SOURCE: Schwartz, Jerome. “The Poet In Bivio: Du Bellay's Spiritual Itinerary in Les Regrets.” In Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays For Donald A. Stone, Jr. edited by Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash, pp. 61-71, Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1994.

[In this essay, Schwartz studies the allegorical and mythical aspects of two of Du Bellay's works.]

Critical response to the Regrets has typically been praise of the small number of masterpieces in the collection, emphasis on the elegiac and satirical poems and neglect of the final 60 sonnets of praise for the French monarchy. A characteristic assessment is Thomas M. Greene's remark that, compared with the greatness of the Antiquitez de Rome, Du Bellay's “aspiration in the Regrets will fall short of poetry's noblest and most proper goals; they rise no higher than a versified journal.”¹ Such a negative evaluation of the Regrets fails to account adequately for the mythic and allegorical dimensions of the sequence, which is not merely a heterogeneous grouping of elegiac, satirical and encomiastic verse, but one which also narrates the spiritual itinerary of the poetic persona. Apart from its external form as “journal,” this collection is no less a “web of ironies” than the Antiquitez.² As Albert Py has written, the paradox of the Regrets is that it sings the impossibility of poetry (“Espace de l'avoir,” 565-71). A disabused credo written under the sign of negation, the Regrets is an enactment both of poetry's dispossession and poetry's desire.

Both sequences are concerned with the relationship between poetry and political power. In the Antiquitez, the power of Rome and the power of Latin poetry are in paradoxical relation to one another. While Imperial Rome in the architectural sense has been reduced to “poudreuses reliques,” the power of Latin literature still exercises its supreme dominion over the Renaissance mind, acting upon it as a reminder of glories accomplished which the European writer can only weakly imitate, but at the same time as a spur to emulation, rivalry and surpassing. The liminary sonnet of the Antiquitez addressed to Henri II is a virtual simulacrum of imperial Rome that announces the resuscitation and reconstruction in France, and in the French language, of the grandeur that was Rome in the person and power of the French monarchy. But the poem is tinged with irony in that the history of Rome and its disappearance (the “poudreuses reliques” of the second quatrain) is already inscribed in the tercets' prayer for Henri's success:

Que vous puissent les Dieux un jour donner tant d'heur,
De rebastir en France une telle grandeur
Que je la voudrois bien peindre en vostre langage:
Et peult estre, qu'à lors vostre grand' Majesté
Repensant à mes vers, diroit qu'ilz ont esté
De vostre Monarchie un bienheureux presage.(3)

In these lines are a complex of ironized themes, an interplay of negation and affirmation. Rebirth of Roman greatness, predictions and hopes of future glories are all predicated on the pillaging of the ruins of empire now reduced to the dust that is the constant memento mori of the futility of human destiny.

In analogous terms, the Regrets opens with persistent negations; not only in the opening sonnets but throughout the sequence the negative statement occupies a predominant position. The poet's refusal of “high” poetry in the first sonnet is, however, despite the insistent negatives, not merely a negative program:

Je ne veulx point fouiller au seing de la nature,
Je ne veulx point chercher l'esprit de l'univers,
Je ne veulx point sonder les abysmes couvers,
Ny desseigner du ciel la belle architecture.

(“54”)

This refusal to embrace Platonic theories of the cosmic poet's divine inspiration is founded on another conception of the poetic function. Not a vessel of the divine afflatus, the poet of the Regrets makes of his verse the site of an interior, and spontaneous dialogue. Not claiming to transcend Time but to be the very creature of human time, Du Bellay's poetic persona asserts a function for poetry that is embedded in the here and now of subjective experience: “Je me contenteray de simplement escrire / Ce que la passion seulement me fait dire” (“Sonnet 4”); “Moy, qui suis malheureux, je plaindray mon malheur” (“Sonnet 5”).

