[In the following essay, Howe conducts a close study of Laforgue's verse, substantiating her assertion that the poet uses cliché and convention to forge his unconventional poetic forms.]

"Mais tu ne peux que te répéter, ô honte!" exclaims the speaker of "Simple agonie" (Derniers vers, VI), referring to himself. This statement applies to all Laforgue's characters, who, whether consciously or otherwise, merely act out the roles in which society has cast them. Playing a part, in life as on the stage, equates to repeating a script, consisting in this case of the ready-made, banal phrases people utter every day—phrases learnt from others and which can scarcely claim, therefore, to represent the genuine self-expression of the speaker. A sense of frustration and weariness caused by observation of the conventional nature of people's behaviour and language is evident throughout Laforgue's poetry from the Complaintes to the Derniers vers. At the same time his own deliberate quotation of stereotyped expressions becomes, paradoxically, a strategy of originality, a means of parodying both Romantic rhetoric and bourgeois eloquence: a technique which other post-Romantic writers, such as Flaubert and Lautréamont, also adapted to their own ends.

Like Flaubert before him, Laforgue began his career by writing in a distinctly Romantic vein himself. One of the main differences between his earliest collection of verse, Le Sanglot de la terre, which he never published, and his subsequent Complaintes, is the move away from the bombastic self-expression of a central unified "I", typical of much Romantic poetry, towards an anonymous multiplicity. The speaker of the Sanglot poems 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"). 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:

J'espérais
Qu'à ma mort, tout frémirait, du cèdre à l'hysope;
Que ce Temps, déraillant, tomberait en syncope,
Que, pour venir jeter sur mes lèvres des fleurs,
Les Soleils très navrés détraqueraient leurs choeurs.

In the majority of the Complaintes, on the other hand, Warren Ramsey notes "a movement towards dramatization, a tendency, having its origin in self-awareness and self-defence, to exteriorize the lyric emotion" [in Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, 1953]. This extėriorization is achieved largely through the use of different voices expressing the thoughts and feelings of various personae: the "ange incurable" and the "Chevalier errant", the "roi de Thulé", the "Sage de Paris" and, most important of all, Pierrot. Dispersion and repetition replace the unique utterance of the Sanglot poems. 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, for the "multiple selves of Laforgue and others" [Looking for Laforgue, 1979]. It is significant that the move from a unified to a multiple self accompanies Laforgue's imitation of a more popular, collective form, the complainte having been originally a type of folksong or ballad. 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. He also frequently imitates the popular diction of the complainte, as if to emphasize that what we hear is not his voice but the anonymous speech of the "folk".

Laforgue first makes use in the Complaintes of the Pierrot figure who was later to feature prominently in L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la lune; his predilection for this stock character can be linked with his move away from the personal poetry of Le Sanglot to the ready-made form of the complainte. His adoption of set form and stock figure is accompanied by the use of ready-made language—the repetition of fixed expressions and clichés. The traditional Pierrot's role was mimed, and his mimicry involved a repertoire of conventional gestures; Laforgue, of course, has to use words, but he does so in such a way as to suggest that language, too, can be merely gesture: his Pierrots (and other speakers) trot out the stock phrases dictated by convention for use in certain situations. To women, for example, they address declarations couched in the rhetoric traditionally associated with love:

Ange! tu m'as compris,
A la vie, à la mort!

while thinking

Ah! passer là-dessus l'éponge! . . .
(L'Imitation, "Pierrots")

Being a comic figure, however, Pierrot likes to give an unexpected twist to the conventional phrases he proffers. In the famous "Autre complainte de Lord Pierrot", the lady's banal exclamation "Ah! tu ne m'aimes pas; tant d'autres sont jaloux!" is countered by Pierrot with another, totally inappropriate, cliché: "Merci, pas mal; et vous?" Similarly, to the lady's accusation "Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j'en suis sûre . . ." Pierrot responds with a stereotyped expression from another context but which makes admirable sense here, too: "Après vous, s'il vous plaît!" The twist which Pierrot gives to banal, stereotyped phrases empties them of any last shred of meaning they may have had when used in their normal context; they become as hollow as refrains like "tirelan-laire" or "diguedondaine" in the popular songs Laforgue was imitating in the Complaintes. The implication must be that language, like the conventional gestures of mime, is a question of habit and custom. The automatic responses which people exchange daily are pure ritual, devoid of profound content, revealing and communicating nothing of value. This type of play with language at once distinguishes Laforgue's Pierrot from, say, Verlaine's.

