[In the following essay, Haig analyzes the ambiguous imagery in Les Destinées of the relationship between humanity and the divine and concludes that the poem affirms Vigny's conviction "that hope is cruel folly."]

The argument of the liminary poem of Vigny's most famous collection is well known. At the Savior's birth, the powers that Vigny syncretically terms destinée must temporarily relax their cruel hold over man; they appeal to the Lord (here called "Jéhovah", which for Vigny always means the terrible and vengeful God of the Old Testament), who reaffirms their subjugation of man. The Fates then return to their "proie éternelle" in the name of grace or Christian providence. The poem concludes with a question of metaphysical anguish: "Notre mot éternel est-il: C'ÉTAIT ÉCRIT?" an expression of the determinism that fundamentally governs the human lot in the world both ancient and modern, eastern and western¹.

With such a theme—man's duplicitous relationship with the Divinity—it is not surprising that the poem's imagery should be ambiguous, in the proper sense of working simultaneously in two opposing directions. In effect, in the course of the poem's forty-one tercets, there appear to be two antithetical semantic fields. Images of imprisonment yield (approximately at tercet 26) to images of liberation, and the latter would seem to be wholly inconsonant with the poem's assertion of an "epochal" change that turns out in reality to be merely illusory. For the Fates reassert their supremacy over humanity. No liberation takes place at all when the ancient world and its slavery are replaced by the Christian ethic.

The purpose of this note is briefly to examine the two sets of images, and to emphasize their underlying unity, for it is clear in the end that both belong to a single semantic field, and that their apparent opposition is intended to suggest divine perfidy².

The first field is that of limitation or circumscription. In the beginning of the poem, the moirai weigh heavily 3 upon man, who is presented as a beast of burden ("boeuf") who is literally subjugated ("le joug de plomb") by what Vigny will call the "poids de notre vie" in the opening line of "La Maison du berger", the only poem in the collection in which escape is truly realized. The yoke causes man to trace a deep furrow in the course of his repetitive movements and restricts those movements to the narrow limits of a "cercle fatal", marked by deadlines ("Sans dépasser la pierre où sa ligne est bornée")⁴. Man, gathered with his fellows like a herd ("troupeau" is not explicitly pronounced until v. 64) is hobbled ("entraves") and his inflexible, eternal condition and burdensome existence are suggested by the mention of "airain" and "plomb". This drama is played out on a negative landscape—"Tous errant sans étoile en un désert sans fond"—suggesting unrelieved desolation and sterility. The unlighted setting, the relative paucity of descriptive vocabulary, seem to play a functional role here, as they point to the very dénuement of man. To this limited vocabulary we can add the relentlessness of the terza rima rhyme scheme⁵. Terza rima (rare in nineteenth-century France; Gautier and Leconte de Lisle make some use of it) is a self-perpetuating form that is unremitting in its enchaînement; it progresses, or rather moves forward, only within the strict limitations of predetermined repetition, and it is no doubt the notion of illusory change—for it cannot break with its own past—that makes it appropriate for this poem.

As the fate of the Fates hangs in an augural balance, the sempiternal, grinding movement of the sphere is suspended, and it is here that the second lexeme is introduced:

Il se fit un silence, et la Terre affaissée
S'arrêta comme fait la barque sans rameurs
Sur les flots orageux, dans la nuit balancée.

This would appear to be a change in register, for the images of the sea and the swimmer suggest liberation and an end to passive, limited situations. All the traditional associations of the sea adventure, from the Homeric periplus to the demonic search of Rimbaud's Bateau ivre—which Vigny's poem anticipates to a largely unnoticed extent—come to mind. (This is indeed the code of liberation in the most optimistic poem of Les Destinées, La Bouteille à la mer.) "Ondes" and "eau" become the new milieu, replacing "désert", and the vocabulary of voyage and exploration dominates one whole line: "Cependant sur nos caps, sur nos rocs, sur nos cimes" (v. 106). Yet, these images of flow and extension are delimited or phrased in such a way—with pejorative modifiers—as to force them into the same negative mold as the prison network. The swimmer is "incertain", the waves are those of "[le] temps qui se mesure et passe", and the voyage is tipped precipitously toward the abyss: "Et, d'un coup, nous renverse au fond des noirs abîmes"⁶. So RESPONSABILITÉ will not replace FATALITÉ, man will not strike out on his own, and the non-reversal of the poem's semantic code (and hence of its message) is confirmed by the appearance of the image of the collar:

