological model of the lyrical imperative-as-prayer, we advance to a model of secular poetry,(11) where the question of the imperative remains crucial. In The End of Culture, discussing the secular esthetic culture of Greece, Gans once again examines Sapphic lyrical verse and offers the following observation: “The poem is a prayer to the goddess; but the modern unbeliever will read it as a love poem addressed in fact to the beloved, as was so often the case in the Renaissance” (277). The one could be said to stand in for the other, as in the case of the “crypto-religious comportments” of the non-religious man explained by Mircea Eliade (24). Lyrical poetry, in a secular world, becomes a vestige of a sacred past while at the same time serving a very personal, subjective, and profane purpose. The collective sacred center is replaced by a (supposedly) individually-desired feminine sacred, equally inaccessible to its evoking poet. In Love and the Western World, Denis de Rougemont saw the great codifier of the verse form as providing lyrical poetry “an entirely pagan breath! Pagan, and not in the least heretical!” (180). The tradition from which Petrarch was distancing himself with his sonnet, that of the medieval performative lyrics of the Provençal troubadours, was not only excessively allegorical but was also too closely involved with the public and didactic in design. A personal, modern, secular lyric would necessarily be more reflective of personal desire; and, the desired object would not be a universally inaccessible god, but rather a personally inaccessible feminine counterpart. As it evolves, the lyrical form no longer evokes God, but, as Gans suggests in The Origin of Language, “is often addressed directly to the object of the Subject’s desire” (241).(12)

Desire remains key in this secular model, for Gans clarifies that “[le] rapport du couple lyrique est une relation de désir, non de fait; leur intimité n’est jamais que potentielle ou lacunaire” (“Naissance” 130). [The relationship between the lyrical couple is one of desire, not fact; their intimacy is never anything more than potential or lacunary.] Thematically removed from the communal scene, the physical intimacy of the couple remains entirely out of question. Passionate love can only exist in absentia–and the lyric is the poetic expression of passionate love. Desire for the inaccessible is all that can ever truly be expressed. However, in the same way that tragic theatre can communally display–in the ostensive sense–the scene of creation, the lyrical poet can likewise verbally occupy the scene of creation. The very failure–or negative resolution–of every truly lyrical poem assures that he will continue to create, if not physically reproducing, at least through representation. In this same article, Gans states it thus:

La poésie lyrique la plus intime reproduit donc la situation fondamentale du rite. Ce n’est pas l’intimité du couple mais la réciprocité potentielle du désir érotique qui fait la différence essentielle entre le lyrisme laïc et ses sources liturgiques. On peut imaginer à partir de signes divers la présence d’une divinité, on peut même la faire parler, mais on ne peut pas lui attribuer un désir qui répondrait à celui de son suppliant. Le rapport du couple possède à l’encontre de celui entre l’homme et Dieu un dénouement potentiel dans la réciprocité (de l’amour, de l’acte sexuel). (“Naissance” 130, his italics)

[The most intimate lyrical poetry, therefore, reproduces the fundamental situation of the rite. It is not the intimacy of the couple but rather the potential reciprocity of erotic desire that makes the essential difference between secular lyricism and its liturgical sources. Considering diverse signs, one can imagine divine presence, even to the point of making the divine being speak; however, one can never allocate to divinity a desire that would respond to that of the beseeching subject. The connection shared between the couple butts up against that between a man and God on the grounds of potential reciprocal fulfillment (in the form of love, the sexual act).]

Still, while the belief in a potential reciprocity does exist at a sacred level (Why would a believer pray if she felt she would never be answered?), it is not presented in erotic terms but rather in the granting of tertiary desires. For the secular (or human) subject, it is a mutual, reciprocal possession of the divinized object–in personal sexual fulfillment–that is sought after. Although it is never really believed in, it is endlessly pursued. In this leurre of cat-and-mouse, this passionate conquest to never be fulfilled, the poet-lover occupies the sacred scene, perpetually recreating it through verse.

Clearly and intimately understanding the dilemma of impossible reciprocity in absence, Petrarch embeds it–formally and thematically–into his lyrical pleas for Laura, creating a parsimonious poetic scene of desire that minimizes anguish and achieves resolution in a constrained 14-verse structure: the sonnet. While the creation of the sonnet–the marriage of two popular Italian forms, the eight-verse ottava and six-verse strambotto–is traditionally accredited to Giacomo da Lentini and the scuola siciliana of Frederick II in the duecento, and the sonnet was practiced by Dante, Cavalcanti and others before Petrarch,(13) it fell to the exiled Tuscan to codify both the theme and structure of impossible, passionate love into the verse form for which he would henceforth be the ultimate reference.

Thematically, the Petrarchan sonnet would sing of anguish at Laura’s inaccessibility, but others had already successfully accomplished this using other lyrical forms. To produce the ideal form in which to express lyrical frustrations, it was also necessary to formally recreate the asymmetrical, imperative situation of presence and absence. This was achieved in the form of the sonnet. Italian poetry operates on a numerical system of versification (as does French)–that is to say that each verse bears the same number of syllables and rhyme is determined by a phonemic homophony between at least two verses at the level of the final stressed vowel and all sounds that follow. For the Petrarchan sonnet (unlike the crossing rhymes of Giacomo), the ottava would be a dually-repetitive stanzic pair of embraced quatrains: ABBA ABBA. While this symmetrical, uniform series of rhymes would seem to be able to continue ad infinitum, stanza after stanza (ABBA ABBA ABBA…), in the sonnet it is violently ruptured in the tenth verse with the introduction of a new rhyme (C): ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.(14) In violating the continuous rhyme, the poet introduces a sudden change that allows the poem to run its teleological course to resolution. Symmetry (or an illusory reciprocity) is, therefore, sacrificed to bring an end to the lyrical suffering of the poet.

Interpreting the stanzaic divisions as competing wills or mirrored desire (ABBA ABBA), in GA terms, the introduction of the C rhyme would be the moment of deferral that allows for peaceful resolution. This tripartite division of the sonnet can be said to operate as a syllogism. Understanding that, in the Renaissance, poetry was commonly known as “the art of second rhetoric,” it should come to surprise that poeticians of the period readily recognized the sonnet’s syllogistic qualities (Gendre 7). In the classic example of syllogism, “All men are mortal/ Aristotle is a man// Therefore, Aristotle is mortal,” a more general first premise is followed by a more specific second premise leading to a logical conclusion. For the syllogistic sonnet,(15) one quatrain (Q1) would offer a premise of objective generalities and the other (Q2) another a premise of more subjective particularities that would together build to a conclusion in the tercets (T) that would resolve–albeit negatively–the dilemma of the desiring subject-poet. Reading this structure into the Petrarchan thematic, the sonnet could break-down as follows: My desire for her is powerful (Q1)/ She is inaccessible to me (Q2)// Because I desire her, I am predestined to suffering (T).

Contained within the 14-verse structure of the sonnet, this syllogistic form (that responds to and recreates the lyrical thematics) is minimal, parsimonious, and repeatable. Teleologically-driven within a set mold, it allows for the poet to express his suffering while offering a resolution that is ritualistically repeatable in a subsequent sonnet. What is the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s collection of Rime sparse (Scattered rhymes), his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (collection of vulgar fragments), or later, the French recueil d’Amours, after all, but an anthologized collection of ritualistically repetitive, failed imperative pleas? This perpetually negative resolution of the sonnet enables its continuity. As Gans writes: “Les poèmes lyriques se répètent à l’infini, mais le désir qu’ils expriment est chaque fois nouveau, indépendant de toute norme rituelle ou simplement sociale” (“Naissance” 131). [Lyrical poems infinitely repeat themselves, but the desire they express is new each time, independent of any norm, ritualistic or merely social.] Within the constrained 14 verses of a sonnet, desire is recreated, represented and resolved–and can be born anew in each subsequent sonnet.

Advancing from theoretical exploration to analytical demonstration, I shall examine this phenomenon of the self-contained lyrical desire of a syllogistic sonnet in the work of its master: Petrarch. This first sonnet, the 18^th poem of the Canzoniere, is a fine example of the lyrical imperative:

Quand’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte (A)
ove’l bel viso di madonna luce, (B)
et m’è rimasa nel pensier la luce (B)
che m’arde e strugge dentro a parte a parte, (A) 4
i’ che temo del cor che mi si parte, (A)
et veggio presso il fin de la mia luce, (B)
vommene in guisa d’orbo, senza luce, (B)
che non sa ove si vada et pur si parte. (A) 8
Cosí davanti ai colpi de la morte (C)
fuggo: ma non sí ratto che’l desio (D)
meco non venga come venir sòle. (E) 11
Tacito vo, ché le parole morte (C)
farian pianger la gente; et i’ desio (D)
che le lagrime mie si spargan sole. (E) 14

[When all of me is drawn in the direction/ of that place where my lady’s sweet face shines,/ and in my thought there shines the lingering light,/ that burns and melts me inside bit by bit,/ I, fearing for my heart that breaks to pieces,/ and seeing my day’s light is soon to end,/move forward like a blind man, without light,/ who knows not where he goes but all the same./ And so it is before the blows of death/ I flee, but not so quickly that desire/does not come with me, as it always does/ I go in silence, for my deadly words/ would make all others weep, and I desire/ that all my tears be shed in solitude. (Musa 19)]

In this lyrical plea to an inaccessible, desired, and divinized woman, madonna (literally, “my lady,” but with clear reference to the Virgin), the desiring subject, the poet, “move(s) forward like a blind man, without light,/Who knows not where he goes but all the same” (Musa 19), only to be burned, melted and broken (m’arde e strugge; v. 4) before shedding his tears in solitude (le lagrime mie si spargan sole; v. 14). Speaking of her effect on him in the first stanza (her light that both attracts him and burns him), the second, mirroring embraced quatrain appeals to his efforts to find asylum despite his broken heart and his ardent passion for her. Between the two, an antithetical play on the word luce (the B rhyme; “light”) first references her divine radiance a stanza before the poet shuns light altogether for the unbearable anguish its unavailability causes him. From these two quatrain premises of “her” and “me,” the poet interrupts the ABBA ABBA continuity with a new, C rhyme in the 9^th verse that is introduced with an interjecting transition, Così, and continues to explain what measures he will now take to cope with his desire. From the destructive premise in its first quatrain to the self-salvaging efforts of the poet in the second, the Petrarchan sonnet reaches its syllogistic conclusion after the volta in two asymmetrical tercets set off by an interjection. Here, death, morte, first as a foreboding object (v. 9) and then as an adjective describing his unspoken words (v. 12), constitutes the homonymic C rhyme; and an emphasized desire, desio–as a noun (v. 10), then a verb (v. 13)–makes up the D rhyme, thus, in a sense, marrying desire to death. In addition, Petrarch drives home this rhetoric in a sort of cause-and-effect figure of style with the enjambment between the 13^thand 14^th verse, as the phrase “i’ desio“ [I desire] is continued through the use of the relative pronoun che [that]: che le lagrime mie si spargan sole [That all my tears be shed in solitude].” Because the poet desires and cannot have, his sole refuge is solitude–which, a lone subject, he finds in the very scene of creation. In the final rhyme, E, again light (this time sunlight, “sòle” (v. 11) is equated with the poet’s original–and final–situation: solitude [sole] (v. 14). The unwitting torture of the “you” premise from the first stanza, the self-preserving “me” of the second, desire and suffering all converge in a logical, syllogistic structural presentation that supports and justifies the Petrarchan thematic of passionate love and unfulfilled desire.

For another Petrarchan example that will provide a segue into our discussion of Marot, “Chi vuol veder…,” the 248^th poem of the Canzoniere is a significant sonnet in that it is one of the most commonly imitated in the French tradition. In addition to famous versions by Pléiade poets Ronsard and Tyard, our poet Marot made an earlier translation of this sonnet, one of six Petrarchan sonnets he chose to translate (to be examined below). First, let us begin with Petrarch’s original:

Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura (A)
e ‘l Ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei (B)
ch’è sola un sol, non pur a li occhi mei, (B)
ma al mondo cieco che vertù non cura; (A)
et venga tosto, perché Morte fura (A)
prima i migiliori et lascia star i rei: (B)
questa aspettata al regno delli dei (B)
cosa bella mortal passa et non dura. (A)
Vedrà, s’arriva a tempo, ogni vertute, (C)
ogni bellezza, ogni real costume (D)
giunti in un corpo con mirabil tempre; (E)
allor dirà che mie rime son mute, (C)
l’ingegno offeso dal soverchio lume. (D)
Ma se più tarda, avrà da pianger sempre. (E)

[Who seeks to see the best Nature and Heaven/ can do among us, come and gaze on her,/ sole sun, and not for my eyes only but/ for the blind world which does not care for virtue;/ come quickly now, because Death steals away/ the best ones first and leaves behind the worst:/ this one awaited in the kingdom of the gods,/ this lovely, mortal thing will pass, not last./ He’ll see, if he arrives in time, all virtue,/ all loveliness, all regal-mannered ways/ joined in one body, tempered marvelously;/ then he will say that all my verse is dumb,/ my talent overcome by too much light./ But if he waits too long, he’ll weep forever. (Musa 353)]

Addressed to an unidentified, anonymous listener/reader–one qualified by the relative pronoun Chi (vuol veder) [Literally, “Who desires to see”; or, as translated by Musa, “Who seeks to see”], this sonnet does not make its imperative appeal to the absent desired woman. Rather, it sings of her inaccessibility and praiseworthiness as it invites the reader to come quickly to bear witness to the finest work of Nature and Heaven (“quantunque po Natura/e ‘l Ciel tra noi”; vv. 1-2). If the first stanza compares her to a universal sun for all–even the blind world–to see and for which virtue has no regard, the second speaks of her ephemerality, as it begins with the imperative et venga tosto [“Come quickly now”]. Therefore, unlike the sun, universal beauty is mortal, limited in duration, and prone to death: “cosa bella mortal passa et non dura” (v. 8) [“this lovely, mortal thing will pass, not last”]. At the place of the volta between the quatrain pair and the tercets, two premises have been presented concerning Laura: first, her beauty is Nature’s finest creation, and, second, he who wishes to bear witness to it must come quickly, for mortal life is limited. Following the syllogistic model of the sonnet, we anticipate a conclusion in the tercets.

Petrarch does not disappoint, as he marries and reconciles the two syllogistic premises after the volta in the first tercet with a hypothetical si clause, “s’arriva a tempo” (v. 9). If he who wished to behold Nature’s finest achievement arrives in time, he will witness all beauty, all virtue and all regal-mannered ways tempered into one creation, one body (“Vedrà . . . ogni vertute,/ ogni bellezza, ogni real costume/giunti in un corpo con mirabil tempre” vv. 9-11). In the final tercet, the transition allor [“thus” or “then”] sets up the ultimate conclusion for the sonnet in a pure example of therefore. In this case, he who wishes to see beauty will be, much like the poet, overcome by the light emitted from the source to the point of being unable to recognize the poet’s craft in the poetry: “dirà che mie rime son mute,/ l’ingegno offeso dal soverchio lume” (vv. 12-13). Physical and poetic blindness are the results of exposure to the finest creation of Nature and Heaven. Still, the final verse holds a worse fate for him who fails to arrive in time: to him is given the poet’s plight of weeping forever (da pianger sempre).(16) In either event, with the syllogism and the sonnet attaining its logical end, the poet is prepared to recreate the scene of forever weeping in a subsequent sonnet–something achieved more potently, I argue, in the form of the sonnet as created by Marot.

