Underdetermination in Two French Poems

 

Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” and Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” are appended following the endnotes in new translations of my own as well as in the French originals. 

 

    Teachers of expository writing, technical writing, and journalism generally stress clarity and economy.   For such forms of discourse the language should most often be transparent with the meaning evident and the style unobtrusive.  In aesthetic genres, though, to exploit literature’s capacity for an extraordinary density of meaning, phrasing, figures of speech, tone, and sound enrich and deepen signification.  Ambiguity can convey a richer truth that reflects the contradictions, even the mystery of things, rather than a reductive simplicity. 

     Literary usage, however, differs widely in deployment of this strategy.  Some texts have what seems a unitary (or at least a rapidly decodable) signification while others are more ambiguous or unclear in meaning [1].  The distinction was recognized in medieval France in the contrast between trobar leu and trobar clus.  Either may be appropriate depending on the aims of the text.  Realistic fiction, for instance, is generally highly determined as are popular dramas like television situation comedies and folktales, while experimental and avant-garde works are more likely to be underdetermined.  Poetry that succeeds in oral performance is likely to be more immediately intelligible than written texts which the reader may ponder and review.

     Though works of both kinds may be found throughout literary history, during the last century and half underdetermined poetry has been particularly prestigious.  Since Romanticism the elevation of the individual genius and the rise of an art indifferent or even hostile to popularity has in part displaced the old emphases on art’s transmitting cultural norms while seeking to please.  Intellectuals relish complexity while the great majority of the population consumes poetry only through the medium of popular music.

    These attitudes are often quite self-conscious.  Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to distance themselves from social norms [2].  Verlaine considered the modern writers he admired to be Les Poètes Maudits and Mallarmé cultivated an obscure style. French Symbolism and Italian Hermeticism gloried in vaguer signification, while Realism, Naturalism, and Tendenzromane of both right and left strove in general for unitary, clearly prescribed meanings.   

     “L’Étranger,” one of the prose poems in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose or Spleen de Paris (1869) and Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” from Jadis et Naguère (Formerly and Recently) (1884) both promote underdetermination in service of rather different styles.  While both poets share with Gautier the view that beauty is the primary desideratum of art, Gautier’s “L’Art” promotes a Parnassian style with attention focused on form and precise concrete description.  For Gautier a poem is a cunningly crafted object like Cellini’s gold, enamel, and ebony salt cellar, its shapes well-defined, with solid heft.  Though Gary Snyder would scarcely be classed with Gautier, he expresses a similar notion in “Riprap”: Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks.”  Both Baudelaire and Verlaine depend on a different aesthetic, with beauty based on more elusive meaning.

     Baudelaire’s stranger prefers clouds the very excellence of which arises from their imprecise suggestiveness.  After denying that he loves what others do – family, friends, country, and wealth – the speaker hedges on beauty, saying that what is called art he finds not always beautiful or divine.  He chooses instead to celebrate the clouds.  Surely this is a manner of saying that he revels in his own imagination.  The clouds themselves bear no meaning, it is only his reception of their appearance that lends them appeal.  In other words, he is affirming his own sensibility as the source of aesthetic delight.  He follows here the Romantic celebration of genius and anticipates not only the obscurity associated with Symbolist imagery, but also the notion of idiosyncratic taste inherent in hip, camp, and kitsch appreciation.  Classical standards of beauty and monosemous theme are dismissed or ignored.

     Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” advocates a similar aesthetic, though with considerably more elaboration.  In fact his “nuance” (also nuance in English) shares an etymology with Baudelaire’s ”nuage” (cloud).  Like Baudelaire he condemns traditional eloquence using vivid terms, even saying it should be throttled).  Like Pater in The Renaissance saying that all art aspires to the condition of music, he declares that music, the most abstract of the arts, must rule [3].  His enemy is the obvious: a cheap laugh, too much garlic, showy costume jewelry.  For him beauty lies in the subtlety of a scent in the breeze, a musical phrase, the flight of a bird.  Equivocation becomes a part of charm.

   Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” used the open form of the prose poem, employed by Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit (1842) and later to shattering effect by Rimbaud in in Illuminations (1886).  Though Verlaine inveighs against rhyme, he rhymes nonetheless (sometimes in slant rhymes such as midi/attiédi, énergie/assagie, and matin/thym).  The eight syllable lines are not entirely predictable, as they are varied without pattern with seven and nine syllable lines, and one of ten [4]. 

     This freedom is consistent with the expression of novel content and the elevation of art to a quasi-religion.  The appeal of the poets’ underdetermination arises in part from its suggestion that the artist is a kind of shamanic conjurer dealing in spells, but the reader, too, shares in the creation of meaning not through mechanical decoding but in a kind of collaborative construction of signification.  By violating conventions and establishing new ones, the poets help bring to birth new forms of literature.

      

 

 

1.  Roland Barthes’ S/Z distinguished between readerly (lisible) texts and writerly (scriptable) ones   Since for him certain further assumptions and value judgements are associated with these terms, underdetermined and highly determined are preferred here.  (Overdetermined should be reserved for cases in which too much information is given resulting in potentially tiresome replication.)

2.  Flaubert ridiculed the bourgeois, for instance, in Bouvard and Pecuchet and the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Baudelaire praised the “dandy” whose style indicates his aesthetic concerns.  In another clear sign of transgressive intent, both were prosecuted for obscenity.

3.  Pater in 1873 was far from alone in his sentiment.  In Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850) he said "It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles -- the creation of supernal Beauty.”  Verlaine had described Poe as malin though naïf and even puéril in a letter of May 16, 1873 to Edmond Lepelletier.  Many others have voiced similar ideas.  For instance, Susan Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 says “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts— it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure— and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.”

4.  I find two lines of seven syllables, ten of eight, twenty-three of nine, and one I count as ten: 8899 8899 8998 9979 10998 9999 9898 9997 9989.

 

 

 

 

The Stranger

 

 

     “Whom do you love better, mystery man, tell me: your father, or mother, your sister or brother?”

    “I have no father, mother, sister, or brother.”

     “Your friends?”

     “You are using a word the meaning of which has always been unknown to me.”

     “Your country?”

     “I don’t even know its latitude.”

     “Beauty?”

     “I would gladly love her as an immortal goddess.”

     “Gold?”

     “I hate it just as you hate god.”

     “So, what then do you love, you extraordinary stranger?”

    “I love the clouds – the clouds which drift by – like there – and there! The marvelous clouds!”

 

 

L’Étranger

 

— Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou ton frère ?

— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.

— Tes amis ?

— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.

— Ta patrie ?

— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

— La beauté ?

— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.

— L’or ?

— Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.

— Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?

— J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages !

 

 

 

The Art of Poetry (Paul Verlaine)

 

Before all else the verse must swing,

so build a rhythm just off-beat,

dissolved in air and not too neat,

no weighty or prescriptive thing.

 

You must not choose your words without

allowing polysemy in. 

Grey songs have aways finest been

where certainty contends with doubt.

 

Behind a veil a lovely eye,

or noonday trembling in the sun.

Blue stars arrayed when day is done

across the mild autumn sky.

 

Nuance alone is what will suit

No color, just nuance alone!

For only by nuance is shown

The links of dreams or horn to flute!

 

Fly far then from the deathly spot,

the cruel shade, the laugh so cheap

which makes the very sky to weep

like too much garlic in the pot.

 

Take eloquence and twist its neck! 

A little work and you’ll do well

To calm the rhymes for a short spell

If we don’t curb them, there’s no check!

 

Why, who rhyme’s wrongs can ever know?

And what deaf child or crazy slave

to us this shoddy jewel gave

which proves so false when studied close.

 

It’s music always wins the prize!

Your verse must be a thing in  flight,

an active soul alone can write

which takes to other loves and skies.

 

So may your verse fly with the birds,

and swim in morning’s breeze so chilled,

with mint and thyme aromas filled

and all the rest is only words.

 

 

Art Poetique

 

Paul Verlaine

De la musique avant toute chose,

Et pour cela préfère l’Impair

Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,

Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

 

Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point

Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :

Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise

Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.

 

C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,

C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,

C’est, par un ciel d’automne attiédi,

Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !

