[In the following essay, Rigolot examines Ronsard's theory of poetic mimesis as it is expressed in the prefaces to the Franciade.]

“I could find no more excellent subject than this one”

Ronsard, Preface to the `Franciade' (1572)

There has been much discussion in modern criticism (at least of late) of what is now commonly referred to as the paratext, that is, to paraphrase Gérard Genette's Palimpsestes, a number of signals (titles, prefaces, postfaces, footnotes, epigraphs, illustrations, etc.) which form the entourage of the text and, at the same time, constitute a major locus for the conditioning process of potential readers.¹ In taking the prefaces of the Franciade as my object of study I intend neither to examine the theory of the heroic poem or epic—it has already been the object of much expert analysis²—nor to carry out a historical study that would position Ronsard in the evolving myth of the French people's Trojan origins.³ Instead, choosing texts that are by nature explanatory, normative and prescriptive, I hope to surprise the poet in the act of intentionality. By “intentionality” I mean here not so much the explicitly declared intentions of the author—these should not always be taken at face value—as the implicit confessions capable of being gleaned from specific contradictions in the utterances of the discourse. Since all representation is a doubling of the self and the refashioning of a subject as an object, establishing the characteristic features of this object will allow us to understand better the subject's strategy in so composing it. Far from accepting at face value any advice to the “apprentice reader” (who is encoded as such in the prefatory discourse), I would like to attempt to unearth the semi- or largely unconscious projective symbolic system of the paratext, and to read, beyond the surface utterances that stage the fiction of the apprentice reader, the ambiguous projection of the Ronsardian theory of imitation.

The theoretical status of the imagination has of course been a subject of great interest to specialists of Ronsard and, more generally, to sixteenth-century scholars.⁴ The concept of imagination, we are told, must be studied in the context of related notions of invention, imitation and fiction. Ronsard thus would be situated at the intersection of two main currents. One has a moral and didactic origin and would condemn “phantasie” as “mistress of false hood”; the other proceeds from the rhetorical tradition and would welcome the ability of the mind to recreate ideas in different forms. Thus, beginning with the Abbrégé de l'art poëtique françois (1565), Ronsard dismisses “fantastic inventions” because they are the product of sick imagination, and can only conceive “a thousand monstrous forms lacking order and connection.”⁵ In the same work, however, our poet also sets forth a positive conception of the imagination, one growing out of a “natural good” and allowing the representation of “the ideas and the forms of everything that can be imagined.”⁶ This two-faced discourse on the imagination seems to express Ronsard's poorly articulated desire to restore the lost importance of rhetorical composition without abandoning the admonitions of the moralist tradition.

What exactly is there of this conceptual ambivalence in the corpus of successive prefaces of the Franciade? And is it not paradoxical to seek to discern an imaginary element in a place that it normally would tend to avoid? Discourse that “escorts” a text generally achieves its legitimacy by positing an equivalency of principle between its saying and the doing of the text it escorts. This conception supposes that the preface is deliberately located outside the realm of the imagination in order to ensure the rational apprehension of its critical object. However, the status of what is today called the paratext is not always so clearly delimited.⁷ It is not certain, for example, that we can deny to the peripheral sections certain characteristics traditionally attributed to what we conventionally call the “text” itself.

In addition, recent studies on the literature of Renaissance have taught us to distrust the distinctions, established with some haste although with the best of intentions, between prose and poetry, and between the theory and practice of writing. Terence Cave, in his excellent study, addressed the problem with respect to the notion of copia.⁸ In Du Bellay, for example, it is no longer possible to assert that we can separate the theoretical discourse of the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise from the praxis underlying that polemical manifesto. In fact, there is an oscillatory movement between “intention” and “performance,” so that it would be useless to detach the Deffence from the rest of Du Bellay's work on the grounds that it supposedly follows different principles of composition.⁹

The preface of the first edition of the Franciade (1572) will receive the greatest share of our attention, both because it is certainly composed by Ronsard alone and because it is there that we are given, in the most immediate (most brutal? least considered?) way, the product of the prefacer's imagination. Repeating a favorite distinction of rhetoricians from Aristotle to Quintilian, Ronsard begins by warning his reader that, unlike the historian who seeks truth “without deception or pretence” (Franciade, 4), the poet must “stop at what is plausible.”¹⁰ This “plausible” is immediately defined by Ronsard as “what can be” or “what is already recognized by common opinion” (4). And he adds:

I venture only to say (if my opinion should carry some weight) that the Poet who writes things as they are does not merit as much as he who feigns them and who draws as much as he can from the historian: not however in order to feign a fantastic Poetry like that of Ariosto the body of which is so deformed and monstruous that it resembles more the dreams of a man sick with a prolonged fever than the inventions of someone of sound health.