III. From the Epigram to the French Sonnet: the Innovation of the couplet marotique

One can scan the pages of Clément Marot’s most famous work, his Adolescence clémentine (1532), and find only the simplistic “medieval poetic forms” for which he is condemned by the Pléïade. One major point his critics fail to consider, however, is blatantly announced in the collection’s title: these adolescent attempts at rondeaux, ballades, chansons, etc. were just that–the juvenilia of a burgeoning but already masterful poet. His invention of the French Petrarchian sonnet would date from a later, much more difficult time of his life, when he was exiled in Venice and Ferrara from 1536-37 for his “Lutherian tendencies.” It is most likely during this sojourn in Italy, where Marot was protected by Renée de France and would frequent Calvin, Rabelais and Budé, that the poet would adopt the sonnet form and pen its first versions in the French language. What is believed to be the first published French sonnet appeared in Marot’s Second livre des epigrammes, appearing in Lyon the year of the poet’s return to France, 1538. While placing the invention of the French sonnet (as rediscovery) with Marot in 1538 is a mere exercise in archival, historical research, examining its innovation–and explaining Marot’s all-important couplet marotique–requires an additional level of analysis. The remainder of this essay will break down the process of Marot’s innovation par imitation with regard to the sonnet.

Rather than proceeding chronologically with Marot’s first sonnets, it may be useful to begin with one of his “translated” Six sonnetz de Pétrarque (1539): Marot’s third, a version of Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura (as studied above). Upon demonstrating the effectiveness of the couplet marotique through analysis of this poem, I will then offer an explanation of the evolution of Marot’s novel take on the fixed form, concluding with the analysis of two of the sonnets from 1538.

First, I reproduce Marot’s Petrarchian version of the Petrarchan original:

Qui vouldra veoir ce que peult Nature, (A)
Contempler vienne une qui en tous lieux (B)
Est ung soleil, ung soleil à mes yeulx, (B)
Voire aux ruraulx qui de vertu n’ont cure. (A)
Et vienne tost, car mort prent (tant est dure) (A)
Premier les bons, laissant les vicieux, (B)
Puis ceste cy s’en va du reng des dieux: (B)
Chose mortelle et belle bien peu dure. (A)
S’il vient à temps, verra toute beaulté, (C)
Toute vertu et meurs de royauté (C)
Joinctz en ung corps par merveille secret: (D)
Alors dira que muette est ma ryme, (E)
Et que clarté trop grande me supprime: (E)
Mais si trop tarde aura tousjours regret. (D) (II: 495-96)(17)

At a thematic (and syllogistic) level, Marot’s translation is so true to Petrarch’s text as to make analysis of its content unnecessary. Moving on to form, then, we notice that the similarity continues in Marot’s attempt to maintain the structural order of stanzas and verses; he even makes an effort to use the same rhymes when possible (Nature/cure from Natura/cura; vv. 1 and 4). Schematically, through the quatrains, the French poet holds to the rhyme disposition of his Italian forebear: ABBA ABBA. The difference is found in the rime plate, the CC distique of the 9^th and 10^th verses–thecouplet marotique. Even with the near verbatim translation, the inclusion of the hypothetical si clause and the continuation of Alors and Mais to bolster the Petrarchan syllogism, Marot’s translation is more poetically and syllogistically rigorous, as this doubled violent rupture in symmetry provides a “therefore” moment that gives way to another embraced quatrain with a new rhyme. As the sonnet’s objective is to minimally resolve the crisis of desire, the Marotic syllogism of ABBA ABBA CC DEED is, indeed, logically more resolute than Petrarch’s ABBA ABBA CDE CDE and can therefore be considered an improvement upon the Petrarchian Lyrical Imperative. While using another language to say the same things as Petrarch, Marot’s rhetoric is more concise as he introduces the couplet marotique to the Petrarchan form.

In his article “Sonnet ou quatorzain? Marot et le choix d’une forme poétique,” John McClelland asks an interesting question as to the development of the sonnet by tracing it to a common, unfixed poetic form of 14 verses: the quatorzain. Obviously, by its very nature, the sonnet is far more constrained and complex than the 14-verse epigram. The basic epigram is a poetic building up of successive rimes plates or rimes croisés to a final verse or couplet that delivers a conclusive mot spirituel, a witty punch-line. While this comical form neither corresponds to the passions graves called for by the sonnet nor does it employ rhetorically grouped forms, it does function as a sort of set-up in the same way as the sonnet does. Comically, the epigram builds to a final resolution in a mot spirituel; and, as we know, the first rule of comedic rhetoric is timely delivery. As an example of set-up and delivery in the epigram, let’s examine one of my personal favorites, “De Jehan Jehan,” where Marot plays with a stock image of a common idiot (un Jehan; likely written in response to someone named Jean), whose misery is doubled by the fact that he is also a cuckold (Defaux, II: 1148n):

Tu as tout seul, Jehan Jehan, vignes et prez.
Tu as tout seul ton cueur et ta pecune.
Tu as tout seul deux logis dyaprez,
Là où vivant ne pretend chose aucune.
Tu as tout seul le fruict de ta fortune.
Tu as tout seul ton boire et ton repas.
Tu as tout seul toutes choses fors une:
C’est que tout seul ta femme tu n’as pas. (II: 348)

[You have all alone, Jehan Jehan, vineyards and fields./ You have all alone your heart and riches./ You have all alone two colorful lodges,/ There where no other living soul can pretend any claim./ You have all alone the fruit of your fortune./ You have all alone your drink and your meal./ You have all alone all things save one:/ This is that your wife, all alone, you have not.]

In eight verses of couplets, Marot catalogues all of the private possessions that this certain Jehan enjoys: vineyards (vignes), fields (prez), heart (cueur), money (pecune), two lodges (deux logis), the fruit of his fortune (le fruict de ta fortune), his drink (ton boire) and meal (et ton repas), building one upon the other in a series to the final revelation: he does not possess his wife all alone (“Tu as tout seul toutes choses fors une:/ C’est que tout seul ta femme tu n’as pas”; vv. 7-8).

Witty and comical, the progressive listings are completed with a significant interruption in the fourth verse to ultimately deliver le mot final in the final verse. The sonnet is not dissimilar, as it also sets up and prepares a final resolution and does so, in French, with the intrusion of the couplet marotique. A master of the epigram, Marot would have certainly been acutely attuned to the importance of set-up and delivery needed for resolution in a poetic form, like the sonnet, built upon constraints.(18)

Aside from the set-up and delivery Marot carries over to his sonnet, we also recognize the form of the tercets–a distique followed by an embraced quatrain–in others of Marot’s poetic forms. A couple of epigrams from the Quatriesme Livre bear witness to this AABCCB form: one entitled “De Macé Longis” (II: 356) and another “De Pauline” that I reproduce here:

Pauline est riche et me veult bien (A)
Pour mary : Je n’en feray rien, (A)
Pour tant vieille est que j’en ay honte. (B)
S’elle estoit plus vieille du tiers, (C)
Je la prendrois plus voulentiers: (C)
Car depesche en seroit plus prompte. (B) (II: 357)

[Pauline is rich et very much wants me/ for a husband: I will do nothing,/ For so old is she that I am ashamed./ If she was even older by another third,/ I would voluntarily take her:/ For being rid of her would be much quicker.]

These two sentences couched in six verses set up another humorous situation where a rime plate introduces a situation that is developed and nuanced in an embraced quatrain, where the repetition of the B-rhyme in the sixth verse delivers the punch-line: While I won’t marry this rich woman because she is too old, if she was even older, I’d do so because I could more quickly inherit her money! In using Marot as his example, Thomas Sébillet was quite adroit in suggesting that structurally the sonnet “n’est autre chose que le parfait épigramme de l’Italien” (II: 107). [(The sonnet) is nothing more than the perfect Italian epigram.] However, concerning its subject matter, Sébillet offers some clarification:

(S)ache que la matière de l’épigramme et la matière du Sonnet sont toutes unes, fors que la manière facétieuse est répugnante à la gravité du sonnet qui reçoit plus proprement affections et passions graves, même chez le prince des Poètes italiens [Pétrarque], duquel l’archétype des Sonnets a été tiré (II: 107-08).

[Know that the subject matter of the epigram and that of the sonnet are all one, with the exception that the facetious manner (of the epigram) is repugnant when compared to the sonnet, which more honestly receives affections and grave passions, even with the Italian Prince of Poets [Petrarch], from whom the archetype of the sonnet was taken.]

While the Marotic epigram did prepare the way to parsimoniously build to and deliver a final thought, it did not preserve the gravity and seriousness called for by lyricism. For this, Marot had other verse forms.

To answer the ends of passionate verse and solemn tone in his lyrical output, Marot would turn to Hebraic imitation with the translation of his Psaumes de David.(19) In his psalms, Marot not only interpreted David’s hymns from the Hebrew original, he improvised–as he did with the sonnet–with the form in making them French. In fact, two of his psalms bear the same sestet AABCCB rhyme scheme we saw in the sonnet and epigrams. Without analyzing the translated meaning of Marot’s “Pseaulme Trentesixiesme,” I reproduce the first stanza in order to outline the use of this rhyme scheme to establish a thought through a distique and nuance it in an embraced quatrain:

Du maling les faictz vicieux (A)
Me disent que devant ses yeux (A)
N’a point de Dieu la crainte : (B)
Car tant se plait son erreur, (C)
Que l’avoir en hayne, et horreur, (C)
C’est bien force, et contraincte . . . (B) (II : 642)

[Of the evil one, his vicious deeds/ Reveal to me that before his eyes/ Is no fear of God:/ For, so pleased is he with his errors/ That to feel both hatred and horror/ For him one is both forced and obligated.]

What’s more is here we recognize a 3 : 3 division in the sestet that translates over to his French sonnets (written at roughly the same time in his poetic career). For establishing and delivering a final idea, Marot’s distique and embraced quatrain was yet again quite effective.

Alas, Marot never composed any sonnets I would qualify as purely lyrical–considering both structure and thematics. His only real lyrical sonnets are translations of Petrarch. He did, however, through his innovation, provide a model that would come to be the norm for the French sonnet. The couplet marotique, while a product of bricolage from various other poetic forms, was truly an “innovation” in the Renaissance sense of the term in that it was not a rediscovery (invention) but a change–even an amelioration–of the form being imitated. In Évolution du sonnet français, Gendre states it thus:

[…] (L)’innovation française de la rime plate aux vers 9-10 (abhorrée des Italiens) ne serait pas une invention appropriée à une nouvelle forme, mais le prolongement d’une habitude . . . (34)

[The French innovation of a rime plate in verses 9-10 (abhorred by the Italians) would not suitably constitute an invention of a new form, but rather the continuation of an existing habit . . .]

In spite of the disdain displayed by the Italian Petrarchist poets for the couplet marotique of the French sonnet, Marot’s CC-rhyme became the model par excellence for the French avatar of the 14-verse lyrical structure (Gendre 18) and is today known in France as the sonnet régulier [regular sonnet].(20)

Having laid out and developed the theoretical apparatus surrounding Marot’s poetic innovation, prior to concluding, let us now turn to two examples where Marot used this form to compose original sonnets. Of the four original sonnets penned by the poet, two actually have a claim to firstness in the Marotic œuvre. Let us begin with the sonnet that is currently generally accepted as the first French sonnet (Villey 538; Mayer 481; McClelland 591), most likely composed in exile in the summer of 1536 (Kennedy 126; Roubaud 18; Defaux 1099n), Marot’s “Sonnet à Madame de Ferrare”:

Me souvenant de tes graces divines, (A)
Suis en douleur, princesse, à ton absence: (B)
Et si languy quant suis en ta presence, (B)
Voyant ce lys au milieu des espines. (A)
O la doulceur des doulceurs feminines! (A)
O cueur sans fiel! ô race d’excellence! (B)
O dur mary remply de violence, (B)
Qui s’endurcist pres des choses benignes. (A)
Si seras tu de la main soustenue (C)
De l’Eternel, comme chere tenue, (C)
Et tes nuysans auront honte, et reproche. (D)
Courage, doncq: en l’air je voy la nue (C)
Qui çà, et là s’escarte, et diminue, (C)
Pour faire place au beau temps, qui s’approche. (D) (II: 297-98)

[Remembering your divine graces/ I am pained, princess, by your absence:/ And so languished when in your presence/ Seeing this lily amidst the thorns./ O the sweetness of feminine sweetnesses!/ O heart without guile! O excellent race!/ O brutal husband full of violence,/ Who hardens next to benevolent things./ Therefore shall you be sustained by the hand/ Of the Eternal One, like precious attire,/ And those who wish you harm will have shame and reproach./ Courage, then: in the sky, I see the cloud/ That here and there moves away, and diminishes/ To make room for the lovely weather, that draws near.]

Written for the court of Ferrara, where Marot had taken exile to escape charges of “Lutherianism,” and addressed to Renée de France, daughter of king Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne and wife of the cruel duke Ercole II d’Este, this sonnet did take as its subject an inaccessible and absent woman; however, needless to say, so inaccessible was Renée that this poem lacks the verisimilitude that would make it’s desire imitable or believable. Therefore, it cannot be considered entirely lyrical or Petrarchian. Still, it does operate syllogistically to present two conflicting premises that parsimoniously resolve themselves through a couplet marotique followed by a concluding quatrain. The first stanza adopts a laudatory tone as it tells of her absence and its effect on him as the poet-subject, one that is doubled in the presence of her sorrow as he introduces her as the lone lily in a valley of thorns. The second stanza expands on this image as it makes an apostrophic appeal to her feminine sweetness and lack of guile, juxtaposing those with the hardness of her abusive and unappreciative husband. This embraced pair of quatrains (ABBA ABBA) is interrupted, however, in verse 9, when (perhaps for the first time ever) Marot introduces a doubled CC-rhyme to this repetitive ottava. Not only does he interrupt this continuity poetically, he also does so linguistically with the interjection Si (“Therefore” or “Hence”): “Si seras tu de la main soustenue […].” With the introduction of an interjection, the syllogistic nature of the sonnet is reinforced. To the first two syllogistic premises (P1: She is a divine lily in the midst of thorny company/ P2: He is a cruel and unworthy husband to such a sweet being), Marot prepares a conclusive resolution with Si. Whereas the first two quatrains speak of, first, the poet’s distress at the absence of his graceful duchess, and, second, the sorrow in her life despite all her virtues, the first rime plate (vv. 9-10) responds to the sorrow expressed in the second quatrain, as it evokes the allegorized Hand of the Eternal that would–while doubly divinizing her with its touch–avenge her shameful wrongdoers (“Et tes nuysans auront honte et reproche,” v. 11). Closed with a period, the syntax of this first tercet prepares for another, final tercet to close the sonnet. With a second couplet marotique (CC), the poet appeals to the repetitive dédoublement of the epigram and prepares the reader for the final mot, expressed in a quasi-imperative: “Courage, doncq: en l’air je voy la nue/ Qui çà, et là s’escarte, et diminue,/ Pour faire place au beau temps, qui s’approche” (vv.12-14). He prays her to “Take courage,” chiastically referring back and responding to all her graces divines from the first quatrain and assuring her that the divine hand that avenges her will also clear out the gloomy clouds, making space for the beau temps on the horizon. As we see, even with a very different thematics, the dual interruption of the repeating quatrains with the tercets–here, prepared by two couplets marotiques–allows the poem to abruptly change pace and ushers it to a resolute end. Written more for the novelty of its poet’s having been in Italy, this sonnet, with all its epigrammatic qualities that allow for its decisive, syllogistic end, is very effective in conveying its message.