Vous avez élargi le COLLIER qui nous lie,
Mais qui donc tient la chaîne?—Ah! Dieu Juste, estce vous?
(vv. 110-11)

COLLIER is an obvious and perhaps predictable variant of the boeuf-joug-entraves paradigm, and with its appearance there comes a fall back into the state of chains (here that of domesticated animal) from which escape was always illusory.

Brooding and plangent, the double register of confinement of Les Destinées projects a failed escape. In the political context of 1849, the poem signals a multiplicity of failed aspirations. It is a reaffirmation of one of Vigny's oldest convictions, that hope is cruel folly. In 1832 Vigny had written "II faut surtout anéantir l'espérance dans le coeur de l'homme" (H, 950). And in the same Journal d un poète, for the same year, we find the transcription of the Docteur Noir's most pessimistic dictum on hope: "L'espérance est la plus grande de nos folies" (II, 945).

Notes

¹ Vigny attached great importance to the phrase C'ÉTAIT ÉCRIT, making it not only the conclusion but also the epigraph of this poem and of the collection as a whole. In Le Malheur which Vigny claims to have written in 1820, we find these verses:

Vers les astres mon oeil se lève;
Mais il y voit pendre le glaive
De l'antique fatalité, (vv. 48-50)

Meditations are consigned to this theme in the Journal d'un poète as early as 1826: "D'où vient que, maigre le christianisme l'idée de la fatalité ne s'est pas perdue?" (Pléiade edition, II, 895) See also an entry for 1832 (II, 965) and one for 1860: "ce que l'antiquité nommait Destin, Fatalité, Sort et le Christianisme Providence" (II, 1353).

Yves Le Hir notes that the term "Jéhovah, est inconnu des premiers traducteurs et des auteurs profanes. Il ne doit pas remonter au-delà du XVI e siècle (Styles. Paris, Klincksieck, 1972, p. 146).

² As for perfidy, P.-G. Castex would seem to offer an opposing view in his commentary of Les Destinées: "Le second moment du poème définit l'esperance chrétienne" (Paris, Société d'Edition d'Enseignement Supérieur, 1964, p. 249).

³ And alliteratively: the first tercet contains four words beginning with a "p". For the notion of weight in Vigny's works, see François Germain's compendious thèse, L'Imagination d'Alfred de Vigny, Paris, José Corti, 1961 [-1962], pp. 152-53, 161-86 (L'Enfer).

⁴ "Borne" is repeated in v. 66, and "sillon" is reinforced by the image of v. 67: "Le moule de la vie était creusé par nous."

⁵ James Doolittle terms its usage in this poem "deliberately plodding" (Alfred de Vigny, New York, Twayne, 1967, p. 98).

⁶ Cf. Pascal: "tout notre fondement craque, et la terre s'ouvre jusqu'aux abîmes" (Brunschvicg 72); an earlier Pascalian note in this poem was the comparison of men to "ces condamnés à mort" (v. 65). For the prison theme in Vigny and its Pascalian resonances, see C. SAVAGE, Cette prison nommée la vie: Vigny's Prison Metaphor, "Studies in Romanticism", 9 (1970), pp. 99-113. Two figures of struggle neglected in my study are the athlète (vv. 24, 89, 101) and the Prometheus figure ("vautour", ν. 16 and "proie éternelle, v. 94).

I would like to acknowledge the gracious assistance of my colleagues George Mauner, Francis and Lois boe Hyslop, Alain de Leiris, and James S Patty, all of whom read this paper and offered valuable suggestions.