(4)

There is a doubly negative attitude here that merits further attention. On the one hand, we witness the rejection of history in the name of the freedom of invention (history represents a subservience to reality because it “only admits the object as it is or was”). On the other hand, all “fantastic” imagination finds itself relegated to the domain of pathology because it neglects nature and lapses into teratology (“body … deformed and monstruous”).¹¹ The use of the verb “to feign” (feindre) is interesting here because it denotes a keen awareness of the admissible limits of the imagination for the feigneur, that is to say, for the poet.¹² If history is that theoretical place characterized by the absence of the fictive (feintise, the non-imaginary), “fantastic poetry” on the contrary is marked by an excess of fiction (the delirium of the imaginary). The prefacer's discourse refuses to embrace both deficiency and excess, two extremes which cancel each other out before the natural and learned blend of the perfect fiction where “frenzy” and “art” remain in perfect harmony.

Thus, from the beginning Ronsard marks out the boundaries of a permissible space in the poetic realm of the imaginary. He does not, however, wish to be alone in assuming such responsibilities; and this accounts for his citation of Homer and Virgil, whose works bear witness, he believes, to the same theoretical conception. Indeed, neither the Iliad nor the Aeneid is the work of an historian. Homer and Virgil did not seek to derive their subject from the verifiable reality of their culture for two reasons. First, they had definite political aims; Homer would have liked to “insinuate himself into the favor and good graces of the Eacides” (6-7) and Virgil sought to “merit the good grace of the Caesars” (7). This political aim was coupled with a very clear sense of their own poetic destinies. They wished to adopt or develop easily transposable myths, whether by exploiting well-known events acknowledged as such by their contemporaries (as Homer did with the Trojan War: “the report of such a war was acknowledged in the general opinion of men at that time” (7),) or by gathering such information from notable predecessors as they could legitimately put to good use (as did Virgil, reader of Homer and of the “old Annals of his time” from which he conceived the subject of his Aeneid).¹³

Ronsard has the same political and poetic aims; and he does not disguise that fact. On the one hand, he claims to have “an intense desire to honor the house of France” (8) and to sing the “heroic and divine virtues” of his prince, “King Charles IX” (8), whose “great victories” he does not hesitate to compare with those of “Charlemagne his grandfather” (9). On the other hand, he means to add his name to the long list of great epic poets by employing the same terms he had used to talk of Homer and Virgil. The subject that he treats is “founded on general knowledge” (9)—a phrase which echoes the description given, two pages earlier, of the intention attributed to the author of the Iliad, who exploited the “report” of the Trojan War and the “general opinion” that his contemporaries had of it (7). Moreover, if the Aeneid took its inspiration from the “old Annals of his time,” the Franciade would be founded on a tradition “well established by the Annals” (7) and the “old beliefs of the Chronicles of France” (9).¹⁴ The correspondence of vocabulary is striking; everything points to the French poet's self-conscious imitation of his ancient models. In rhetorical terms, he seeks to convince his reader that the Idea that moves him is no different in nature from that which rendered Homer and Virgil immortal. Hence the self-assurance with which he addresses us concerning his topic: “I could find no more excellent subject than this one”(9).

It matters little to Ronsard that subsequent readers might have doubts about his having chosen Trojan legends to give the French a sense of their national history.¹⁵ For him the “excellence” of the subject is measured by its ability to emulate a pre-existing imaginary structure, one furthermore guaranteed by the endurance of ancient epics. The success of the “heroic poem” is no mystery to him; three obvious conditions seem immediately to present themselves:

1) One should avoid both the non-fiction of History and the sur-fiction of “Fantasy.”

2) One should rely on the authority of the Annals and the Chronicles, that is, on an acceptable and accepted tradition: what is called plausible fiction.

3) Ancient models should serve as inspiration for contemporary works because they offer proof of the validity of the two preceding conditions.