Now, let us turn to another Marotic sonnet, one undoubtedly written (given its subject matter in the city of Lyon) after Marot’s return from exile and the first ever published French sonnet, “Pour le may planté par les imprimeurs de Lyon devant le logis du seigneur Trivulse”:

Au Ciel n’y a ne Planette, ne Signe, (A)
Qui si à poinct sceust gouverner l’Année, (B)
Comme est Lyon la Cité gouvernée (B)
Par toy, Trivulse, homme cler, et insigne. (A)
Cela disons pour ta vertu condigne, (A)
Et pour la joye entre nous demenée, (B)
Dont tu nous as la liberté donnée, (B)
La liberté des Thresors la plus digne. (A)
Heureux Vieillard, les gros Tabours tonnants, (C)
Le May planté, et les Fiffres sonnants (C)
En vont louant toy, et ta noble race. (D)
Or pense doncq, que sont noz vouluntés, (E)
Veu, qu’il n’est rien, jusqu’aux arbres plantés, (E)
Qui ne t’en loue, et ne t’en rende grâce. (D) (II: 280)

[In the Heavens there is neither Planet nor Sign/ That so knew how to govern the Year/ As is governed Lyon the City/ By you, Trivulse, great and learned man./ This we say for your virtuous merit/ And for the joy we all express/ Of which you have given us the liberty, The liberty of most worthy Treasures./ Felicitous Old Man, the great thundering Drums,/ The staked Maypole, and the sounding Fifes/ Continue praising you and your noble race./ And yet, think then, that these are our desires/ In view of the fact that there is nothing, even to planted trees,/ That does not praise you and render its good graces.]

While we are dealing with another laudatory sonnet, considering that this is a poème d’occasion, commemorating the traditional practice of erecting a maypole (planter un mai) in front of the home of an elected official,(21) there is no need to focus on the thematic disparities between this and the Petrarchian brand of lyrical sonnets. However, structurally, the purposes of the sonnet are served. The first two quatrains build upon each other to establish Pompone Trivulse as a capable and praiseworthy governor, one who brought liberty and fortune (Thresors) to his people–both stanzas representing syntactically individual units, as indicated by the period that concludes each. The first syllogistic premise nods to Trivulse’s superlative governing of the city of Lyon, while the second deals with the recognition and appreciation of the governed people who enjoy the fruits of Trivulse’s labors. (In this case, the you is contained in the first stanzic premise and the us in the second.) These two premises prepare an interjecting conclusion in the tercets, which is introduced with an apostrophic appeal to the “Heureux Vieillard” (v. 9). Poetically, when the rime plate in the 9^th and 10^th verse positions abruptly interrupts the flow of the embraced quatrains, it also marks a movement from passive, conceptual adulation to contemporaneous action (with the gerundive rhymetonnants/sonnants) and a work accomplished, “Le May planté,” which is followed in the 11^th verse by a continuous action indicated with the use of a gerundive (“Et vont louant…”), which is, again, closed off with a period. As Marot did in the preceding sonnet, this elegiac piece is also concluded with an independent, free-standing tercet that begins with a transition (“Or,” like the previous poem’s “doncq”) and, this time, an imperative command: “pense” (v. 12), which sets up the anticipated mot final that justifies the May planté: “Veu, qu’il n’est rien, jusqu’aux arbres plantés,/ Qui ne t’en loue, et ne t’en rende grâce” (vv. 13-14). Rather than merely suggesting praise, as the poet does in the first eight verses, with the doubled couplet marotique, he assures that due glory will be delivered to the beloved governor. What is more, with the disposition he offers to the resolving sestet (of two separate tercets), Marot allows for a final conciliatory message: that the symbolic actions taken by the Lyon printers (one becoming many planted trees) are reflective of their continued appreciation and praise. With the marriage of the sonnet to the epigram, if Marot lost sight of the Petrarchian thematics of the form, he certainly maximized its structural ability to build to and impressively deliver a point.

Conclusion

As the above analysis of these two of his early sonnets demonstrates, Marot certainly recognized and understood the esthetic potential of the Italian verse form. A memory from his Italian exile, a form unproven, and something, to him, particularly un-French, it is safe to assume that the sonnet was simply not his form of predilection (as evidenced by his limited number of 4 original sonnets and 6 translations that seem to be “perdu[s] au milieu d’un grand nombre d’épigrammes” (Villey 547) [“lost in the middle of a great number of epigrams”]. In the end, Marot still preferred less constrained forms. McClelland offers the following explanation:

Il est tentant, plus exact aussi je crois, d’estimer que la forme fixe du sonnet représentait pour Marot une façon de penser la poésie dont il voulait se libérer . . . . A part les rimes, on ne remarque guère de différence entre ses premiers quatorzains et ses premiers sonnets. Avec le temps la conception originale du poème en quatorze vers se scinde en deux: formes complémentaires au début, sonnet et quatorzain finissent par s’organiser chacun selon les critères qui lui sont propres. Chacun signifie une manière particulière d’appréhender et de présenter une réalité affective. C’est l’épigramme qui gagne à la fin, parce que désormais le monde qui entourait Marot–le poète adulte en pleine possession de ses forces–ne pouvait plus s’exprimer par de rigides structures intellectuelles et esthétiques. (607)

[It is tempting, and I believe more correct, to consider the fixed form of the sonnet as representing for Marot a conception of poetry from which he wanted to free himself. . . . Except for the rhymes, one hardly notices any difference between his original quatorzains and his first sonnets. In due time, the original conception of a poem in fourteen verses splits in two: at first complementary forms, the sonnet and quatorzain end up each organizing itself according to its own criteria. Each represents a particular way to comprehend and present an affective reality. It is the epigram that wins out in the end because from then on the world that surrounded Marot–the adult poet in full possession of his capacities–could not express himself by means of rigid intellectual and esthetic structures.]

McClelland’s explanation for Marot’s final choice of the epigram over the sonnet is sufficiently convincing, citing the personality and time period as determining factors for the poet–“Il crut même [en pétrarquisant] devoir [se] sacrifier au goût du jour” (Piéri 55) [“(Marot) felt the need to sacrifice (himself) to the poetic tastes of his day”]; however, his judgment that the early sonnet and quatorzainwere noticeably similar except for the rhyme structure (the thesis of his article), is doubtful, according to our understanding, in that the rhyme structure is what makes the sonnet function. Even if Marot would ultimately prefer the liberties of the epigram, to deny his contributions to the sonnet verse form as it entered into France constitutes a considerable oversight. Jean Balsamo asserts that “Mieux qu’un second Pétrarque, ou qu’un Pétrarque français, Marot avait voulu être un nouvel Ovide, et il voulait surtout être un nouveau David” (51) [More than a second Petrarch, or a French Petrarch, Marot wanted to be a new Ovid, and more especially a new David.] In spite of his poetic wishes or his believed calling, Marot enhanced the “Petrarchian” sonnet structure that would be exploited to positive ends in the Pléiade’s love sonnets of the subsequent decades.

In La Deffence, Du Bellay called on his contemporaries to innovate through imitation, to rediscover models from the past and incorporate them into the French tradition for the embellishment of the French language. Ironically, they attempted to do this while breaking away from the past, singling out Marot, who was, with the ode, sonnet, elegy, discourse, and other forms, their contemporary master of innovation par imitation. Still, with no concern for firstness, Marot, this one, great poetic imagination, “invented” (re-discovered) the sonnet and innovated a French poetic form that would become the lyrical form par excellence in the tradition of French letters.

Why must violence happen? When–exactly–does the originary violence of the sparagmos happen? It is absurd for us to ask these questions, since we are creatures who must eat. But let us insist, child-like and naive: why do we not at the origin continue to represent the object? Why is it that the sign may not be prolonged indefinitely? If human uniqueness in representation is linked to the uniqueness of human violence, as the fact that we are the only animals capable of enjoying the esthetic of torture rituals attests, then generative anthropology ought to have something to say about our being so linked to the inseparability of violence and representation–setting deferral itself aside. Why must we “harm” objects?

It is not coincidentally in the context of reflections on the Holocaust, in a subsection titled “Messianic Awaiting” (in the chapter “The ‘Jewish Question’”) that Eric Gans offers a textual passage particularly relevant to these questions. The context is a refinement of his contrast between the Mosaic and Christian revelations first elaborated in Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation(1990). Here in Signs of Paradox (1997), Gans has made this suggestion: “[the] Passion demonstrates that the enunciation of the moral model of absolute reciprocity as an ethic sufficient for the conduct of everyday life . . . is destined to reanimate the originary resentment that led to the sparagmos” (155). Before mistaking the suggestion that the Passion reanimates resentment as a demotion of Christianity, notice its resemblance to Rene Girard’s interpretation of Jesus’ self-description as the one who brings not peace, but a sword. The famous revelation of the “scapegoat mechanism” makes it more difficult, not less difficult for humans to function peacefully in community. Violence after Jesus is no less than earlier violence; it is only more ashamed of its failure to renounce itself, and so more hidden. Individuals take their violence underground, into the unconscious: “Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” (Coleridge 49-50). The contagious individuation and democratization of resentment is not its reduction. But let us continue: adapting the quotation to fit the minimalization of the event to the originary triangle, the “return to Girard” (8) in Signs of Paradox , let us say: the absolute moral reciprocity of the two humans caught by mimetic incompatibility animates the resentment that leads to the violence of the sparagmos.

Gans continues: “making explicit the implicit moral configuration of the originary event undermines its original deferring effect” (155). In the originary event, the “original deferring effect” is the slightest of hesitations, the minimal act of good will constitutive of the-sign-as-imitation-of-the-object and the-object-as-imitated-by-the-sign. It is the “formal closure” of the sign that makes explicit the implicit difference between the sign-using humans and the object as not-sign. The formal closure of the sign reveals the mimetic enemy-partners as morally alike, as identical–morally about to do violence. When all the differences between the two humans disappear, the one difference between them and the object reappears in what we might call the self-revelation of the object as one “vulnerable” to disfiguration.

When–exactly–does the originary violence of the sparagmos occur? In the next paragraph, Gans hypothesises as follows:

At the origin, the sparagmos occurs once the sign has appropriated for its peripheral enunciators the formal closure of the central figure, so that it is no longer necessary for this closure [of the figure] to subsist in itself. As it comes to appear superfluous, the figure’s figurality becomes vulnerable to the resentment it generates and open to the defiguration of the sparagmos. (Signs 155)

Sparagmatic defiguration: the violent destruction, tearing to pieces and eating of the object, unconsciously controlled anarchy. But this passage is obscure. In what sense can we speak of it having been “necessary” (prior to the sparagmos) for the “formal closure” of the “central figure” to “subsist in itself”? The “figure’s figurality” refers to the object-as-imitated-by-the-originary-sign, not the raw cosmological material.(1) But how are we to grasp the process of the “figure’s figurality” somehow coming to “appear superfluous” to the originary humans in the triangle of mimetic incompatibility? When would the superfluity become intolerable? When would the necessity of the formal closure of the central figure to “subsist in itself” cease?

The answer may be something like this. The originary human intuition of the sign’s self-completion in its formal closure as the-sign-imitating-the-object is one and the same with the originary intuition of its unreality as an inadequate material substitute for the object-as-imitated-by-the-sign. The instant of absolute moral reciprocity occurs when the instant at which the subject-rival and model-obstacle caught in paradox are equally satisfied with the “formal closure” of their signs. The originary humans’ perfect equality in attention to the formal closure of their signs alone is also the instant of their equality as two, symmetrically opposed to the one central object. Thus, their “seeing” of the signs alone–with the object having dropped out of sight–is the minimal model of total cultural indifferentiation. Alike, the humans both oppose its brute cosmological difference (as object of appetite) and oppose its figural otherness (as significant object).

The now-initiated “amoral” horror of the return to animality against the object is proportionate to the just-completed “moral” purity of good will in sign-mediated hesitation. The instant of the sign’s self-completion and formal coherence is itself the instant of the appearing-superfluous of the figure’s figurality. Only when the sign-as-imitation-of-the-object appears to be complete in itself as a substitute for the object may we speak of the sign as having–“appropriated for its peripheral enunciators the formal closure of the central figure.” It is as if the peripheral enunciators’ sense of the perfection of the sign-as-imitation-of-the-object has permitted a minimal forgetting of the appetitive object. Appetite returns “with a vengeance,” human violence added to animal aggression to compensate for the deprivation in that forgetting. This originary forgetting we may take as the minimal model of the later forgetting of communal order threatened by the private criminal imaginary in real sparagmatic violence, the almost-forgetting of the shared whole figure in the individuated consumption of fragments.(2)

In the somewhat surprising next paragraph of Gans’ discussion, the central figure is briefly but fancifully personified as an agent speaking to the originary humans. Let us continue to reduce the circular “communal” version of the event to its minimal triangular version, to emphasise the theme of paradox foregrounded in Signs of Paradox. Keep in mind that the central figure is the one that just prior to the sparagmos has become “vulnerable to the resentment it [itself] generates.”

But what this central figure “says” to the periphery in the originary event is the substance of what Jesus would articulate as morality: “You are all equal, because you all imitate me.” This message of peace is in effect a call to war; the central figure affirms its difference from its peripheral imitators in the act of denying it. There is no escaping from this impasse any more than from any other variant of the foundational human paradox. (155)

Let us consider this passage first by following the hint and imagining without embarrassment, in the originary event, the object as a food object–represented and now about-to-be-violently-appropriated–“speaking” to the two symmetrical humans at the other corners of the mimetic triangle. What would this figured food object be “saying” to them? Consider “you are all equal, because you all imitate me.” We might transpose the address as follows: “You are equal to each other, because you both imitate me.” This transposition reminds us of the anesthetic paradox of mere incompatibility. Their resentments of the center are equally intense but equally unsatisfiable. What the object “says” to the originary humans is: “You are perfectly similar to one another because your signs-as-imitations-of-me are equally perfect imitations. You are moral equals in hesitation of appropriation and deference to each other.” A third-person description from “outside” would likewise emphasise that the formal closure of one sign is the formal closure of the other; there is no telling them apart. But here is the paradoxical necessity: that perfect moral equality of the two sign-actions generates the one difference between the central figure and the signs. From this paradox emerges the Draconian solution of the revelation of the object’s originary vulnerability.