As Yvonne Bellenger has briefly noted, following the hypotheses of Emile Benveniste, there are two je's in the Regrets: the je of the poet/narrator who consciously wills, judges, pities, who is his own witness, and another, passive je, one who has been dispossessed and who complaisantly listens to his sorrows.⁴ The lyricism of the Regrets is inscribed in that space between the two subjects of the discourse—the je de l'énonciation and the je de l'énoncé, between Du Bellay as writer responsible for his discourse and as the passive object of the writer's scrutiny. One could take this further in the attempt to understand the Regrets as a discourse functioning within a dialectical model of the human subject. According to Lacan's account, the true focus of human psychical reality is the “subject”—decentered, unstable, discontinuous, not an entity at all but a lack or a gap—rather than the “ego” as the stable site of identity and selfhood. Behind the ego's discourse in the Regrets lies an unconscious discourse (“le discours de l'Autre”), the discourse of Du Bellay's desiring subject that incapacitates him for selfhood.⁵

Thus the initial sonnets of the sequence pose the foundations of a poetics of subjectivity (or rather, of the “subject”—plain English belies Lacan's notion of the subject) that asserts its independence from humanist models and from the practice of other sixteenth-century French poets. What makes all this interesting and complex, furthermore, is the tension between the poet's explicit statements (those made by the moi-poet/narrator) and the discursive models implemented by this poetic voice. There is a tension, for example, between the sermo pedestris and the dense allusiveness of the language.⁶ The ambiguous poetic voice who pretends to flee the humanist poetic in a negative denial in effect performs what he purports to negate, as in “Sonnet 2”:

Un plus savant que moi, Paschal, ira songer
Avecques l'Ascréan dessus la double cime:
Et pour être de ceux dont on fait plus d'estime,
Dedans l'onde au cheval tout nu s'ira plonger.(7)

An anonymous third-person is the apparent subject of this parodic performance. While at first glance the effect is obscure, once the puzzle is solved and the allusions clarified, the parody of humanist style is obvious, even comical (“tout nu” achieves a certain hyperbolic and ludicrous concreteness). The poet appropriates high style while at the same time rendering it transparent as the vehicle of a discourse that is its own counter-discourse, deflating it from within itself. In the rest of this sonnet, the poetic voice now sets itself apart from the third-person of the first quatrain: “Quant à moi, je ne veux …,” as though to make it clear that the initial quatrain is but a counter-example of what the poet really intends. The concluding lines, however, pose the paradox of a rhyme that is unique and inimitable despite its (deceptive) simplicity, of a poetic style that is a rhymed prose or a prosaic verse forged on no other model than the poet's own. François Rigolot has termed Du Bellay's poetics a “poésie du refus,” citing his refusal of metaphor, his pervasive negativity, his fragmented moi given rather to the simile which atomizes the world.⁸ I would prefer to speak of the ambiguous negativity of the Regrets, the irony and praeteritio⁹ that constitute one of the major features of its rhetoric. Irony and praeteritio are similar rhetorical figures, as Robert Griffin has remarked: “The figure would approach irony if Du Bellay were aware of his duplicity or if this harmless duplicity became apparent to the reader through exaggerated use.”¹⁰ In fact, is it possible to know whether or not Du Bellay was aware of his duplicity and whether or not we may make a strict distinction between conscious and unconscious use of these figures? A reading of the Regrets, in fact, reveals the repeated use of praeteritio and irony as the characteristic rhetorical stance of this collection.

Indeed, these figures have been described from a psychoanalytic point of view as the inverted rhetoric of the unconscious which affirms and asserts through denial.¹¹ Negation in the Regrets is not so much mere negation but dénégation (Freud's Verneinung).¹² What this means in psychoanalytic terms is that the subject formulates the expression of his desire at the same time that he denies it. Rhetorically speaking, this is strictly what a preterition is.

Du Bellay formulates his desire in terms that appear to be univocal denials and refusals but which are, according to a psychoanalytic hypothesis, the simultaneous affirmative expression of the text's unconscious desire.¹³ What I take this to mean is that the je of the Regrets exists at a number of levels which include author, poetic persona, the subject which the reader assumes in reading Du Bellay's text—all both at conscious and unconscious levels. When we speak of the text's unconscious we speak of a phenomenon of trans-subjectivity that functions in ways that are not always available to the consciousness either of author or reader.