These conditions, reduced in practice to one alone, reveal clearly the degree of Ronsard's confidence in the theory of imitation. However, once the premises of his art have been laid out, the prefacer hastens to explain that practical considerations forced him to modify the historical particulars on which he based his fictions. Even in the first preface he writes, “I lengthened the canvas” (7). By this he means that he found necessary to invent certain episodes in order better to “imagine,” that is to say, to represent the adventures of Francion. His choice of the word “canvas” or “cloth” (toille) is significant: it refers to the craft of the artisan, of the weaver (spelled variously as tessier, tissier, texier, tixier) fabricating textiles and texts. But the verb “lengthen” (allonger) is equally interesting, especially since it appears twice in the same context. Speaking of the genealogy of the French kings, Ronsard tells us that, unlike Virgil, he has had to take into account 63 sovereigns and that he was therefore obliged to “lengthen the paper” (5). The valorization of the poet's work is thus not a matter of innovation (an abrupt, qualitative leap of the imaginary) but of amplification (“lengthening” of the “cloth” and of the “paper,” that is, of the already written texts, the ancient epics).¹⁶

In other terms, in this case Jakobsonian ones, one might say that the imagination (the imaginative, inventive, creative faculty) does not proceed by paradigmatic change along the axis of substitutions but by syntagmatic progression, along the axis of combination. And this is not merely a result of bending to the exigencies of the translatio studii. Refusing the “modern” challenge that pure metaphor represents, the Franciade seeks to assert itself naturally, by means of metonymic sliding—to the extent of supplying an eloquent suffix to the Iliad. In so doing, it follows the “natural good of the imagination” and not its unacceptable “fantastic inventions.” There will be no break between the ancient text and the new poem: no cut in the “cloth,” in the “paper” of universal Poetry; in short, it ensures that one will not encounter the “disjointed dreams of a madman.”¹⁷

However, this conception of the “heroic poem” as a simple “lengthening” (alongeail) of the epic tradition of antiquity could be misleading. This metonymic process must not lead to a confusion of the historian's task: to set down the record of princes “thread by thread” (5) or “bit by bit” (336), with the poet's labor. In the middle of his first preface, Ronsard returns twice to consider the process of the poem's conception—attributing the most carnal sense to that word. He first establishes an equivalence between the intellectual faculty of the imagination and, in the physiological order, the act of childbirth: “Les espirts conçoivent aussi que les corps” [“Minds conceive, just as well as bodies.”](8). This slightly awkward alexandrine, placed between an apology for the poem's title and an encomium of Charles IX, is illuminated by an explicit comparison found in the next paragraph: “Now just as women who are ready to give birth select a good atmosphere, a healthy house, a rich godfather before having their child, I have chosen the richest argument, the most beautiful verses and the most distinguished godfather in Europe to honor my book, and support my work.” The idea of parturition replaces that of amplification. Ronsard does not lose sight of the fact that his Franciade must retrace poetically the birth of a great nation. His ambition, quite simply, is to give birth to France, but he cannot realize this ambition without “lengthening” the “cloth” of the ancient epic.

To give birth and to perpetuate the human race are notions intimately linked for the sixteenth-century mind. One need only to recall the famous letter of Gargantua to his son. The Poet, as progenitor, reproduces the will of the great Plasmatic Being. He knows that he can “acquire a sort of immortality and, in the waning of this transitory life, perpetuate his name and seed.”¹⁸ Ronsard is in fact so aware of this power that in the same phrase he associates his own glory with that of his king: “Possessed therefore of an intense desire to honor the house of France … and desiring together to perpetuate my renown everlastingly … I could find no more excellent subject than this one” (8-9). We have here a sort of verification of the sententia pronounced just before this: “minds conceive just as well as bodies.” To conceive the Franciade is not to create something from nothing, but rather to accept the law of universal reproduction, celebrated by the Roman de la Rose and common to both minds and bodies. For Ronsard there is no difference between prolonging the Ancients' discourse (l'allongement) and perpetuating the Moderns' renown. It is not a question of choosing between the two; we must accept them together because—biologically, one might say—they are indivisible. What is more, the poet will not be induced to make his lyric heard (he will not be touched by “furor” and “enthusiasm”) unless his “affections” are set in motion by the experience of the past.¹⁹