 

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !

Oh ! la nuance seule fiance

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !

 

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,

L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,

Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,

Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !

 

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !

Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,

De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.

Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?

 

Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime ?

Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou

Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou

Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?

 

De la musique encore et toujours !

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée

Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.

 

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Éparse au vent crispé du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…

Et tout le reste est littérature.

Irony in Aucassin et Nicolette

 

 

 

     It may surprise the modern reader of Aucassin et Nicolette, the eight-hundred-year-old chantefable [1], to learn that it was long regarded as a straightforward story of two perfect partners, according to one scholar “the purest example imaginable of characters motivated by idyllic love” [2].  The modern age is admittedly suspicious of ideals and finds a particular appeal in paradox and irony.  Even those who would not label themselves post-structuralists are liable to see earlier authors burlesquing or otherwise undermining themselves.  Yet, quite apart from a modern taste for cynicism and iconoclasm, this particular tale of love’s overcoming obstacles seems at times explicit in its own self-satire [3].

     The episode of Torelore is the most undeniably comic passage.  In this up-side-down land, women fight by tossing foodstuffs while the king lies “en couvade,” as though in childbed.  There is surely caricature, too, in Aucassin’s declaration that he could never enjoy the afterlife without his beloved.  While the basic sentiment is more or less conventional, his depiction of heaven as boring, packed with tiresome old fogeys, in contrast to a hell populated by courtly sophisticates is certainly meant more to raise a smile at his silliness than to impress the reader with the depth of his devotion or to shock with his apparent irreligion. 

     Apart from these farcical passages, Aucassin is regularly presented as an incompetent hero.  Initially unwilling to fight at all, he is lost in a dream when he does enter the battlefield.  The reader sees him in  warrior mode only when he attacks the helpless Toreloreans including their feckless bed-ridden king.  Separated from his beloved, Aucassin makes no attempt to find her and he is, indeed, slow to recognize her in the end.  On the other hand, Nicolette is an unusually active heroine.  Her seeking out her lover while disguised is more often a man’s ploy (as in the case of Odysseus) than a woman’s.   

     Apart from the satirical comments on romance conventions and on the church, at the outset the poet makes an extravagant self-reflective claim. 

 

 

Nus hom n’est si esbahis,

Tant dolans ni entrepris,

de grant mal amaladis,

se il l’oit, ne soit garis,

et de joie resbaudis,

     tant par est douce.

 

There is no one so downcast, afflicted and in poor shape, so very ill that he would not, at hearing this [story] recover health, joy, and vigor, so sweet as it is.

(Lines 10-15)

 

     To what degree of irony is this assertion pitched?  Taking it as a direct assertion of truth may seem somewhat fanciful, but in fact the idea that poetry (or music or stories) might have healing power, though entirely magical, is widespread, indeed, all  but universal in human culture.  The Chinese character for medicine contains the sign for music (as well as a radical indicating herbs).  As it happens I can present more than one bit of contemporary evidence of this belief.  I was once acquainted with a Gnaoui musician from Marrakech who had not attended even a Koranic school.  He said that in his youth he was most often hired, not for weddings or parties, but to play by the bedside of sick people.  He had not the slightest doubt that his art was an agent of healing.  In modern American culture, my wife worked in an inpatient mental health unit that employed a full-time music therapist whose work was considered to contribute to effective treatment [4].    

     To most readers the author’s declaration of the healing powers of his composition seems satirical.  The primary object of the humor might be the literary conventions of the day, paralleling the lovers’ puffed-up professions of devotion, but it might also have seemed a burlesque of the spiritual rewards sometimes promised for the reading of religious texts like saints’ lives. 

     Those who wish to salvage some of the promised benefits of consuming such stories might respond to this ironic reading by insisting that while a poem cannot cure illness, it can improve life by heightening a person’s sensitivity.  Surely the catharsis Aristotle expected from tragedy was therapeutic.  The humanistic approach to literature, unfashionable in the twenty-first century, but dominant in various forms earlier, rests on the notion that literature in some way is “improving.”  

     The theoretical critic might answer that artists know no more than others about how properly to live the good life, that their particular skill lies instead on the artful arrangement of forms or words or sounds, and that it is thus futile to look to poets for wisdom. 