Interestingly, Montaigne, in an often-cited passage, spoke intuitively of the unconscious of his text while using the figure of Fortune:

Mais la fortune montre bien encores plus evidemment la part qu'elle a en tous ces ouvrages, par les graces et beautez qui s'y treuvent, non seulement sans l'intention, mais sans la cognoissance mesme de l'ouvrier. Un suffisant lecteur descouvre souvant és escrits d'autruy des perfections autres que celles que l'autheur y a mises et apperceües, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches.¹⁴

In the context of this passage, Fortune “functions in a way akin to the unconscious. It is the principle of hidden organization in texts.”¹⁵ If this is the case, one might say that the figure of Fortune can stand in Renaissance texts not merely for destiny and chance but as well for any imputation of causality that is not understood but that is nevertheless presumed to exist. So it is with Fortune in the Regrets.

While John Lapp has asserted that mythological allusions in the Regrets “might almost be considered … as an ‘anti-poetic’ device,” this is surely not always the case.¹⁶ Certainly, Du Bellay's deployment of the Fortune figure is not confined to ironic uses, except insofar as the wheel of Fortune, the accidents of destiny, are inherently susceptible to what is commonly termed the “irony of fate.” Fortune functions also in alliance with “adventure” in “Sonnet 1,” where, under the guise of an initial and initiatory praeteritio that appears to refuse the high calling of the poet and the Neoplatonic conventions of divine inspiration, the narrative je invokes, implicitly, the figure of Fortune as his tutelary goddess:

Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidents divers
Soit de bien, soit de mal, j'escris à l'adventure.

(ll.7-8)

To write à l'adventure is to invoke the power of Fortune, or as Montaigne suggests, to allow the unconscious to speak. The preterition reinforces the idea that what will emerge in the Regrets are not the prescribed poetic conventions which a court poet obeys, but the displacement of the conventional poetic program by the poet's unconscious desire.

Fortune is frequently paired with Virtue in Renaissance iconography. The two are found together in “Sonnet 3,” framed by a praeteritio. The quatrains oppose the poet's past, when he was not yet exposed to the play of Fortune and was a follower of Apollonian furor, to his present loss of inspiration and suffering; the tercets explain his abandonment of the path followed by Ronsard:

Et c'est pourquoy (Seigneur) ayant perdu la trace
Que suit vostre Ronsard par les champs de la Grace,
Je m'addresse ou je voy le chemin plus batu:
Ne me bastant le coeur, la force, ny l'haleine
De suivre, comme luy, par sueur & par peine
Ce penible sentier qui meine à la vertu.

In my view, the tercets describe a kind of preterition, the disavowal of the intention to scale the heights of virtue (“vertu” here means poetic difficulty and excellence) in order to remain on the beaten path of lesser ambition. I would term this an ironic preterition which reveals something of the unconscious of the Regrets. The final line—alluding to the myth of virtue situated on a rocky mountaintop, which comes, as we know, from Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 289ff.—is a verbatim quotation without quotation marks from Ronsard, a line originally from the Hymne de la philosophie and repeated by Du Bellay in his Hymne de la surdité, l. 146.¹⁷ This line can be interpreted in more than one way: is it proof of Du Bellay's sincerity, that is, has he lost inspiration to the point where he can do no better than import a line of Ronsard's to close his sonnet? Or else, is it, in fact, the pointe that clinches, by an intertextual irony, a reading of the sonnet as a text that subverts from within its apparent assertions? The line appears then in all its cliché-ridden facility as an unconscious discourse running counter to itself.