As important to Laforgue as the figure of Pierrot is that of Hamlet, who resembles Pierrot in many respects: both of them are stereotypes (Hamlet having certainly become one by the late nineteenth century), both are taken from the stage and are very much aware of themselves as performers and actors, i.e. repeaters of roles and scripts. The Hamlet of the Moralités légendaires deliberately plays the role of l 'Incompris for the benefit of the young girl whose canary he has killed:

—Oh! pardon, pardon! Je ne l'ai pas fait exprès! Ordonne-moi toutes les expiations. Mais je suis si bon! J'ai un cœur d'or comme on n'en fait plus. Tu me comprends, n'est-ce pas, Toi?

—O monseigneur, monseigneur! balbutie la petite fille. Oh! si vous saviez! Je vous comprends tant! Je vous aime depuis si longtemps! J'ai tout compris . . .

Hamlet se lève. "Encore une!" pense-t-il.

Here we see again, as with Pierrot, that role-playing tends to be accompanied by an addiction to an appropriate type of rhetoric—in this instance, as very frequently in Laforgue, that of love.

Despite their mockery of women's readiness to accept the conventional stereotyped roles offered by society, Hamlet and Pierrot are themselves obliged to adopt similar poses, to "vivre de vieux compromis", as Lord Pierrot puts it in his "Complainte". This is what they find so repugnant about life, and why they are so ready to criticize those people who seem perfectly satisfied with the "vieux compromis", the fixed patterns of speech and behaviour imposed by social convention or literary example. The difficulty they themselves experience in asserting their own personality stems partly from a lack of self-knowledge; the Hamlet-like speaker of the Derniers vers finds it impossible to declare his love because he does not know himself: "d'abord je ne me possédais pas bien moi-même," he declares in DvIII. In addition, Laforgue's male speakers are aware of a multiplicity of selves within them, of the "société un peu bien mêlée" mentioned in the poem "Ballade" (Des fleurs de bonne volonté). All Laforgue's men are torn between different versions of themselves; Pierrot's violent fluctuations, sometimes within one poem, between flippant and serious moods, between brutality and tenderness, suggest a dislocated personality, as J.A. Hiddleston points out [in Essai sur Laforgue et les Derniers vers, 1980]: "Pierrot incarne dans sa personne la discontinuité et la dislocation internes, le manque d'équilibre entre les émotions et l'intelligence, bref les contradictions du poète-héros .. . Pas plus que le poète, Pierrot n'est un, mais innombrable."

In Laforgue's poetry we witness a dislocation of the very notion of personality, and language plays an important part in this process; his poems convey the impression that character is the stereotyped phrases in which it expresses itself. [Michael] Riffaterre points out [in Essais de stylistique structurale, 1971] that to make a literary character speak in stereotyped phrases almost automatically deprives him of personality because they imply conformity to ready-made attitudes or standards:

La formule figée, parce qu'elle est inséparable de certaines attitudes sociales ou morales, sert à l'auteur à situer son personnage: il n'a qu'à mettre sur ses lèvres les modes verbales d'un milieu donné . . . Recueillir des automatismes, c'est choisir delibérément de voir l'homme sous un mauvais jour, dans les comportements sociaux ou mentaux par lesquels il abdique sa personnalité.

These statements appear in Riffaterre's essay on "Le Cliché dans la prose littéraire", but they apply equally well to Laforgue's poetry. Thus John E. Jackson speaks [in La Question du moi, 1971] of the "usure du langage chez Laforgue" and suggests that "les mots sont en voie, pour lui, de perdre leur créance sémantique. Ils sont formules, stéréotypes, c'est-a-dire omnitude autonome, désinvestie de presque tout répondant au moi qui les profère". A similar phenomenon is typical of the early poetry of T.S. Eliot, particularly in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady"; Jackson comments that the way in which "le langage échoue ici coïncide avec l'échec de Prufrock . . . d'affirmer librement, au-delà du stéréotype, une individualité propre .. . qui ose .. . imposer sa singularité".

