SOURCE: “Mirror Images in ‘La Maison du berger,’” in French Review, Vol. 56, No. 3, February, 1983, pp. 393-99.

That homely object the mirror has played over the centuries an extraordinarily rich metaphoric role. At various times a figure of human vanity, an image of the mimetic function of art, or a mythic emblem of self-consciousness, it has lately been elaborated and enriched as a metaphor of human consciousness by psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray. In his essay “Le Stade du miroir”¹ Lacan brilliantly condenses Hegel's description of self-consciousness and Freud's formulation of narcissism into a new mythic figure: the child before the mirror. In Lacan's view the process by which the child reaches self-consciousness always includes the splitting and projection of the self into an external image so that the self is first perceived as being out there, in the mirror. The formation of the Ego, one of the products of this defensive strategy, thus inextricably links visual processes with aggressive impulses.

In Speculum de l'autre femme (1974), Luce Irigaray develops further the meaning of this myth by asserting that the child before the mirror must of necessity be a male. His otherness, i.e., his femaleness, is aggressively split off and projected into the inverted image of the mirror self. While Irigaray insists that the predominance of vision in the formation of identity is a peculiarly male characteristic, she does share two assumptions with Lacan: first, that the processes of vision are linked with aggressivity; and second, that the phenomenology of sight will yield a general logic and geometry defining the subject's relationship to space and finally to the outside world.

Lacan says in “Le Stade du miroir,” “l'image spéculaire semble être le seuil du monde visible” (p. 95). As “the threshold of the visible world,” the mirror takes on, then, a central hermeneutic role in the meaning of seeing. The ancient vanitas and speculum mundi have evolved into a psyché, a looking glass, in which we simultaneously look out and into ourselves. The mirror has become the image of the sighted psyche.

All of this seems a long way from Romantic poetry, but the psychoanalytic mirror will serve us well as we look at Alfred de Vigny's poem “La Maison du berger” (1844). The very lexicon of the poem, studded as it is with mirrors and sight imagery, seems to make an appeal to the reader to see the seeing in this poem. Vigny's belief in the Romantic notions of poetry as a concentrating mirror and in the poet as Seer is well known. I would like to go beyond these beliefs in order to examine, in the light of Lacan's and Irigaray's myths, what this poetry reflects and how the Seer sees.

“La Maison du berger” is in the form of a letter addressed by the poet to his mistress, Eva, pressing her to flee the city with him. But Vigny immediately introduces a new and curious modification of the traditional ethics of Romantic pastoralism. As the poet presents it, the corruption and moral decay attendant on urban life do not depend, as one might expect, on the superficiality and dishonesty of city dwellers, but rather on the inevitable and unavoidable visibility of the individual to the gaze of anonymous lookers:

Si ton corps, frémissant des passions secrètes,
S'indigne des regards, timide et palpitant;
S'il cherche à sa beauté de profondes retraites
Pour la mieux dérober au profane insultant,
.....Pars courageusement, laisse toutes les villes.

(Vv. 15-18, 22)

In this passage, it seems to be the very visibility of his mistress that makes her morally vulnerable, as if she could be penetrated and possessed by these insulting looks. The poet paradoxically reveals the sadistic component of his own visual imagination and at the same time imagines the woman timidly palpitating under the powerful and oppressive gaze of the multitude. Vigny has supplanted the traditional ethics of pastoralism by another ethics inherent in what he conceives to be the power politics of vision. Eva's passion, for instance, is no more pure than the villainous desires of the city dwellers. What gives it its particular taint is its public visibility. The poet can therefore protect and purify his mistress by taking her away into hiding: “Viens y cacher l'amour et ta divine faute” (v. 47).

In this initial section of the poem, vision creates its own moral dynamics: it is a closed system, defined by extreme polarities and by either/or oppositions. To be seen is to be blinded and made powerless by the look of the other in a visual process of pre-emption and sexual debasement. The moral polarities set up here by Vigny promote prostitution, in its original etymological sense, to the position of major crime in urban social life: Eva is shamed by standing forth in the other's field of vision.

