SOURCE: "Anteros, Son of Cain?" in Writing in Modern Temper: Essays on French Literature and Thought in Honor of Henri Peyre, edited by Mary Ann Caws, Anma Libri, 1984, pp. 91-101.

[In the following essay, Kneller explicates the poem "Anteros" as the protagonist's announcement of his revolt against God.]

The Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval continue to fascinate us because they are both hermetic and startlingly clear. These sonnets invite us to wonder about their sources, their genesis, and their hidden meanings. They move us by the cogency of their own poetic statement.

Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Hugo, and Baudelaire, Nerval did not write about theories of poetry. Even if he had, he probably would have departed from the generalizations and principles he had developed as he went about the practice of poetry. Here and there throughout his prodigious and varied literary output he scattered traces which have been pursued with sometimes successful and sometimes uncertain results. If it is true that no gap separates Nerval's sources from his writings—or his writings from one another—it is also true that none of the mythological, historical, or biblical figures that stand out in his poems conforms to the accepted characterization of that figure. Their names may well be Artemis, Amor, Phoebus, Orpheus, Isis, or Daphne, or even Caesar, Pilate, or Christ—in which instances we had better know our Sir James George Frazer or our Bible. And if their names are Myrtho, Kneph, Lusignan, Biron, or Delfica, we ought to scurry to more recondite source books. To attempt, however, to resolve these figures into their antecedents is to be guilty of the genetic fallacy.

No belief or attitude of Nerval exists prior to or after any of his works. His figures are new. At the moment of creation, they assume an existence quite apart from their historical, literary, or mythological models and quite apart from the poet himself.

Although Nerval developed no theory of poetry, he did leave us two important passages which can serve as lanterns to guide us through the labyrinth of images in The Chimeras.

At the end of Aurelia, in the "Memorabilia," he writes:

I resolved to fix my dream-state and learn its secret. I wondered "Why should I not break open those mystic gates, armed with all my will, and master my sensations instead of being subject to them? Is it not possible to overcome this enticing, formidable chimera, to lay down a rule for the spirits of the night which make game of our reason?"

This passage states the author's purpose in writing Aurelia. The presence in it of the word "chimera" provides a clue not only to the title of the group of sonnets in which "Anteros" appears, but also to the experimental, explor atory nature which the sonnets share with the prose narrative.

Another passage, earlier in Aurelia, is even more explicit: "Then I saw plastic images of antiquity vaguely taking shape before me, at first in outline, and then more solidly: they seemed to represent symbols, whose meanings I grasped only with difficulty." This sentence tells us much about the process that crystallized out into The Chimeras. The process seems to evolve through the following steps: (1) the fixing of an image associated with a vague spiritual state; (2) the molding of the image and the state into sonnet form; (3) the independent existence of the poem. Such a succession of steps relies heavily on the recapturing of dream-states and the discovery of their meaning.

But Nerval's sonnets are not simply the artistic ordering of recaptured dream-states. Each one of them is a coherent—albeit obscure—statement. Not the expression of an emotion, but, as T.S. Eliot would later say, "the creation of a new emotion."

By creating a new emotion, rather than reflecting a prior emotion, Nerval parts company with prevailing expressive theories of poetry during the Romantic period. He probably never read Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and, in any case, would surely have rejected the formulation that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." His great appeal for us today is—to modify the last two lines of the "Ars Poetica" of Archibald MacLeish—is that for him "a poem must not only mean but be." His sonnets are the forms he gave to his discoveries—the transformed plastic images of antiquity. Our approach to them must respect the unity of each of these forms, the oneness of each experience.

The experience, or new emotion, which concerns us here is metaphysical revolt, about which herewith some background.

Metaphysical revolt was given great currency and put in historical perspective by Albert Camus in The Rebel. Camus would have it go back to the Old Testament account of the Lord's refusal of Cain's offering and Cain's subsequent murder of Abel. It is inseparable from the belief in a personal God, who is not only the creator of all beings but also responsible for all evil. Its development in the history of ideas parallels that of Christianity in the western world. The New Testament, according to Camus, can be considered "as an attempt to reply in advance to all the Cains of the world by mitigating God's countenance, and by creating an intercessor between God and man" [Essais, 1965]. In Camus's logic, Jesus Christ came to solve the two principal concerns of the world's rebels—evil and death: "Only the sacrifice of an innocent God could justify the long, universal torture of innocence."