     This back-and-forth dialectic is generated by the special capacity of art to deal with ambiguities and contradictions.  Further elaboration is possible but would require ingenuity more than hermeneutics.  Fundamentally, the proposition is in a sense true and also false.  The oscillation between the possibilities creates a rich resonance and avoids reductive formulae.  This is one example of the transformation of convention characteristic of literature in which to employ a formula or repeat a phrase instantly enables variations and contradictions that render the idea more precise as well as thickening the plot of narrative.  Aucassin et Nicolette makes its parodic values clear to most contemporary readers, but the same phenomenon is traceable in less strident form in most aesthetic texts.

 

 

 

1.  While the combination of prose and verse exists elsewhere, under the name of prosimetrum in Latin literature (e.g. Petronius and Boethius) and (變) in Chinese tradition (e.g. Jiang Mo Bianwen [降魔變文], “Magical Combat”) as well as elsewhere, but Aucassin et Nicolette is unique among French narratives.  For a comparison of Aucassin et Nicolette with the biànwén form, see Li-Li Ch'en, “Wen Chantefable and Aucassin et Nicolette,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1971).

2.  Robert Harden, ‘"Aucassin et Nicolette’ as Parody,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1966). 

3.  Apart from the article already cited above, additional evidence is presented in Barbara Nelson Sargent, “Parody in Aucassin et Nicolette: Some Further Considerations,” The French Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar., 1970).

4.  In America this artist played with the likes of Don Cherry and Miles Davis and worked regularly here with three bands: one traditional, one jazz, and one rock.  Listening to his Arabic singing with the rock ensemble, I asked him to translate the lyrics.  They were all cliches of the Islamic shahada: Allah is great, there is one god, Allah determines all things.  “Of course,” he said, “music is always an offering to Allah.”  According to him, in Morocco they would often perform through the night, and generally found their patient better by daybreak. 

The Oscillation of Meaning in Volpone

 

                                   illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

 

     The aesthetic text has a capacity to represent contradictions and ambiguities with great economy, often using figures of speech.  Through devices such as oxymora and  irony, authors may suggest a proposition and its opposite as well, allowing thereby the delineation of logically incongruous complex experience.  This characteristic may appear even in highly conventionalized aesthetic texts.  Though the psychological types of the “comedy of humours” and the social conventions on which the satire of “city comedy” realism rely on values shared by author and audience with the plays reinforcing the expectations of the culture as a whole, this general alignment by no means forecloses the use of equivocal images. 

     Virtually all the pillars of bourgeois society are questioned and ridiculed In Ben Jonson’s most frequently performed play Volpone: lawyers and courts, merchants, and doctors.  Each is presented as driven solely by cupidity.  That unifying theme not only characterizes most of the characters; it seems very nearly their only trait.  Every act in  the drama arises out of self-interest, even (for Corbaccio) to providing euthanasia for a testator who inconveniently continues to live. (III, ix)  This simple, unvarying motivation is consistent with Jonson’s definition of a “humour.” [1]

 

Some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way.

 

Marrie ile tell thee what it is (as tis

generally received in these daies) it is a

monster bred in a man by self loue, and „

affectation, and fed by folly.

 (III, i, 156-I58  Every Man in his Humour)

 

 

     The audience knows very little of any of the main male characters beyond their avarice.  The only exceptions are the hermaphrodite, eunuch, and dwarf who are fundamentally ornaments of Volpone’s establishment included only to indicate his affluence and peculiar taste, and the honorable Bonario and Celia to provide contrast and conflict as they are, so far as the reader may judge, perfect in every way.

     Jonson was careful to distinguish such deep-seated over-riding “humours” that dominate an individual’s actions from mere vogues to which any weak-minded person might be susceptible and which may vary over time.

 

 

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to runne one way,

This may be truly said to be a Humour.

But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather,

The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe,

A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot

On his French garters, should affect a Humour!

0, 'tis more than most ridiculous.

(Every Man out of His Humour, Induction, I05-II4).