Another figure that functions frequently in the Regrets and elsewhere in Du Bellay's work is the figure of Hercules at the Crossroads choosing virtus over voluptas. In fact, this figure is implicitly present in “Sonnet 3,” where it seems that Du Bellay, unlike Hercules, chooses the lesser path. In fact, Du Bellay is, in the Regrets, rehearsing a spiritual crisis in which the poet, feeling himself the victim of Fortuna (the generalized figure for the complex of forces—fate, destiny, necessity—indifferent to his talent), is at the same time contemplating the possibility that he may throw off the oppressive weight of these powers by pretending to accept his fate through the preteritions that are really “Freudian negations,” denials that are affirmations in disguise. Du Bellay is actually positioned in the Regrets at the crossroads of Fortuna and Virtus and the focus of the collection is the enactment of an ontological drama in the guise of a moral conversion.

We are familiar enough with the role of Fortune in the sequence. In “Sonnet 6” she is “maistresse”; in sonnets “24” and “82” she is accompanied by allusions to one of her iconographical attributes—the wheel. In “Sonnet 24,” her blindness is the attribute that pits her and Du Bellay, on the one hand, against Amor and Baïf, on the other:

Qu'heureux tu es (Baif) heureux & plus qu'heureux,
De ne suivre abusé ceste aveugle Deesse,
Qui d'un tour inconstant & nous haulse & nous baisse,
Mais cest aveugle enfant qui nous fait amoureux!

and in “Sonnet 82,” where Du Bellay evokes the wheel of Fortune in the context of the round of fickle destinies to which one is enslaved in Rome:

Veuls-tu sçavoir (Duthier) qu'elle chose c'est Rome?
Rome est de tout le monde un publique eschafault,
Une scene, un theatre, auquel rien ne default
De ce qui peult tomber es actions de l'homme.
Icy se void le jeu de la Fortune, & comme
Sa main nous fait tourner ores bas, ores haut.

Rome becomes identified in the Regrets with vice and with the error Du Bellay made in choosing to exile himself there for the wrong reasons. The Regrets sing the lament of that error:

O marastre nature (& marastre es-tu bien,
De ne m'avoir plus sage ou plus heureux fait naistre)
Pourquoy ne m'as tu fait de moymesme le maistre,
Pour suivre ma raison, & vivre du tout mien?
Je voy les deux chemins, & de mal, & de bien:
Je sçay que la vertu m'appelle à la main dextre,
Et toutefois il fault que je tourne à senestre,
Pour suivre un traistre espoir, qui m'a fait du tout sien.

(“45,” ll. 1-8)

It is noteworthy that lines 5-8 articulate two contradictory and coexisting desires. In psychoanalytic terms, the conscious ego recognizes what is called virtue, that is, socially approved desires, but this is suborned by a desire for transgression that has proven itself stronger and has succeeded in lifting the repression against it. The ego, under the domination of repression, finds no pleasure in its transgression and chooses flight in sonnets “50” and “51,” which evoke the possibility of rededication to virtue through moral conversion and self-knowledge: “Sortons (Dilliers) sortons, faisons place à l'envie, / Et fuions desormais ce tumulte civil. … Allons où la vertu, & le sort nous convie. … Banissons la vertu d'un exil volontaire” (“50”). Then, even misfortune can be an ally in the renewed quest for virtue:

Mauny, prenons en gré la mauvaise fortune,
Puis que nul ne se peult de la bonne asseurer,
Et que de la mauvaise on peult bien esperer,
Estant son naturel, de n'estre jamais une.
Le sage nocher craint la faveur de Neptune,
Sachant que le beau temps long temps ne peult durer:
Et ne vault il pas mieulx quelque orage endurer,
Que d'avoir tousjours peur de la mer importune?
Par la bonne fortune on se trouve abusé,
Par la fortune adverse on devient plus rusé:
L'une esteint la vertu, l'autre la fait paroistre:
L'une trompe noz yeux d'un visage menteur,
L'autre nous fait l'amy cognoistre du flateur,
Et si nous fait encor'à nous mesmes cognoistre.

