Читать книгу Amphion Orator - Michael Taormina - Страница 7

epideictic speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)This is a book about the corpus of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes that François de Malherbe composed for the Bourbons between 1600 and 1627. It seeks to make an original contribution to Malherbe studies in showing how this series of poems constitutes a unified sequence whose highest ambition is to reimagine the French nation nation in the aftermath of the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion (1562-1598). The broader political and cultural issues that the argument marshals for support grew organically out of the demands of close-reading such complex masterpieces. It has been necessary to gather critical insights from scholarship in the areas of political history, absolutist theory, literary patronage, noble identitynobilityidentity, the history of eloquenceeloquence, and mythologymythology to reclaim the patriotic voice of a poet reduced to a technician by generations of literary critics.

emphasisfigures of thoughtIn trying to make sense of these magnificent literary artifacts, I realized that Malherbe was not simply fashioning a positive public imageimagepublic image for the monarch and shoring up the symbolic power of the monarchy, but was also revising the myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of of the French nationnation, whose unifying thread in the odes is no longer the Catholic faith but loyalty and service to king and country. That seemed to me an interesting focus because it upended the formalist approach that has dominated criticism of Malherbe’s poetry. For that reason I have been obliged to investigate the issue of French nationnationhood, although in retrospect I would have preferred to avoid it since it has proved a rather vexed topic. Historians and critics alike acknowledge that there is no scientific definition of a nationnation and disagree about the time and conditions of its emergence in France.1 Accordingly, I feel that I must offer the following caveat right from the start: it has not been my intention to write a chapter in the history of French nationnationhood, and this book does not aim to demystify the royal odes’ ideological construction of the French nationnation.

elocutiostyleBoth projects have already been undertaken by Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus in Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650). KellerKeller, Marcus deserves credit for seeing that Malherbe’s odes could easily be placed in the “series of ideological struggles over the meaning and limits of community” that Timothy Hampton so brilliantly charts in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France. Despite his avowed chronological limits, Hampton’s powerful theoretical framework and deep historical knowledge suggest several productive points of contact with Malherbe’s royal odes: these latter construct an image of the nationimageof the nation; define the national communitynationnational community in terms of an in-group and various out-groups; search for “a way of expressing new forms of collective experience from within a vocabulary rooted in [waning] institutions” (Hampton 11); mobilize figurative language in the service of centralized power to define the limits of the national communitynationnational community; and, to that end, allegorize prior events and stories to insert them in a new history. KellerKeller, Marcus, freely acknowledging his indebtedness, builds on Hampton’s analysis of the ways in which the figural language of literary texts mediates the historical gestation of the nationnation-state while it at the same time registers the violent struggle, physical or ideological, over “the identity and constitution of community that accompany the emergence of modern nationnationhood” (Hampton 28).

deliberative speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)Hampton and KellerKeller, Marcus, however, both treat the entwined evolution of the nationnation and the state in early modern France as a “pre-history” to nationnationalism and the modern nationnation-state. In my view, such a long historical arc devalues the creative and imaginative response of artists like Malherbe to the contingent events of their time. Hampton’s and KellerKeller, Marcus’s analysis performs a great service by unmasking the self-serving teleological and revisionist history of nationalist ideology, and yet their approach does not fully resist the temptation to read early modern texts in light of later socio-political categories and developments. It fits within a standard historical narrative that assumes more political centralization than probably existed in sixteenth-century France, presupposes Renaissance literary culture to be secular and autonomous and, therefore, distinct from rhetoric and ideology, imports from later nationalisms such defining criteria as racial purity and nationnational spirit (KellerKeller, Marcus 108), and generally emphasizes nationalist concerns with “language, space, and charactercharacterethos” (Hampton 9).2 In particular, I fail to see how the notion of “nationnational charactercharacter” that appears in the royal odes may be equated with “soul” or “spirit” (KellerKeller, Marcus 5). While there is allegedly a spirit watching over the king and the French nationnation, Malherbe’s nationnational charactercharacter is neither ontological nor metaphysical. It is ethical. The significant interpretive divergences I have with KellerKeller, Marcus stem from his avowed aim of “charting the ideological grounds on which the modern nationnation-state takes shape,” which he sees fit to anchor in “Etienne Balibar’s theory of the nationnation form and some propositions on the idea of nationhood by postcolonial critics” (KellerKeller, Marcus 5-6). “Fictive ethnicity,” for instance, is much less prominent in the royal odes than the notion of public goodcommonwealthpublic good, common interestcommonwealthcommon interest, or commonwealthcommonwealth. Nor does the postcolonial rejection of teleology and transcendence sit well with early modern cultural assumptions. My approach is thus more narrowly historical, more synchronic, and less worried about the “Medusa-like power to fascinate” (Hampton 27) that early modern literature and poetry may exert over readers too willing to accept their ideological claims. I have no stake in Malherbe’s construction of French nationnationhood, and the complexity of the task I found myself engaged in—discovering the grand tapestry of the royal odes, contextualizing the various threads, and showing how they all seamlessly fit together—was so overwhelming that it precluded the critical distance needed to deconstruct Malherbe’s nationnational ideology.