 

 

Sir Politic Would-be and his wife are examples of this minor sort of “humour,” a condition which is not deep-seated or permanent but which follows fashion.  Their absurdities (contrasted with Peregrine’s better sense) form a lighter parallel to the primary drama around Volpone’s wealth. They are surely ridiculous, but they are not wicked.

    Greed is associated with black bile and Volpone is clearly consumed with a rapacious selfishness.  This is evident not only in his miserliness, but also in his fondness for spectacle, for pranks that humiliate others while benefiting himself. 

 

 

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth

Than in the glad possession, since I gain

No common way.

                               (Volpone I,i)

 

 

Later he declares, “I must have my crochets/ And my conundrums!” (V, vii)  His cruel art form consists of arranging for others to make fools of themselves, but he pursues his medium to the point that he is ultimately found out.  Apart from this rather endearing theatricality, though, Volpone is a merciless and unattractive con man.

     This straightforward assignment of values, however, is complicated by ambiguities and contradictions, beginning with the very title.  The central metaphor of the play, of course, is there announced: the foxy man.  Foxes are admired in the folklore of the world, particularly in many trickster stories for their cleverness and sagacity.  During the European Middle Ages stories of Reynard the Fox were circulated throughout Western Europe.  Foxes are, like Odysseus πολύτροπος (“of many turns”), notoriously wily, yet sometimes the tables are turned on them and their adversaries carry the day.  In life the fox is most often seen as a chicken thief hated by farmers.  Oddly, foxes are also traditionally obliged to run for their lives, pursued by great crowds of loud men and dogs.  Volpone may be, as the dramatis personae names him, a “magnifico,” but he is one few would care to emulate not least because his arrogance seems likely to be heading for a fall.

     Any ambiguity about Volpone’s character is instantly evaporated as he worships his money in the opening scene.  He is clearly in the grip of an obsession that has sunk him in vice and sin.  His servant, his “creature” or “parasite” Mosca, “the fly,” encourages his every move and remains entirely at his service until the end.  Mosca devotes considerable enthusiasm to carrying out his master’s deceptions.  Now a fly is an altogether despicable thing in the common view.  Though Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, was a deity to the ancient Philistines and Canaanites, he became for Jews and Christian a demon, though in Paradise Lost (II) a significant one, "than whom, Satan except, none higher sat."  Flies accumulate about a corpse almost immediately upon death where, as part of the machinery of dissolution, they are regarded with distaste by the living.  Cooks and tired campers and wide-awake front stoop loungers are mightily annoyed by flies.  Mosca lacks perhaps the grand, almost Byronic, defiance of Volpone’s plotting, but he feels the same relish that his master does in deceit.  Mosca is depicted as utterly obedient until the point when he conceives that he might grab Volpone’s wealth for himself, when he feels suddenly no trace of the loyalty that had seemed so central to him

     The three scavenger birds – crow, raven, and vulture – are equally inauspicious in folklore, though the first two are often considered tricksters, for instance among natives of the American Northwest and Australian Aborigines.  While this mythic role is doubtless facilitated by the impressive cognitive skills of corvids, in Jonson’s play Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore are ridiculous dupes, blinded by the golden bequest they expect to receive.  They think they are getting the better of each other, while they are only fooling themselves.  In the same way, Volpone and Mosca themselves turn out to be tricked.  Whereas in simpler and more stylized allegories such as Everyman most characters are stable with unambiguous, in Jonson’s more realistic drama, they have a certain equivocal looseness, cunning, yet careless due to greed.

     The same principle applies to metaphors.  When Mosca lures his master to new crimes by describing Corvin’s wife Celia as  “bright as your gold, and lovely as your gold,” (I,1), the qualities shared by tenor and vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms) include beauty, value, and prestige.  Yet in context the viewer knows that Volpone’s greed for gold has made him a selfish and hateful miser, and his appreciation of female beauty has been corrupted into lechery and sexual coercion.  Both passions can only inspire further duplicity and crime.  The love of both wealth and women, each of which might be a factor in a fulfilling life instead drives him toward both practical and moral ruin.  Each is thus presented as a potential evil as well as a positive good.