Let us notice that Gans has asked us to imagine the about-to-be-victimized central figure in “the act of denying” its own central “difference from its peripheral imitators.” But what is the difference from the imitators that is being “denied”? How can the object hidden by the central figure “deny” its difference? Let us re-try our formulation: the instant of the sign’s self-completion is the instant of the appearing-superfluous of the figure’s figurality. When the sign-as-imitation-of-the-object appears to be complete in itself as a substitute for the object, then the two originary humans “hear” the food object speak “in the act of denying” its ontological difference from the sign. It’s helpful to imagine the personified object making this denial because we can imagine its trying to prolong its invulnerability to the violence of the two humans held at bay. Only as long as the sign “lasts” does the vulnerable object subsist; it is about to be torn to bits. The originary object of violence is “sacred” only for an instant of hesitation. It’s the eternal instant–of the origin of language, the origin of God, the origin of the human.

This exposure of vulnerability is only one side of the flippable coin, however. For the object is also caught in the act of “affirm[ing] its difference from its peripheral imitators,” inviting violence. Humans have appetites; we must eat. The object’s denial of its real otherness is suspected and flipped to a confession of its objective difference from the sign: “I am real food, not a sign of it.” This self-revelation of the significant food object as food, not merely as significant, is the central figure’s “affirmation of its difference from its peripheral imitators.” The revelation of the object’s reality is paradoxically generated by the sign’s seeming sufficiency as substitute for food. The instant of seeming sufficiency of the sign is the instant of the appearing-superfluous of the figure’s figurality. The otherness of the reality of the object as not-sign returns. This is the object’s revelation of its “objective” difference from the inadequate sign.

Perhaps allowing a quasi-cartoon version of this speaking central figure of the food object is not inappropriate. Imagine the moment of denial at which the central figure says, “Don’t eat me; eat your sign-imitations of me instead.” That’s the moment at which we originary humans recognize the impossibility of obeying such an order. We realize anew our hunger; and we take our violent revenge on the object for having trapped us in such a paradox. Nor does it change anything in the poor food object’s favour that it gives us this command only in our imaginations–that, in reality, it has “said” nothing of the kind, has said nothing at all. Human representation changes the real; it makes out of the real a vulnerable object of real imagination. More essentially, notice that “Don’t eat me as the-object-as-imitated-by-your-signs” has presupposed that we are sufficiently conscious of our sign-imitations that we might indeed think of eating them instead. There, in the absurd eating of signs, imaginable despite its absurdity, is a cartoon version of our intuition of the otherness of the real object as insufficiently represented by the sign, itself a material object but no substitute for the real thing. There–is the absurdity of eating scrolls, of kissing pictures, of dancing with mannequins, and conversing earnestly with statues.

Therefore, the centrally-figured food object saying “Don’t eat me; eat your signs of me instead” certainly makes the “call to peace” that’s in effect a “call to war.” For its denial reveals the anthropological truth that we just know: our sign-imitations complete in their formal closure reveal their incompleteness as objects of appetite. To become fully conscious of the sign as such is to become newly conscious of its object as other to the sign. Our willed defiance of the “don’t eat me” command marks the primordial separation between word and thing, the fall from representation into violence. But both the representation and violence now must be owned as human. We have no choice but to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Let’s get the meaning of eating knowledge: knowing, taking into ourselves the truth, that our representations (as good as they are in themselves) are never good enough to eat. That’s one truth we have known from the origin; we share it now with our earliest ancestors then. There shouldn’t be any hint of shame in our needing to eat (“we’re only animals”). But because we are the only animal that knows something of the memorability of its violence in the act of eating–the only one that intuits the human violence appropriate to human eating–there will always remain a little such shame (“we’re only human”–it’s only a human shame). “Don’t eat me; eat your signs instead,” says the food object. Even that we are able to share the food object as representation with these words at this conference table (now) doesn’t cancel our sense of the laughable inappropriateness of the command. Such a food object is as unsatisfactory as it is imaginable. The call to perfect asceticism is the call to perfect satiation. The call to peace, a call to war. It is outrageous that we should be asked to eat words, not food.(3) Conversely, no human creatures know their hunger more than those who have nothing to eat but words.(4)

After our cartoon, it might seem impossible to make anthropological contact between the food object-as-imitated-by-the-sign subject to originary violence and the second Person of the Christian Trinity. But we might regain our bearings by remembering Gans’ efforts to give the Christian revelation, in Science and Faith but elsewhere as well, its full due. For Gans, there is no softening of the figurality of Jesus as the object of a universal human violence. On the contrary, originary thinking presents the figure of the Crucified as the very image of the anthropological idea of God–God Incarnate as Person. Jesus is the human figure of the One we “must have“ in the sense of “must have obliterated and rendered objectively inaccessible only to hold in subjective memory as infinitely valuable.” The Crucified is the sacred food object on which we depend for our bodily survival, incarnate in human form. The basis of figurality incarnate is not so much that of consumption, hence a scandalous cannibalism (eating Jesus). The basis is more that of the incarnation of victimization, of the marks of violence, of what has been done to the object prior to its consumption. Of all the many figures of violence done to a single human, Jesus has endured: his memorability and his victimization are not identical, but they are inseparable. He is remembered as the Divine human victim, the man-God (a scandalous paradox for all).(5)

Jesus was and is the victim of a necessary evil. The victims of necessary evil are the most horrifying, for they are the ones for whom we cannot deny responsibility without smothering our intuition of the scene of representation. The horror of the figure of human sacrifice as the Divine Incarnate victimized is its seeming inseparability from the historicity of the human scene itself. The crucifixion seems as necessary to modernity, given the victimary gestures of the romantic self and its descendants, as the violence done to the originary object seems necessary to humanity itself.(6) Witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus is one with the hypocrisy of our attempts to believe that we can disavow responsibility for having crucified him. This is to recall the formula “to know Jesus is to have participated in the crucifixion” (Science and Faith). We might even posit an analogy between knowledge of the Divine person Incarnate, with its necessitation of the revelation of our having participated in the crucifixion, and the knowledge of natural objects and the revelation of the “violence” we must do to them before consuming them.(7)

But let us return to the puzzling “substance of what Jesus would articulate as morality: ‘You are all equal to me, because you all imitate me’”(Signs 155). We may try to imagine what it is that Jesus is saying to the two humans in the paradox of originary mimesis at that impossible instant when the object-as-imitated-by-the-sign “calls” those performing the sign into violence. The most desacralizing translation would be to imagine Jesus (crucified or anticipating his crucifixion) saying something to this effect: “You are all trying to be martyrs as I am now; in your equally vain attempts to imitate me as exemplar of absolute nonviolence, you are all equally condemned to failure, for I am here on the cross first.” Such a translation takes us to the limit of cynicism toward the historical figure of Jesus, making him less a victim of paradoxically necessary evil than a self-contradicting monster of a certain bizarre egotism. It ought to be rejected.(8)

Let us return and retry: the “substance of what Jesus would articulate as morality: ‘You are all equal to me, because you all imitate me’” (Signs 155). We seek to blend this into what the originary object of violence as the second Person of the Trinity there at the origin of the human “says” to the human subjects caught in the paradox of mimesis. We seek what it is that God as the Divine Incarnate (not in the first person of the Mosaic afigural Other) is saying at the beginning to them (and to us) at that instant when the sign generates the violence done to the object. The two humans “listening” may hear instead something like the following: “Your signs-as-imitations-of-me have generated within each of you a sacred centrality equivalent to my own. You are now humans equally vulnerable as possessors of the sign. I am the Divine Person Incarnate who withstands the insufficiency of those signs. You will learn your own vulnerability by remembering the violence you have done to me.”

This may be (something like) what the central figure “says” at the instant of hesitation before the sparagmos. It is also what we might imagine Jesus as the Divine object subject to human violence “saying” at the moment of the crucifixion. Our signs of peace, our promises of peace, do not suffice. Under the necessity of their difference from the object, the object will suffer real violence. There is no way out of this originary paradox, human violence inseparable from although contained by representation. Let’s remember Saul on the road to Damascus, who heard the voice of God as Jesus only after having persecuted him, aimed for his obliteration. The revelation to Saul–his remembering having participated in the crucifixion–is the maximal model of the minimal “significant memory” that endures through the originary sparagmos. Jesus speaks to us in the voice of the originary object of violence as Jesus spoke to Saul. To know Jesus is to know having torn apart the object of human violence in its Divine otherness. The first person of the Trinity says “I am who I am.” The second person says something like: “I am the Divine Object incarnate, torn apart by your violence. You lie to yourselves if you believe you did not wish to hurt me. For I have given myself to reveal to you your own human, sacred subjective vulnerability. Remember me–for the violence you can do to each other (as sacred human centers) you must have done to an object such as me first.” These formulas venture to capture the “humanization” of the object-victim in the Christian revelation.

To close, let us try reflecting briefly on the paradox of the inimitability of moral perfection that our analysis may have left implicit, for it too is a part of what Gans is after. In suggesting that Jesus as the incipient victim of originary violence says, “You are all equal, because you all imitate me,” Gans acknowledges the hard truth of the inimitability of the uniqueness of Jesus’ (seeming) moral perfection. Much is at stake in our naming of the quality of that perfection. The paradox of any exemplary human figure of self-giving conduct and pacifist righteousness consists in the guaranteed capacity of such self-effacing perfection to bring out the worst in the very people whose violent natures are to be improved by their following the example. (We are the “very people.”) Jesus himself, insofar as he is a type of the morally perfect “pacifist” teetering eternally on the brink of human self-righteousness, does represent that paradox. To say that his goodness “brought out the worst” in those who crucified him is only a hair’s breadth away from saying Jesus “asked for it.” But Jesus can only be mistaken as a figure of self-righteousness. He was human; he knew resentment; his perfection is expressed in the originarity of his historical Jewish Person, not in a moralistic accounting that would prove he never broke any rules, nor in a metaphysical description that could persuade us that he possessed certain attributes.

Meanwhile, another test of the paradox of the inimitability of moral perfection is available. Ask yourself whether the morally perfect person does not necessarily arouse your resentment, for the very reason that such a person “reveals” your own moral imperfection to you. What would you prefer: to be a castaway on a desert island with a perfect saint, or with an ordinary sinner? The human who denies being an ordinary sinner is one who denies his humanity, who starves his common desire for the sacred vulnerable subjectivity of the victim of necessary evil alone. By contrast, to indulge a desire to present oneself in the victimary mode–subject to fancied persecution in a false imitation of Jesus crucified–is to wish to be a victim of unnecessary evil. In fact, self-righteousness creates and courts unnecessary evil according to the paradox of pacifist exemplarity above. The more we suspect Jesus of courting martyrdom, the more we make him vulnerable to the accusation of self-righteousness and having “asked for it” in the grotesque victimary mode.

True righteousness opposing human violence is destroyed only by necessary human evil, just as the originary object-victim of the sparagmos was necessarily destroyed as the prerequisite of self-knowledge. The difference in Jesus’ case is that his moral “perfection” is one with his “personable,” that is, revealed only in and as a person, forgiveness of the most spectacular and horrific human imperfections. The Jesus who reveals himself to Saul has already forgiven Saul–or he would not be revealing himself to him. Divine forgiveness is revealed in one and the same instant that we recognize what our violence has done to the Divine Image. To know Jesus is to have participated in the crucifixion; to become human is to know having done violence to the Divine object. But to know Jesus is also to know Divine forgiveness. The human is the species given to scenic representation. It is the species that self-knowingly does violence to creation. Thus the human needs to be forgiven (eternally) for the violence it has done to the sacred objects that its receives on its scene, as created, as revealed, as having been given by the Divine Other.

This has been a rough reduction of what I think might be the strain of “Christian” thinking in originary thinking.(9)

Introduction

Forests, as René Girard sees them in Shakespeare’s comedies (the gentle, pastoral Forest of Arden in As You Like It or the enchanted wilderness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), are places to which young people flee in order to escape parental oppression. The lovers flee the cruel, artificial obstructions imposed by dictatorial parents in order to live out their idyll in unobstructed, primal innocence (A Theater of Envy 97-98, 37-38). Of course, Shakespeare and Girard cast a rather jaundiced eye on these ever-obligatory parental obstructions–uproariously satirized in A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the character “Wall,” whom the artisan players contrive to stand between Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare and Girard are even more cynical when it comes to the youthful idyll in the forest. What the young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream really do when they get to the forest is to create monstrous obstructions of their own. The forest becomes an arena for raw mimetic rivalry. As Girard observes, it is only the restrictions of genre that prevent the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream from killing each other (A Theater of Envy 49).

Jane Austen does something very similar to Shakespeare in Mansfield Park. In many ways, Mansfield Park really is Austen’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at least up to Sir Thomas’ return to Mansfield.(1) Like Shakespeare, Austen removes parental authority (Sir Thomas’ prolonged trip to Antigua) to give the young lovers an unregulated romantic playground. She arranges for some disorienting, jealous wanderings in the forest (the outing at Sotherton). Finally, she stages a play-within-a-play (the ill-fated amateur production of Lovers’ Vows, which ultimately leads to an ugly and destructive sexual scandal). For the “cruel wall” that separates Pyramus and Thisbe, Austen substitutes a gate in the woods at Sotherton. Far from oppressing the lovers, the gate presents (like the forbidden fruit in Genesis) an easily surmountable obstacle that invites transgression. Further innovations of Austen’s are having the lovers themselves undertake the theatricals (a “slumming” exercise in collective egoism that greatly exacerbates the romantic self-deceit) and the return of Sir Thomas to Mansfield, which puts a panicked end to rehearsals and brilliantly synthesizes two unlikely dramatic motifs: Bottom bursting upon his terrified fellow thespians with the head of an ass, and Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai to find the Israelites engaged in a pagan orgy.(2)

In this study, I propose to explore some of the “natural” spaces in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, following the lead of Girard’s Shakespeare criticism. Austen’s treatment of land is significant in Mansfield Park, both for the way she examines the re-shaping of grounds itself as a form of feverish competition among peers, and for the way the land serves as a stage for ferocious rivalry among young romancers.

Yet Mansfield Park is an onion with many layers. To see how Austen treats outdoor spaces, it is necessary to understand more broadly how and why she is reworking material from Pride and Prejudice. This is the subject of the next section. In the three sections that then follow, I examine respectively the treatment of landscape design in Mansfield Park, the aggressive outdoorsmanship of its young people, and finally, their misadventures in the woods at Sotherton.

Oppositions Attract

In Mansfield Park, Austen uses a play-within-a-play to challenge the romantic assumptions aroused in her previous work, Pride and Prejudice, precisely the way Shakespeare uses the amateur production of Pyramus and Thisbe to parody the romantic assumptions his audience had for Romeo and Juliet (Theater of Envy, 271).(3) Specifically, Austen targets the commonplace intuition that “opposites attract.” Austen’s play-within-a-play is Lovers’ Vows,(4) which has as its chief love interest a stereotypical presentation of the “opposites attract” bromide (Anhalt and Amelia), paralleling on the one hand the attraction between Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, and on the other, the pairings that are anticipated in Mansfield Park (Edmund-Mary, Henry-Fanny). Austen knows that it is not opposites but rather (as also with Shakespeare) oppositions which attract.