Hamlet and Pierrot find it difficult to "imposer sa singularité" not only because of a lack of self-knowledge and an awareness of the plurality of the Self, but because, as they realize, language simply does not allow one to be original. The uniqueness which they both feel ("—Et, au fond, dire que j'existe! Que j'ai ma vie à moi!" exclaims the Hamlet of the Moralités) can only be expressed with the "Words, words, words" of other people. Both personae confront the problem of how, using language, to break out of the established patterns of language, and the answers proposed are extreme. One is to indulge in the type of word-play practised by Hamlet and Pierrot, ironically twisting the meanings of words; ultimately this remains unsatisfactory, however, since it precludes any meaningful communication with their interlocutors. A second possibility is silence: "rien n'est pratique que se taire, se taire, et agir en conséquence," says the Hamlet of the Moralités. ("Agir" would be another way of expressing oneself, but a notoriously difficult one for Shakespeare's Hamlet and Laforgue's; as Albert Sonnenfield says [in "Hamlet the German and Jules Laforgue," Yale French Studies, 1964], for Laforgue's Hamlet, "action means acting", i.e. once again the repetition of a role.) Silence is also the solution adopted by Laforgue's Pierrot fumiste, in that he offers no explanation for his peculiar conduct; besides, the role of Pierrot was traditionally mimed, and therefore silent. The alternative to silence is death, which befalls both Shakespeare's and Laforgue's Hamlets; and death, of course, means silence, as the former's dying words proclaim.

Rather than an original, fully-developed personality, Laforgue's personae possess only certain recognizable traits—jealousy, faithlessness, timidity, tenderness, brutality, sentimentality—endlessly repeated and, through irony, endlessly negated. Laforgue's universe is one of repeition; instead of presenting an authentic, unique self, his speakers demonstrate that the "I" is a place where repetitions are gathered: "Mais tu ne peux que te répéter, ô honte!" This "shame" is attendant on both behaviour and language: people who adopt stereotyped roles inevitably express themselves in a language appropriate to that role—which is equally stereotyped. Laforgue clearly demonstrates this in his use of clichés, the clichés of a sophisticated group of people playing endless love-games, asserting that "On n'aime qu'une fois", accusing one another: "Assez! assez! / C'est toi qui as commencé" (Dv VIII), or assuring one another that "Je t'aime pour toi seul" (L'Imitation, "Pierrots (on a des principes)"). Laforgue's personae all have similar voices, because the things they say tend to be what they have heard other people say.

In the section of Laforgue's Mélanges posthumes entitled "Sur la femme", the following passage appears, under the subheading "Première entrevue d'aveux":

Dès qu'on s'est bien dit et dûment déclaré "je t'aime", un silence, presque un froid. Alors, celui des deux qui est destiné à s'en aller plus tard (c'est fatal) commence ses inutiles litanies rétrospectives: "Ah! moi, il y a longtemps déjà! . . . Tenez, vous ne saurez jamais! . . . Oh! la première fois que je vous vis . . . etc."

Such phrases are typical of Laforgue's speakers. The girl in Derniers vers IX talks of her "vie faite exprès", and affirms: "ma destinée se borne . . . / A te suivre" because "c'est bien toi et non un autre". Just as we saw Hamlet greeting such trite declarations with a scathing "Encore une!" so the speaker of this poem takes an ironical view of them and of the girl, as he imagines her rolling about on his doormat. Again, the male speaker in this poem, though playing a role, is conscious of doing so and mocks himself for it, whereas the girl, like Laforgue's other women, has no distance on her language: she says what she means, or what she thinks she means. The cynical attitude of the male speakers shows up the clichés for what they are: trite, empty phrases passed from mouth to mouth but devoid of any true meaning—the sort of phrases Flaubert collected in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, or, more appropriately since the context is almost always one of love, by Roland Barthes in his Fragments d'un discours amoureux. According to Laforgue's men, "love" is simply a matter of being in love with the discourse of love. Thus the speaker of "Sur une défunte" (Dv XI) suggests that a woman can make the same declarations indifferently to "les nobles A, B, C ou D", to any of whom she will say:

"Oh, tes yeux, ta démarche!
Oh, le son fatal de ta voix!
Voilà si longtemps que je te cherche!
Oh, c'est bien Toi, cette fois! . . ."

The man implies that these are simply empty verbal formulas which can be reproduced at will, as they are in so many of Laforgue's poems, either deliberately (by the men), or unconsciously (by the women). Here as elsewhere Laforgue emphasizes the sheer automatism of a language that purports to speak the heart: the discourse of love is never original, but always a repetition of what someone has said previously, and cannot therefore represent the authentic expression of the unique Self. Along with the notion of love, this view of language as repetition undermines the very concept of interiority itself; for, since words are always exterior, repeated, overheard, the individual can never possess language, which remains outside him, belonging to others as well as to himself.

