i) From unicity to multiplicity

Quand j'organise une descente en Moi,
J'en conviens, je trouve là, attablée,
Une société un peu bien mêlée,
Et que je n'ai point vue à mes octrois.

Such is the experience of the speaker of Laforgue's poem "Ballade." "JE est un autre," Rimbaud had written some fifteen years earlier, in the context of his critical remarks about Romantic poetry; Laforgue shares this sense of the "otherness" of the self, insisting indeed on the presence of a multiplicity of "others." According to Warren Ramsey, Laforgue had learned from the philosopher Hartmann "to think of the human individual as an aggregate, a sum of many individuals." Such a viewpoint must clearly affect the nature of the poetic "I," tending to invalidate the notion of the single, unified persona typical of Browning's early dramatic monologues, and of the lyric "I" associated with Romantic poetry. Yet Laforgue had begun writing in a highly Romantic vein: the speaker of the poems collected under the title Le Sanglot de la terre, but never published, dwells constantly on his own personal preoccupations: his awe at the vastness of the universe; his shocked awareness of the insignificance and transience of man's life; his horror of death. "Je puis mourir demain" is an oft-repeated phrase, and he hates to think that after death "Tout se fera sans moi!" ("L'Impossible"). These poems are of a philosophical cast, inspired by Laforgue's reading of Hartmann and his knowledge of Schopenhauer; the tone is for the most part one of high seriousness. Meditations on the fate of mankind produce a sense of cosmic despair:

Eternité, pardon. Je le vois, notre terre
N'est, dans l'universel hosannah des splendeurs,
Qu'un atome où se se joue une farce éphémère.
("Farce éphémère")

The speaker of these poems pontificates about Man and Life in verse reminiscent of both Hugo and Baudelaire:

Enfin paraît un jour, grêle, blême d'effroi,
L'Homme au front vers l'azur, le grand maudit, le roi.

…. .

La femme hurle aux nuits, se tord et mord ses draps
Pour pondre des enfants vils, malheureux, ingrats.
("Litanies de misère")

Already in February 1881 Laforgue expressed "disgust" with this early verse; by 1882 he was more emphatic: "Je me suis aperçu que mon volume de vers était un ramassis de petites saletés banales et je le refais avec rage." The result of this burst of activity in 1883 was the Complaintes, published in 1885.

[Warren Ramsey notes in Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, 1953, that there exists] in the majority of the Complaintes, "a movement towards dramatization, a tendency, having its origin in self-awareness and selfdefence, to exteriorize the lyric emotion." This exteriorization is achieved largely through the use of different voices, leading away from the straightforward expression of the personal feeling of a single "I." The disgust Laforgue later felt for the Sanglot poems was undoubtedly partly inspired by their self-centred mode of writing: in the "Préludes autobiographiques," a long poem which he insisted on including as a prologue to the Complaintes in order to show what his literary "autobiography" had been and how his poetic aims had changed, he mocks his former tendency to see himself as the centre of the universe:

The themes of the Complaintes are often similar to those of the Sanglot poems, but they are treated differently. Instead of the first-person diction of Le Sanglot de la terre, thoughts and feelings are distributed among many voices belonging to different personae and expressed indirectly, resulting in a much lighter, less morbid type of verse, even when the subject is still death. In the poem "Guitare," from the Sanglot collection, a solemn narrating (or sermonizing) voice predicts, in alternating alexandrines and octosyllables, the death of a beautiful Parisienne and how soon she will be forgotten by her contemporaries. No "I" speaks in this poem, but the address to the lady in the second person presupposes a first-person "shifter," a lyric "I," as the serious-minded speaker of these lines. In the Complaintes, however, the very different "Complainte de l'oubli des morts" also treats the theme of the dead being forgotten by the living, but the identity of the poem's speaker radically alters the tone of the poem. Rather than a heavily moralistic accent we hear the more light-hearted, if wistful, voice of the grave-digger, a man with plenty of experience of death, which explains his familiar, almost flippant remarks:

He has considerable sympathy for the dead ("Pauvres morts hors des villes!") and his attitude to the living is not without sympathy, though the very nature of his employment represents a threat to them, as he gently points out:

Mesdames et Messieurs,
Vous dont la soeur est morte,
Ouvrez au fossoyeux
Qui claque à votre porte;

Si vous n'avez pitié,
Il viendra (sans rancune)
Vous tirer par les pieds,
Une nuit de grand'lune!