characters of stylestyleIn my view, France in the late sixteenth century was not yet a nationnation-state, but it was a nationnation, or at least had achieved sufficient national consciousnessnationnational consciousness to enter a period of dire crisis when, as Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P. writes in Renaissance and Reformation France, “the advent of ProtestantProtestantism in the 1540s shattered the unity of religion” and “led to the contesting of the monarchy itself” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 23). The Catholic faith and the monarchy were the two strongest unifying threads in the nationnational tapestry. Four decades of civil war did not succeed in destroying the French state, although it was teetering on the brink, but the 1580s and 90s did witness the emergence of competing ideas of the nationnation. By 1600, Catholic orthodoxy could no longer play the role it once did in nationnational identity. Loyalty to the king and to the commonwealthcommonwealth had gained the upper hand. HoltHolt, Mack P. does not dispute the consensus view that the sixteenth century is the crucial period when the transformation of France into a nationnation-state “first took root” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 2), but he significantly postpones its full-blown emergence until sometime after the Fronde (1648-1652). In 1600, therefore, the monarchy still had major problems to solve before the state could achieve its full strength, and the composition of the French nationnation was still in abeyance.

Malherbe’s reimagining of the French nationnation, it follows, does not represent a precocious step toward the secular nation-state. Rather, his de-emphasis of religious orthodoxy and his choice of new myths and images for the nationnation are a creative response to the rich and confusing national tapestry that was inherited from the late Middles Ages and badly damaged in the late sixteenth century. As Colette Beaune amply demonstrates in The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbolsnationmyths and symbols of of Nation in Late-Medieval France, the consciousness of belonging to a nationnation was “entwined” with the precarious rise of the House of France (Beaune 311) and fostered by the veneration of saints and kings. Its traces are attested in the liturgies, hagiographies, and histories composed by medieval clerics and royal propagandists responding to the changing political environment. There was nothing accidental about it. A shifting web of shared myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of gradually and deliberately enveloped disparate cities, towns, and regions by fueling a collective sense of exceptionalism for the kings, the kingdom, and the peoples of medieval France. It was propagated from the Paris basin, though “its slow evolution was far from continuous or unrelenting” (Beaune 314). “Different areas of France were moved by national ideology at different times” (Beaune 323). Unlike most modern nationnation-states, the sacred was the basis for this collective identity, which may be encapsulated by the term Most Christian, “applied without distinction to the French king, the people, and the territory” (Beaune 192). The emergence of an imagined community in France, with some of the basic features of a nationnation, did not have to wait for the waning of religious belief.3

allegoryfigures of thoughtThere are several characteristics of nationnations recognizable in the wealth of material that Beaune mines from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. First, the French nation was thought to be chosen by God.4 Such a notion stresses the continuity of the past with the present and posits a destiny to be realized in the future. Saint Remigius was alleged to have promised that the kingdom of Clovis would triumph over all other rival nationnations as long as it adhered to the true faith (Beaune 181), while successive generations of commentators elided the kingdom’s ethnic and cultural diversity as well as prior political differences to forge the vision of a unified chosen people, a New Israel, “the people of the New Alliance” (Beaune 180). Second, the French nationnation claimed autonomy. The mythical continuity of the royal bloodline (single, pure, sacred, perpetual) from Clovis onward set the kings and the kingdom of France “above the claims of the Church and the Imperium” (Beaune 172). Third, it inspired acts of patriotismpatriotism and xenophobia. As early as 1124 something akin to national sentimentnationnational sentiment was responsible for the spontaneous and unexpected baronial support of Louis VI against Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In the fifteenth century, a surge of collective identity swept over parts of France that was tied to the veneration of Saint Michael. Charles VII had turned from Saint Denis to venerate the warrior angel as early as 1418, while royalist armies after the “miraculous” victory at Orleans in 1429 reported sightings of a rider holding an unsheathed sword in the sky and took to processing “behind the banner of Michael’s white cross, like masses of reverent pilgrims” (Beaune 158-159, 18). The crusades to the Holy Land and the persecution of Jews and heretics were the negative flipside to this growing consciousness of French exceptionalism.5 Fourth, the net result of various medieval stories tracing the origins of the Gauls and Franks to the mythical city of TroyTroy was to create a common ancestry, “to root nationnational solidarity in a thick soil of blood ties” (Beaune 226). Such myths promoted the unity of north and south, the three estates, noble and commoner, kings and subjects. They made of the peoples of France a vast clan whose shared and ancient lineage ennobled them, argued for their moral and cultural superiority, and justified their political independence from England, Rome, and the Germanic Empire. Finally, the resistance of nobles and commoners to royal taxation and administrative centralization beginning in the mid-fourteenth century presupposes a developed consciousness of solidarity independent of loyalty to the monarchy. In the War of the Public WealcommonwealthPublic Weal (1465), the question was whether the king and the centralized state were the sole protectors of the public goodcommonwealthpublic good: great nobles asserted that “the commonwealthcommonwealth stood above the king” and that they shared responsibility for its protection (Collins, “State Building” 612). Theoretically, the king defended the public goodcommonwealthpublic good, and when one fought for the king, one fought for both. Occasionally, however, the public goodcommonwealthpublic good could be evoked against private interests, even those of the king, especially if the king’s policy were perceived to be unjust (Collins, “State Building” 617). The goodcommonwealththe good of the French nationnation was then identifiable with the commonwealthcommonwealth, “those interests common to all households living in a given politypolity” (Collins, “State Building” 608).

political eloquencegenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)The issue, therefore, is not whether a French nationnation existed in the early modern period, but whether a sufficient number of people believed that it did and behaved as if it did.6 We know that it was not a pure fiction because material traces of the conditions of its existence persist, but there were indeed phantasmic components that made it, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an imagined community. One of the primary tasks of this book has been to historicize and to analyze the myths and images contained in Malherbe’s royal odes which would have contributed to the reimagining of the national communitynationnational community—if contemporary readers had been up to the task and bought into them. I take no firm position on whether they did, although I suspect that most did not. By all appearances Malherbe’s vision for the French nationnation was overtaken by events and swept aside for other more compelling imagined communities.

If the particulars of medieval French nationnationhood constitute the symbolic strata against which to compare and to appreciate the imagined community of the royal odes, it is because Malherbe was uprooting and planting in the same medieval soil as his sixteenth-century predecessors. The significant social and political developments that separate Malherbe from his Renaissance counterparts are what account for the noticeable differences in their political and esthetic commitments. One must remember that Malherbe was writing from the other side of the religious warsreligious wars. Henri IV had managed to tamp down the violence and to win the peace by 1600. The first royal odes were thus composed not only against the backdrop of the crisis of nationnational identity, but also in the afterglow of the patriotic feelingpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiment that surged through France in the 1580s and 90s, a phenomenon that echoes previous waves of nationnational pride, notably Bouvines (1214) and Orleans (1429). In addition, the support that Henri IV enjoyed among noble elites and the people, and the profound lassitude with the destruction caused by civil conflict, created a reservoir of goodwill and fostered a general spirit of reconciliation. Pockets of resistance and mistrust were the exception that proved the rule. Therefore, in their inception, the royal odes partake of this eagerness to bury the past and to move forward, striving to erect a linguistic monumentmonuments whose universal eloquenceeloquence will move, with persuasive arguments and powerful emotionemotions, the hearts and minds of French subjects of every ideological stripe to rejoin the nationnational fabric. Malherbe’s royal odes reflect the blurring of the boundaries between rhetoric and poetry, or between literature and propaganda, that occurred during the Wars of Religion, and they echo arguments, opinions, affects, and images found in the polemical pamphlet literature that arose to spread the ideology and propaganda of the competing religious factions.7 An important difference between these pamphlets and the odes, however, is that the latter are less concerned with an ontology of Frenchness. Rather, what they seek to instill is an ethical commitment to king and commonwealthcommonwealth. While they crucially offer up alternative imagesimage of the king, the monarchypolitymonarchy, and the nationnation, it is less a question of representation than persuasion.ethosēthosproof The nationnational ethosethos they ethosmegalopsychosmagnanimitypropose for the nationnation is not the result of blood, soil, or climate, but is the product of consent and choice. Their figural language is not about resisting a collective identity or critiquing the claims of a centralized monarchy. On the contrary, it seeks to inspire subjects with the sense of belonging to a new national communitynationnational community, with a sense of loyalty to the crown and to fellow subjects, and with hatred for enemies of the state. The Other in the royal odes is less an object of fear than of hatred and anger—it is an enemy, domestic or foreign, that must be expelled from the body politicbody politic for the return of the Golden AgeGolden Age to begin. The royal odes are thus about closing ranks, consolidating gains, and questhero cyclequesting for greatness. If in the sixteenth century, as Timothy Hampton notes, generic and rhetorical multiplicity is the imaginative response to “the breakdown of community” (Hampton ix, 28-29), the royal odes respond in contrary fashion with an elaborate and intricate unity—a “higher, hidden order,” to borrow the phrase from David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee, one of Malherbe’s most perceptive readers. The rhetorical and esthetic unity of the odes prefigures, if only in the symbolic order, the national unitynationnational unity they seek to bring about.

virtueintellectualphronēsisSuch are the reasons why the arguments of this book do not constitute a chapter in the deconstruction of French nationnationhood. Rather than critique Malherbe’s ideology of the nationnation, or tease out its puzzles and contradictions, I have tried to assemble all the threads of the imaginary nationnational tapestry composed by the royal odes and to describe the grand tableau without losing sight of the details and their proper contexts. It follows that the construction of the French nationnation by the royal odes has been analyzed using their own terms for the sake of demonstrating the sequence’s amazing unity. The primary intention has been to share with contemporary readers my sincere and profound admiration for Malherbe’s poetic artistry. In the process, however, I believe this book has uncovered surprising and significant connections to the most contested notions of early modern France (i.e. nationnational and religious identity, nobiliary identity, absolutismabsolutism, female kingship, literary autonomy, etc.), which receive novel and, in some cases, prescient formulations in the royal odes. The highest compliment this book could be paid would be for its historical and rhetorical analyses to inform future critiques of French nationnational ideology.