All this perhaps explains why the prefacer of the first edition devotes thirteen lines (in the Laumonier edition) to explain why he did not write the Franciade in alexandrines. In the second edition of the Abbrégé de l'art poëtique françois he had already given us a justification based on circumstances judged exterior to his will: “If I did not begin my Franciade in alexandrine verse, which I have brought (as you know) into vogue and honor, it is necessary to blame those who have the power to command me, and not my will, because this is done against my wishes, hoping one day to make it march in alexandrine step, but this time I must obey.”²⁰ Thus in 1567 Ronsard tells us that it is by order of the king that he does not use a meter which nevertheless would be appropriate for a “solemn, lofty, and (if necessary to talk thus) altiloquent composition.”²¹ Five years later, the reason advanced is quite different. Alexandrines are now judged to be too “long” and too “subject,” that is too alien to prosody, too similar to prose. Thus they are ill-suited to the task of “lengthening” the ancient epic and of “giving birth” to a new heroic form. It should be noted that the two explanations Ronsard proposes are not mutually exclusive. The possibility of the alexandrine's prosaic nature was raised as early as the first edition of the Abbrégé, even if expressed in the conditional tense: “[Alexandrines] would fairly exude prose, if they were not composed of distinguished, solemn, and resonant words, and of a rich rhyme, so that such richness might preclude a prose style.”²² That which remained menacing in 1565 became a concrete reality in 1572. The present tense is henceforth appropriate: “The shameful realization I have that it smacks too much of its prose [prevents me] from composing my work in alexandrine verse”(9). As for the royal interdiction, which figured prominently in the extension of the Abbrégé in 1567, it is not mentioned in any preface to the Franciade. The prefactory imagination simply cannot accommodate any tension between the poetic and the political projects. “Conception” can only occur with the harmonious and faithful cooperation of the two partners: the king and the poet are henceforth seen as co-participants, co-creators of the national hymn whose birth they celebrate.

This question so preoccupied Ronsard that he returned to the argument in the posthumous preface of 1587, this time placing it in the exordium of his text:

Preface to theFranciade,
touching on the Heroic Poem.
To the apprentice reader:

You should not marvel, Reader, that I have not composed my Franciade in alexandrine verse …

(331)

A single controlling idea runs through this entire paragraph on the alexandrine: it is summarized in a sentence placed between parentheses: “The prosaic style is the worst enemy of poetic elegance” (332), and the use of alexandrines is the easiest way of succumbing to this fault. The commentary of 1572 is amplified and made more radical to the extent that any meter of twelve syllables becomes completely unacceptable. The evolution of the alexandrines' prosaic character is clear: they “fearly exude prose” (in 1565); they “smack too much of their prose” (in 1572); they “smack too much of very facile prose, and are too enfeebled and limp” (in 1587).²³

The birth of Ronsard's hero, Francion, of the Franciade and of France could not be evoked with such prose; what was needed was a voice that spoke the language of poetry and that was not liable to founder against the baser aspects of history. One thinks of the vigorous attack of 1587 launched against contemporary writers:

The majority of those writing in our time drag themselves, enfeebled [the word was previously used to describe the alexandrine], across the ground, like weak caterpillars [what is more “limp” than a caterpillar!], which no longer have the strength to climb to the treetops, and are satisfied with feeding on the base moisture of the earth, without seeking the nourishment of the high reaches [where epic poetry resides!], which they cannot attain because of their feebleness.

(337)

The alexandrine runs the risks of being the metrical medium of the “thing as it is” (4), of the “base moisture of the earth” (337), whereas what is needed is a medium suitable for feigning, which abandons pedestrian discourse in order to “climb to the treetops,” there to dine on the “high reaches” (337).

It is this voice which the prefacer of 1572 treats at length when he invites the reader to speak his work, to “articulate it well” by reproducing faithfully the accents of the original song: “I will entreat only one thing of you, reader, which is to articulate well my verses and to adjust your voice to their sentiment; not as some read them, as missive, or as a few royal letters, but as a well-articulated Poem: and I beseech you once more, when you see this mark:!, to raise your voice slightly, so that you may render graceful that which you are reading” (12).

This emphasis on the pronunciatio, while following the traditional rhetorical prescriptions of the orators, here assumes particular importance in the context of Ronsard's rejection of the discourse of history. In the Franciade itself we learn, indeed, that Francus owes his name to an error of pronunciation. The passage is worth citing in the original French:

Adonq Francus qui seul prince commande,
Pront & gaillard au milieu de la bande,
Voulant sa main d'une lance charger,
D'Astyanax en Francus fit changer
Son premier nom, en signe de vaillance
Et des soldats fut nommé Porte-lance,
Pheré-enchos, nom, des peuples vaincus
Mal prononcé, & dit depuis Francus.