(“51”)

As Robert Griffin has written, “Du Bellay holds that Fortune disregards virtue and at the same time makes it more evident to the individual through self-knowledge” (Coronation of the Poet 139). What we call “self-knowledge,” however, is not a static process; it is dynamic and dialectical, as “Sonnet 51” suggests. This dialectic is functioning in the subjective itinerary of the Regrets. The very misfortune of the poet is what makes him sensitive to the ploys and deceitfulness of others, and prepares him to rededicate himself to virtue with the inevitable passage of fortune's wheel. But when we speak of “self-knowledge” as process we had better understand what we are saying, for psychoanalysis teaches us something about the human psyche that eludes these overly self-confident formulations. The sense of self is an “uneasy fabrication, born under the pressure of others and of the inextirpable otherness that social codes and custom embody” (Bowie 148). The dialectic of self-knowledge described in these sonnets functions also at the level of the text's unconscious. In the guise of the allegorical figures of fortune and virtue a dramatic agon is taking place that is nothing less than a psychomachia in a psychoanalytic sense. “Sonnet 169” evokes the triumph of virtue over fortune:

La fortune (Prelat) nous voulant faire voir
Ce qu'elle peult sur nous, a choisi de nostre aage
Celuy qui de vertu, d'esprit, & de courage
S'estoit le mieulx armé encontre son pouvoir.
Mais la vertu qui n'est apprise à s'esmouvoir,
Non plus que le rocher se meut contre l'orage,
Dontera la fortune, & contre son outrage
De tout ce qui luy fault se sçaura bien pourvoir.

(ll. 1-8)

From this sonnet onward, Fortune disappears from the Regrets as a powerful force and gives way to the predominance of virtue in the final 30 sonnets of the collection. The myth of Virtue (according to Hesiod, situated at the summit of a rocky mountain) is combined with the story of Hercules at the Crossroads, as in “Sonnet 172”:

Voicy de la vertu la penible montee,
Qui par le seul travail veult estre surmontee:
Voila de l'autre part le grand chemin battu,
Où au sejour du vice on monte sans eschelle.
Deça (Seigneur) deça, où la vertu t'appelle.
Hercule se fit Dieu par la seule vertu.(18)

Indeed, the figure of Hercules, who passed through purifying flames before ascending to heaven as an immortal, comes to the fore in the second half of the Regrets. One entire sonnet, number “117,” which other commentators have found “out of place,” “troublesome,” or “puzzling,” is devoted to the theme of fire.¹⁹ This sonnet can, however, be viewed as critical in the mythic and moral context of the Regrets in relation to the Hercules story and its exemplary value for Du Bellay. The Screech edition quotes in a footnote the text of another sonnet of Du Bellay's (Oeuvres 2: 259) in which the theme of fire, explicitly associated with the myth of Hercules, is the vehicle for the poet's desire for transcendence:

Tout ce qu'on voit universellement
Resent du feu la nature divine,
Du feu qui tout purge, esprouve & affine,
Comme plus noble & parfaict element.
Hercule mesme, avant qu'au firmament
Feust eslevé pour faire un nouveau signe,
De Juppiter n'en fut estimé digne
Que par le feu purgé premierement.
Et moy, pour m'estre approché de ce feu,
Je me sens ja esloigner peu à peu
De tout penser terrestre & vicieux.
Mais si l'ardeur penetre jusqu'à l'ame,
J'espere bien sur l'aile de ma flamme
Laisser la terre & m'en voler aux cieux.(20)

“Sonnet 117,” while not as specifically Neoplatonic, nevertheless functions in its immediate context as a philosophical vision of the divine fire that would purify base matter and restore the purity of a new spiritual beginning. The preceding sonnet announces the theme of war and creates a martial context in which Rome is potentially consumed in the apocalyptic yet abstract conflagration of “Sonnet 117.”