Austen’s treatment of oppositional attraction in either novel cannot be developed here in any completeness but can be sketched in outline. In Mansfield Park, Austen does not seek to “deconstruct” Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship, movingly depicted as a process of antipathy growing into love through mutual understanding and sympathy. Austen seeks instead to engage misinterpretations. From all appearances, Darcy and Elizabeth seem to distill the essence of the “opposites attract” principal: Darcy is tall, intimidating, and reserved; Elizabeth is petite, personable, and vivacious. Yet the attraction is not founded on these contrasts, nor does it develop around them in any fundamental way; the relationship is mimetically directed. Though Elizabeth is genuinely put off by Darcy (as Fanny will be by Henry in Mansfield Park), Darcy, like an inadequately coached Girardian, comes to interpret her resolute hostility as the strategy of a saucy coquette, or in Girard’s terms, as “pseudo-narcissism” (Deceit, 105-106; Things Hidden, 370-371). Darcy is further provoked by Elizabeth’s engaging manner with other men, especially (in my opinion) Colonel Fitzwilliam, a plausible romantic rival. Against his own better judgment, Darcy allows himself to fall victim to Elizabeth’s “strategy” (i.e., she must be repulsing him because she wants his attention, and she must be receiving attention from other men because she wants to make him jealous), and makes his disastrous first proposal. “What will you think of my vanity?” he confesses later. “I believed you to be wishing, expecting my addresses” (434). Elizabeth’s sharp rebuff, and Darcy’s subsequent letter, serve to clear both of their misconceptions.

However, the relationship does not stop being mimetic, it simply stops being oppositional. Both begin to conform to the merits seen in the other. Darcy begins acting in a way that would please Elizabeth (even when it seems they will never meet again) and Elizabeth begins to sound, even syntactically, like Darcy (as when she unsuccessfully opposes Lydia’s trip to Bath). This “good mimesis” is further developed in Mansfield Park. It is a strong though imperfect factor in Fanny and Edmund’s relationship, and a tragically unrealized potentiality for Henry and Mary Crawford in their respective relationships with Fanny and Edmund.(5)

To pursue these issues would go beyond the scope of this study. For present purposes, the essential point is Austen’s calculated misdirection, in Mansfield Park, regarding the “opposites attract” myth. Austen is not content to simply disabuse readers of the idea. Rather, she lures them further into their own error. With Anhalt-Amelia (in the play), Mary-Edmund, and Henry-Fanny, the stakes are raised threefold with regard to the “opposites attract” principle. Yet, as the novel proceeds, the eternal romantic truth that like is drawn to unlike gives way to the prosaic truth that resistance is arousing: opposition attracts. Opposition animates nearly all of the romantic activity in the novel. Yet nothing comes of any of the promised pairings, which, like the theatricals themselves, are shattered, interrupted, frustratingly unconsummated. Many readers, and a substantial number of critics, have never forgiven Austen for this. Yet, since Austen has stoked these romantic expectations so thoroughly herself, it is very difficult to believe she did not anticipate this reaction, and not at all difficult to surmise that she deliberately provoked it.(6)

Understanding how Austen treats oppositional attraction in Mansfield Park is crucial to understanding how Austen treats her “natural” spaces as well. Specifically, we should remember that Austen is revisiting material from her previous novel, and thus Austen’s treatment of landscapes and outdoor activity in Mansfield Park should not be considered apart from their treatment in Pride and Prejudice. These are two of the many areas where Austen sets out to overturn what we thought we knew from her previous novel.

Landscape Design and Mimetic Rivalry

Like so much else in Mansfield Park, the treatment of landscapes should be considered as co-extensive with Pride and Prejudice. In that novel, the grounds of Darcy’s Pemberly estate are depicted uncritically as a perfectly realized harmony of art and nature. Pemberly possesses the ideal placement of human structures upon the land, the minimal adjustment of natural assets so as to bring out their grace and grandeur without imposing artifice (for instance, the stream that flows in front of the manor), and the careful preservation and maintenance of woods, grounds, game, and so on. Darcy is the perfect landowner, exercising his stewardship with pride but without pretence, and Elizabeth Bennet, who loves long, rambling, contemplative walks in the country, will likewise make the perfect Mistress of Pemberly.

When Charles Bingley is urged by his sister to build his own future estate in the same manner as Pemberly, he can only reply with amused incredulity that it would be easier to simply buy it: “I should think it more possible to get Pemberly by purchase than by imitation” (245). Obviously, Darcy could never sell his ancient family estate, yet it is equally impossible for Bingley to emulate it by other means. Where great estates are concerned, Pemberly (like Darcy himself) is an “external mediator”; it can be admired, but not aspired to.

In this light, the shift Austen makes in Mansfield Park must be seen as quite radical. The shift, in mimetic terms, is from external to internal mediation.(7) Austen is not rejecting the idea of Pemberly so much as the plausibility of Pemberly. Mansfield, though smaller in extent, is another grand estate with all its carefully maintained natural beauty and symbiotic reciprocity with the local farming community. Yet Mansfield is a troubled home, and its outward placidity appears in increasing and finally implausible isolation from a surrounding world of energetic status seekers. Landscaping is one area in which this intense competition is played out.

Home “improvement” is all the rage, and quite a few properties aspire to “be a Pemberly” (though without the symbiotic relation to the community). Six locations (two parsonages, one summer cottage, three large estates) are either shown or mentioned in connection with “improvement,” which seems to involve eliminating Euclidean geometry to get a more “rustic” effect, cutting down trees to open up prospects and dramatize approaches to dwellings, and shutting out from view ploughed fields, penned up animals (though free range herbivores are desirable), and other signs of profit or methodical industry, either by removal or by judicious placement of greenery.(8)

Thus, it does indeed seem possible (contra Charles Bingley’s assertion) to “get Pemberly by imitation.” Internal mediation is transforming grounds into Arcadian showcases. Sotherton is by far the largest and oldest of the properties considered for “improvement,” but–in a striking reversal of the situation with Darcy and Bingley–it is in fact Sotherton’s owner, the dimwitted Mr. Rushworth, who becomes mimetically fascinated by the “improvements” made on the much smaller property of his friend Smith. Once he sees Smith’s “improved” Compton estate, Rushworth suddenly feels that his huge but rather staid familial holdings are bleak and confining, and he becomes obsessed with imitating Smith. He must have Repton (the famous, and famously expensive, landscape designer) to keep up with his friend.

Luckily (or, as it turns out for Rushworth, unluckily) Henry Crawford has appeared on the scene. Henry is the world’s greatest authority on anything that engages his attention, and “improvement” is no exception. Henry has effected improvements on his own property, Everingham, and the gentleman adept is now enlisted to “improve” Sotherton in lieu of a paid professional. This project becomes a group outing wherein the young people can all take part in formulating a plan to reshape the grounds of Sotherton. They collectively assume the roles of impromptu experts–as they will later with their amateur theatricals.

By now it should be clear that the re-shaping of landscapes in Mansfield Park has little to do with people’s relation to the earth but quite a bit to do with their relation to other people, or in other words, with internal mediation, with mimetic fascination. For extended periods, the privileged will retreat from the fashionable bustle of London and repair to their equally fashionable country homes, where they can show off their pastoral paradises to envious peers. The desire to be “modern” is mixed with a desire to be aristocratic. A stylish Arcadian rusticity is sought that shields the eye from anything so distasteful as profitable farming or methodical industry, even as it rather aggressively advertises wealth, yet, at the same time, vies for the kind of prestige where money doesn’t matter.

This landscaping as a form of social positioning becomes more blatant later in the novel, when Henry casts his improver’s eye on Edmund’s future parsonage, Thornton Lacey, and offers his unsolicited advice in voluminous detail:

“The farmyard must be cleared away entirely, and planted up to shut out the blacksmith’s shop. The house must be turned to front the east instead of the north–the entrance and principal rooms, I mean, must be on that side, where the view is really very pretty; I am sure it may be done. And there must be your approach, through what is at present the garden. You must make a new garden at what is now the back of the house; which will be giving it the best aspect in the world, sloping to the south-east. The ground seems precisely formed for it. . . . The meadows beyond what will be the garden, as well as what now is, sweeping round from the lane I stood in to the north-east, that is, to the principal road through the village, must be all laid together, of course; very pretty meadows they are, finely sprinkled with timber. They belong to the living, I suppose; if not, you must purchase them. Then the stream–something must be done with the stream; but I could not quite determine what.” (585-586)Henry’s deliberating over the stream is almost certainly a clue from Austen to remind us of the stream at Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice, “a stream of some natural importance . . . swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance” (362). Henry proposes very Pemberly-like properties for this modest but respectable parsonage–and anticipates something of the spirit of home and garden glossies that come down to us in the present day.

Quite some distance has been traveled from Pride and Prejudice, not to mention the placid Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Or rather, the Forest of Arden has come closer to us, since in Mansfield Park such fashionable rusticity is now literally reproduced in everyone’s backyard, providing they have sufficient means to execute it. The mania for “improvement” now transforms the stylized Arcadian landscape into a commodity, a much sought after status symbol. As Henry continues his surprisingly modern sales pitch, the real point of all of this proposed improvement becomes clear. He is not really interested in the natural assets or beauty of the property; instead, he wants Edmund to use it to “make a statement” about “who you are”:

“[The parsonage] is not a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows; it is not cramped into the vulgar compactness of a square farmhouse: it is a solid, roomy, mansion-like looking house, such as one might suppose a respectable old country family had lived in from generation to generation, through two centuries at least, and were now spending from two to three thousand a year in. . . . The air of a gentleman’s residence, therefore, you cannot but give it, if you do anything. But it is capable of much more. . . . By some such improvements as I have suggested (I do not really require you to proceed upon my plan, though, by the bye, I doubt anybody’s striking out a better) you may give [the house] a higher character. You may raise it into a place. From being the mere gentleman’s residence, it becomes, by judicious improvement, the residence of a man of education, taste, modern manners, good connexions. All this may be stamped on it; and that house receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as the great landholder of the parish by every creature travelling the road; especially as there is no real squire’s house to dispute the point. . . .” (586-587)

In other words, the purpose of the “improvement” that Henry proposes for the surrounding land is to augment the house itself with hyper-inflated status markers. An extraordinary volume of information is to be conveyed to anyone who happens to pass by, and all of it has to do with prestige, with comparative positioning in property, income, expenditure, manners, fashion, education, connections, and the like.

It is Mary Crawford, imagining herself as the future wife of Edmund, who is most excited by the mental picture created here by her brother, and most resentful when Sir Thomas and Edmund quash it all by making it known that Edmund plans to be a plain-living, full-time clergyman. Mary is “startled from the agreeable fancies she had been previously indulging on the strength of her brother’s description” and “no longer able, in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune. . . .” (589).

Mary thinks very much like her brother. In fact, Henry’s projection matches the picture she has already formed sometime earlier, when she tells Fanny, “I can even suppose it pleasant to spend half the year in the country, under certain circumstances, very pleasant. An elegant, moderate-sized house in the centre of family connexions; continual engagements among them; commanding the first society in the neighbourhood; looked up to, perhaps, as leading it even more than those of larger fortune. . . .” (567, emphasis mine). This is the only way it is tolerable for Mary to imagine herself as the wife of a country clergyman.

Yet Henry and Mary Crawford, though wrong enough in their values, are seldom inaccurate in their observations, and often merely say aloud what other characters will not acknowledge openly. The Crawfords are “fashion leaders,” who know how much a little image management can enhance status so that even one’s ostensible “superiors” will follow. The trick is to make your own desire so appealing that everyone else wants to make it their own. This has been seen above in Rushworth, who catches the fever for “improvement” from his friend Smith, so the dynamics are not limited to savvy fashion leaders like Henry and Mary, and these dynamics extend even to shaping the earth and fashioning it into a mimetic accouterment.

The reproduction of gentle pastoral landscapes is, ironically enough, the outward expression of a burgeoning mimetic fever that is actually quite red in tooth and claw. The ferocity of this mimetic competition manifests much more nakedly when the young people are set loose in the artificially planted woods at Sotherton.

Nature and Outdoorsmanship

Austen obviously views the expensive, calculated rusticity of “improvement” with a critical eye, as is suggested when Fanny mourns the fate of grand old trees that line an avenue at Sotherton (479), and clearer still when we know a little of Austen’s upbringing. From Claire Tomalin’s biography, we can understand that Austen was herself raised in a parsonage that doubled as a noisy farmyard–far from Henry’s “improved” vision of Thornton Lacey. However, what sort of “love of nature” does Austen regard as authentic?

Though Austen rarely dwells at any length on natural description, she does seem to share a wholesome love of natural beauty with her greatest nature lovers, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot. However, appreciation of nature takes contradictory forms, since it is expressed so differently in the characters, particularly Fanny and Elizabeth.

As with land and grounds, the shift between the two novels is substantial. In Pride and Prejudice, everything that is good, wholesome and true seems to find its apotheosis in the vigorous outdoorsmanship of Elizabeth Bennet, whilst her morally repulsive counterparts are over-ornamented and sedentary characters (Caroline Bingley and her sister) who sneer at all this inane activity undertaken by inferior woman (dancing, long walks through the mud, acquiring a tan from summer travels). Even the pathetic and sickly Miss De Bourgh is portrayed in a harsh and unforgiving light via her guilt by association with the characters who oppose Elizabeth. Yet the robustly countrified Elizabeth, smiling in blissful indifference at her sedentary rivals, seems to have constituted a dilemma for Austen that she needed to tease apart.

In Mansfield Park this scale of values via the outdoors is almost completely reversed. Fanny Price inherits virtually all of Elizabeth’s love of nature, yet it is she who is now the frail and sickly one, and usually sedentary. She can only take the outdoors in moderate doses, is the first to be exhausted in any walking party, and is terrified of her first pony ride as a child.(9) An even more striking shift can be found in the women who stand in contrast to our heroine: Julia and Maria Bertram, and Mary Crawford. These characters (quite unlike Caroline Bingley) are strong, hardy, active–robustly and aggressively athletic. The height of fashion for young ladies of distinction now seems to combine Elizabeth Bennet’s energetic outdoorsmanship with the flagrant boy-chasing (less overtly crass in Mansfield Park than in Pride in Prejudice, but hardly less intense) that constantly occupies her silly younger sisters Lydia and Kitty.

Whether they express it in word, action, or restless body language, the stylish young women in Mansfield Park always see activity as the ultimate virtue, and inactivity the most loathsome of curses. We hear it from Julia Bertram at the supper table, when the subject of improvement is first aired, and she seeks to ingratiate herself with Henry by praising him as an active man. Never one to be outdone, Maria Bertram will show Henry how much she values action in her “bold,” taboo-busting leap over the gate in the woods at Sotherton. (The haplessly delayed Julia will leap past the gate soon afterward, and charge off into the woods after them.) Neither can Mary Crawford endure inactivity. She fidgets restlessly as she sits on the bench with Edmund, when Fanny must stop to rest: “‘I must move,’ said she, ‘resting fatigues me’” (503).

Wherever we see Julia, Maria or Mary placed outdoors, they inevitably display their athletic vigor. Except for Fanny, few young people in Mansfield Park can endure sitting still for more than a few minutes. Fanny’s love of nature (though often expressed in an awkwardly stilted literary manner) can be judged as sincere simply because it has nothing to recommend it other than the genuine and much needed sustenance she draws from it. None of this is transferrable as mimetic currency in the new fashion for vigorous outdoorsmanship.

The athletically endowed certainly have every right to their gifts, and to enjoy them as much as they wish, but what, for Austen, is the point of all this restless activity? In Mansfield Park the point rarely has much to do with athletic ability itself, and it has nothing to do with nature at all. Outdoorsmanship in Mansfield Park always boils down to self-exhibition and competition.