(Book I, vv. 945-52, 76-77)

The onomastic remotivation from a learned etymology is not at all unusual here.²⁴ There are, however, two stages in this transformation of the name. First, in the conformity with the model of Homeric epithets, Astyanax becomes “Lance-bearer” (Pheré-enchos): this is the crucial moment when the identity of the hero finds itself translated into language and acknowledged by an act of speech. Next occurs the deformation of the name through ambiguity of Time: Pheré-enchos becomes Francus. Now, this second process is attributed to the “conquered people”: it is they, the uncouth, who by their fault have obsured the Greek transparence of the heroic epithet. And it was not until Ronsard that the meaning of the original appellation could be recovered. In other words, without this poor historical pronunciation there would not have been any doubts about the Trojan origins of the French: they would have remained Pheré-enchoi, faithful descendants of the original Lance-bearer. “Tantum pronunciatio potuit suadere malorum. …”

Ronsard the prefacer thus possesses the wisdom to advance nothing that was not demonstrated previously by Ronsard the epic poet. His defense and illustration of the voice are all the more eloquent for it. It is probably with this goal in mind that the singer of France devoted the final lines of the initial preface to a seemingly minor topic, that of spelling: “Excuse, Reader, the printer's mistakes: for all the eyes of Argus would not pick them out well enough, especially in the first printing” (12). It does not seem likely that printing errors are Ronsard's only concern here, although in fact they were quite substantial.²⁵ In the dominant imaginary domain, that of praise of the voice, printing mistakes are mere trifles without interest, deserving of the reader's “excuse.” The visual aspect of the text is only a necessary evil; what really matters is the oral participation in the poet's song. The ocular hypertrophy, symbolized by the hundredeyed giant, Argus, becomes ridiculous in the context of the all-powerful Poem: carmen fictum, non figuratum: song imagined and not represented on the page. For Ronsard is not Jean Lemaire de Belges (even if preoccupation with the Trojan origins of the French is common to both; he is not content to produce the “artifices,” the optical illusions, of the “Great Rhetoric.”²⁶

In the same way, in order better to “adjust” and “elevate” his “voice” above the dissonant cacophonies, the reader/singer is invited to “close the mouths of those who are naturally envious of the property and honor of others” (12). When these mouths are closed, then will resound the triumphant voice of the poeta vates, free of parasitical interference. The mouth of the just, Os ab Origine, opens wide when the prefacer closes his discourse, as he emphasizes with a play on words: “J'ay fermé ce préface pour fermer leur bouche (des envieux)” [“I shut this preface in order to shut their mouths (those of the envious)”] (12). There could be no more convincing clausula for a reader completely prepared to welcome the plenitude of the Song.

This imaginary structure of the Voice will become noticeably richer in the Preface of 1587 where it takes on the form of a conflict between versifier and poet. The opposition, taken by Sebillet and Du Bellay from Quintilian (Inst. orat., X, I, 89) is well known²⁷: “There is as much difference between a Poet and a versifier, as between an old nag and a noble steed of Naples, or to choose an even better comparison, as between a venerable Prophet and a charlatan selling drugs” (335). In spite of what the common people might think, the versifier is merely a disguised writer of prose: he “composes rhymed prose” (336). He thus finds himself on the deaf side of writing, where Argus delights, unable to hear his omnivoyance. “On the contrary, the heroic Poet (… makes the Gods converse with men and men with Gods” (336). This dialogue, which takes place between Heaven and Earth, concerns invention; it is coupled with another dialogue, this one on imitation, between the poet and the various authorities on whom he has drawn. Before Montaigne made it famous, Ronsard took from Virgil the image of the bee who, having “plundered flowers here and there” finally produces a honey “all its own”²⁸: “In short, [the Poet] is a man who, as a bee samples and sucks all flowers, then disposes of his honey and profit depending on the timeliness of his arrival” (336). The verbs “sample” and “suck” refer to the buccal activity and not to manual work: once more the logos seeks to eliminate any monument either to graphic reproduction or to the craft of the writer.

Paradoxically, it is Amadis Jamyn, the devoted secretary of Ronsard, author of the Argumens of the Franciade and of several liminary pieces in verse, who comes to recall the Poet to his role as writer. The quatrain placed underneath the portrait of Charles IX, just before the “First Book,” is a lesson in modesty for Ronsard as well as an encomium of the prince:

Tu n'as, Ronsard, composé cet ouvrage,
Il est forgé d'une royalle main,
Charles scavant, victorieux & sage
En est l'autheur, tu n'es que l'escrivain.