Themes of the poems just quoted are fused in “Sonnet 189,” Du Bellay's final expression in the Regrets of the poet's desire to emulate Hercules' choice, to have virtue triumph over fortune, to reenact the Herculean apotheosis and appropriate it as his own:

Cependant (Pelletier) que dessus ton Euclide
Tu monstres ce qu'en vain ont tant cherché les vieux,
Et qu'en despit du vice, & du siecle envieux
Tu te guindes au ciel comme un second Alcide:
L'amour de la vertu, ma seule & seure guide,
Comme un cygne nouveau me conduit vers les cieux,
Où en despit d'envie, & du temps vicieux,
Je rempliz d'un beau nom ce grand espace vide.
Je voulois comme toy les vers abandonner,
Pour à plus hault labeur plus sage m'addonner:
Mais puis que la vertu à la louer m'appelle,
Je veulx de la vertu les honneurs raconter:
Aveques la vertu je veulx au ciel monter.
Pourrois-je au ciel monter aveques plus haulte aelle?

This poem, complimenting Peletier, who turned from poetry to mathematics, is far from “the ultimate disparagement of poetry in the Regrets,” as Katz would have it (The Ordered Text 194). Although it speaks of virtue not in the sense he had used the word in “Sonnet 3” (virtue as the conquest of poetic technique) but in a strictly ethical sense, this does not mean that poetry is being downgraded as quasi-Platonic imitation (Katz 194). Poetry is not conceived here as mere praise in the sense of paid flattery, but as dedication to virtue itself and because of this, coinciding with virtue itself. If we compare the context of “Sonnet 3” with that of “Sonnet 189,” we observe a clear contrast between Fortune and virtue in Hesiod's terms as a painful and difficult ascent to the mountaintop, and the Herculean apotheosis to which Du Bellay aspires. Transfigured, “comme un cygne nouveau,” and under the guidance of virtue, the poet rises toward his apotheosis, utterly displacing the melancholic swans of “Sonnet 16.” This sonnet is in every way the counterpoint to the previous one, “188,” where Du Bellay returns, in a final reminiscence, to the preteritions with which the collection opened—preteritions in which he appears to reject “fable” in favor of “veritable histoire.” As Screech notes, “Du Bellay exagère ici, en partie pour flatter Paschal, historien” (ed. Regrets 264n). “Je ne veulx deguiser ma simple poesie / Sous le masque emprunté d'une fable moisie, / Ny souiller un beau nom de monstres tant hideux.” But in fact Du Bellay has by no means rejected the role of myth in the overall plan of the Regrets, and the figures of Fortune and Virtue, and especially of Hercules, are never ironized (as are, for example, those of Ulysses and Jason), and preside over the mythical unity of the Regrets.

And yet, one may ask, what of the altered role of poetry, those lowered sights, that ironization of poetry to which I alluded at the beginning? Does not Du Bellay's return to encomium with his return to France in the last third of the Regrets prove ironically that Du Bellay merely resigns himself cynically to the poet's dependence on courtiers, flattery, all the courtly vices which make his praise of virtue hollow indeed?

Notwithstanding the ironies of the concluding sonnets, Du Bellay's repeated praise of Marguerite in the final sonnets (“174-90”) is different from all the other poems of praise. In these poems, Marguerite is the embodiment, as it were, of the allegorical figure of virtue. Not reducible to her physical existence, nor merely to her royal identity, she is the essence of virtue itself, both signifier and signified, image and concept of virtue victorious over fortune.²¹ Just before the end of the sequence, despite the final two sonnets which evoke a France devoid of beauty and poetry and the poet's nothingness totally dependent on an ironically inflated royal power (“Car rien n'est apres Dieu si grand qu'un roi de France”), it is the figure of Marguerite/Virtue who synthesizes the poetic persona's spiritual itinerary from exile to return, symbolizes the transcendant desire of poetry for spiritual perfection—beyond elegy and satire, beyond the dissatisfaction of ego, the failed ambitions of career, the cupidities of bodily existence. If only in a virtual sense, the poet of the Regrets contemplates the possibility of realizing his desire—to go beyond regret itself, to reclaim, in the immolating, self-consuming fire of virtue, his soul's true homeland.

Notes

1. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1982) 230. But cf. Albert Py, “Espace de l'avoir, espace de l'être dans les ‘Regrets’ de Du Bellay,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 79 (1979): 563-76.

