Taormina Amphion Orator

How the Royal Odes of François de Malherbe Reimagine the French Nation
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0249-0
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 224, 315 Seiten

Reihe: Biblio 17

This new approach to Malherbe's odes interweaves political, cultural, rhetorical, and literary history to show how they constitute a unified sequence whose ambition is to forge a new national community in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, dislodging Malherbe from his moribund critical reception as a grammarian and technician and recovering the brilliance of a poetic genius whose political mythmaking stems from an impassioned patriotism.

Michael Taormina is an Associate Professor of French Michael Taormina is an Associate Professor of French Literature, Culture and Language in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College, CUNY. His research explores the intersection of eloquence, patronage, and noble identity in French lyric poetry of the early seventeenth century, and he has published articles on the work of Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, and Vincent Voiture. He is also a translator of French theatre and philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taormina, Michael

Leseproben

Preface

This is a book about the corpus of encomiastic 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 in the aftermath of the Wars 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 identity, the history of eloquence, and mythology to reclaim the patriotic voice of a poet reduced to a technician by generations of literary critics.

In trying to make sense of these magnificent literary artifacts, I realized that Malherbe was not simply fashioning a positive public image for the monarch and shoring up the symbolic power of the monarchy, but was also revising the myths and symbols of the French nation, 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 nationhood, 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 nation 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 nationhood, and this book does not aim to demystify the royal odes’ ideological construction of the French nation.

Both projects have already been undertaken by Marcus Keller in . Keller 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 . 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 nation; define the national 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 community; and, to that end, allegorize prior events and stories to insert them in a new history. Keller, 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 nation-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 nationhood” (Hampton 28).

Hampton and Keller, however, both treat the entwined evolution of the nation and the state in early modern France as a “pre-history” to nationalism and the modern nation-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 Keller’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 national spirit (Keller 108), and generally emphasizes nationalist concerns with “language, space, and character” (Hampton 9).2 In particular, I fail to see how the notion of “national character” that appears in the royal odes may be equated with “soul” or “spirit” (Keller 5). While there is allegedly a spirit watching over the king and the French nation, Malherbe’s national character is neither ontological nor metaphysical. It is ethical. The significant interpretive divergences I have with Keller stem from his avowed aim of “charting the ideological grounds on which the modern nation-state takes shape,” which he sees fit to anchor in “Etienne Balibar’s theory of the nation form and some propositions on the idea of nationhood by postcolonial critics” (Keller 5-6). “Fictive ethnicity,” for instance, is much less prominent in the royal odes than the notion of public good, common interest, or commonwealth. 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 nationhood, 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 national ideology.

In my view, France in the late sixteenth century was not yet a nation-state, but it was a nation, or at least had achieved sufficient national consciousness to enter a period of dire crisis when, as Mack P. Holt writes in , “the advent of Protestantism in the 1540s … shattered the unity of religion” and “led to the contesting of the monarchy itself” (Holt 23). The Catholic faith and the monarchy were the two strongest unifying threads in the national 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 nation. By 1600, Catholic orthodoxy could no longer play the role it once did in national identity. Loyalty to the king and to the commonwealth had gained the upper hand. Holt does not dispute the consensus view that the sixteenth century is the crucial period when the transformation of France into a nation-state “first took root” (Holt 2), but he significantly postpones its...