     When Celia is horrified at her husband’s suggestion that she join Volpone in bed, her husband calls her a “whore” (II, iii) specifically because she is not.  Thinking she might cost him a fortune, his nasty nature generates weird fantasies of degradation for her – the insulting name is less lurid than his threats to oblige her to walk only backwards, or to dissect her body as an anatomical lesson.  A little anxiety throws Corvino into hysterical misogyny. 

     The lovely and often-reprinted lyric, perhaps Jonson’s most well-known lines “Come, my Celia, let us prove,/ While we can, the sports of love” (II, iii), which out of context seems a sweet lover’s seduction plea much like “To His Coy Mistress,” is, in fact, delivered by a vicious predator to a most unwilling lady whose response is to wish herself dead. 

     While the characterization governed by the theory of “humours” might tend toward the reductive, in Jonson’s hands it is fleshed out by secondary traits, such as the gusto both Volpone and Mosca find in cheating others.  The readers’ partial sympathy is more easily engaged due to the fact that the  vulture, raven, and crow have equally low motives and less élan vital.  The clever fox turns out to be outfoxed, the fly can find  no fat corpse on which to feed, and the scavengers go hungry as well. 

     On the level of individual figures of speech terms like gold and whore have doubled ironic use in the play, indicating for the first both a positive good and a potential pitfall and, for the second, a degradation of woman that in fact indicates the degradation of the man uttering the insult.  Yet in the end retributive justice has restored a balance to society.  The play’s final lines appear to be moralizing.

 

1^st lawyer:                              Now you begin,

When crimes are done, and past, and to be punish'd,

To think what your crimes are: away with them.

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,

Take heart and love to study 'em! Mischiefs feed

Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

 

suggesting that the malefactors on stage might make the viewer reflect on morality, but this impulse is soon overrun by the realization that the play was all in fun, causing no real injury, and the audience's high comedic spirits can be expressed only by resounding applause.

Volpone:: The seasoning of a play, is the applause.

Now, though the Fox be punish'd by the laws,

He yet doth hope, there is no suffering due,

For any fact which he hath done 'gainst you;

If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands:

If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.  (V, viii)

 

 

. 

1.  George Chapman, Jonson’s friend and sometime collaborator, had introduced the theory of “humours” slightly before Jonson with his plays The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and An Humourous Day's Mirth. 

Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book. 