We can see this with Mary Crawford who, in marked contrast to Fanny, proves to be a natural and fearless horsewoman. Her quick progress even draws the admiration of the old coachman (who recalls Fanny’s quailing in terror at her first pony ride as a child). Austen editorializes further on Mary’s horsemanship: “to the genuine pleasure of the exercise, something was probably added in Edmund’s attendance and instruction, and something more in the conviction of very much surpassing her sex in general” (486). Here Mary’s outdoor propensities merely factor down to the things that really matter: attracting male attention and beating other women.

In this brash, strutting, competitive athleticism, the fierce rivalry of Austen’s young people touches ground with her contested landscapes.

Traipsing into the Forest

In the Sotherton scenes, the differences from Shakespeare are as enlightening as the similarities. When the lovers of Mansfield Park make their breakaway into the woods of Sotherton, they are not breaking away from parental oppression in any reasonable sense. The imposing Sir Thomas is far away in Antigua, and all that is left to escape is the dawdling pace and chattering civilities of an aunt and mother, who waste their morning with a tedious tour of the great house. (Significantly, this tour closely parallels the much more reverent one taken at Pemberly by Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle in Pride and Prejudice.) This straining at the bit of restless young people against minimal adult constraints is another constant in Mansfield Park. It anticipates the spirit of dozens of youth movies, wherein there is no greater heaven than to escape the half-hearted chaperoning of ridiculous adults and escape into the backyard to imbibe illicit substances or pursue amorous adventures in the bushes.

There is likewise nothing idealistic or lyrically self-dramatizing about these lovers. Like the office romancers of contemporary television, they understand, for the most part, the delicious attractions of jealousy and rivalry. And if the breakaway of Shakespeare’s lovers into the enchanted wilderness finds its echo in the “back to nature” movement of the Woodstock generation, Austen’s lovers are much more like the cast of Survivor. Survivor‘s participants may be airlifted to exotic wilderness locales, but are hardly there to commune with nature or to reclaim their primal innocence. They are there to grab their fifteen minutes of fame and, above all, to win, to come out on top, to bury the competition.(10) The wilderness serves only as a backdrop, an obstacle course on which they test their mettle against one another through an aggressive athleticism, temporary tactical alliances, deceit, humiliation, back-stabbing, and treachery. In Mansfield Park, the spotlight grabbing aspect is seen in the theatricals, which come later, while the competitive aspect is captured in these scenes in the woods, which constitute (like Survivor) essentially a brutal elimination contest. But to the extent that Austen’s lovers are non-idealistic, less self-deceived about what they are really up to, they are actually more self-deceived–by the idea that anyone can actually “win” such contests and benefit from the victory.

Mansfield‘s lovers are fiercely, impatiently, aggressively competitive; they are out to make war, not love. Mary begins her determined attack to overturn Edmund’s core ideals and prevail on him to conform to her idea of a satisfactory mate. Edmund in turn is roused to counter-attack, to convert her so that she instead will conform to his. Maria Bertram, engaged to the dull Rushworth, is determined to trip up her sister Julia so that she does not gain preeminence in Henry Crawford’s attentions. Julia is equally determined not to let her eternally superior elder sister spoil her chance with Henry and steal her shot at a place in the sun. Henry is happy to play the jealous sisters off one another, and prepared to jilt whichever one wins. Rushworth, wanting only to show off his estate and his trophy bride, dimly senses himself losing out to Henry, and runs around fretfully to defer the inevitable.

The romantic misadventures of the young people do not take place in an ancient, enchanted forest with fairies and sprites, but in a few acres of planted woods on the grounds of a staid estate, the grounds themselves being assessed for “improvement.” The only person to enjoy the scenery for its own sake is also the only non-belligerent, Fanny Price. Though pleasant to look at–“darkness and shade, and natural beauty”–and “refreshing for its shade” in the hot glare of a summer’s day, the wood itself is “laid out with too much regularity” (500), that is, planted in the old style rather than the newer Arcadian mode of calculated irregularity. There is no pretence of this being Eden, yet, strangely enough, this makes Austen’s use of the Edenic element especially intense.(11)

The scenes at the gate are loaded with literary and religious significance. Fanny is on a nearby bench, having been abandoned there by Edmund and Mary (who have wandered off to nurture their nascent but impossible romance). However, Fanny is joined after a while by the chief contingent of the “improving” party, Henry, Maria and Rushworth. They want to get through the gate, which leads out of the woods and into the park of Sotherton, where the best vista for “improvement” can be obtained. However, there is no key, and the flustered Rushworth is sent back to the great house to get it. Then, under Fanny’s flabbergasted eyes, Henry manages, with a few artful insinuations, to vanquish Rushworth, to indicate his preference for Maria over Julia, and to present himself as Maria’s ardent admirer. All of this is child’s play for Henry (which makes it so easy for him to dump Maria later). But there remains the symbolic consummation, which Henry proposes as a temptation against authority, an appeal to self-sufficiency and freedom through bold, taboo-busting athleticism:

“Mr. Rushworth is so long fetching this key!”

“And for the world you would not get out without the key and without Mr. Rushworth’s authority and protection, or I think you might with little difficulty pass round the edge of the gate, here, with my assistance; I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.”

“Prohibited! nonsense! I certainly can get out that way, and I will. Mr. Rushworth will be here in a moment, you know; we shall not be out of sight.” (505)

Here the “cruel wall” which separated Pyramus and Thisbe is reduced to an ornamental and easily surmountable obstruction, yet it also serves as the Tree of Knowledge (a trivial, arbitrary restriction) and as Maria’s symbolic chastity belt (with her future cuckolded husband scampering off to fetch the key that nobody actually needs). Additionally, the gate serves as a sort of exit turnstile from Eden, one which Fanny guards, standing in for the Angel with the Flaming Sword. Comically, Fanny does not seek to bar the fallen from re-entry, but watches in astonishment as the garden empties itself of feverishly preoccupied, self-exiled sinners.

Julia is the next to storm the gate, like an enraged bull, having been held back from the others by the doddering pace of the elder ladies. She fumes impotently at Fanny, then leaps over the gate in pursuit of Henry and Maria, intuiting correctly that she is being edged out. Rushworth soon follows, and after fulminating about how no one waited for him and his superfluous key, he stomps off after Henry and Maria as well.

Most of the battle that occupies the rest of the novel is decided here in the woods. Henry triumphs effortlessly over Rushworth, though the inevitable events that justify Rushworth’s fretful jealousy must wait until the end of the novel. Maria triumphs over Julia, though Julia will not discover this until chapter fourteen, in the casting of the theatricals. However, the scope of her seething resentment is already evident. Henry triumphs over Maria, insofar as he penetrates her superior allure and usurps it with his own. She will not realize this until he unceremoniously dumps her in chapter twenty, after which her seething resentment will come into play. The battle between Mary and Edmund over core values will remain unchanged, neither yielding an inch, both mistaking their fundamental incompatibility for arousing oppositional banter, until the misperception collapses under both of them in an ugly epiphany near the end of the novel. The only young person left standing will be Fanny, an astonished bystander to the misadventures in the woods.

The barest restraints of civility (rather threadbare to begin with) are being methodically breached, and the lovers are in a real sense getting “back to the garden,” “getting in touch with themselves,” that is, coming completely under the control of internal mediation. The outcome simmers unacknowledged through the rest of the novel and ultimately explodes dismally in the final chapters. The artificial obstructions the young people cast off are as nothing compared to the ones they are creating for themselves.

Conclusion

In surveying the natural spaces in Mansfield Park, the focus has continually resolved to mimesis, whether it is the land itself–where the reproduction of Arcadian tranquility has become an aggressive form of social positioning–or the human players that contend upon it, struggling for priority in battles that no-one can win.

All of Austen’s six canonical novels are ripe for mimetic treatment,(12) but Mansfield Park above all might be considered the summit of her achievement as an “anthropological” study. It plunges more deeply into fundamental problems of human co-existence. Characters and readers alike are embroiled in the novel’s proliferating scandals, which perpetually spill out from the text, confounding or enraging readers and critics. Reader sympathies are tested as in none other of her novels, yet “bad” characters are treated with surprising depth and understanding (considering the perennial accusations about Austen’s judgmentalism in the novel). Moral conundrums are left unresolved and to some extent unresolvable, while the social dynamics of Mansfield continually threaten to converge toward a sacrificial resolution. Finally, “good mimesis”(13) (so rarely explored in mimetic theory) is treated concretely and poignantly in Mansfield Park, either as a good strongly (if imperfectly) nurtured in the relationship of Edmund and Fanny, or tragically unrealized in Mary and Henry.

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This paper was initially presented in part at the 2004 meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), “Nature, Human Nature & Mimetic Theory,” Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico, June 3. The present paper has subsequently benefited from comments by Anne Astell, background resources provided by Jeff Hendrix, Lanny Dryden, and my father Donald Taylor, pointers on Generative Anthropology and romanticism offered by Andrew Bartlett, and the advice and encouragement of Eric Gans.

(1) Merimée’s “Lokis,” like many 19 ^th -century fantastic tales, features an implausibly violent marriage: the half-man/half-bear protagonist, Michel Szémioth, apparently attacks his wife, Ioulka, at the conclusion of their wedding ceremony. (1a) In Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille,” a similarly peculiar event occurs when the protagonist, Alphonse de Peyrehorade, appears to die at the hand of his accidental bride, a Venus statue, as he attempts to consummate his union with his “real” bride, Mlle de Puygarrig.

Why does marriage–a sacramental ritual whose traditional function was to spiritually unite “two souls and bodies”–trigger violent death and radical separation? What theory or vision of marriage motivates Mérimée’s “fantastic” depictions of modern nuptials?

If we adopt a thematic approach to this mystery (affirming, for example, that Michel inherited his animalistic characteristics from his father, who was, in fact, a bear), we merely displace the problem at hand. It would then be necessary to explain how the marriage of a bear and a human female could produce such an outlandish hybrid, why Michel’s bloodthirsty appetite becomes evident only at the precise moment of his marital union, and so on. One could resort to a formalist (or generic) explanation and say that the metamorphoses and implausible violence are merely part and parcel of the fantastic genre. We would then need to discuss various formal questions raised by the tale (to what extent does it correspond to such and such model of the fantastic? does it produce the necessary “hesitation” described by Todorov? etc.). But such a formalist approach also displaces our attention away from the specific problem of marriage raised by Mérimée. (2) Marital catastrophe, as we shall see, is a point of entry into the real issue that concerns Mérimée, namely the persistence of the sacred (and its potentially violent effects) in a supposedly modernized and secularized France. As a threshold experience, the event of marital union works to visually dramatize the psycho-social consequences of the border-crossing between traditional and modern worlds. It serves as a useful metaphor or allegory to focus attention on the precise limit between sacred and secular, irrationality and reason.

We know that Mérimée, as a son of the Enlightenment, was a sober rationalist. If he chose the fantastic genre for many of his tales it is no doubt because he discovered in it a narrative strategy that permitted him to communicate the complexity of his paradoxical, counter-Enlightenment view of human nature. Although most philosophers and human scientists in the wake of the Enlightenment believed in human perfectibility and considered Reason to be the supreme faculty of consciousness, Mérimée viewed humans, including sophisticated academics, as fundamentally irrational and eminently susceptible to self-deception and mystification. In particular, he thought that humans externalize, and thus hide from themselves, their potentially violent desires via mythical or ritualistic projections of violence onto super- or sub-human “others” (such as the violent man-bear “Lokis,” or a statue of Venus). At the same time, Mérimée recognized that his anthropological insight would make no significant impact if uttered purely discursively or theoretically, such as in a treatise. (3) Mérimée opted, then, for literary mystification as a strategic means to combat mystification; he encourages readers to fall into his narrative traps with the aim of exposing both our potential for violence and our propensity to hide these tendencies with self-deceptive myths about our humanity and our rationality. As we shall see, he also exposes the necessity of this self-deception. In the case of the catastrophic marriage in “Lokis,” Mérimée induces readers to “reasonably” conclude via narrative contiguity that the metamorphosis of Michel into a bear and the ensuing bloodshed is caused by marriage, although we know that this cannot be the case. The marriage event thus appears to trigger a rupture not only between the characters’ desire for sacred union and its traditional outcome, but between conventional Reason and the hidden relation between sacred ritual and violence. As in “La Vénus d’Ille,” it is as if a magical or metaphysical force from the past snatches one of the spouses at the very moment he or she crosses the symbolic threshold into marital union.

What is this invisible limit? Why does crossing it appear to coincide with violence, death and mystification?

If we turn to criticism devoted to the question of failed union, we find two principal lines of inquiry: (1) the feminist approach, which considers representations of failed marriage as thinly veiled critiques of an obsolete patriarchal institution (4) and (2) the psychoanalytic approach, which considers failed marriage as an allegory of the Oedipal complex or as a manifestation of the death-drive. (5)

A third approach, as yet unexplored, is to situate Mérimée’s works within an historical and anthropological problematic of marriage. Mérimée’s failed unions, as we suggested above, allegorize his thoughts on cultural modernization and, in particular, the attempt by France to dechristianize its traditional institutions. Mérimée lived through a moment of severe crisis, when the future of sacred institutions like marriage were a source of heated legislative, philosophical, and scientific debate. At the risk of oversimplification, the kinds of questions being raised about marriage were: what is the nature of marriage (secular or sacred)? what is marriage’s link to the social or political order (contractual or religious/metaphysical)? what are the psycho-social effects of its desacralization (traumatic or liberating)? and so on. (6)

Marriage suffered a number of major shocks in the early to mid-19 ^th century, beginning with its official desacralization in 1791, the legalization of divorce in 1792, various modifications to family and marriage law under Napoleon, and a de facto re-sacralization of marriage in 1816, when the Restoration legislators reinstated indissoluble marriage. Despite the complexity of these changes, let me emphasize this essential point: before the Revolution of 1789, marriage in France was controlled by the Catholic church. As a sacramental ritual, Catholic marriage was designed (in theory) to bind the couple spiritually via the intervention of grace as well as to anchor the couple to France’s Christian cosmology. During the Revolution, marriage was ripped from its Christian heritage, transformed into a civil “contract,” and emptied of its sacred or transcendent dimension. According to historian Darrin McMahon, the revolutionary legislators intentionally exploded the sacramental model of marriage in order to dramatically mark a symbolic rupture between a modern and secular Republic and the historically obsolete, “superstitious” mentality of the Old Regime. (7) Even if the royalist legislators in 1816 suppressed the right to divorce granted in 1791-92, it is important to underscore the fact that France never fully returned to the sacramental concept of marriage as it existed under the Old Regime. The symbolic and juridical priority of the marriage contract remained intact throughout the 19 ^th and 20 ^th centuries. At the same time, the 1816 law produced a curious “hybrid” solution (a contractual but indissoluble marriage?) that no doubt reflected the cultural tensions and political contradictions of a radically divided France. It helped keep alive a belief in access to sacred transcendence via marriage long after this access had been officially renounced.