The logic and tone of the opening section lead us to expect that the proposed pastoral retreat will serve the purpose of establishing a form of interaction superior to the prostitution of city life. We expect Vigny to erect a third observation post from which he can watch both the seers and the seen. But although his physical retreat from society seems to propose this new triangular geometry to us, emotionally the poet remains within the dyadic struggle for visual mastery. His removal from society is not so much a liberation as a strategic retreat meant to enhance his position on the battlefield. Vigny does not spurn society's duel of looks but rather maneuvers in order to win it by reversing the direction of forces. He flees the self-alienation of visibility in order to achieve mastery as the Seer.

The poet's pastoral retreat is a feint, then, meant to enslave the multitudes who have enslaved him: “Du haut de nos pensers vois les cités serviles / Comme les rocs fatals de l'esclavage humain” (vv. 24-25). From his elevated position, the poet establishes his power by looking down on the multitudes, both physically and morally. He becomes “un roi de la Pensée,”² and his gift of poetic vision is defined in this moral scheme precisely by the dominance he achieves by being able to see without being seen.

The poet must thus be concealed, and the landscape he describes as his asylum is seen as a function of this need. By a process of emotional projection onto the visible world, Nature is turned into a reflection of the poet's desires. The place of hiding becomes itself a process of self-concealment: “La forêt a voilé ses colonnes profondes / La montagne se cache” (vv. 33-34).

The poet hides himself in the hiding of Nature. He takes refuge in the mobile shepherd's hut. But eventually he finds his surest asylum in an unexpected place, the gaze of his mistress:

Je verrai si tu veux, les pays de la neige,
Ceux où l'astre amoureux dévore et resplendit,
.....Que m'importe le jour? Que m'importe le monde?
Je dirai qu'ils sont beaux quand tes yeux l'auront dit.

(Vv. 57-58, 62-63)

The poetic process is here expressed entirely in terms of sight and vision. It is, in fact, a strangely silent process, promoted only by Eva's will to see. In a wordless exchange, Eva provides the will to see while the poet furnishes the power of vision. By means of this symbiosis the poet becomes a passive instrument while maintaining his power of sight through the will of a blind other. The poet is thus safely shielded by Eva from the dangers of visibility. Her gaze becomes a mask for the poet to hide behind. And this mask has a double function: it protects the poet both from the hostile looks of others and from the responsibility of his own desire to be a Seer.

This desire, which appears here as a gift of love, reveals its root in the soil of aggressivity, affirming Lacan's assertion that altruism is always the product of a deeper wish to destroy: “le sentiment altruiste est sans promesse pour nous, qui perçons à jour l'aggressivité qui sous-tend l'action du philanthrope, de l'idéaliste … voire du réformateur” (p. 100).

The aggressivity underlying the will of this poetic idealist and pastoral reformer becomes extraordinarily clear in the following section of the poem. Having secured Eva as a mask, as the source of his sight, the poet unleashes a series of angry imprecations whose aggressive power produces images of hallucinatory brilliance. Vigny's poetry, which he calls elsewhere “le miroir magique de la vie” (Journal, II, 1192), seems rather here to turn into a carnival gallery of distorting mirrors, for everything the poet looks at becomes twisted into the grotesque shapes of corruption.

Seeing, here, is a process of laying bare, of penetrating and possessing, just as previously the gazes of the “profane insultant” violated Eva. Politicians, statesmen, even the Muse, appear to the poet as actors in the debasing drama of prostitution described earlier. As before, Vigny translates relationships of power inherent in social visibility into the language of promiscuous and sadistic sexuality. Even the virgin Muse is transformed by the poet's angry gaze into “une fille sans pudeur” singing like a street-walker “aux carrefours impurs de la cité” (vv. 155, 158). And what corrupted her, what made her bad, was precisely her solicitation, not of sex, but of the other's look: “Dès que son œil chercha le regard des satyrs / Sa parole trembla, son serment fut suspect” (vv. 150-51).

What the poet's second look at society reveals is that things are exactly the opposite of what they first seemed to be. As in the opening section of the poem, all reality is divided into a closed system of polar opposites; gradations are banished; hierarchies denied. All aspects of human life thus fall into mutually exclusive categories: love or hate, master or slave, virgin or prostitute. Looking at the world is like looking at a mirror where every image is reversed, turned around. Vigny literalizes this process of reversal and betrayal in an image of sexual inversion. As the final instance of the debauchery of the Muse, the poet pictures her in ancient Greece, perched happily in the midst of a pederastic festival: “Un vieillard t'enivrant de son baiser jaloux / […] parmi les garçons t'assit sur ses genoux” (vv. 163, 165).