Needless to say, the notions of repetivity and externality apply not only to the language of love but to language in general; they are central to the influential theory of intertextuality outlined by [Mikhail] Bakhtin, who stresses that no single utterance can claim to be totally individual or unique. The words we use, he says [in Esthétique et théorie du roman, 1978], have been used by others and are inevitably impregnated with their intentions: "Le langage n'est pas un milieu neutre. Il ne devient pas aisément, librement, la propriété du locuteur. Il est peuplé et surpeuplé d'intentions étrangères." It follows therefore that "tout énoncé se rapporte aussi à des énoncés antérieurs, donnant ainsi lieu à des relations intertextuelles''[according to Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: le principe dialogique, 1981]. This is the case not only in works of literature, of course, but, as Bakhtin points out, in everyday speech, where the social context plays an important role: "Aucun énoncé en général ne peut être attribué au seul locuteur: il est le produit de l'interaction des locuteurs et, plus largement, le produit de toute cette situation sociale complexe, dans laquelle il a surgi." Stereotyped expressions offer a privileged, extreme illustration of this state of affairs. At the end of "Dimanches" (Dv III), the speaker temporarily adopts a motherly, protective attitude which expresses itself in clichés and makes light of the sufferings of the "Pauvre, pâle et piètre individu" recounted earlier in the poem:

—Allons, dernier des poètes,
Toujours enfermé tu te rendras malade!
Vois, il fait beau temps tout le monde est dehors,
Va donc acheter deux sous d'ellébore,
Ça te fera une petite promenade.

In lines 2-3 and 5 we can hear, as well as the poet's voice, that of any mother talking to her child, and the speaker parodies this voice while at the same time offering a valid comment on his own behavior. He is temporarily looking at himself from the outside, or as Bakhtin puts it "avec les yeux d'un autre homme, d'un autre représentant de [s]on groupe social ou de [s]a classe". The resulting speech is, in Bakhtin's terminology, "double-voiced", i.e. it is an utterance in which two voices can be heard, even though only one speech act is involved.

In Laforgue (as in Flaubert) such phrases are often, though not always, signalled typographically by italics, quotation marks or points de suspension:

.. . le pur flacon des vives gouttes
Sera, comme il convient, d'eau propre baptisé. ("Complainte des pianos . . .")
Oh! ce fut pour vos cors, et ce fut pour l'automne,
Qu'il nous montra qu'"on meurt d'amour"! (Dv VI)

Leurs Altesses congratulèrent le Tétrarque, se félicitant eux-mêmes du bon vent qui .. . à pareil glorieux jour .. . en ces îles,—et terminèrent par l'éloge de la capitale . . . ("Salomé")

Other, non-typographical marks of distanciation include exaggeration, repetition and accumulation. In Derniers vers IX, the speaker parodies the utterance of an intense, passionate young girl; his voice can be heard through hers because of the sheer exaggeration of her claims:

"Pour moi, tu n'es pas comme les autres hommes,
Ils sont ces messieurs, toi tu viens des cieux.
Ta bouche me fait baisser les yeux
Et ton port me transporte
Et je m'en découvre des trésors!"

A certain weakness in the logic of the girl's argument also indicates irony:

"Tu me demandes pourquoi toi et non un autre,
Ah! laisse, c'est bien toi et non un autre.
J'en suis sûre comme du vide insensé de mon cœur
Et comme de votre air mortellement moqueur."

The man's mocking voice can be heard distinctly in this unconvincing choice of comparisons, as well as in the insistent acoustic repetitions he puts into the girl's mouth (port, transporte, trésors; pleure, soeurs, peur, meure).