Contronyms

     Contronyms, that is, words which are their own opposites, have been given such a rich variety of names that there can be no mistaking they engage the interest of those for whom words may be attractive playthings. They have been called contranyms, Janus words, auto-antonyms, autantonym, antagonyms, enantiodromes, self-antonyms, antilogies, or addad (Arabic, singular did). For all the Greek and Latin roots, these terms are recent. A great number of websites provide lists of such words.
     The range of names parallels the range of phenomena they describe; a variety of paths can end in a contronym. The purest form might be that in which two originally separate words developed identical forms, so that their opposition is in a way accidental. This is the case with cleave, for instance, with its meanings of “hold together” and “split apart” and let in the common sense of “allow” and the nearly obsolete one of “bar” or “prevent.” Such apparent self-contradiction is in fact a mere coincidence, words which look the same, but which turn out to have developed from entirely different etymological roots. The verbal usage of rock is derived from a Germanic word meaning “to yank or pull” while the noun is derived from a medieval Latin word for stone. Clip in the sense of cutting has a different root than clip in the sense of fasten together.
     Such accidental similarity is, of course, hardly confined to the realm of the lexicon. I know a poet named George Wallace who has very little in common with the one-time presidential aspirant with whom he shares a name. A ball bearing has the same shape but a different function than a child’s marble. Parallel evolution is familiar to biologists, for instance, in the development of similar animals – litopterns and horses, European and South American saber-toothed tigers, moles, and others -- among marsupial and placental groups since they diverged a hundred million years ago. In these cases, though, the similarity reflects a similar purpose, whereas the verbal appearance is identical but the function altogether different.
     Some contronyms are born of transactional words that indicate a relationship instead of a particular action. To consult, for instance, might mean either to seek or to give advice, and one who leases might be either a landlord or a tenant. In some languages the same word can be used for borrow or lend (e.g. German ausleihen), while In English etymologically guest and host are derived from the same word and simply happen to have developed distinct uses over time. Here the contradiction is resolved simply by defining the word as “to enter into a relationship” rather than to take a specific action. This process, too, has non-linguistic parallels. A merchant may be either buying or selling, and, if an individual is said to be “into sm,” it remains undetermined whether he or she favors the first or the second of those letters.
     A variety of other circumstances can also produce contronyms. Meaning, like plants, can form branches which grow independently. Fast, for instance, from a root meaning of “firm and solid,” acquired an intensive meaning that eventually developed into the more common modern definition “speedy,” in such usages as to run fast. In an analogous way outside the realm of words, the associations of tobacco have mutated from the original ceremonial and sacred uses through suggestions of sophistication and conviviality to the present connotations of addiction, illness, and death.
     However they arose, such words cast a light on the imprecision inherent in all signifying. A modern critic contemplating contronyms will think of Derrida and the recognition that meaning is “always already erased.” A polemicist could declare them the only honest words in that they admit their utter ambiguity.
     If one were to imagine an entire language made of such words, what would any utterance really mean?  Would all statements be substantially the same? Would every statement be both trivial and profoundly meaningful? Perhaps the linguistic system would then more closely mirror the subatomic realm in which positives and negatives balance and, in the end, cancel each other. It certainly seems as though matter and antimatter should also similarly balance, though at present physicists say they do not.
     Long before Deconstruction, the revelation of the limits of duality was common to many of the most lofty of thinkers. The old man Lao Zi was at home amid such cosmic speculations which seem indeterminate as they founder with the burden of vast implications. He repeatedly insisted “is and is-not come together.” Hard and easy, long and short, high and low, beauty and ugliness. (poem 2) ‘The heavy is foundation for the light. (26) “What is to be shrunken is first stretched out.” (36) “Bad fortune will promote the good.” (58) To have an original thought, one must not shrink from self-contradiction.
     The rishis who declared the Advaita revelation that the individual and the godhead are identical knew the explosive potential of paradox and mystery. Christ spoke in paradoxes. Nagarjuna saw in every statement its opposite. Blake wrote “Without contraries is no progression” and knew that body and soul were one.
     So it may happen (to the leximaniacal at any rate) that contronyms lift a bit of the curtain of maya, providing a glimpse beyond, a chance to see all things new. They remind one of how slippery the words that we use to package and contain our flowing perceptions bear no guarantee but their own unreliability. Reflecting on such words, if it provides little progress toward certainty, will perhaps remind the thinker of the unstable ground beneath everybody’s conceptual feet.

The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in a Medieval Lyric

Fowles in the frith,
The fisses in the flood,
And I mon waxe wood
Much sorwe I walke with
For beste of bon and blood.

[Birds in the woods, fish in the stream, and I’m going mad. I walk with much sorrow for the best (or beast) of bone and blood.]