2. See Richard A. Katz, The Ordered Text: The Sonnet Sequences of Du Bellay (New York, Berne, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985). While I find some of Katz's ironic readings persuasive, the present essay is in part an attempt to refute Katz's thesis that the final epideictic poems are ironic.

3. Les Regrets et autres oeuvres poëtiques, eds. J. Jolliffe and M. A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1966) 271.

4. Du Bellay: Ses ‘Regrets’ qu'il fit dans Rome … (Paris: Nizet, 1975) 99.

5. I rely here on Malcolm Bowie's account of the Lacanian subject in his Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 114-17.

6. On sermo pedestris see Floyd Gray, La Poétique de Du Bellay (Paris: Nizet, 1978) 58-78.

7. L'Ascréan is Hesiod; la double cyme is Mount Parnassus; l'onde au cheval is Hippocrene, the fountain sacred to the Muses. See Screech ed., notes ad loc.

8. “Du Bellay et la poésie du refus,” BHR 36 (1974): 489-502.

9. Praeteritio is the figure by which one mentions subjects one claims not to discuss.

10. Coronation of the Poet: Joachim Du Bellay's Debt to the Trivium (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969) 55.

11. See Paul-Laurent Assoun, “L'Ironie comme rhétorique de l'inconscient,” in Analyses et réflexions sur “De l'art de conferer,” de Montaigne et l'ironie (Paris: Edition Marketing, 1980) 157-65; and for an analysis of Racine's Phèdre built on Freudian negation, see Francesco Orlando, Toward a Freudian Theory of Literature, trans. Charmaine Lee (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) [originally published in Italian in 1971 and 1973].

12. See Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961) 19: 235-39.

13. The hypothesis of the text's unconscious has been formulated by J. Bellemin-Noel, Vers l'Inconscient du texte (Paris: PUF, 1979), quoting B. Pingaud: “Dans l'oeuvre ce n'est plus l'écrivain qui parle, c'est, en quelque sorte, le texte lui-même—un texte qui, en se fermant sur soi, l'exclut. … On pourrait dire que le texte est le gardien du fantasme, qu'il incorpore, annexe, manipule pour en faire sa substance propre, l'arrachant ainsi au vécu de l'auteur. Dès lors, la critique psychanalytique n'a de chances d'atteindre son véritable object que si elle pose, au départ, l'hypothèse d'un inconscient du texte … “(119).

14. Essais, I, 24: 127 [PUF edition].

15. Jeffrey Mehlman, “La Boétie's Montaigne,” Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 51.

16. The Brazen Tower (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1977) 26-27, quoted in Richard A. Katz, The Ordered Text 83-84. I do not agree with Katz's assertion, altering Lapp, that such poems are not merely “frequently ironic,” but “invariably so” (Katz 206).

17. See Divers Jeux rustiques, ed. V. L. Saulnier (Paris: Droz, 1947) 182-83, and notes.

18. Screech notes (ad loc.) Du Bellay's combining of Hesiod and the myth of the choice of Hercules.

19. Katz 212-13. Cf. Screech, who asks “Que fait dans les Regrets ce sonnet philosophique?” (Regrets 191n1). Indeed, this sonnet is a prime example of the lofty poetry that Du Bellay's poetic persona excludes/includes in the Regrets by ironic preterition.

20. As quoted in Regrets, Screech ed. 191.

21. Although I do not subscribe to all her assertions, Marie-Dominique Legrand, “Explication du sonnet 176 des Regrets de Joachim Du Bellay,” Information Littéraire 39 (1987): 84-88, underlines the importance of the Marguerite poems in establishing the unconventional status of encomium in the Regrets: “les poèmes qui achèvent Les Regrets donnent a posteriori une signification à l'éloge et à la satire. Dispersé dans les palinodies de l'enfer romain, le moi du poète retrouve ici son unité, son identité; la poésie retrouve son sens: le voyage était une initiation, une catharsis” (88).