The quotation of stereotyped expressions such as those uttered by the girl in this poem represents at once a mimetic and a parodic procedure: mimetic in that it imitates the language a naïve girl might use in reality; parodic in that the speaker of the poem clearly views her utterances in an ironic light, passing "du portrait à la charge" [according to Riffaterre]. This tendency for the quotation of clichés to slide from mimesis into parody is explored by Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen [in Les Discours du cliché, 1982]. In the realist novel—and in Laforgue's poetry—the use of clichés helps to establish the feeling of "reality", since they inject into a literary text the discourse of a "texte culturel extérieur au récit", namely that of everyday life. Judiciously placed, therefore, "le cliché assure la crédibilité de la narration en la conformant au savoir du public et, conséquemment, en provoquant une reconnaissance confondue avec la connaissance du réel". However, the artificiality of this procedure becomes evident when the "device is bared" and it becomes a parodie gesture (marked, typographically or otherwise, as in the examples from Laforgue quoted above):

Le cliché ne contribue néanmoins à consolider l'édifice du vraisemblable qu'en le marquant du sceau de la conventionnalité. Le procédé, en effet, se laisse aisément reconnaître et la figure originellement destinée à "masquer les lois du texte" tend précisément à les exhiber .. . Le même fait de langage se voit dès lors attribuer, à des niveaux différents, deux fonctions inverses: d'une part le cliché renforce une vérité commune, renvoie à un savoir préétabli, "naturel"; de l'autre, il en dénonce la conventionnalité et la facticité.

If the deliberate "quotation" of stereotyped phrases tends to become a parodie gesture, parody, conversely, cannot exist without quotation, or repetition, since the parodie text constitutes, by definition, a text constructed with other texts. As Claude Bouché points out [in Lautréamont: du lieu commun à la parodie, 1974], "appliquée à la parodie, la méthode intertextuelle n'est plus seulement une option parmi d'autres possibles". All texts are "intertextual" but some are deliberately and systematically so, particularly those which employ parody and related devices. In Laforgue we find parody of Romantic poets, of Flaubert and Mallarmé, and of Laforgue himself. The poem "Solo de lune" (Dv VII) contains the lines "Tout n'en va pas moins à la mort, / Y a pas de port", which echo Lamartine's "Le Lac": "L'homme n'a point de port, le temps n'a point de rive; / Il coule, et nous passons!" However, parody of specific texts is much more frequent in the Moralités than in Laforgue's poetry: Bouché devotes a section of his book on Lautréamont to a thorough analysis of "Hamlet" as a typical example of parody; "Salomé" parodies Flaubert's "Hérodias", and a page of "Hamlet" echoes St. Julien 1' Hospitalier's massacre of animals. Another target of "Salomé" could be Mallarmé's "Hérodiade" (of which the "Scéne" had been published in 1869), as well as the many Symbolist evocations of Salomé: Laforgue's heroine dies, significantly, "moins victime des hasards illettrés que d'avoir voulu vivre dans le factice et non à la bonne franquette à l'instar de chacun de nous". "Pan et la Syrinx" parodies the myth, but Laforgue undoubtedly has in mind also Mallarmé's L'Après-midi d'un faune. Syrinx declares to Pan that "l'art, c'est le désir perpétué . . .", recalling the Faun's desire to "perpetuate" the nymphs in his song. And Pan, after Syrinx's disappearance, exclaims, echoing the Faun (and Faust): "O Syrinx, t'ai-je rêvée?" following this with his own formulation of the Faun's dilemma: "encore une fois . . . je n'aurai pas eu la présence d'esprit de me pénétrer du fait de la présence des choses!"

Laforgue sometimes parodies, in the Moralités, attitudes or phrases from his own earlier works. Lohengrin and Elsa "tombèrent ensemble aux genoux l'un de l'autre; ensemble, mais, hélas! plus ou moins fatalement"—which represents an ironie rendering of the wistful lines from "Solo de lune":

Ses yeux disaient: "Comprenez-vous?
Pourquoi ne comprenez-vous pas?"
Mais nul n'a voulu faire le premier pas,
Voulant trop tomber ensemble à genoux.

Salomé incongruously delivers a long speech on the theme of "le Néant" and "l'Inconscient" about which Laforgue used to write somewhat more seriously in the Sanglot poems; and Pan has the following exchange with Syrinx:

"O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre .. . et la circulation de la vie! . . . Tout est dans Tout!"
"Tout est dans Tout! Vraiment? Ah, ces gens à formules!"

One of the parodie procedures mentioned by Bouché is "la Stéréotypie", which involves the multiple, diffuse referent of a discours, rather than a particular text:

Avec la Stéréotypie, on débouche sur le vaste domaine des poncifs et des "topoi", des clichés et des lieux communs . . . Styles éculés et situations-types se recontrent un peu partout: dans les livres, certes, mais aussi dans les journaux, la publicité, les messages politiques, le langage de la rue, bref, dans tout ce qui est manifestation écrite ou orale collective.