The introduction of the grave-digger's voice, the shorter lines and choppier rhythms, together with the removal of the Baudelairean emphasis on pourriture that we find in "Guitare," transform a slow-moving, trite poem-sermon into a much more original and effective one.

The question of love arises less often than one might expect in the Sanglot collection, the "I" of these poems being preoccupied with his own destiny to the exclusion of all else. In one poem, however, "Pour le livre d'amour," he complains that

Je puis mourir demain et je n'ai pas aimé.
Mes lèvres n'ont jamais touché lèvres de femme,
Nulle ne m'a donné dans un regard son âme,
Nulle ne m'a tenu contre son coeur pâmé.

Je n'ai fait que souffrir….

This expression of personal distress can easily be read as that of the poet himself. At one point in the Complaintes we hear virtually the same phrase, "Nulle ne songe à m'aimer un peu," but the whole tone of this poem, the "Complainte de l'automne monotone," suggests an ironical attitude on the part of the speaker towards himself, a self-awareness which tends, as Ramsey says, to "exteriorize the lyric emotion":

The words "nulle ne veut m'aimer" recur again in the Complaintes but this time in the mouth of a third person, the "lui" of the "Complaintes des pubertés difficiles"—a thin disguise for Laforgue himself perhaps, but a disguise nevertheless, once more indicating a desire to disclaim direct responsibility for the utterance:

Mais lui, cabré devant ces soirs accoutumés,
Où montait la gaîté des enfants de son âge,
Seul au balcon, disait, les yeux brûlés de rages:
"J'ai du génie, enfin: nulle ne veut m'aimer!"

Laforgue uses various disguises, or masks, throughout the Complaintes: the "ange incurable" and the "Chevalier errant," the "roi de Thulé," the "Sage de Paris" and, most of all, Pierrot. Each disguise makes possible the utterance of a new voice. In subsequent collections also, L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la lune and the Derniers vers, different voices can be heard, speaking, in David Arkell's words [Looking for Laforgue, 1979], for the "multiple selves of Laforgue and others." It is significant that this move from a unified to a multiple self accompanies Laforgue's choice of a more popular, collective form, since the complainte was originally a type of folk-song. Henri Davenson, in his Livre des chansons, distinguishes two categories of oral folk-song, "les rondes ou chansons à danser que caractérise la présence d'un refrain," and "les complaintes ou récits continus" which have affinities with English "complaints" and ballads. Ballads are a form without an author not only because they are often anonymous, but because they specifically aim at objectivity: the "I" of the poet is never mentioned, only that of the various characters. Laforgue seems to be seeking a similar kind of anonymity by attributing his poems to different speakers.

According to Laforgue himself, he first thought of writing poems based on complaintes on September 20, 1880, during a celebration in the Place Danfert-Rochereau, when he heard—not of course for the first time—popular songs sung in the street. By the late nineteenth century, the style of the complainte had lost the freshness and vigour of the original folk-songs. Davenson is reluctant even to mention the "compositions auxquelles avait fini par se restreindre le nom de complainte," namely "chansons volontairement composées à l'intention du public populaire … qui prétendaient descendre du peuple, et qui en fait étaient descendues bien bas." They had become "récits détaillés …d'un prosaïsme écoeurant et … d'une intolérable tristesse"; their sentimentality can be seen reflected in the work of poets such as Richepin. Nevertheless, Laforgue seizes on those aspects of the complaintes which suit his purposes. He frequently imitates the popular diction of the complainte, for the phrasing, syntax and vocabulary of his second volume of poetry are far removed from the more literary tone of Le Sanglot. The songs sung by organ-grinders and other street musicians employed, not the traditional versification of poetry but the rhythms of popular speech, in which mute "e's" did not count as syllables and the hiatus between vowels was filled with a "z" or a "t" sound. Laforgue sometimes adopts these features, as if to emphasize that what we hear is not his voice but the anonymous speech of the "folk," as in:

Je suis-t-il malhûreux!
("Autre complainte de l'orgue de barbarie")

C'est l'printemps qui s'amène
("Complainte des printemps")

Voyez l'homme, voyez!
Si ça n'fait pas pitié!
("Complainte du pauvre corps humain")

and in the two poems which he indicates as being variations on actual songs, the "Complainte du pauvre jeune homme" and the "Complainte de l'époux outragé."