Metaphysical revolt during the Romantic period merges into satanism and owes much to the writings of John Milton, particularly as emphasized by William Blake. Blake's interpretation of Paradise Lost may very well be challenged today; he nevertheless set the keynote of the Romantic attitude when he declared in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." This interpretation was probably never questioned by the Romantics themselves, who noted that Satan, not Adam, was the central figure of Paradise Lost, and that after the fall he was—in Milton's own terms—"majestic though in ruins." By espousing the right of human beings to redeem themselves, by making an apology for the right to revolt, and by placing humanity at the center of the universe, Milton, with Blake's assistance, opened the way to Romantic satanism.

The affinity for Satanism and metaphysical revolt, as Mario Praz and Max Milner have shown [in The Romantic Agony (1956) and Le diable dans la littérature française (1960), respectively], appears almost everywhere from the end of the eighteenth century on: in Schiller's Die Räuber (1781); in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1787); in Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk (1796); in Shelley's Defense of Poesy (1821); and especially in Lord Byron's Lara (1814), The Corsair (1814), Manfred (1817), The Giaour (1813), and Cain (1821). Jean Richer and Max Milner have discussed these works and their influence on Nerval [Richer, Nerval: Experience et création, 1963].

There can be little doubt that Gerard, more often than not, adhered to Romantic satanism—that, like so many of his contemporaries and immediate literary forbears, he denied that the devil was wicked, that he considered evil as an active force produced by energy, and traditional good as a passive element whose principal characteristic was to follow reason. The sonnet, "Anteros," first published in Daughters of Fire (1853), is—and expresses—Nervalian satanism in its purest form.

Because "Anteros," like all other poems of The Chimeras, is complete in itself and in its order, we shall present it in the original French, which the reader will, we trust, read along with our English approximation and our comments.

     Antéros

Tu demandes pourquoi j'ai tant de rage au coeur
Et sur un col flexible une tête indomptée;
C'est que je suis issu de la race d'Antée,
Je retourne les dards contre le dieu vainqueur.

Oui, je suis de ceux-là qu'inspire le Vengeur,
II m'a marqué le front de sa lèvre irritée,
Sous la pâleur d'Abel, hélas! ensanglantée,
J'ai parfois de Cain l'implacable rougeur!
Jéhovah! le dernier, vaincu par ton génie,
Qui, du fond des enfers, criait: "O tyrannie!"
C'est mon aïeul Bélus ou mon père Dagon…

Ils m'ont plongé trois fois dans les eaux du Cocyte,
Et protégeant tout seul ma mère Amalécyte,
Je ressème à ses pieds les dents du vieux dragon.

The Anteros of the title has, of course, a mythological ancestor. The Greek Anteros does not appear in early myths. He seems to have been shaped late in the cult of the Gymnasia when the ancients, wishing to depict the struggle of passionate instincts which attract or repel, divided Eros into two gods: Eros as consummated love and Anteros as unfilfilled love. The name, which means literally "against love"—ant(i)-Eros—lends itself admirably to ambiguity, since it connotes the negation of love as well as the reciprocity of love. Anteros was the quintessential deus ultor ("avenging god")—the avenger of those whose love has been spurned. As such, he had an altar dedicated to him by the metics, or alien residents, in Athens. On this altar, according to Pausanias, artistic figures told a legend. The Athenian, Meles, was loved by Timagoras, a metic, but returned the love only with scorn and according to his whims. One day he dared Timagoras to plunge from the rocks of the Acropolis. Timagoras was accustomed to gratifying the young man's every whim; feeling in this instance that he should prove his love at the expense of his life, he threw himself headlong to his death. Meles was so shocked and ashamed that he too climbed the rocks to die in the same manner.

Nerval read the consulted Pausanias. He could therefore have known this legend. He might also have seen the passage in which Pausanias describes a bas-relief in a palestra of Elis showing Eros and Anteros wrestling, the former holding a palm branch and the latter trying to get it away from him. He could have seen a marble relief in Naples and especially a bas-relief in the Palazzo Colonna depicting Eros and Anteros wrestling during a torch race. But even granting some prior knowledge on his part of myths or legends concerning Anteros—especially those depicting wrestling matches with Eros—and acknowledging that some familiarity with the stories can enrich our understanding as readers, it is fruitless to see the meaning of Anteros and other figures of this poem beyond the poem itself.

(1) You ask me why my heart rages so (2) And why my head remains unconquered on my flexible neck; (3) It's because I am sprung from Antaeus' race, (4) I hurl back the darts against the conquering god. Who is the tu of the first line? An anonymous interlocutor? The Jehovah of verse nine? If tu is an indefinite person who has asked Anteros the question which has inspired the poem, then the point of view must necessarily shift from the two quatrains, in which Anteros would be speaking of this tu, and the tercets, in which he unambiguously addresses Jehovah. But if we let the tu of the first line be the Jehovah of line nine, the poem acquires not only unity of point of view, but richer connotation.