How did these juridical changes to marriage (and the cultural conflicts that they reflected) influence Mérimée’s conceptualization of marriage? It’s difficult to know with any certainty, but we can surmise that it would have been nearly impossible to remain indifferent to the marriage debates of his time, just as it was no doubt difficult to remain indifferent to recent debates on the PACS or on homosexual marriage: people tend to be for or against and the position adopted usually reflects an underlying (sacred or secular) political vision. It is rare, for example, to find 19 ^th -century monarchists who were for contractual/civil marriage or republicans who supported the Catholic/sacramental version.

There is another reason to believe that Mérimée had given serious thought to the nature of marriage: he defended a thesis for his law degree in 1823 titled De Matrimonio . The thesis is now lost, so we have no way of knowing with certainty his thoughts. One might speculate, given Mérimée’s anti-religious, anti-clerical, anti-Restoration sentiments, that he would have sided intellectually with the republican cause. At the same time, we know that, like an anthropologist, Mérimée was sensitive to local culture and to the role that collective mentalities play in the formation of the tastes, thoughts, and political judgments of individuals. In each of his tales he goes to great lengths to describe local settings and customs in order to show the involuntary and often hidden socio-cultural influence on human thought and action. Even if Mérimée might have defended in private the secularist thesis of the republicans, he would have been careful, from a scientific perspective, to consider the relation between the deeply-ingrained religious mentality of the Old Regime and the persistence of anti-modern views on marriage into the modern era. He understood that the modernization of consciousness did not occur in a single event like the Revolution; residual sacred sentiments and desires from the Old Regime continued to animate modern consciousness without its awareness.

It is helpful when interpreting Mérimée’s fictional portrayals of catastrophic marriage to recall that Mérimée defended his law thesis just a few years after the publication of Louis de Bonald’s important treatise on divorce and after the juridical abolition of divorce in 1816. In this debate, the conservatives promoted a “catastrophic” and even “lethal” vision of divorce and desacralized marriage. Bonald, who furnished the theoretical justification for suppressing the right to divorce, considered desacralized marriage as a “principle of death” that was corroding the nation’s foundations: “Divorce was decreed in 1792 and surprised no one since it was the inevitable and long predictable consequence of the destructive system pursued with so much passion during this time. But now that we have embedded divorce as a principle into the very foundation of the social edifice, it must make those who are destined to live within it tremble.” (8) Bonald adds: “[The nations that are] being agitated internally by this principle of death will find peace only when they return to the order they have abandoned” (259).

It is, of course, unlikely that Mérimée would have personally espoused such an extreme position. Bonald, however, was an important touchstone for the conservative position at the time, as he clearly exposed the vital socio-political stakes of marriage for Catholic monarchists: the very survival of France and of the French.

We may be tempted to laugh off Bonald’s paranoia about cultural modernization, but the idea of a link between the secularization of marriage and the destruction of the moral and metaphysical foundations of France were not uncommon. Marriage debates were a symbolic way of debating the destiny of France itself. The curious fact, of course, is that even though from a juridical point of view, the metaphysical link between marriage and the state had already been officially ruptured, the popular imagination persisted in its belief in sacred marriage to maintain social order, a belief that went beyond the power of a simple contract. The sociologist, Irène Théry explains the hidden logic of this mentality: “The traditional marriage, whether it be religious or secular, has always expressed a profound link between a moment of our history and the rules of alliance, the idea that a common, fundamental referent grounded all of society, whether one thought of it as divine, natural or founded, as modern society is, on a contract. It was the matrimonial institution’s task to be the symbol of this referent. Thus, over the course of centuries, not everything was marriage, but everything referred to it . . .” (9) According to Théry, there is a kind of “sacred residue” attached to marriage that persisted into the modern era and that continues to irritate the modern spirit. It is for this reason that changing the definition of marriage is always perceived as changing the very nature of society.

In a previous article on “La Vénus d’Ille,” we have already demonstrated that the indissoluble marriage between Alphonse and the Venus statue (a common allegorical figure for the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages) and the conventional marriage with Mlle de Puygarrig illustrates the two conceptions of marriage–sacred and secular–in play during the 19^th century and how Mérimée allegorizes the psychic ambiguity produced by the historical border-crossing from a superstitious world (grounded, for example, in religion) into the skeptical world of modernity.(10) The violent obstacle to marriage (visually thematized by the Venus statue strangling Alphonse to death) marks the impossibility of reconciling two radically opposite worlds; the violent failure exposes the institutional and juridical obstacle to the expression of a residual desire for religious transcendence in a secularized world.

“Lokis,” written about thirty years after “La Vénus d’Ille,” represents in our view the flip side of the same problem: it’s about two irreconcilable cultures, except that this time the historical trajectory (Christianity –> secularization) is inverted since the failed union of Michel Szémioth and Ioulka represents a pagan resistance to the recent Christianization of Lithuania. The narrator insists here on Michel’s attachment to a primitive and overtly violent form of the sacred; his Christian marriage does not correspond exactly to his sacred aspirations, inculcated by Lithuanian customs and traditions. And it does not suffice to realize his desire for transcendence. His pagan reflexes (for example, his desire for blood sacrifice) become visible at the precise moment when he realizes the emptiness of the Christian ritual.(11)

The cultural hybridity that Mérimée describes in Lithuania isn’t exactly what it is in “La Vénus d’Ille”: 19^th-century France is exiting Christianity and entering pagan modernity, whereas Lithuania is repressing its pagan dimension in order to civilize itself under the tutelage of Catholic Poland and the civilizational values of the Enlightenment. Michel’s mentality, for example, is clearly split between the local influences of Samogitian culture and the broader values of European culture. He is presented, on the one hand, as a man of the Enlightenment, an art and book collector, a cosmopolitan and a speaker of many languages (including French); on the other, he seems to be a traditional Lithuanian who takes pleasure in speaking Jmoude and who is deeply attached to the old rituals and traditional dances. Michel is also fascinated by his country’s traditional sacred sites, such as the “Tumulus,” the ancestral burial ground and former site of sacrificial rituals. We also detect an animalistic dimension hidden beneath the veneer of his humanity, suggested by the fact that he climbs trees and makes animal-like sounds, he is brutish and ultimately he is a wife-killer (or so it seems).(12)

But Michel is not the only hybrid in the tale. Ioulka, his fiancée, is also torn between two cultures: she is cultivated, knows several languages, orders her clothing from Paris, is gracious and distinguished. At the same time, she is described as the “Lithuanian Muse,” she speaks and writes Jmoude, and she incarnates the “ideal woman” described by the Lithuanian “Legend of Boudrys”: “playful like a cat, white like cream.” If we follow the metaphors attached to Ioulka (a gazelle, a cat, a dove, etc.), she also carries traces of an underlying animality.

To the extent that the narrator, Professor Wittembach, a pastor and an intellectual, is torn between Christian/European culture and the paganism of Lithuania, Mérimée seems to be commenting on the incapacity of western Reason to apprehend sacred violence while at the same time exposing Christianity’s inability to repress completely the “fascination” generated by pre-Christian forms of the sacred. The professor is himself clearly fascinated by the old Lithuanian rituals and by the mystery of the violent events that he observes. His “hesitation” between attraction and repulsion is, as Todorov describes, the formal source of “Lokis”’s fantastic dimension. (13) Yet any purely formalist approach to “Lokis” misses the underlying anthropological insight that secretly informs the tale’s dualistic (sacred/profane, transcendent/immanent) tension.

Let us return, then, to the question of marriage since it is via marriage that Mérimée visually dramatizes the collision of sacred and secular worldviews and provides an entryway into his theory of the relation between violence and the sacred. We should note, in this connection, that the theme of marriage is announced from the very beginning, when we learn on page 2 that the professor is supposed to soon marry but that he chooses to delay the ceremony in order to travel to Lithuania to prepare a Jmoude translation of a gospel. The ironic significance of this observation becomes clear only later, when we see the professor criticize the frivolous attitude of Michel and Ioulka toward their marriage. We naturally wonder if the professor isn’t guilty of the same frivolity when he chooses to defer his own marriage in order to study Jmoude grammar and vocabulary. And how do we interpret the fact he never returns to the subject of his own marriage although he goes to the trouble of insisting on its importance at the outset? Is the silence an oversight? A strategic omission?

Given the alignment of narrative events, we could speculate that the deferral of the professor’s marriage is secretly linked to Michel’s marriage to Ioulka since this second marriage is announced immediately after the professor’s arrival in Lithuania and because the professor is clearly attracted to Michel’s fiancée. The professor, in fact, seems to be Michel’s rival or even his double.(14) It is after all the professor who calls Ioulka “the Lithuanian Muse.” And it is she who teaches him to recite by heart the “Legend of Boudrys” concerning the three marriages after convincing him that the legend is a founding document of Samogitian culture. She seems to know everything about the traditional dances and rituals and is thus the main source of information for his linguistic study. The professor, in fact, views Ioulka as a kind of “mysterious center” of Jmoude language and culture. And she eventually becomes the object of his erotic and conjugal fantasies.

Critics have already noticed, for example, the sublimated eroticism of the “game” in which the professor inserts his finger in Ioulka’s pot of honey.(15) Yet isn’t this also a ritualization of his displaced marital desire? If honey is the preferred food of the bear, and if honey here is a metonymy for Ioulka, Mérimée seems to be establishing an identity between the conjugal desire of Michel, the bear-man, and that of the professor, who plays the role of a bear-man. The distinguishing feature of the two bears is that the professor, who is on the side of civilization, knows the “rules of the game”: he knows that the goal of ritual is to simulate the penetration of the woman and to exhaust only symbolically his desire for union with the “sacred center.” Michel, outside of civilization, bursts beyond the limits of ritual in order to express his natural desire without constraint.

Let us recall here that by leaving his fiancée, Mlle Weber, the professor has effectively “deferred” his contact with the sacred center furnished traditionally by Christian marriage and thus leaves his residual sacred desire open to new possibilities.(16) Mérimée, in fact, seems to be suggesting that the professor/pastor sublimates his Christian desire for transcendence by expressing it along the deviated pathways available to him in his new setting in Lithuania. For example, his immediate project after deferring his marriage is to translate the gospel into the Jmoude language. This is a project whose explicit purpose is to install the Christian sacred within the heart of Samogitian culture and thus to displace a pagan form of the sacred that is viewed as more primitive. This project of translation and of evangelization in fact winds up distancing the professor from his own culture and drawing him closer to an archaic and more fascinating world. The discussion of the professor’s deferral of marriage is therefore not merely a detail for the purpose of producing a “reality effect”; it underscores the fact that the professor is availing himself of an alternative form of the sacred and perhaps even of an alternative spouse through which to access it. To the extent that the professor is a double of Michel, he enters into a rivalry with him to gain the affection of Ioulka as well as to get closer to the “sacred center” that she symbolizes, either by the founding myth of the “three marriages” that she recounts in Jmoude, the dances and rituals that she reenacts, or by a potential marriage with her. The tale’s final event, the murder of Ioulka the day of her marriage with Michel, is in fact the mystery–the manifestation of sacred violence–that motivates the professor to write the story “Lokis” whose reading motivates us to find the hidden meaning of the name as well as a rational explanation for the irrational logic of events that he portrays.

Mérimée spotlights here an “anthropological” problem that would later preoccupy thinkers such as Mauss, Durkheim, Bataille, Caillois and the members of the Collège de Sociologie, namely: how can we understand sacred violence by purely rational means? How can we approach it without being overly “fascinated”? without falling under the spell of its contagion? Before the birth of “sacred sociology” or cultural anthropology, no offshoot of Enlightenment science or philosophy seemed equipped to deal with this intellectual problem, and Mérimée is clearly aware of this fact.(17) He appears to be seeking solutions to questions that official scientists, given the predominance of materialist and rationalist epistemologies of the time, were not asking. The domain of literature offered an alternative communicative strategy through which to explore the emergence of a divided consciousness, animated by residual sacred aspirations in a world that had renounced the sacred as pure superstition. By doubling characters (Michel and Wittembach, Wittembach and the main narrator, the narrator and “Mérimée”), Mérimée is able to represent the psychological oscillations between the “abyss” of fascination for the sacred center (the professor) and a detached and objective understanding of the cultural emergence of this inaccessible center via the professor’s double, the ideal narrator or Mérimée.

The professor, who presents himself as a comparative linguist and a cool-headed scientist, is thus mesmerized, in spite of his better judgment, by the world of pre-Christian sacrality seemingly embodied by Ioulka and ultimately rendered inaccessible by ritual violence (symbolized by the violent marriage). He enters into this world through three main pathways: language, myth and ritual. He discovers the myths by studying the language’s origins and he confronts the rituals via Ioulka’s games and dances, by the visit to the sacred burial site, and at the marriage ceremony, where pagan customs, which were believed to be repressed and dormant, erupt into violence.(17a)

The professor, who claims neutrality vis-à-vis Samogitian culture, discovers that by studying the origins of its language, he is at the same time studying the origins of culture. What he does not at first understand is that his exposure to this culture diminishes his scientific objectivity and in fact, winds up involuntarily influencing his tastes, desires and actions.(18) For example, even if the professor seems initially to be interested in the “Legend of Boudrys” only for its documentary and linguistic value, we later see that he becomes interested in its content. The legend recounts among other things the story of the ideal woman whom a Lithuanian father desires for his three sons: a Polish woman who is “as playful as cat” with “skin as white as cream.” The irony here of course is that the legend is not at all a linguistic sample of ancient Jmoude, as the professor is led to believe; it is a translation into Jmoude of a famous poem by the Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, prepared offstage by Ioulka.

The professor’s error reveals two things: (1) he is not as competent in Jmoude as he has led us to believe and (2) that he is mystified by the seductive charms of Ioulka.(19) Let us note that Ioulka “translates” Mickiewicz’s poem not only linguistically, from Polish into Jmoude, but also physically: she incarnates the traits of the “marital ideal” that the poem lauds. The narrator repeats that Ioulka is as “playful as a cat” and that she has the white skin of a Polish woman, although she is ethnically Lithuanian. What this means is that the professor’s desire for the sacred center of Samogitian culture that Ioulka embodies is based on a linguistic effect. His desire for her is a second-hand desire, inherited from another language and culture (Polish), that he unwittingly projects onto her. Caught up in the web of poetic language and illusions, the professor’s desire to “unite” with the incarnation of the sacred center remains unsatisfied. The desired center, in fact, becomes lost within the infinite play of signification, especially once she is murdered (or sacrificed).

If “Lokis” is approached in the manner we are suggesting we suddenly begin to see other “effects” of the professor’s displaced desire for sacred transcendence. In his attitude toward Samogitian books in Michel’s library, and especially when he thinks he has discovered the book that will permit him to translate the gospel, Mérimée underscores that the professor is animated by a mysterious force: “Imagine my joy when one of the first volumes I pulled from the armoire happened to be the Catechismus Samogiticus ! I couldn’t restrain my cries of pleasure. A mysterious attraction must have been exerting its force on me without my knowledge” (278, my emphasis). This involuntary attraction to a sacred book that leads to “cries of pleasure” would seem to be a transfer of his original attraction to his fiancée and, later, to Ioulka. The locution “without our knowledge” (à notre insu) points to an unconscious sublimation of a deeply ingrained, but frustrated, desire for the sacred in search of alternative outlets of expression.