A.I. (27)²⁹

This denial of the Ronsardian “conception” of the work is quite a strange revelation in light of the great pains Ronsard took to impose the imaginary structure of his voice of the poet. Is this an indication that there is a counter-voice in the prefaces, camouflaged and repressed, which can only make itself heard indirectly, by means of the secretary's verses? Such a hypothesis is made all the more plausible if we consider that it would explain the addition of 1567 in the Abbrégé de l'art poëtique, discussed above, concerning the renunciation of the alexandrine.³⁰ The “tu n'es que l'escrivain” (“you are only the scribe”) of Jamyn would be the imperative repetition of Ronsard's “il faut obeyr” (“I must obey”). And the verses would make quite clear what was only suggested in prose: “It is necessary to blame those who have the power to command me, and not my will.”³¹

However, the myth of the voice is all the more powerful for its being bound up with the very reality of the language. Ronsard in fact comes out in favor of a “flourishing language (… lively and natural” (349), which is defined more and more by the use one makes of it than by the authority given to it. The vulgar tongue is superior to the learned one because it is shared by aristocrats (“Princes,” “Magistrates”) and bourgeois alike (“merchants and shop-keepers”). It circulates on all levels of society “in the same way as the commerce and traffic of coins” (350). In this sense, it serves as a link between the various elements of the nation, all of which the Poet aspires to join in discussion, just as the Gods and men are so joined (336). Such, a vision of unity is, of course, a devoted illusion; but it is rooted in this “conception,” unanimist before the fact, of an imaginary domain of the voice. The paradox affirms that the prefaces are addressed to “readers,” specialists in the deciphering of letters. At a time when the reading public is limited, the voice of the Poet will, in fact, be the “common currency” of all those who speak the “maternal language”; and yet it will never be able to breach the dividing line traced by alphabetism and, imitating the great ancients (“as Homer did, with Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, Virgil, Livy, Sallust, Lucretius and a thousand others”), speak “the same language as plowmen, valets and chambermaids” (351).

The desire for a unifying voice is probably the source, at least in part, of the preference accorded Homer in the Preface of 1572: “Moreover, I have modeled my work (of which these first four books will serve as an example) rather on the natural facility of Homer than on the meticulous diligence of Virgil, imitating as much as possible from both the craft and subject matter built more on plausibility than on truth” (5). In opting for the “natural facility” that he attributes to Homer, Ronsard only returns to a theme that is dear to him (the diatribe against art which he developed, beginning in 1552, in the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital”); but he also inscribes his epic conception in a philosophy of language and proclaims the “right” to “living” languages (350), to “natural” language, “without difficulty,” “without a schoolmaster” (350-51). In practice, however, as we shall see, he does not forget Virgil and his “meticulous diligence.” For we must take into consideration the role that art plays in a discourse ostensibly against art, an art which counterbalances the desire for “natural birth.” The quotation concerning the “natural facility of Homer” and the “meticulous diligence of Virgil” already bears witness to this. Did not Ronsard claim that he imitated the craft of the two poets “as much as possible” and that this craft is “built” on the plausible? The vocabulary of the plastic arts is here to remind us that procreation arising out of a state of frenzy cannot eschew careful composition, or the rules of art. In the first preface of the Franciade, Ronsard writes concerning the mythic voyage of his hero through Gaul, “On this foundation of plausibility I built my Franciade with his name” (8). And in the 1587 Preface he uses the same verb to denote an identical aim. “I built my Franciade, founded and based upon our old Annals, without concerning myself with its truth or falsity” (340). Yet because the “builder” is very sensitive to possible accusations that his composition is too “artful,” he is careful to respond in advance to likely objections. For example, he anticipates the reader's censure of the length of Jupiter's speech at the beginning of Book I (vv. 33-156): “I do not doubt but that I will be accused of little artfulness by those saying that the harangue of Jupiter at the beginning of my first book is too long, and that I should not begin with it” (10). In fact, underlying the reproach of “little artfulness” is an accusation of an artfulness that is too visible, overdone, artificially long. But Ronsard defends himself by stating that such artfulness must be attributed to the model, to rules of the genre, to the necessities of action and, secondarily, to constraints inherent in the French language (“You must know that thirty lines of Latin are worth more than sixty of our French” [10]). He justifies its length by showing that Virgil was guided by related principles in a similar passage of the Aeneid (I. 283ff.). That he should have recourse in this manner to the art of the model and the constraints of the language which increase the need for “artfulness” is indeed an important indication that the “meticulous diligence of Virgil” is, in many ways, more important to him than the “natural facility of Homer.”