"Stéréotypie" of this diffuse type forms the main thrust of the parodic impulse of Laforgue's poetry, and it accompanies the parody of specific texts in the Moralités. We have already seen examples of the "lieux communs" of everyday speech, particularly of the discourse of love; in addition, parody of literary stereotypes, especially the "topoi" of Romantic poetry, is prevalent in both the poetry and the Moralités. Laforgue cannot describe a sunset without remembering the innumerable Romantic evocations of that phenomenon; accordingly, his "soleil fichu" "Gît sur le flanc, dans les genêts, sur son manteau, / Un soleil blanc comme un crachat d'estaminet" (Dv I); or alternatively it "Lâche les écluses du Grand-Collecteur / En mille pactoles" (Dv II). In "Persée et Andromède" we are prepared for yet another "couchant qui va faire le beau", and sure enough: "L'Astre Pacha, / Son É minence Rouge . . . / Descend, mortellement triomphal", until someone kicks this "citrouille crevée" over the horizon. Romantic seascapes, leading to many a digression on Time, Infinity, changelessness, etc., are parodied by Laforgue at the beginning of "Persée et Andromède":

La mer! de quelque côté qu'on la surveille, des heures et des heures, à quelque moment qu'on la surprenne: toujours elle-même . . . empire de l'insociable, grande histoire qui se tait, cataclysme mal digéré . . . Bref pas l'étoffe d'une amie (oh, vraiment! renoncer à cette idée, et même à l'espoir de partager ses rancunes après confidences, si seul à seul qu'on soit depuis des temps avec elle).

(These last remarks are aimed no doubt at poems like Baudelaire's "L'Homme et la mer", which personifies the sea and suggests an affinity between it and man.) "Salomé" presents, more succinctly, "la mer, toujours nouvelle et respectable, la Mer puisqu'il n'y a pas d'autre nom pour la nommer".

Within the area of Stéréotypie, Laforgue does not restrict his parody to the topoi of Romanticism in particular, but embraces various more general literary conventions. The notion of the hero is one of his favourite targets: "Je voudrais bien connaître leur vie quotidienne," he exclaims in an interesting passage about heroes published in Mélanges posthumes. When he refers to mythical figures it is not to exalt them; on the contrary, he cuts them down to size and shows that they, too, act out the roles society casts for them. In "Lohengrin", Elsa, playing the part of the modest, misrepresented virgin, "s'avance sur l'estrade, tête basse, l'air positivement blessé". She declares "angéliquement", "Je crois être innocente. O méprises cruelles!" but adds under her breath, "Mon Dieu, que de cancans!" As soon as Lohengrin arrives she begins to see herself in the traditional image of a warrior-hero's wife: "Je ne saurai que laver, chaque matin, votre armure de cristal, avec mes larmes . . .". Similar parody of pseudo-heroic discourse and gestures which in fact amount simply to narrative convention occurs in all the Moralités. Perseus, "plein de chic" and mounted on Pegasus, describes circles over the head of Andromeda in order to impress her, but is promptly deflated by the phrase "Ce jeune héros a l'air fameusement sûr de son affaire". Hamlet, too, adopts a variety of roles and poses, and is quite aware (unlike Perseus) of their conventionality. When a gravedigger interrupts his pseudo-philosophical musings over Yorick's skull to announce the arrival of Ophelia's funeral procession, "le premier mouvement du penseur Hamlet est de singer à ravir le clown réveillé par un coup de mailloche à grosse caisse dans le dos; et c'est tout juste qu'il le réprime" (emphasis added). His favourite role, that of artist, dictates his last words: "Ah! . . . qualis . . . artifex . . . pereo!"; for even in death, Hamlet assumes a pose: "Notre héros s'affaisse sur ses genoux orgueilleux, dans le gazon, et vomit des gorgées de sang, et fait l'animal talonné par une mort certaine." The clichés here ("s'affaisse", "gorgées de sang", "talonné par une mort certaine") emphasize that this "heroic" pose in fact represents nothing more than a narrative device.