The mingling of Greek mythology with Old Testament religion becomes more acceptable if we remember that Anteros—and, later, Antaeus—are avatars of their Classical prototypes, playing fresh roles in the world of this poem. The muffled fury of the first two lines goes far beyond Genesis 4:5-7: "but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you so angry and why has your countenance fallen?'"; and even beyond Isaiah 48:4, when the prophet berates the people of Israel: "Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass…" The neck and the head become symbols of his revolt. The neck may have been all too ready to yield, may not have been invincibly rigid; but the head, unabashed, unsubdued, bespeaks eternal resistance to the power of Jehovah.

Throughout the rest of the poem, Anteros gives his reasons. His heart seethes with rage, first, because he is descended from Antaeus. Son of Poseidon and Gaea—God of the Sea and Mother Earth—Antaeus, let us remember, was the giant Libyan king and wrestler whose strength revived every time he touched the earth. Heracles took him on and soon realized that the only way to beat the giant was to lift him high into the air and thus prevent him from renewing contact with Mother Earth, the source of his strength. Holding him aloft, Heracles succeeded in strangling him. Heracles, son of Zeus, kills Antaeus, son of Mother Earth—by trickery. But Antaeus lives on as do all creatures whose destiny was to be slain by the God of Heaven or his delegates, Anteros, descendant of Antaeus, does not shoot arrows at potential or actual lovers; he hurls them back at the "conquering God," who is not Eros but the archetypal embodiment of the victorious sons of heaven.

(5) Yes, I am one of those whom the Avenger inspires, (6) He has put a mark on my brow with his angry lip, (7) Beneath Abel's—alas!—blood-stained paleness, (8) I sometimes show (literally: have) the implacable redness of Cain!

To say that the Avenger of verse five is the conquering god of the previous line is to accuse the poet of redundancy. The Avenger is on the other side. He drives Anteros to revolt against Jehovah, to fling back the arrows and javelins against the conquering god. He has branded Anteros with his angry lip.

Nor can he be the Cain of verse eight. "The Avenger" is indeed an epithet frequently applied to Cain during the Romantic period. Byron so regarded him in Cain: A Mystery, which was lavishly praised by Goethe, Shelley, and Scott, as well as by Nerval. But, again, if Nerval had wanted the Avenger to be Cain, he would have found a better way to do it. The Avenger is the personification of all the meanings of that word—a new figure created by the poet. He is the progenitor of the race of Antaeus, the one from whom Anteros is sprung.

"Cain-colored" is red, since the color of Cain's hair is reputedly red—just as Judas' beard is supposedly red. The Cainites are a heretical sect of the second century, sonamed because they held that Cain was created by a powerful force (fire) and Abel by a weak one (heaven). The Cain-Abel opposition parallels the Avenger-Jehovah struggle. Abel's paleness, or whiteness (the color of heaven) has been bloodied over and over again by the wrathful Jehovah of this poem who has unleashed great evil upon innocent people. Perceiving humanity as being divided into two groups, the chosen and the damned, the sons of Abel and the sons of Cain, Anteros declares his filiation from Cain/Antaeus and his opposition to Abel/Heracles. That his brow should be marked by the Avenger's angry lip is a nice twist. If the Almighty could set a mark on Cain to provide divine protection from physical harm to the first son of Adam, then why couldn't his rival, the Avenger, do the same for Anteros? The Almighty's power to bestow immunity is stolen from him, just as the sacred fire was stolen from Zeus by Prometheus. The mark of Anteros guarantees protection from the despotic abuse of celestial authority. It assures that his head will be unbowed.

Although the entire poem is addressed to him, Jehovah does not appear until verse nine. In this run-on position at the beginning of the first tercet, he serves as a semantic and syntactical linchpin holding the parts of the sonnet together. (9) Jehovah! the last one conquered by your spirit (literally: genius), (10) Who, from the depths of hell, cried out: "O tyranny!" (11) Is my grandfather Belus or my father Dagon…

The last one to be conquered by Jehovah—le dernier—has been identified variously as Dante's, Milton's, or Blake's Satan, and as Julian the Apostate. But a careful reading of the tercet provides a more accurate identification. He is, as Anteros clearly states, Belus—a Babylonian cognate of Baal—or Dagon. Baal is the name used throughout the Old Testament for the deity or deities of Canaan. Among the many biblical stories on this subject, the one depicting the contest between Elijah, representing the God of Israel, and Ahab, fighting for the Canaanite Baal is especially pertinent. Ahab's prayers were ignored, while Elijah's supplication was answered by the "fire of the Lord." Thereupon Elijah ordered the prophets of Baal to be killed and ran seventeen miles before the chariot of Ahab to announce to the people of Jezreel the victory over the forces of Baal (I Kings 18:20-46).