Mérimée would seem to confirm the idea of a displacement and “transfer” of desire, since at the very moment the professor expresses his joy over the book, he must displace this sentiment once again to go visit the “Tumulus” with his host, Michel. From that point forward, the professor will scarcely spend any time in the library, although this was precisely his stated objective in going to Lithuania. Why does Mérimée underscore the professor’s desire to study Jmoude only to go on to have him recount a story about a sacrificial site and a violent marriage? What is the function of his digressions?

When rereading the tale we notice that the professor announces early on that marriage is a cause of bad luck: it is the source of Michel’s migraines and the origin of Michel’s mother’s madness. When the professor asks the doctor if Ioulka is Michel’s fiancée, he responds: “Fiancée? . . . I have no idea. A real coquette! She will make him lose his head, just like his mother” (262). Later, when Michel and the professor visit the Tumulus, they encounter a sorceress who attempts to warn Michel about the dangers of marriage with “the little dove” (Ioulka). She even consults with her snake and her pagan God, Pirkuns, who confirm that his marriage augurs “a sinister adventure” (289).

Michel tries to rationalize the prediction: “The mischievous old lady has seen me more than once on the road to the castle of Dowghielly. . . . There is a marriageable demoiselle there: she concluded that I was in love” (289). Michel knows that her predictions are superstitions and that it would be stupid to lend any credibility to them. Nonetheless, he winds up believing the sorceress and is haunted by fear. He asks the professor to demystify his superstitious thoughts, but the professor says only: “in matters of marriage, I give no advice” (289). In addition to the malefic view of marriage announced by the sorceress, we find a curative view, offered by the doctor. He thinks that marriage would be healthy for Michel as it would be an outlet for his pent-up desire. “No, he has no mistress. He doesn’t marry, but he’s wrong. He needs an outlet” (304). The professor is mildly scandalized by the doctor’s reduction of marriage to sexual expenditure, but he at the same time seems to agree that marriage has a civilizing effect on men.

Given the outcome of the story, Mérimée seems to side with the malefic view of marriage, which brings us back to our original question concerning Mérimée’s linkage of marriage to violence. The doctor–one of the few rational voices in this tale–explains that Michel’s mother, a countess, was kidnapped and raped by a bear two days after her marriage and that the product of this implausible union, Michel, inherited certain ursuline characteristics from his “father.” But is the countess’s madness the result of the bear’s aggression, as many critics have claimed? The text suggests that it results from the “terror” she experienced from the proximity of the bear’s death (it is shot while still grasping the countess) and from her fixation on this bloody event. The doctor offers as a remedy a second and equally significant act of violence–a thorough beating. But, alas, beating is no longer permitted!

Michel, we repeat, inherited his madness from his mother. Mérimée characterizes it as “a mania . . . transmissible by blood” (303). Is Mérimée suggesting a hereditary transmission or rather a “taste for blood” linked to the culture of sacrificial ritual? The text remains ambiguous on this point, but we can suppose from textual details that his strange behaviors are animated by a repressed taste for blood sacrifice.(20) His familiarity with mysteries of the forests and especially with the Tumulus suggests that Michel is strongly attached to the ancestral customs and rituals that modern-day, Christianized Lithuanians had abandoned. We also see that Michel is fascinated by the professor’s story of drinking his horse’s blood as a source of nourishment while stranded in the Argentine countryside. The professor, who confesses to liking the taste of blood, nonetheless points out his moral distaste. Michel remains intrigued by the story and asks several questions about how to go about sampling animal blood. This discussion upsets Ioulka and wants the professor to refrain from explaining the procedure for fear that Michel might try it on the people around him, including her. Michel, moreover, remains overly fascinated by Ioulka’s white skin, which is so transparent that the flow of her blood is visible: “This is everything that is good in her . . . the skin, above all. . . . Without a doubt, we can say that she is a beauty. . . . Her skin is marvelous! . . . Professor, the blood that runs beneath this skin, mustn’t it be better than a horse’s blood” (307)? Later, when Michel is sleeping, he bites his pillow and mutters in his sleep that Ioulka is better than a horse, as if he were trying to suck the blood of Ioulka from the edges of his pillow.

Where does this need for (or attraction to) blood come from? Mérimée suggests that it is linked to the primitive reflexes of human nature, reflexes that society seeks to ritualize in order to ward off collective violence. Mérimée could have picked up this idea from a reactionary proto-anthropological thinker, Joseph de Maistre. We know from Mérimée’s correspondence that he was familiar with Maistre, and we can easily see Maistre’s ideas at work in the sacrificial logic of his narratives.(21) The rituals linked to the traditional dance, to the Tumulus, to marriage, etc. are supposed to tame desire by deferring it and exhausting it symbolically. But it is precisely in Michel’s failed approach to ritual that his desire leads to violence. During the traditional dance with Ioulka, Michel is supposed to simulate a kiss, fall to the ground and play dead. The purpose of this ritual is obviously to simulate a symbolic refusal of the desired object and thus a displacement of desire. But Michel does not play his “role,” and he attempts to express his natural desire with Ioulka. His refusal to adopt the rules of the game “animalizes” him in the eyes of Ioulka, a fact made clear by her renaming him “a bear.” Mérimée suggests that Michel will repeat the same error during the marital ceremony by unleashing his repressed animality and bloodthirsty appetite. Like all sacraments, one of the purposes of Christian marriage was to transcend natural desire by “spiritualizing” it. The idea, according to Maistre, is that by symbolically accepting Christ’s blood as a stand-in for real blood, the desire for sacrifice is ritually exhausted. The Christian marriage of Michel and Ioulka, which obviously did not exhaust Michel’s sacred desire, is insufficient to hold back his ancestral appetite.(22)

This Maistrian idea which opposes primitive blood sacrifice with Christian, non-violent (or simulated) sacrifice seems very close to Mérimée’s thinking since it is the weakness of imported Christianity, on the one hand, and the stubborn persistence of the taste for blood and ritual sacrifice, on the other, that structures Michel’s consciousness and that animates his desire and behaviors. At one point, Michel and the professor openly discuss human nature and wonder how an “enlightened” person can be fascinated by evil and by acts of senseless violence. One example they discuss is this: “You hold a loaded firearm. Your best friend is present. The idea occurs to you to put a bullet through his head. You hold in total horror the idea of assassination. Yet you have the thought” (305). The many other examples of Michel’s violent desires seem to underscore Mérimée’s Maistrian idea that man is involuntarily attracted to violence and blood. The professor, who is also a pastor, agrees with Michel. But he believes that man can control his violent tendencies by rational reflection and above all via the imitation of Christ: “I tried to talk to him about our responsibilities as men and as Christians, about the necessity of imitating the ‘warrior of the Scriptures’, always ready for combat” (306).

The professor’s stand on the power of religion obviously does not reflect Mérimée’s authorial stand because Michel’s irrepressible desire for blood ultimately fails to be “civilized” by Christian ritual. The violence that explodes within the couple during the marriage is the proof that Mérimée considers Christianity ultimately impotent in the face of man’s inherent primitivism. Mérimée dramatizes this point further by extending the violence to the crowd of guests. The professor claims that he would have liked to stay at the wedding to observe the traditional dances but that he was afraid of an overflow of violence.

When investigating the hidden causes of the failed union, we might note the unusual comparison between Ioulka and a dove. We already saw that the sorceress had predicted a catastrophe linked to the marriage with the “little dove.” Mérimée picks up this image again at the moment of marital union: “The count, taking her into his arms, carried her to the top of the stairs as easily as if he were carrying a dove” (313). According to Christian tradition, the dove symbolizes the Holy Ghost that descends from the heavens to communicate grace during sacred events, such as baptism, the “annunciation,” or sacramental union. In this case, the metaphorical dove dies at the precise moment it should have achieved its sacred and unifying function. According to the interpretation we are advancing, this death of the “spirit” allegorizes Christianity’s inability in the modern era to accomplish its traditional effects; Mérimée visually dramatizes via failed marriage and death the displacement of religion by secular modernity; he exposes the historical and cultural limits of the traditional desire for transcendence and spiritual “life” via sacred marriage.

Let us further explore now the idea that Michel is a double of the professor and that Michel’s fiancée is an object of the professor’s sacred desires. We have already seen that professor has a taste for horse’s blood and a predilection for “cats” (282) and that he vicariously expresses his own fascination for sacred violence via the desires and actions of Michel. We have also seen that he openly recognizes man’s evil tendencies, although he thinks they can be managed through the imitation of Christ. He appears to view himself as an example of Christian self-transcendence.

Mérimée, nonetheless, attempts to expose the professor’s self-mystification by showing us how he displaces and projects his own violent tendencies onto Michel-the-bear. The professor positions himself on the side of rationalism and scientific objectivity in order to secure sufficient credibility with readers to recount the irrational violence of Michel. A scapegoating and cover-up, however, emerge as a possibility when on the final page the narrator explains the odd title “Lokis” by equating the name with Michel. As we noted above, this equation does not explain anything; it merely confirms what the reader already thinks. What we really want to know is why Michel is (or seemingly turns into) a bear and wife-killer.

Again, the typical way of solving the mystery of “Lokis” is in the most implausible way suggested to us: we conclude that Michel is Lokis, the man-bear. Yet by encouraging us to equate a human with a bear, the narrator is tacitly asking us to dehumanize Michel while having us deceive ourselves into believing that we and the professor are exempt from violent tendencies and therefore innocent. Most of us are reassured by the narrator’s equation, even though we know that it makes little rational sense. And even if we consciously recognize the doubling between the professor and Michel, and suspect that the professor may be susceptible to violence, in the end he appears more human to our eyes because he has learned to “defer” and transcend his impulses. We are content to see Michel/Lokis expelled from his world to the extent that we accept the moral division that the narrator draws between the professor and Michel.

Yet the narrator’s story–the story that we read–is paradoxical since he is in fact attempting to expose his understanding of the universality of the desire for blood sacrifice (even within himself). If the narrator quite obviously focuses our attention on Michel/Lokis as the savage killer, while he secretly points to professor as a possible culprit, is he not at a deeper level of reading exposing the professor’s awareness of his own self-deception? The reader’s task, I would argue, is precisely to pierce through his linguistic and narrative game in order to discover via the complexity of the narrator’s example both the inherent violence of human nature and our natural tendency to hide this violence from ourselves through self-deception and self-serving myths. The narrative demonstrates our tendency for sacred violence by having us tacitly participate in the sacrifice of Michel/Lokis and by providing subtle clues that can lead to the self-understanding of our participation.

It is important to note that Mérimée’s view of human duality does not follow the typical Christian or metaphysical duality (i.e., the traditional soul-body or mind-body split). His view of it is anthropological: the duality emerges from the uniquely human capacity to symbolize and to substitute the natural appetite for violence by language, myth, and ritual.(23) The production of a transcendent symbol, ritualized by narrative, reflects, in fact, the Gansian insight into the origins of language and culture: the linguistic sign emerges as a solution to defer mimetic violence via substitution and collective sharing. The shared sign verticalizes desire and embeds it in language while simultaneously cordoning off the desired object as “sacred.” Yet in order for this sacralizing process to work the origins of the symbol’s emergence must remain obscure.(24)

It is in this sense that “Lokis” can be read as Mérimée’s self-conscious staging of the sacralizing potential of language. Mérimée keeps readers in the dark from the outset about the meaning or identity of the name “Lokis.”(25) For the duration of the narrative, the narrator plays on the ambiguity of Michel’s identity and strategically defers the identification of the human, Michel, with the sub-human creature, Lokis, until the very end. At the same time, if we accept this reduction furnished on the final page, we unwittingly participate in a sacralizing process that transforms a human being into an emissary victim.(26) We deny Michel his humanity while denying our own animality; we remain mystified by the word “Lokis” as we search for its significance along various deviated paths. We, in fact, revert to the traditional metaphysical dualities of good/evil, soul/flesh, human/animal without understanding the anthropology of their emergence–the very anthropology that Mérimée is attempting to expose.

Here the ontological difference between the narrator and the professor and between the narrator and Mérimée begin to play a crucial role: once we notice it, we can escape the trap of our inherent fascination with the sacred (and the mystifying explanations for it) into which we have obviously been led. We can also now better appreciate the narrator’s double game: he mimetically arouses our fascination for the sacred center (and the violence that can ensue if one reaches for it) via the professor’s fascination with Ioulka. But then in order to break the sacred’s spell he indicates the more objective and detached position of the ideal narrator. It is only when we recall that this ideal narrator is actually Mérimée, the creator of the fictional professor and of the narrator, that we begin to perceive that he has mystified us via a fantastic account of marital violence in order to make us self-aware of our own residual desire for the sacred and the various ways language and culture work to deflect this desire. In the end, his point is to have us to discover an apparently unavowable truth about human nature while showing us how we lie to ourselves in order to avoid discovering it.

With the exception of Andrew Bartlett‘s brilliant essay on the originary theology of the Son, a companion piece to his “Three Affirmations of the Being of God” in Anthropoetics 13, 2, this issue focuses on in-depth literary analysis. Ian Dennis provides a rich application of originary thinking to historical analysis in his study of the victimary evolution of Crabbe’s 18th-century poem “Peter Grimes” into Britten’s 20th-century opera. Andrew’s and Ian’s articles were both drawn from papers delivered at last June’s GA Summer Conference at Chapman University on the theme of “Esthetic History and the Knowledge of the Human.”

Bob Hudson, a newcomer to Anthropoetics, advances an ambitious originary theory of lyric in his discussion of the earliest French sonnets. Scott Sprenger, Bob’s senior colleague at BYU, who has previously published two Anthropoetics articles on Balzac, gives us a provocative analysis of Prosper Mérimée’s late story, “Lokis.” And Matthew Taylor, known to Anthropoetics readers for his astute observation of Japanese society, returns to his professional specialty with a stimulating Girardian analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

About Our Contributors

Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver and teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. He has attended several meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion.  He organized the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event in Vancouver (July 2007).  He is working on a book-length study in applied GA, Playing God the Creator: Science Fictions of the Artificial Human.

Ian Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of four novels, and of a Girardian study, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997). His Lord Byron and the History of Desire is forthcoming with the University of Delaware Press, and he will host the third GA meeting in Ottawa in 2009.

Robert J. Hudson is Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in the French Renaissance, lyrical poetry, French film, and socio-anthropological approaches to literature. A 2008 PhD (UCLA), he has recently begun work on a book-length manuscript with the working title “Lyrical Lyon: Plato, Petrarch and Poetry in the Cradle of Renaissance France,” which will seek to both explore and explain the birth of the French lyric. Bob also looks forward to participating in the 2009 GASC in Ottawa.

Scott Sprenger is Associate Professor of French and director of European Studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has published around 35 articles and chapters on 19th-century and 20th-century literature, and his book Balzac, archéologue de la conscience is slated to appear at Encrage Editions (France) in 2009. He is currently working on another book on the relation between secularization and 19th-century representations of catastrophic marriage titled Marriage in 19th-century France : A perverse history of secularization. He is editor of the journal Lingua Romana, a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at UCLA (1999-2001), and currently a Fulbright-Schuman scholar at the CNRS in Paris.

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training, and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy, science-humanities issues, and mimetic theory, and has recently co-authored and published an academic writing textbook for EFL students with Cengage Learning.