What is most interesting about this economy of projection, reversal, and inversion is that the poet participates blindly in his own process of vision. While presenting himself as the pastoral poet who is “above it all,” he is actually the occasion for the very depravity he reviles. His own look prostitutes the object of his gaze. So while he thought to hide from the capricious and hostile power of the other's look, he has, in fact, hidden from his own aggression. Although the angry and debasing thrusts of his look are concealed from the poet's consciousness, they become paradoxically visible everywhere in the spectacle of the outside world. The poet's anger, which he does not acknowledge as his own, seems therefore to be coming at him from the outside.

This blind spot, the focus of the poet's denied aggression, becomes particularly visible in Vigny's dazzling diatribe against the railroad. The railroad appears first of all as the corrupt and sexually inverted counterpart of the shepherd's hut. While the rolling hut wanders free like the “mobile pensée” (v. 251) of the female mind, the phallic railroad reduces space into a network of constricting straight lines. This coldly predictable machine re-emerges, however, in the contradictory guise of a fiery bull that eats up men and boys. In the poet's double vision the steam engine is at once a scientific apparatus and a dangerous, perverse monster:

Sur le taureau de fer qui fume, souffle et beugle,
L'homme a monté trop tôt. Nul ne connaît encor
Quels orages en lui porte ce rude aveugle.
.....Son vieux père et ses fils, il les jette en otage
Dans le ventre brûlant du taureau de Carthage.

(Vv. 78-80, 82-83)

While the presentation of the railroad as a “chemin triste et droit” (v. 121) logically furthers the pastoral thematics of the poem, the ambivalence of Vigny's vision is overwhelmed by its own wildness. The mythical “dragon mugissant” (v. 90) devours its own impotent apparition as cold machinery, just as the monster's unseeing eye stares down the poet with the blindness of his own rage.

The poet's helplessness in the face of his own anger finally structures all knowledge in a paranoid mode. Vigny views the truth as a hostile force whose main property is to victimize him. This anguished sense of victimization, of undeserved betrayal, takes shape in the second apparition of Nature. The poet's aggression finally breaks out of its silent hiding place in Eva's gaze and speaks in the voice of a proud and punishing woman:

“Je n'entends ni vos cris ni vos soupirs; à peine
Je sens passer sur moi la comédie humaine
Qui cherche en vain au ciel ses muets spectateurs,
Je roule avec dédain sans voir et sans entendre.”

(Vv. 285-88)

The split of the poet's consciousness is reified in this hallucinatory image of Nature where the actual relationship of self and other is at once proposed and denied. To the poet's bitter disappointment, Nature does not recognize him as her own; but, on the other hand, neither does the poet recognize her as his double. The poet's own blindness has made him invisible. The unseeing stare of his own image looks through him as if he were not there. The nightmare of reflexivity has been accomplished; the impalpable figure in the mirror has become the source of vision, while the Ego has dissolved into nothingness.

Significantly, this I/eye, this distanced self whom he does not recognize, is envisaged by the poet not as a “he” but as a “she,” la marâtre Nature, an unnatural and perverse mother. What the poet has cut off from consciousness and rejected as a debasing component of his identity is therefore not only his aggression but also the female part of himself. The poet as “she” appears in two images in the poem: in the punishing but eloquent figure of Nature and in the passive, silent figure of Eva. In the last section of the poem, following the song of Nature, the themes of narcissism and split consciousness finally become explicit in the metaphor of the mirror.

Eva is described as a reflecting pool where God has forever fated narcissistic man to contemplate himself, “tourmenté de s'aimer, tourmenté de se voir” (v. 231). She thus becomes simultaneously a passive instrument of reflection and the place where the poet will inscribe his self-knowledge. Poetry, “ce fin miroir solide, étincelant et dur” (v. 200), and woman, “ce miroir d'une autre âme” (v. 234), merge in a bivalent symbol where love and vision blend in the single process of producing self-conscious poetic language. In his effort to forestall the dizzying process of self-contradiction and reversal, the poet here seeks unity as poetry looking at itself. Doubleness of vision seems at last evaded; subject and object, reflection and mirror, appear to fuse in the shining diamond of poetry's song.