In the Foreword of 1573 Ronsard does not hesitate to compare himself to the most celebrated painter of Antiquity, Apelles, and to tell us that he has corrected his work “to render it more perfect”: the Franciade will dare to “endure the filings and perfect polishings demanded by time” (3). The architectural and pictorial metaphors are considerably more developed in a passage from the Preface of 1587, in which the miserable hut of the historian undergoes a metamorphosis into a poet's sumptuous palace: “From a small hut [the Poets] create a magnificent Palace, which they enrich, gild and embellish with an exterior of marble, jasper and porphyry, with gillochis, ovolos, frontispieces and pedestals, friezes and capitals, and within, by paintings, raised tapestries, embossed with gold and silver” (340). Ronsard excels at constructing beforehand, in his prefaces, the grandiose dwelling which he will necessarily fail to create in his poem. For us, however, it is the intention that counts here: the resolution to “embellish,” to “enlarge” his work (341), the “desire to enhance the language of [his] nation” (353). The fantasy of birth is not without an accompanying fantasy of construction.

Ronsard recognizes that the work is never halted in its development, in its march toward perfection. He even proclaims it forcefully as he notes the incompletion, the im-perfection of his Franciade. In 1572 he both anticipates that “some other pedant in another's book will reprove me of not having followed the absolute rule of Poetry” (11), and tells the reader “that there is no perfect book, mine even less so” (11-12).

What we have here is not a simple expression of false modesty. In the Ronsardian imaginary space, the work is seen capable of being modified by changes in time, in the mood of the writer, or by suggestions from his friends. The “matter,” certainly, will not change; but the manner of saying it, the form, is destined to undergo changes, whether by addition or subtraction³²: “I shall be able, depending on the length of my life, the judgment and sincere opinion of my friends, to increase or diminish (my book), as one who does not swear by self-love, or by the persistency of his inventions” (12). This stance in favor of an open form, opera aperta, a text whose exact formulation remains subject to the fluctuation of time, will be taken up again in the very brief “Foreword” of 1573, as if the text's receptiveness were what Ronsard wished above all to affirm in his prefatory discourse. He writes that he is ready “to hear the judgment and the pronouncement of everyone” and “to receive any gracious correction” (3).

Returning to the question of “perfect polishings,” the posthumous Preface of 1587 subordinates itself entirely to the authority of Horace. Three verses from Ars poetica serve as an epigraph to the long theoretical manifesto:

Carmen reprehendite quod non
Multa dies & multa litura coercuit, atque
Praesectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.

(vv. 292-94) (331)³³

The apprentice poet must work for perfection while adhering to the principles of the prince of poeticians, that is, while avoiding “mediocrity”: “You are not unaware, Reader, that a Poet must never be mediocre in his trade, nor learn his lessons half-way, but rather quite well, most excellently and most perfectly: mediocrity is an extreme vice in Poetry; it would be better never to get mixed up in it, and to learn another trade” (348). And yet languages are not perfect, poets make mistakes, and the art of perfecting can always be taken up again.³⁴

Having discussed several examples of conceptual ambivalence in successive prefaces of the Franciade, we can say in conclusion that the prefatory discourse seems to embody, in both theory and practice, a number of complex and important oppositions: history vs. poetry, nature-inspiration vs. art-work, closure vs. openness. The succession of paratexts thus serves as a pretext for Ronsard to articulate the contradictory aspects of his poetics while, at the same time, staging the fiction of an “apprentice reader” whose credibility is meant to reinforce the imaginary structure of the poetic voice.

Notes

1. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982) 9-10.

2. I refer here to the bibliography established by Guy Demerson as an appendix in the new edition of Ronsard's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Nizet, 1983) 378-380. Page numbers between parentheses in my text refer to vol. 16 of this edition.

3. For a look at the current state of this question see Bodo L. O. Richter, “Trojans or Merovingians? The Renaissance Debate Over the Historical Origins of France,” Mélanges à la mémoire de Franco Simone (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982) 3:3-26.

4. Of special note is Grahame Castor's study, Pléiade Poetics (Cambridge UP, 1964) 119ff. and 172ff.

5. Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, supra n2, 14: 25.