     These brief five lines, found on a single page in a legal manuscript amid lists of names and dates, have attracted considerable attention in modern times, though their interpretation remains highly uncertain. The concision and elaborate sound-play of the piece have charmed readers even as experts cannot agree on the poem’s theme. The very mystery of the text may be itself admired, if the ambiguity be a sort that results not in lack of communication, but in the more precise communication of a more complex theme.
     The unfolding of the sound pattern is a marvel of incantation, justifying the poem as a virtuoso melodic invention. The alliteration with the f-sound in the first line is repeated in the second to a resounding three-beat accentual rhythm. The third line turns instead to alliteration on w which is continued in the fourth and, in the end, all is swept away with three stressed words in the final line beginning with b.
     This tight alliterative pattern, drawing on the Old English poetic tradition is combined with the ABBAB rhyme scheme to knit the whole into an almost hypnotic spell. The lovely music of the piece is self-sufficient, though many recordings exist due to the two-part musical notation accompanying the poem.
     When these powerful phonic effects are linked to a semantic structure so delicately poised that an approximately equal number of critics have read the poem as an expression of romantic love and of Christian faith. The secular reading, which was dominant until the 1960s, treats the first two lines as the most conventional of medieval love poetry openings: a reverdie. Presumably the original form of the convention was equivalent to Tennyson line in “Locksley Hall”: “In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” “Foweles in the frith” tropes on the expression by reversing that sympathy with nature. In this poem all nature is fertile and thriving, but the speaker is depressed, presumably due to his lover’s lack of complaisance. The hyperbolic compliment (“beste of bon and blood”), the woman’s coolness, and the lover’s consequent suffering are among the expected components of the sort of courtly love familiar from countless other texts. The phrase itself appears with very nearly meaning the same other love lyrics such as “The Fair Maid of Ribbesdale” and “Blow, northerne wind.”
     Early scholars took the poem without question as an expression of romantic love. Yet in the 60s another school of thought arose to whom the lines required a Christian reading. [1] For them the speaker is an Everyman suffering, “mourning and weeping in the valley of tears” while nature chugs on, grandly unbothered. [2] But the religious interpreters do not agree on the poem’s end. One camp favors the Hebrew scriptural association and the other the Greek. [3] Among the former, the word “beste” in the last line is read as meaning “beast,” and the derangement of the speaker, so out of tune with the rest of nature, is the result of original sin. A variety of Biblical passages have been adduced in support of this interpretation. The word beast is indeed used the Psalms to indicate a fallible, sinning person [4] In another Psalm the thoughtless human is identified with the brute creation. [5] The poem’s final line, read in this manner, might be paraphrased as “ I live in pain because I am a physical being, afflicted with His sorrow is the sorrow of Genesis 3:17 to which postlapsarian mankind is universally subject. As a creature of blood and bone, he feels the prick of thorns and thistles. The “unfallen” birds and fish, unburdened by original sin, enjoy a sort of bliss the tortured, self-conscious human envies.
     Thomas Moser found that there are sixteen mentions of birds and fish together in the Christian Bible, thirteen on the Old Testament and three in the New. The two, encapsulating as they do the worlds of the air and the sea, are first linked in the creation story which describes both as the sole creations of the fifth day. Several ancient Hebrew passages imply just the sort of gap between humanity and the rest of the animal world that maddens the speaker in “Foweles in the frith.” Psalm 8 praises God for the birds and fish as marvels of his handiwork, yet asks “what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Similarly in Job beasts, birds, and fish are all called to astonish and awe, to humble the human, asking the devastating and unanswerable question: “what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” [6] The poem from this point of view delivers the same chastening reminder of the wretchedness of humankind in contrast to the brute creation.
     Some, however, would maintain the romantic love reading of “beste of bon and blood,” but consider this as referring to Jesus Christ, the paragon. Christ is, after all, to them the Man of Sorrows foreseen by Isaiah. [7] Christ, too, was estranged from creation, enduring particular extreme suffering. As Matthew has it, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” [8] The poem’s speaker is sympathetically identifying with Christ’s suffering as Christians seeking to follow the imitatio Christi have done throughout history.
     Ambiguity need not be a result of sloppiness. (In fact, I suspect that it is a major rhetorical device in Chinese poetry; it certainly is in Elizabethan.) I have here mentioned only a few of the puns and ambiguities of this little lyric. The two or three readings of “Foweles in the frith” continue to contend because, far from excluding each other, each elaborates, enriches, and, in the end, reinforces the others. Lyric is typically an expression of affect. This poem is like a cameo engraved with a mythological scene in which the hero battles a monster. The enemy might be a woman who rejects the poet. For a person of a different sensibility, it would be the ineluctable nastiness of our lives with which the ego fights, or the contemplation of such undeserved suffering projected onto a divine (or human/divine) figure. The emotional truth remains the same. The vision of a rich a thriving nature constantly reproducing itself without existential woe is identical for each reading. The consequences of being made of bone and blood does not change. It is this underdetermination that gives the poem its magic.





1. "A Critical Approach to the Middle English Lyric”, College English 27 (February 1966).

2. From the Salve Regina.

3. Thomas Moser’s PMLA article vol. 102, no. 3, May 1987.

4. For instance in Psalm 73.

5. 49.

6. Job 12.

7. 53:3.

8. 8:20.