But like someone trying in a quick turn to catch a glimpse of his own back, poetry's look at itself must of necessity be fleeting and oblique. In order to see as One, in order to see the One, the poet must try to immobilize this evanescent moment of first sight: “Aimez ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois” (v. 308). What one sees only once is “true” because it does not change: it is forever fixed in its initial appearance. The truth is made One, is made pure, only by its disappearance.

Once again, the poet's effort to escape the tormenting vision of his own Otherness is not achieved through synthesis and integration but rather by a repetition of the same denial that was the original source of his alienation. The poet can no more recuperate the denied part of himself by visualizing it out there in a female reflection than Narcissus could be requited by his own image in a pool. Eva's very function as reflection disables her as a healer of the poet's narcissistic wound; immobilized by her imagined passivity, she is powerless to desire. Her love therefore can find expression only in regret, in mourning:

appuyée aux branches incertaines
Pleurant comme Diane au bord de ses fontaines
Son amour taciturne et toujours menacé.

(Vv. 334-36)

At the end of “La Maison du berger,” the image of the mirror is itself split as it becomes the figure of an irreversibly divided consciousness. The aggression and dissolution inherent in self-enunciation splinter Vigny's mirror of poetry into two component parts. On the one hand, the quick-silver reflecting surface embodied in Eva, the moon-maiden, is the projection of the poet's passive femininity, of the silence and dissolution that threaten him, of the death that inhabits him. On the other hand, the poet isolates himself within the crystal covering of the mirror to become the pure, preserving Word, self-present and diamond-hard, never menaced by change or dissolution.

As a result of this final splitting, the poet remains an everlasting “pur esprit, roi du monde / […] / visible Saint-Esprit,”³ while his Other, woman, becomes the pool of banishment where the poet's frailty, his mortality, shimmers palely in the light reflected from the sun of his intellect. The female part of the mirror becomes the mercurial image of fleeting time while the male part represents the imperishable diamond of thought. He is the One, and she is the process of self-destruction that sustains his unity.

The two parts are contiguous without ever being joined, since fusion with his Other represents for Vigny a horrifying and repugnant union with his own death, with his own putrefaction. The preserving crystal and the quick-silver of mortality are separated by an infinitesimal space, the pressurized domain of fear and hostility whose purpose it is to keep death at a safe distance, out there.

But by exteriorizing his own death, Vigny has paradoxically and tragically cut himself off from his own vitality. In his attempt to localize his fear and anger in the outside world, he has, in fact, rendered himself defenseless against them. These feelings that threaten from within become hauntingly omnipresent without; they color all that the poet sees with a somber and heavily charged light. The triumphant figures of life and independence in “La Maison du berger” are persistently overshadowed by the specters of death and dependence. All expressions of love in this poem have, if I may use the term, a necrophilic halo. Nature, that sweet refuge, is also a tomb; the shepherd's hut, the symbol of Romantic revery, is called a “char nocturne” (v. 53); and the nuptial bed, erotic bower of pleasure, turns into a coffin-like “lit silencieux” (v. 56). The diamond of poetry itself becomes a dazzling and sadistic evil eye whose aggressive rays flutter fatally around the image of the mourning mistress, forever weeping, forever silent, forever dying.

Vigny experiences his relationship with the world as a duel with a persecuting Other. As the place where he can be most intensely alone and therefore most significantly in control of this duel, poetry becomes for Vigny a kind of therapeutic process of self-domination by dominating others. But this poetry, which represents for Vigny the gift of sight, is also a focus of his own blindness. The mimetic function of poetry, this “miroir magique de la vie,” is thus fragmented and undermined by its function as psyché, the narcissistic looking-glass. The mirror of life is dismantled in “La Maison du berger” in a personal mythology that will persist in Vigny's poetry. The reflecting quick-silver of the world, at once beautiful and menacing, is separated from the crystal protective surface, the diamond of poetry, which will sing its invulnerability in a language blanched by its own purity and impoverished by its very unity.

Notes

1. Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 93-100.

2. Vigny, Le Journal d'un poète, in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), II, 1192.

3. “L'Esprit pur” (1863), vv. 50, 56.