Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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      Michael Taormina

      Amphion Orator

      How the Royal Odes of François de Malherbe Reimagine the French Nation

      Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen

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      Cover Image: “Amphion, Builder of Thebes.” Illustration from Michel de Marolles, Temple des Muses (Paris, Nicolas Langlois: 1655). Printed by Cornelis Bloemaert and Theodor Matham, after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, circa 1635. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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      ISBN 978-3-8233-8464-9 (Print)

      ISBN 978-3-8233-0249-0 (ePub)

       movit Amphion lapides canendo

       [Amphion moved the stones with his singing]

      Horace, Odes 3.11.2

       La migliore fortezza che sia, è non essere odiato dal populo; perché, ancora che tu abbi le fortezze, et il populo ti abbi in odio, le non ti salvono.

       [The best fortress in the world is not to be hated by the people, because even fortresses will not save you if you are hated.]

      Machiavelli, Il Principe [The Prince]

       Ce miel attique, cest à dire une oraison perfaictement elabouree, ornee de graves et sages sentences, embellie de belles paroles, où la raison et la verité, illustrees par leur propre et plus riche ornement, reluisent en une splendeur admirable.

       [Attic honey, that is, a perfectly composed oration, adorned with grave and wise thoughts, embellished with beautiful diction, where reason and truth, illustrated by the proper and richest ornamentation, radiate with a wondrous splendor.]

      Du Vair, De l’eloquence françoise

       [Of French Eloquence]

       ὥσπερ οὖν ὁ πλωτὴρ εἷς τις τῶν κοινωνῶν ἐστιν, οὕτω καὶ τὸν πολίτην φαμέν.

       [Just as a sailor is a member of an association, so too is a citizen].

      Aristotle, PoliticsAristotlePolitics 3.4 1276b20,

      trans. Ernest Barker.

      To Jennifer

      my love, my life, my light

      Preface

      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