Davenson defines complaintes as "récits continus," in opposition to the "chanson" or "ronde." Like the ballad, the complainte implies narrative, which is, to some extent, a feature of Laforgue's Complaintes. Almost all his speakers have a story to tell, usually involving a loss they have sustained and which forms the subject of their lament: a lost love in the "Complainte de la bonne défunte" or the "Complainte des blackboulés," lost innocence in the "Complainte du roi de Thulé," lost wealth and health in the "Complainte des grands pins dans une villa abandonnée." However, the affinity of the Complaintes to the ballad is limited, since the latter is essentially a third-person form, whereas the Complaintes, as well as Laforgue's later poetry, are written in the first person: they are monologues and many of them, specifically, dramatic monologues.

ii) Dramatic monologue and interior monologue

It is significant that, like Browning, though in a much more modest fashion, Laforgue began his career by attempting to write plays, as well as poetry. In 1882—the year he abandoned the Sanglot de la terre poems—he wrote, but did not complete, Pierrot fumiste, in which the hero puts on "the same ironic and poignant comic mask" as Lord Pierrot in the Complaintes. According to Haskell Block, Laforgue "planned several plays … and worked on at least some of them," in 1882-83, as his correspondence shows. Apart from the unfinished Pierrot fumiste, however, his only published play, or playlet, is Le Concile féérique (1886), a verse drama composed of five poems from the Fleurs de bonne volonté, which Laforgue had decided not to publish.

Various critics have noted the basically dramatic impulse of Laforgue's poetry, though few refer to his poems as dramatic monologues. Block talks of the "intrinsically dramatic character of Laforgue's poetry with its complex interplay of several voices," and Ramsey mentions the "dramatic form of the most characteristic Complaintes," with their dialogues of "many voices." Not surprisingly, the "many voices" heard in Laforgue's Complaintes and later collections often engage one another in dialogue, and dialogue is inherently dramatic, since it constitutes the distinctive form of stage drama. Again it represents a move away from the authoritative discourse of a central "I," allowing room for the speech of others or for internal debate. In some of Laforgue's earlier poems, opposing voices are channelled into an actual dialogue between two speakers like the "LUI" and "ELLE" of the "Complainte des formalités nuptiales." The "Complainte sous le figuier boudhique" boasts four sets of speakers, all named; but more commonly speakers are not designated in this way, the alternations in their speech being indicated by the use of quotation marks, as in the "Complainte des grands pins dans une villa abandonnée." Sometimes the main speaker's words are not enclosed in quotation marks, only those of his imaginary interlocutor, for example in the "Complainte des printemps," the "Complainte des pianos …" and Derniers vers VIII and IX. Finally, the voices of the dialogue can reflect opposing views solely within the mind of one speaker—the conflicting attitudes of the "société un peu bien mêlée" making up the self:

Mais, Tout va la reprendre!—Alors Tout m'en absout.
Mais, Elle est ton bonheur!—Non, je suis trop immense
Trop chose.
("Complainte des Consolations")

The frequent suggestion of a dialogue within the mind of one speaker, as in this poem and especially in the Derniers vers, reflects the fact that many of Laforgue's speakers are engaged in some form of conflict with themselves, which again contributes an element of drama to his poems, since conflict is in itself essentially dramatic. Indeed, Laforgue's personae are nearly always torn between two opposite impulses: between the desire for love and a mocking rejection of it, as in Derniers vers IX; between a feeling of sympathy for women and an instinctive suspicion of their motives (e.g., in Dv V and VIII); between a sensual and an ideal love (Dv III and "Complainte de Lord Pierrot"); between patient devotion and impatient desire ("Locutions des Pierrots, I"). Whereas the speakers of Browning's early dramatic monologues are not engaged in any conflict with themselves, only with the outside world, their freedom from inner division confirming their status as characters with well-defined personalities and views, Laforgue's protagonists, on the contrary, suffer from inner conflicts, doubts and hesitations, and from a general lack of confidence that makes it hard for them to establish their own identity. The speaker of Dv III confides:

… j'allais me donner d'un "Je vous aime"
Quand je m'avisai non sans peine
Que d'abord je ne me possédais pas bien moimême.

