Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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СКАЧАТЬ and the rhetorical effort they make to establish a close relation between poet and reader, in other words, subjects of the Bourbons, suggest that they partake of what Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene calls a civic rhetoric, “one in which more than the external goal is at stake. The audience is not an enemy, and the civic rhetorician must construct a civic relation between himself and his audience” (GarverGarver, Eugene 46; see also 6-12). “Civic rhetoric aims at an identity between the speaker making the arguments and the audience receiving them” (GarverGarver, Eugene 47). Although the royal odes, being a species of poetry, approach the delicate balance of civic rhetoric from the side of pure craftcraft, that is, a skill or knack in which there is no guiding end, their integration of argumentative reasoning (logosprooflogos, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.3) makes them a technēcrafttechnē in the full sense of the term, while their celebration of virtuevirtue assimilates them to a civic activity, orienting them toward the goodcommonwealththe good (GarverGarver, Eugene 7). Although a highly ornamented and emotionally charged discourse like encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poetry, consigned to a professional poet, would seem to be incompatible with, or at least irrelevant to, the speaker’s virtuevirtue, the quality most essential for a good citizencommonwealthcitizen (GarverGarver, Eugene 6-7),25 it is my contention that the odes partake of rhetoric in the noblest sense of the term, integrating “the apparently opposed properties of citizencommonwealthcitizenship and artfulness” and exhibiting “a harmony between reason and characterethoscharacter, logosprooflogos and ēthos” (GarverGarver, Eugene 12). The capacity to reconcile the potential conflicts between craftcraft and virtuevirtue, or the contradictions between tools and technēcrafttechnē, makes ethosproofēthos central to Malherbe’s royal odes. Its function is to maintain such contraries in a causal relationship, bringing tools under technēcrafttechnē, and technēcrafttechnē under virtuevirtue.

      The scholarship on Malherbe has yet to recognize the value of ethosethos and virtuevirtue as concepts critical to correctly grasping the ideological purpose of the odes. The rhetorical education that writers and poets received in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not to mention the politicized atmosphere created by civil strife and pamphlet propaganda, suggest that Malherbe intentionally engaged the political arena. It was understood that epideicticeloquenceepideictic eloquenceeloquence, to which poetry belonged, could have political consequences. Stella P. Revard, a classical scholar of the Pindaric ode, puts it best when she observes that “the poetry of praise always has an agenda” (Revard xiii). For the sake of their ideological purpose, the odes have been invested with the assumptions and the tools of politicalpolitical rhetoric. Ethosethos is the most important persuasive technique they employ, and virtuevirtue, a quality of characterethoscharacter, is what they most single out for praise. But this is where things get interesting. Malherbe’s odes clearly invite the confusion of actions and texts, persons and speech, doing and making. Their confusion of rhetorical ethosethos with moral ethosethos, I believe, is deliberate. The odes are designed to make their readers believe that the characterethoscharacter portrayed in and through discourse—whether of the poet himself or one of his patrons—is the actual person. The immortal glory offered by this poetry was very much intended for the living.

      III.

      Whether Malherbe’s royal odes belong to the paradigm of the Renaissance, Classicism, or the Baroque, twentieth-century critics have disagreed. Although Malherbe famously rejected the late-Renaissance esthetic of Desportes, leader of the school of Ronsard, it can be shown that the royal odes share many of the same rhetorical and poetic devices. Following Boileau’s lead in the L’Art poétique 1.131-162 (1674), most critics, like FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, continue to see in Malherbe a precursor of the French classical esthetic. Others, taking their cue from Jean Rousset, have preferred to classify Malherbe’s poetry as baroque, and with good reason: the royal odes exhibit the goal, the broad themes, and many of the rhetorical features of baroque poetry. 26 Rousset must be credited with providing scholars with a powerful framework to investigate the mentality, culture, and literature of early seventeenth-century France, even if the category suffers from internal contradictions, with respect to France, that are difficult to resolve.27 In this book, however, none of these literary and historical paradigms has been used to unpack the form and function of Malherbe’s royal odes. My concern was simply that the theoretical challenges involved in engaging the vexed questions they raise would divert too much attention from analysis of the poetry and its historical context.

      Instead, this book’s reconsideration of Malherbe’s royal odes in terms of ideology and eloquenceeloquence has been nourished by several overlapping areas of historical research. My thesis director, Pierre Force, an unfailing source of erudition and encouragement, first set me on this path many years ago when he urged me to read Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s L’Âge de l’éloquence. Since then, the work of many other scholars, Jean-Pierre Chauveau, James BiesterBiester, James, Debora K. ShugerShuger, Debora K., Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene, Mark Bannister, Peter W. Shoemaker, Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P., Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam, Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus, and David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee, have immeasurably contributed to casting the odes in their proper historical and rhetorical light. But I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kathy EdenEden, Kathy, whose analysis of CiceronianeloquenceCiceronian decorum as it relates to literary hermeneutics suggested how I could legitimately link close textual analysis to historical context, especially for odes composed in an eminently oratorical age:

      CiceroCicero defines eloquenceeloquence as the ability to practice decorum, defined in turn as the ability to accommodate the occasion, taking account of times, places, and persons: ‘This, indeed, is the form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ—to adapt himself to occasions and persons .’ As it affects poetry, he continues, decorum comes under the careful consideration of the grammaticus (OratorCiceroOrator 72). For the interpretation of poetry, as the grammarian’s chief function, depends in large part on the very same set of questions asked by the orator in the interests of decorum: who, to whom, when, where, why, and so on. [ ] Interpreting poetry, in other words, is fundamentally a historical investigation, one grounded in the very questions that constitute the principle of decorum (EdenEden, Kathy, Hermeneutics 26-27).

      Accordingly, Malherbe’s practicing of decorum in the composition of his royal odes not only requires that readers look beyond the text to the historical particulars of time, place, and persons, but actually justifies seeing these as already embedded in the fabric of the text. This is not to say that the odes are only mirrors of their context, but rather that an immanent reading of the odes reveals the dominant values, beliefs, and assumptions that Malherbe’s intended audience took for granted28—provided we keep in mind what the composition of such an audience owes to the poet’s own creative imagination. A merely positivist reading would risk overlooking how the poet-orator constructs an adequate concept of his audience (Perelman 33)—adequate to the historical particulars, certainly, but also to the poet’s own poetic imagination. Malherbe’s royal odes address the monarch and the subjects of France, but they also aim to create a new national communitynationnational community out of the existent constituencies they address.

      By attending to the odes’ rhetorical tactics and strategies, this book restores the sociopolitical dimensions to a poetic form—the royal encomiumencomium—too quickly dismissed by critics as “a game” or “merely an ornament of power.”29 Poetry may not have been the divine discourse of the humanities, with special access to wisdom, as the Pléiade contended. But it was more than mere honnête divertissement (noble diversion).30 Poetry was a minor art in a variety of ways, but major political elites nevertheless made use of it for their own purposes. This fact alone would have sufficed to assign poetry a sociopolitical function even if Malherbe were not aspiring to be more than a bon joueur de quilles [good player of skittles]. The extra-literary function of the royal odes is not merely suggested by their conditions of production: such a purpose is sometimes explicitly stated in the poems. Only when severed from any meaningful external purpose does early seventeenth-century poetry, and the royal encomiumencomium in particular, look like an ornament or a game. Is it any surprise, then, that twentieth-century criticism, with its formalist bias, СКАЧАТЬ