Laforgue parodies other conventional literary practices, such as the framing device, which is used at the end (but not the beginning) of "Persée et Andromède". At one point in "Le Miracle des roses" he ridicules the assumption in traditional novels that the narrator can actually see the scene he evokes: "Approchonsnous, de grâce," he says when wishing to describe a detail. Long descriptive passages such as those in Flaubert's "Hérodias" are also imitated in a parodic spirit by Laforgue, for example in the description of the Tetrarch's palace ("Salomé") or of the "Villa-Nuptiale" ("Lohengrin"). In the poetry, Laforgue parodies traditional rhymes, pairing, "tombeau", for example, not with "flambeau" or some other "suitable" word, but with "lavabo" ("Complainte du vent qui s'ennuie la nuit"). In "Complainte des printemps" "Angélus" is rhymed irreverently with "foetus". Parody of the vocabulary of Catholicism abounds, especially in the early verse but also in later works, for example at the beginning of "Légende" (Dv VIII) or in the Grand-Priest's salutation in "Lohengrin": "Je vous salue, Vierge des nuits, plaine de glace".

Distinguishing between pastiche and parody, Bouché states that pastiche imitates only the style of a text, whereas parody can deal with any aspect of it, and he relates this to a similar distinction between cliché and lieu commun, quoting Rémy de Gourmont: "cliché représente la matérialité même de la phrase; lieu commun, plutôt la banalité de l'idée." Riffaterre, too, emphasizes that a cliché must be "un fait de style": "la Stéréotypie à elle seule ne fait pas le cliché: il faut encore que la séquence verbale figée par l'usage présente un fait de style, qu'il s'agisse d'une métaphore comme fourmilière humaine, d'une antithèse comme meurtre juridique, d'une hyperbole comme mortelles inquiétudes, etc." We have seen Laforgue parodying clichés of this type in the Moralités (e.g. "talonné par une mort certaine"); he also "renews" them sometimes by altering one or more words, as in the example quoted by Riffaterre of the birds "qui ont élu volière dans les frondaisons"; or he deliberately underscores them, for instance when "le cliché 'public houleux'" is said to come into Hamlet's mind as he surveys the scene in the theatre; or when, Lohengrin having dismissed his swan, the narrator declares: "Oh, sublime façon de brûler ses vaisseaux!" The poetry, however, offers far more examples of lieux communs: stereotyped expressions which are not figures of speech; Laforgue is concerned not only with their "style" or form but with the attitudes they betray, with the mentality of the speakers who proffer them so uncritically. Amossy and Rosen claim that "le lieu commun . . . renvoie à une Stéréotypie de la pensée et non de l'unité discursive", though in practice the two tend to go hand in hand, stereotyped language reflecting "Stéréotypie de la pensée". The ironic quotation of clichés or lieux communs often represents a device for suggesting criticism of the assumptions underlying them. As Amossy says of Eugénie Grandet, "C'est souvent à la faveur d'un jeu de mots ou d'un emploi ironique du cliché que certaines valeurs consacrées se voient tournées en dérision". Laforgue's love-sick ladies are condemned out of their own mouths by the platitudes they utter.

Laforgue's constant repetition of empty verbal formulas, whether of a literary or an everyday type, inevitably suggests that there is nothing but "Words, words, words"; that language refers to no reality beyond itself. "A mesure que la répétition se répète," says Shoshana Felman [in La Folie et la chose littéraire, 1978] of Flaubert's Un coeur simple, "le signe linguistique se décale à la fois de son sens et de son référent;" she concludes that the function of clichés is "de nous forcer à réfléchir l'arbitraire du signe, qu'ils mettent en évidence, en dénonçant du même coup l'illusion réaliste et référentielle". This property of the cliché, or of "la Stéréotypie"; accentuates the feeling we have, reading Laforgue, that his is a universe of words eminently conscious of itself as such, aware of its own non-referentiality. As Bouché says of the Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, Laforgue's works, written within fifteen or twenty years of Lautréamont' s, "se situent à la croisée de ces mouvements multiples qui ne cessent de ramener l'écriture à elle-même"—a statement which of course applies with at least equal force to Flaubert. Furthermore, the stereotyped phrases constantly issuing from the mouths of stock characters such as Laforgue's Pierrot and Hamlet emphasize that language is a barrier to, rather than a vehicle for, genuine self-expression. The "I" in Laforgue sees itself not just as split into two but as adopting a multiplicity of poses and playing a succession of different roles over and over again. All the Self can do is repeat itself; it is as "intertextual" as its language.