The dramatic irony in Browning's poems, arising from the discrepancy between the speaker's apprehension of his situation and the reader's understanding of it, leads to collusion between author and reader behind the speaker's back; the factor causing the speaker to distort reality is, very often, simply his own personality, with its prejudices and blind spots. In Laforgue's work there is still enough emphasis on character traits for the reader (and the poet) similarly to judge the speakers—but not behind their backs, because they forestall criticism by judging themselves, too. Thus the speaker of Dv IX avoids being labelled as incurably romantic in his desire to "Faire naître un 'Je t'aime!'" by the irony implicit in the sheer exaggeration of his wishes:

Qu'il vienne, comme à l'aimant la foudre,
Et dans mon ciel d'orage qui craque et qui s'ouvre,
Et alors, les averses lustrales jusqu'au matin,
Le grand clapissement des averses toute la nuit! Enfin!

Again, in Dv XII, the patent irony of the speaker's exclamation "Oh! arrose, arrose / Mon coeur si brûlant, ma chair si intéressante!" shows that although he feels desperate and melancholy, he is also the sort of sophisticated person who—like the reader and the poet—finds desperate melancholy ludicrous. The drama in Laforgue's poems derives more from the internal conflict within the speaker and from the irony that discloses it, than from any discrepancy between his view of himself and our own.

The presence of dialogue in Laforgue's poetry disguises, paradoxically, another essential difference between his monologues and those of Browning. In the majority of Browning's dramatic monologues, the speaker directly addresses a listener, with the poem as a whole representing one side of a dialogue. In most of Laforgue's poems, however, the speakers are alone; any dialogue is purely imaginary, consisting either of comments which the speaker mentally attributes to someone else or words which one side of his personality addresses to another, within the privacy of his own mind. In other words these monologues present, not the speech of a given character to an interlocutor, but his private thoughts, his inner language. For this reason, Laforgue's poems are sometimes referred to as "interior" rather than "dramatic" monologues. J. P. Houston, for example, suggests [in French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement, 1980] that the "monologue created by Laforgue is largely an inner one, and if the analogy with drama is appropriate to the monologue invented by Browning, that with the stream-of-consciousness novel is more so in this case." Interior monologue, as practised by Joyce and by Dujardin before him, strives to transcribe in writing the random, fragmentary nature of the "stream of consciousness," of thought as it is formed in the mind. Dujardin asserts that interior monologue represents "un discours antérieur à toute organisation logique"; its form is therefore very simple: "il se réalise en phrases directes réduites au minimum syntaxial." He admits, however, that interior monologue cannot claim to reproduce man's barely-conscious thought-processes verbatim, but can only give the impression of doing so: "Le monologue intérieur ne doit pas donner la pensée 'tout venat,' mais en donner l'impression." This impression is conveyed partly by the use of short "direct sentences" with very loose and abbreviated syntax, and partly by the way the thoughts expressed jump from one subject to another, by a process of free association, often without any apparent logical connection: "Notre pensée court d'un plan à l'autre avec une rapidité qui après coup peut sembler mais n'est pas de la simultanéité; et c'est précisément cette course" à bâtons rompus' dont le monologue intérieur donne l'impression."