6. Michel Dassonville makes an association between the “natural good” of Ronsard and what Boileau will define as “a certain elevation of the spirit which makes us consider things in a favorable light” (Traité du sublime, ch. 6). Cf. “Ronsard à l'oeuvre,” Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1984) 364, n8.

7. On the notion of the paratext, see Gérard Genette's Palimpsestes, 9-10 and my Texte de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1982) 253ff.

8. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).

9. Ibid., xiv and xx.

10. In the Preface of 1587 one finds, “He holds as a very necessary maxim of his art, never to follow the truth step by step, but the verisimilar, and the possible” (336).

11. Horace himself did not speak with more eloquence (Ars poetica, vv. 408ff.). In the Abbrégé de l'art poëtique françois, Ronsard had already made the same criticism of “fantastic inventions.” (Paris: Vendômois, 1565) 25.

12. Let us recall that to feign (Fr. feindre) retains the sense of the Latin fingere, itself a translation of the Greek poiein (to make, create). On this etymological justification, see Pléiade Poetics, supra n4, 120-22.

13. The posthumous Preface of 1587 adds that it is in reading the Aeneid that the poetic imagination of the future poet can develop: “such ecstatic descriptions, that you will read in such a divine author (… will make you a poet, though you had been a rock” (333).

14. The word “Chronicle” (Chronique) is used with reference to Virgil in 1587; it is perhaps an echo of the Chroniques de France of 1572. Instead of “well established by the Annals” one finds: “founded and based upon our old Annals.”

15. P. Laumonier will echo these doubts: “Why did he not choose the eminently natural subject of Joan of Arc, delivering France from the English occupation?” (9, n1).

16. In 1587, after having lavished varying advice on his “apprentice reader,” the prefacer adds: “Moreover, Reader, if I wished to instruct and inform you of all the precepts associated with Heroic Poetry, I would need a ream of paper” (348). This evinces a rather remarkable parallel between the lengthening of prose and that of poetry. It is as if in the imaginary domain of the preface the status of theory was somehow contaminated by that of practice.

17. Cf. Abbrégé supra n11, 14:13.

18. Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 8, ed. P. Jourda (Paris: Garnier, 1962) 1:256.

19. As Daniel Ménager writes, “the poetic project happens to be in deep complicity with heroic destiny.” Ronsard. Le roi, le poète et les hommes (Geneva: Droz, 1979) 33.

20. Abbrégé, supra n11 14:25, addition of 1567-1573.

21. Ibid., text of 1565.

22. Ibid.

23. Cf. Abbrégé, supra n11, 14:25, addition of 1567-1573.

24. See my Poétique et onomastique. L'Exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1977) concerning the theory of the remotivation of names.

25. Cf. Ronsard, Oeuvres, supra n2, 12, n3.

26. It should be noted that the Preface of 1587 also ends with brief observations on orthography; they are limited to vague proposals of reform and refer the reader to future remarks (353). The Abbrégé, for its part, was more eloquent on this subject, supra n11, 28-34.

27. Cf. T. Sebillet, Art poëtique françois, ed. F. Gaiffe (Paris: STFM, 1932) 19-20; J. Du Bellay Deffense et illustration, ed. H. Chamard (Paris: Didier, 1948) 173.

28. Essais, (Paris: Pléiade) 1:150-151a. Amadis Jamyn, in the first “Argument” of the Franciade, writes, “It resembles the bee, which in producing its honey makes use of every flower” (14).

29. As D. Ménager writes, the “invasive presence” of the King “reduces the poet to subordinate role.” “The poet, simple `scribe,' writes in his book that which the king, the only true `author,' has inscribed in reality.” Ronsard, supra n19, 289-90. The English translation of Jamyn's passage is as follows:

    You did not, Ronsard, compose this work,
    It is forged by a royal hand,
    Charles the learned, victorious and wise
    Is the author, you are but the scribe.

30. Abbrégé, supra n11, 14:25.

31. Ibid.

32. In connection with this see the thesis of Louis Terreaux, Ronsard, Correcteur de ses oeuvres (Geneva: Droz, 1968).

33. “Reject that poem which many days and many erasures have not subdued and ten times corrected to perfect accuracy.”

34. Strangely enough, one might use Horace against Ronsard and recall that “sometimes the good Homer falls asleep” (Ars poetica, v. 359). Horace asked that poets be forgiven passing awkwardness if elsewhere they could point to brilliant successes.