One of the nicknames of Baal was Baalzebub (or Beelzebub), which came to mean "lord of the flies" (a mocking distortion of Baal-zebul—"lord of the divine abode") and was used in the New Testament as a synonym for Satan. This association and the various biblical stories depicting the struggles between the God of Israel and Baal provide a rich historical background for Belus, whose identity is shaped by the context of his poem.

Dagon was an ancient Semitic deity whose cult was adopted by the Philistines. Although he was originally thought to be a fish-god, it is more probable that he was an agricultural deity—the root meaning of the word being "grain." According to many authorities, Dagon is supposed to have taught the use of the plough to humanity; he was considered germane to agricultural fertility. His connection with Cain and Antaeus is thus apparent. Like Gaea, he causes the earth to yield its strength to them. According to most accounts, Dagon was the father of Baal, not vice versa, as in some other versions, and in this poem. But aïeul and père can each mean "one who is the head of a long line of descendants" (Littré) and this meaning makes the most sense here. Jehovah may have vanquished them, but their seed survives in Anteros.

(12) They have plunged me three times into Cocytus' waters, (13) And, quite alone, protecting my Amalekite mother, (14) I sow anew at her feet the teeth of the ancient dragon. By some miracle, Belus and Dagon have immersed Anteros in the wailing waters of the Cocytus, the river tributary to the Styx, in order to protect him from the wrath of Jehovah and to safeguard the smoldering fires of his revenge. This act of triple immersion has, of course, nothing to do with the Christian ceremony of baptism, which is for the remission of sins. It is more akin to the dipping of Achilles in the Styx by his mother, Thetis, in order that Achilles be rendered invulnerable—except at the heel, by which he was held. But instead of being protected by his mother, as Achilles was by Thetis, Anteros defends her against extinction. As with other figures of this poem, we must not try to place an identification tag on this mother. For Anteros, she is the one who takes from the earth, not from heaven, the fiery principle of the Avenger and passes it on from generation to generation. She is an Amalekite, a member of an aboriginal people descended from Esau. Since Esau sold his birthright to his brother Jacob for pottage, he is a proper ancestor for the world's disinherited. The Amalekites waged constant war against the Hebrews until they were wiped out by the Hebrews during the reign of Hezekiah.

On the order of Athene, the goddess of wisdom, Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth in the soil, whereupon Sparti (or "Sown Men") sprang up and looked menacingly at the hero. Cadmus tossed a stone among them, and each of the Sparti accused the other of having thrown it. The javelins began to fly and in the battle that ensued only five survived. These five offered their services to Cadmus.

In another sonnet of The Chimeras, "Delifca," "the conquered dragon's ancient seed" sleeps in the cave, which is "fatal to rash visitors," and "the Sibyl … lies asleep under the arch of Constantine." These images signify the eternal return of religious ideas and they are implied but not clearly stated in "Anteros."

Anteros is silent about slaying dragons and about the role of Athene. But he knows that if he plants the dragon's teeth in the earth mother—or, more precisely, at her feet, as she lies asleep (like the Sibyl)—she will give birth to warriors who will fight on his side against Jehovah, the oppressor.

The sonnet "Anteros" is, thus, a second sowing of the dragon's teeth. No commentaries or prose equivalents can ever explain the enchantment of these fourteen lines. The enchantment can, however, be transformed into deeper pleasure and appreciation by a proper interpretation of the poem's discursive meaning. Such an interpretation must be enriched by an understanding of the mythological, historical, or biblical forbears of the images, symbols, metaphors, and myths which figure in this the best balanced and the most tightly constructed of all the sonnets of Nerval.

Anteros is indeed a son of Cain. He prefigures Camus's rebel. He is the man who says no. He says no to the conquering god, to Abel, and to Jehovah. No to the chosen, but yes to the damned. Yes to Antaeus, to Cain, to Belus, to Dagon, to his Amalekite mother, and, above all, to the Avenger.

The sonnet "Anteros" may not negate, but certainly does contradict, important passages of Aurelia, where the narrator appears to have opted for Christianity. It is the stone and marble of Gerard de Nerval's metaphysical revolt.