Laforgue's Derniers vers, in particular, answer to some of these criteria. Written in vers libres, where each line represents a unit of meaning, they adopt a loose, elliptical syntax impossible in regular verse:

Noire bise, averse glapissante,
Et fleuve noire, et maisons closes,
Et quartiers sinistres comme des Morgues,
Et l'Attardé qui à la remorque traîne
Toute la misère des coeurs et des choses,
Et la souillure des innocentes qui traînent….
(Derniers vers XII)

The paratactic arrangement of this passage, with juxtaposition replacing logical subordination, is typical of the Derniers vers, and of the interior monologue, since the barely-formulated thoughts which spring from the stream of consciousness have not yet been ordered by logic. They tend to be linked together by a process of free-association, also found in certain passages of the Derniers vers, for example the opening of Dv X, where the basic themes—of love-making and marriage—conjure up a variety of unexpected but related images:

O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges,
Sacrilèges monomanes!
Emballages, dévergondages, douches! O pressoirs
Des vendanges des grands soirs!
Layettes aux abois,
Thyrses au fond des bois!
Transfusions, représailles,
Relevailles, compresses et l'éternelle potion,
Angélus! n'en pouvoir plus
De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales! …

These characteristics of Laforgue's poetry have led Scarfe to claim not only that he wrote interior monologues, but that he invented the form; in an essay on Eliot [in Eliot in Perspective, edited by Graham Martin, 1970], he asserts that Laforgue "invented a new kind of dramatic monologue, usually known as the interior or internal monologue, close to common speech," and implies that Dujardin developed the technique of Les Lauriers sont coupés from Laforgue "without acknowledgement." It is true that many lines in Laforgue resemble "common speech' in rhythm, vocabulary and syntax, but at the same time the abundance of scientific, erudite, foreign and archaic words in his poetry destroys the illusion of oral speech, and with it the impression of spontaneity appropriate to interior monologue. In any case, the allpervading irony of his poetry (to which these verbal juxtapositions contribute) suggests a fully-conscious, deliberate type of writing, irony being the opposite of spontaneous. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the acoustic effects Laforgue achieves through alliteration, assonance and rhyme can be associated with the supposedly barely-formulated thoughts of the stream of consciousness; or indeed how poetry, which always involves organisational principles of one kind or another, could ever seriously attempt to imitate the disorderly ramblings of the inner monologue.

Though it may be true, then, that certain features of Laforgue's poetry, such as the use of parataxis and of free association, influenced his friend Dujardin to some extent, the claim that Laforgue "invented the internal monologue" is exaggerated. Both interior monologue and poems like Laforgue's Derniers vers present a character's thoughts rather than his speech, but there is another important difference between the two, besides the issue of spontaneity. The thoughts of Laforgue's monologues are concentrated on a specific problem or event, unlike the loosely-connected discourse of interior monologue which supposedly records a character's stream of consciousness over a period of time and is not directed solely at a particular topic. Wayne Booth makes this point regarding Stephen's interior monologue in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which "unlike speech in a dramatic scene," does not "lead us to suspect that the thoughts have been in any way aimed at an effect." The discourse of a Laforguian monologue, however, like "speech in a dramatic scene," is aimed at an effect. Apart from the poem's effect on the reader, obtained by the deliberate manipulation of rhythms, sounds, or images, and dramatic effects achieved through irony, the speakers themselves have an aim, namely to come to terms with a specific problem or event around which the whole poem revolves. Such problems are, for example, in Dv VII—regret for a lost love; in XI—the faithlessness of women, and how to deal with it; in X—the conflict between the speaker's need for independence and his nostalgia for a "petit intérieur" to share with his "petite quotidienne"; in V—a call for a change from love as practised by men and women of the time to the type of love-relationship the speaker advocates, in which the woman would no longer be regarded as an "angel," but as man's equal. In these poems, all the thoughts expressed are in some way relevant to those themes, whereas in interior monologue the thought "court d'un plan à l'autre," as Dujardin says, reflecting the "course à bâtons rompus" of the stream of consciousness. The content of a Joycean interior monologue is often very much affected by the subject's surroundings, which impinge on his thoughts, but in Laforgue's Derniers vers the speaker's present position is not necessarily mentioned at all; if so, then it is directly relevant to the problem in hand, as in Dv III:

Or, cette nuit anniversaire, toutes les Walkyries du vent
Sont revenues beugler par les fentes de ma porte:
Vae soli!

or in Dv VII:

Voici qu'il fait très très-frais
Oh! si à la même heure,
Elle va de même le long des forêts….

Laforgue's monologues, then, though they may have some stylistic similarities with interior monologue, are "aimed at an effect—that of examining and attempting to solve a problem which worries the speaker, or of resolving a conflict within him—and to this extent they are dramatic.